Snake Charming with a Big Shovel

It's entirely too early on a Sunday morning for this kind of excitement. I'll need to huddle in my office and shake this off with a few more cups of coffee.

The weenie-dog doesn't understand Weekend Time. Neither does The Perfect Grandson, but only one of them has to go outside on a leash in public at odd hours. I have a love/hate relationship with Bobo. His real name is Boner, and that explains a lot. Thankfully The Perfect Grandson is still practicing the language and has made hollering at the dog a little more acceptable. He's Bobo now (pronounced Baaahhh-bow) and thank God for that.

Regardless, Bobo had to go outside before my second cup of Sunday coffee. I wear a lot of hats, but Em wears the one that says, "take the damn dog out." Not my job. Besides, she looks cute all the time and I need a little spackling before I go out in the street.

I'm a Southern woman of a certain age. That carries a lot of lipstick-baggage.

So out they go and BAM, they're back inside. Em's hyperventilating and doing an odd tiptoe dance, Bahbow strains at his leash and throws his little black body repeatedly against the front door. Em finds enough breath to tell me there's a baby SNAKE by the MAILBOX. She thought it was a big WORM, but then it STUCK it's SNAKEY tongue OUT.

It was the closest thing to rap music that's ever happened here at my house, what with the breathless emphasis and the hopping around and the thump, thump, thump of the weenie-dog slinging himself rhythmically at the door.

How silly, I thought, we live in a walled subdivision with an iron-clad set of Homeowner's Association Rules and Regs. Snakes aren't in the bylaws.

I snatched up The Perfect Grandson and we - all four of us - went out to the mailbox. Sure enough, there was a little brown snake half in the grass, half on the driveway. Both halves together were probably all of six inches long. It stood it's ground and we kept our distance.

I know there are some snake-huggers out there who might take offense at what comes next, but babies and weenie-dogs and possibly-poisonous reptiles don't mix. The snake had to go. Em high-stepped back inside dragging a frothing Bobo on a leash while I held The Perfect Grandson high and eyeballed the snake to make sure it made no fast moves houseward. The worst kind of snake is the one you can't find. I have experience.

"SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!" said the boy, pointing down.

"You got it, buddy. That," I said, "is a snake."

Em came flying out of the front door, having traded Bobo for a really big garden shovel. I won't give the gory details play-by-play, but you can assume Em's mama-bear instincts kicked in and settled the standoff. Several times. Don't worry, I whisked The Perfect Grandson away before he could witness the carnage.

The issue now is snake identification. Since it was a baby, there's always the possibility of more. We need to know what we're up against. According to the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, it was either a deadly-venomous copperhead, or something harmless like a king snake. This isn't an easy ID because, 1) the snake was young and those look different from the adults, and 2) it's not easy to ID a snake that's in approximately seven pieces.

Em got a little shovel-happy. I don't blame her. If it's any consolation, snake-huggers, she shouted something like oh God, I'm killing someone else's baby just before the shovel hit concrete. On some level, she's remorseful.

The distinction, though, between poisonous-killer and harmless snail-eater is an important one. We've got more research ahead of us. I'll need another cup of coffee and an hour of sensibility before I can say for sure.

Think I'll put on a little lipstick and look over those bylaws again.

Clearly, I'm in the Wrong Line of Work

For the past week, I've heard nothing but horror stories from my students. While these were often about parking tickets - which is their own fault - most of the terror had to do with buying textbooks.

Everyone had a story and the register-tape to prove it.

There's the one about the poor science major whose Intro to Chemistry book was $270 - used. There's another involving a Psychology textbook that rung up at just over $110. "I was relieved," the poor child said, "it was the cheapest book I had to buy." My own daughter threw down $140 for a used Spanish I book. Thank God she found it, because a new one would have set her back over $200.

Keep in mind that these folks have four, five, sometimes six classes to buy books for, as well as other pesky things like tuition, room and board, and "fees." They're all taking out loans.

So I began thinking about my first semester in school. My folks doled out right at $1,000 for the whole Spring 1980 semester. That covered everything, including my books. For two grand a year, you bought a kid's college education, at least at the state university here in Arkansas. No, I didn't walk to class in four feet of snow, but I did have a job and a car - one paid for the other. I'm walking around with an $8,000 undergraduate degree right now. For now, let's forget about grad school.

Students attending school this year at the same university pay approximately $13,000 a year, give or take a science book or two. I realize it's been a few years, but that's an astronomical increase. The average four-year jaunt through the ivory towers will cost 52k - not that many of these fine students will have an average jaunt. Many programs now have five-year plans and there's no getting around it.

Let's forget about their grad school too, because none of them will be able to afford it.

Here's where I got tangled up. After class, I pulled out the Granny Calculator with the Big Buttons and started figuring. If the 79'/80' school year was two grand, and the 09'/10' school year is thirteen grand, and school costs keep rising exactly as they have thus far...

