Once upon a time, there was a young couple who lived in Colorado. They adopted a puppy, and named her Shiloh, and the couple and their puppy often played in a big undeveloped field next to their apartment complex. There Shiloh discovered one of the Great Joys of Doggy Life: chasing geese. Actually, first she discovered the joys of eating goose poo, and her humans had to put a stop to that, but THEN Shiloh discovered the geese, and infinite satisfaction of making a whole flock of them take flight.

Alas, in time, the family moved away from the apartment and the big field full of geese to chase. Shiloh was sad about this lack in her life, but there were other good things going for the new apartment, like being able to see out the windows, so it pretty much evened out. And, on special occasions, Shiloh got to visit places where there were geese to chase. It was a good life.

(Okay, the third person narration is beginning to take its toll, so TA-DAA! We switch!)

A few weeks ago, I brought Shiloh to the seminary campus when I picked up Matt from class. With only one car, we often drop off and pick up, and sometimes it’s really easy to load Shiloh into the car and give her a bit of time to explore a less-familiar place, interact with a variety of people, go running to greet Matt when he comes out of the building, and sometimes, when there aren’t lots of people outside, I can let her off the leash to chase the geese while we wait for class to end.

I generally wait until there aren’t many people around for two reasons:

First, Shiloh can be very, very friendly and excited when she’s meeting new people–when she’s off the leash, this usually involves a very fast incoming approach. This often causes some concern because people aren’t sure whether she’ll jump on them (she won’t) and, regardless, she’s a pretty good-sized dog. People who aren’t comfortable around dogs are usually pretty freaked out by 60 pounds of canine barreling gleefully in their direction. Until we get that under a bit more control, I’m generally very aware of her exuberant tendencies.

Second, technically speaking the campus isn’t really geared toward dogs. There’s an outdoor patio where people sometimes bring smaller dogs on sunny days, but none of the buildings allow non-service animals and none of the on-campus housing allows pets. This is entirely understandable–many people who have dogs overestimate their dog’s good behavior (and lack of mess-making), or assume others will welcome an animal simply because the owner welcomes it. (See above for my awareness that not all people like dogs or are comfortable around them.) Granted, there’s absolutely nothing that even slightly indicates that dogs aren’t allowed on campus–many people love to see Shiloh and many students come play with her for a while, mentioning that they miss their own family dogs–but I still feel just a little bit like I should be extra-well-behaved when I bring Shiloh, especially when any of the seminary higher-ups are around.

At any rate, a few weeks ago I had Shiloh on campus. It was chilly, early evening, but the sun hadn’t set yet so in the light it was warmer. I know the Seminary grounds staff has been complaining about the geese, which are a significant problem. They don’t really migrate any more around here, so these geese have been in the campus area for several years, at least. The deterrents that the seminary uses don’t really work any more, but using new ones will require quite a bit of money invested, and that’s not really an option in this economic climate. Anyway, there weren’t many people around, but there were some geese, so I let Shiloh off the leash and told her to go get them.

With great joy, she sprinted toward the geese, making sure they all took off and were going to stay airborne, and then came back to me, immensely pleased with herself. I spotted another cluster of geese around the corner of a building, so we went and chased them off, too, then returned to the main courtyard area.

Who should be coming across the quad than the Head of Building and Grounds! I waved, since we know each other from the time I was employed there, and he headed toward me.

“Is that your dog?”

“Yep, she is.” Please, don’t be mad at me for letting her run around off-leash.

“I’d like to buy her.” He laughs, so I know he’s not really serious. “What I wouldn’t give for a couple of dogs on campus, trained to run those geese off. But we can’t, because of liability, long-term.”

I volunteered that Shiloh will be glad to help whenever she’s on campus, and Tom made it clear that we’re welcome any time. Yay!

Fast forward to Tuesday. Matt and I were flying back from New York, and when I turned on my phone after our last flight I had a voicemail waiting–it was Tom, asking me to give him a call.

Turns out the school is hosting a big dinner the night before the inauguration ceremony for the new president (who started back in July), and they want the campus to be as clean as possible. Shiloh and I have been contracted to arrive on campus at 9am and stay until a little after 5pm, and keep the geese out of the main areas of campus so the sidewalks will stay clean for the fancy visitors.

I think this is hilarious, but I’m glad to be able to help. Tom asked me to set an amount I’d like to be paid and he’ll get it approved. I have no idea what to ask for. If it’s a warm day, I intend to sit and read or write outside for most of the day, with occasional circuits to be sure the geese don’t get any crazy ideas into their heads about sneaking back. If it’s cold, it’ll be quite a bit more tedious.

But, for a while at least, Shiloh will be the Official Goose Chaser of Denver Seminary.

I couldn’t make this stuff up.

Those of you who are Facebook and/or Twitter friends already know about our flaming oven, but I thought it was worth more than a couple of 160-character update.

Once upon a time (read: Friday evening) a we were at home after a busy day of doing our various busy things. In fact, we were only home for a little while, as Matt was shortly expected at a friend’s house for poker night and I was expecting friends (mostly wives of those at poker) to arrive for a girls’ night in. He planned to eat while playing poker; I fell back on a perennial staple, chickie pa’ pah (read: chicken pot pie). I pre-heated the baking pan for a nice crispy bottom crust, wrapped tin foil around the edge to prevent burned edges, and set my handy-dandy kitchen timer for the requisite baking time.

About five minutes before the timer was supposed to go off, as I was reading on the couch, I heard a faint “pop pop pop-pop” from the kitchen. It sounded a lot like microwave popcorn, but quieter. Maybe something *else* exploding in the microwave?

So I asked, “Matt, are you cooking something in the microwave?” My tone was rather skeptical because, as you may remember, Matt was expecting to eat later and he’d already had a snack.

“No, but you have something in the oven,” he said, as if I were a rather slow four-year-old who would forget that my supper was cooking even though my stomach was trying to eat itself at that point. (I love you, sweetie.) I extremely reluctantly marked my spot in the book, got out from under my cozy blanket on the couch, and went to check on my pot pie, just in case something very odd had happened and it was boiling over.

I feel it necessary to mention that never in all my years of cooking Marie Callender’s most excellent individual chicken pot pies has one of them bubbled over, much less gotten past my tin foil rim AND the baking sheet to make ploppy sizzles on the oven floor that will bake on and set the fire alarm off in a week or so. But I stopped reading and went to check on it Just In Case, secretly hoping the popping noise (which had been going steadily for several minutes since I’d noticed it) was the result of something silly Matt had done and forgotten about. Because I did not want my pot pie to be ruined. I was hungry.

A quick glance through the oven window showed nothing amiss with the pot pit, but a bit of extra brightness down in the front corner of the oven. Maybe something else ran over and now caught fire?

I opened the oven door, and blinked several times.

Me: Um… Matt? The oven is on fire.

Matt (in the living room, unconcerned): That’s not good.

Me: No. The oven is on fire. The metal is flaming.

Matt scurried to my aid with satisfying speed, and by the time he got there I had turned off the oven and was staring in consternation at the heating element, which had actually broken. One end was black (and presumably cool, though we didn’t touch it) and the other end was glowing angry red and shooting off sparks at the end. And flaming, of course. Just a bit at the end, not the whole thing. Maybe a half-inch of the metal was actually flaming, and it wasn’t particularly a huge flame. Maybe an inch tall. But it was in our electric oven. In case you have never used an electric stove before, flames are really quite bad.

Anyway, the oven knob was now turned to “off”, which I expected to mean that the red-hot-ness and the yellow flaming-ness and the throwing off sparks-ness would dissipate. But they didn’t. There was more redness and a bit more flaming, though it did stop sparking as the white-hot area immediately inside the flame began to travel slowly away from the broken end and toward the power source. It was like a very slow magnesium burn.

It was also very alarming.

Matt tossed a cup of cold water on the heating element to cool it down.

Safety note: in retrospect this was a STUPID STUPID idea, but we really thought no power was running through it. Actually, we weren’t really thinking at all. As I mentioned, we were rather alarmed. I am very glad I was not there alone. Regardless, please don’t follow our example. The water did nothing anyway, except run down into all my cake pans in the bottom drawer and then onto the floor in a huge rusty puddle that I had to clean up later.

So the water (STUPID IDEA!) was ineffective, and the flame was still burning its way along the heating element and Matt realized this was all going to go south very fast and he started pulling the stove out from its little nook in the counter so I could reach back and unplug the whole thing.

Everything calmed down right away, and I called my Mommy to tell her we didn’t burn the down the building. Matt sent the landlord an email rather apologetically informing him that we need a new stove (which is supposed to be delivered sometime on Wednesday), and we proceeded with our evening as planned.

For those who are interested, my chicken pot pie was not fully cooked (evidence that perhaps there had been issues for some time before I noticed them) and when I put it in the toaster oven to finish cooking I was completely mistaken in my estimate of how much time it needed–and it ended up charred and mostly inedible anyway. I had ice cream, popcorn, and peanut m&ms for dinner.

Don’t judge me. My oven tried to blow up.

In other news, this week will effectively mark the end of my day job. It hasn’t been the job I signed on for since the middle of June or so, and it’s an entirely amicable parting–in fact, I suggested that it was time for them to stop employing me, given various circumstances. So we will have a test period of me being a Real Writer, complete with external accountability checkpoints because I am like a greased weasel if I try to keep myself on track. And if I, you know, finish things and send them out and sell them, I have permission not to get another day job in the foreseeable future. Woohoo!

Also, I am close to insanely jealous of Neil Gaiman’s library. Close.

Made up a salad tonight to take to dinner at our friends’ house:

baby spinach
thin-cut apple slices
dried cranberries
toasted walnuts
crumbled extra-sharp cheddar cheese
poppyseed and caramelized onion dressing

YUM.

My circle of friends has established a word that I feel is ready to be released to the general public.

snorfle – noun – the noise made when laughter is muffled, produced by the same function that shoots liquid out your nose, sans liquid.

Nice, isn’t it? I’m particularly fond.

My brain doesn’t want to work.

I say, “Brain, how about working now so I can keep moving on this manuscript that’s been languishing in disrepair since February?”And my brain says, “:-P”. And makes a rude noise at me.

Figuratively speaking, of course.

Work has been irregular in pretty much every sense of the word, and is likely to continue that way for some time to come. It’s a little unsettling, but I’m managing. I’ve read a lot this week.

There’s a little boy banging his chair repeatedly on the patio a few feet away from me and I am so tempted to say something to his dad, who is ignoring him to talk on the phone.

In good news, Matt’s employers are upping his paid hours so that he’s eligible for medical insurance through them. So that will save us quite a bit of money on insurance and bring in more in paychecks. Good all around.

And I bought a bird feeder thingy to hang out on our porch so the birds will come. Shiloh likes watching the birds. We’ll see if it works. We’ve been neglecting her a bit. Not a lot, just a bit, but she’s playing it up like a star actress. Melodrama Dog.

That’s about all from this quarter. Maybe I’ll be witty tomorrow….

When I was little, my favorite color was pink.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it’s very cute that Betsy was a typical little girl who liked pink girly things. You’re not seeing the sinister angle. The other side.

See, I went a little bit overboard on the pink. If it came in pink, I wanted it in pink. I had pink jeans, not blue jeans. I had pink tires for my bicycle. I played with Barbies not because I particularly liked them, but because everything came in pink. When we moved across town and into a new house, I got to pick the carpet that would go in my room–without a second’s hesitation, I picked the pinkest carpet I could find in the store. And then I tried to convince my parents to paint the walls pink, too. They stopped me at a pink border around the top of the wall, but for years I was still happy because the white walls of my bedroom looked pinkish because they reflected all the other pink in the room. I had pink curtains, pink sheets, a pink bedspread, pink stuffed animals. . . . it was amazing. I’ll have to find a photo and scan it so you can get even the beginning of an idea of what it looked like.

It was great until I entered my teenage years. Then I revolted against pink, though I couldn’t do much about the carpet. I never, ever wore pink clothes. I changed the curtains and everything else, and tried to pretend my pink phase had never existed. Halfway through high school, I convinced my parents to let me take down that awful pink border and paint the walls and get new carpet (which they probably only agreed to since they knew I’d be moving out and they’d be buying new carpet for the room anyway, since no sane empty nesters have one pink room).

It wasn’t until I was out of college for two years that I voluntarily bought anything pink again, and that was half because I found the perfect laptop bag for 75% off its normal price simply because it was pink. So I’ve been easing myself back into a judicious use of pink for the last three years or so, and I think it’s going pretty well.

But the funny thing? Even back when my favorite color was pink and everything I owned was pink, my favorite favorite color was orange.

Why?

Because I liked orange popsicles best.

Ah, the complexities of childhood.

Have I ranted here on the blog about the silly people who park in our spot? About the people who park right beside our spot in the stripey bit of the handicapped spot beside ours, as if that were a real spot?

I think I have.

Just to give you a little taste of the kind of thing that happens all the time around here, Matt just pulled the car up so we can load bags for our vacation…

Really? Did the lawnmower dude NEED to put his tarp of grass RIGHT THERE?

It has become amusing to me. Maybe I can set up an electric shocker fence for anyone who crosses into our parking space. That would do it, right? Right?

I haven’t felt much like blogging lately. There are times when I’m doing interesting things, or funny things happen to me, and I have a lot of fun relating them to whomever happens to stop by to pay attention to my little corner of the world, or at least what I tell of it here.

There are also times when not much out of the ordinary is happening, or when I’m not in the right mindset to spin ordinary things as funny or interesting. Sometimes that’s because I’m just not feelin’ it (and with depression, it’s hard to tell when one of those days will come) and sometimes it’s because I’m just plain busy with mundane things like work and running errands and doing laundry and flying across the country to help with a family tragedy. Incidentally, that last is the main reason for the last week’s worth of silence.

Also, I’m not really that funny of a person. And there are only so many funny things that can happen to a person in a given amount of time. I don’t know if that resets every few months or what, but sometimes it seems like I use up my funny quota and I have to wait until the program resets before I can have more. Because really, there are only so many jokes one can make about laundry before it gets really, really old. At least, there are only so many in a household of two adults plus a dog. I would imagine that adding one or more children to the mix would add a commensurate level of adventure to which stains might be found, how they were acquired, and various descriptions of attempts to clean them. But really, people, I live a pretty quiet life. I suppose (until I use up my quota) I have a knack for giving stories a humorous spin, but that’s really all it is–spin.

Holey shamoley, I just about had a heart attack. You see, I’m on the plane flying from Syracuse to Chicago (O’Hare, thanks for asking) and although I have a novel, I’m not particularly interested in starting it right now. Although I have manuscript pages printed and ready for editing, my brain just isn’t settled enough to concentrate. I tried working my quick crossword puzzles (I like the quick ones–they make me feel smart) but lost interest more or less as soon as the plane left the ground. And I have my AlphaSmart, because I entertained pipe dreams of lots of lovely time to get work done and maybe even write a scene or two, but again, my brain is not cooperating. So I’m writing a blog entry which I will post when we get home, either tonight or tomorrow morning, depending on where I stashed the cable I need to transfer things from here to there. Anyway, the near-miss on the heart attack was the captain coming on the super duper loud speakers to say something or other, which of course I didn’t pay attention to because even though it was muffled by my headphones, he scared the cheese out of me and I had to stuff it all back in before the flight attendants noticed the mess.

If they’re both women, can I call them stewardesses? Or is that universally politically incorrect now? Do I need to use a gender non-specific term when they are the same gender? These are the things I ponder as we fly over Lake Erie. Look! There’s Canada!

And now I think it would be best if I stopped, or else you’ll all just get a running commentary of the terrain between Erie, PA and Chicago. And everybody knows northern Ohio isn’t very interesting. Also, don’t tell the people who live there, but it smells funky. Seriously. I’ve driven through there tons of times, and it’s almost as bad as North Jersey. Don’t tell the north Jersey people, either. It’ll be our little secret. Me, you, the fence post, and the rest of the internet. Yeah.

See? I should have stopped typing at least a paragraph ago. Why didn’t you stop me? Why?? WHY???

So I went to my coffee shop yesterday. I’m a regular there, and friends with most of the employees (shout out to all my peeps at Solid Grounds).

And there was a pair of teenagers, probably freshmen or sophomores, who were in the back booth “studying”. And by studying, I mean licking one another’s vocal cords. I suppose I should say it’s a big booth. It easily seats six people, eight if you’re friendly.

By the time I got there they were actually doing something or other with graphing calculators and geometry or trig, though naturally they were sitting practically on top of one another, because you can’t actually do homework without touching your boyfriend with two limbs and half your torso. But at least they weren’t making out any more.

But Mike and Angela had been forced to endure them for several hours.

So Mike offered me $10 if I’d just go over and ask if I could join them at the table, then sit down and start typing–with a straight face. Also, if they asked why, I had to say, “Well there aren’t that many tables open.” (There were tons of tables.)

And then Angela threw in a free drink to sweeten the deal. How could I say no?

So I waited at the little “get your drink here” counter while Angela made me a caramel apple cider, and when I got the drink I just turned around and said, “Do you guys mind if I sit here?” And I put my drink on the table and set down my bag before they even took a breath.

They said, “Uhhh… okay. We’re going to be leaving soon anyway.”

At which point a normal person would, you know, find another table and wait for them to leave.

Not me!

I just said, “Oh, that’s great! Thanks!” And I sat down and pulled out my AlphaSmart and started typing, trying not to look at them because if I did I would have busted up laughing and lost my $10.

I was typing things like, “I can’t do this out loud but I really need to laugh so I’m laughing in type HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.”

But according to eyewitnesses (there were three who were avidly watching) the kids were giving me very strange looks, because by then there was the “oooh, awkward…” vibe, and they’d looked around and seen that there were TONS of tables open. And there I was, typing away as if this was perfectly normal.

They left less than 3 minutes later, and we all barely lasted until the door closed behind them before we busted up laughing.

Good times, good times.

Maybe not as fun as the duck joke, but definitely very satisfying. It’s great fun to be the strange person that no one knows how to deal with. :-D

I’m alive. I did drop off the face of the earth for a while, or at least the blog. I have found several great YouTube videos and read several books this week, but nothing of great consequence has happened.

I wrote some more new material for the manuscript, but not as much as I had hoped. Several people who read the full thesis version said they really liked it. One said, and I quote, “It was awesome.” That made me smile, especially since the person in question is an avid fantasy reader.

I am in the midst of watching the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice for the second time in four days. I don’t feel like I’ve gotten a ton done lately, but I suppose it’s been enough to get by.

I did spend a considerable amount of time designing a gryphon for my world–I quite like it, and I think other people will too.

I apologize for the disjointed rambling and also for having begun 75% of this post’s sentences and 100% of its paragraphs with “I”. Please forgive me.