...the unborn children of my students will pay approximately $78,000 a year to receive a state college education. That will be (clickclickclick) around $312,000 for the whole undergraduate rodeo. Feel free to check my math. I was an English major.

Ladies and gentlemen, I may very well be teaching the last generation to earn a college degree. We like to talk about Generation Y (or Millennials) as the tech generation, but history may prove them to be the Last of the Educated. All these texting, Facebooking masses will be intellectual gods.

Tonight I look at the sleeping Perfect Grandson, and even though several generations of family are socking away money for his college, it may take more than this village to educate the child. Even here in Arkansas where such a thing is relatively cheap.

I predict in the future there will be a rash of bank robberies and petty thieveries committed by women in orthopedic shoes and brandishing canes. Legions of Grammies out there trying to raise a little tuition spare-change for their Perfect Grandkids. There won't be jails enough to hold us all.

In the meantime, I'm thinking of going into the textbook business.

Achoo, Y'all

Well, that didn't take long. Let's see...The Perfect Grandson began preschool last Thursday. Here it is the following Tuesday and every last person in this house is sniffling, coughing, sick. I'm not concerned that this is the swine/H1N1 flu business that seems to be everywhere but here, it's just a cold or a collective allergy or something irritating that has all of us in the No Telling household grabbing tissues and drinking orange juice.

The Perfect Grandson prefers to wipe boogies all over his face in a lightning-fast one-two motion with the back of his little fist. Em says she'll be glad when he gets older and isn't so haphazard with his hygiene and learns to use a tissue.

I'm not telling her. You tell her.

The news is fraught with dire predictions about this flu. As someone who works in a sea of devil-may-care college students, this is the kind of train I'd like to see coming down the track before it hits me. College kids stay out too late, eat crappy food, and live too close to each other. Anything that comes on campus sweeps across it like the Black Plague. Just so you know, I'm unapologetic about wearing gloves during Pink-Eye Season and think nothing of running off students before they have a chance to touch a doorknob. Shoo! I say. And take your pink-eye with you to the health center.

My sister is an elementary school teacher in Birmingham, Alabama, and she told me tonight that just about everyone has that H1N1 business right now. She says they're not closing down the schools because it wouldn't make a lick of difference. I'll bet they change their minds when they try finding substitute teachers in another week or so. Good luck with that, Birmingham.

As I am a Woman of a Certain Age it's likely I was exposed to that last bout back in the 70s, which may very well provide some bullet-proofing. We'll see. In the meantime I'm headed to Walgreens for a gallon jug of hand sanitizer and some Lysol spray, because these college kids love to kick you when you're down.

I can't do much about The Perfect Grandson's germs, though. Especially since he wears them everywhere and all over. When the little guy feels poorly he wants extra hugs and kisses - and he'll get them, too. He already has, that's why we're in this condition.

No kissing on the face, though. At least not until he's old enough to use his shirttail instead.

Finders Keepers

I never visited the Palace Theater in Greenwood, Arkansas. This lobby card was in a pile of others like it underneath a dusty Chatty Cathy doll with a wonky right eye.

The Girls take a trip at the end of the spring semester each year to spend money at the outlet malls in Branson, Missouri. There are only two of us interested in roadside yard sales, rusty flea markets, and the like, so stopping at the little gas-station-turned-junk-shop in Marshall had to be a quick trip. Besides, everyone needed a potty break.

I bought the whole stack of lobby cards from the old theater, finished the trip, put them in a drawer, and forgot.

I don't know why I started digging around tonight, but there in my Hideous Gift Scarves Drawer was the pile. The woman who sold it to me for five dollars felt guilty because they were so dusty and had packed them neatly in plastic sheeting. She was a sweet woman on the other side of fifty who wore her hair piled high in the back. Miss Clairol ash blonde. When she wasn't waiting on customers, she worked a baby quilt behind the counter. Sunbonnet Sue, so it must be a girl.

She really doesn't matter to this story, but I remember writing notes about her when I returned to the van. Can't find the notes, but I remember her raisin-colored nail polish clearly enough.

In July 1967, the couples who bought tickets to the Palace Theater in Greenwood, Arkansas saw Doris Day, Charlton Heston, John Wayne, and Elvis. Some sat in the balcony and necked while others sat below and pointed upward. There were only about 2,000 people living there then and I know this because eight months later a good portion of them lost their whole world and many loved ones to a drop-down tornado that flattened most of the town.

I don't know if the Palace Theater survived the carnage. It's doubtful. What did survive are these fairly pristine lobby cards, stacks of them dating back from 1955 through this one in 1967. Some are a little brown around the edges from exposure, but none look like they were fished out of a tornado.

The storm blew up in the late afternoon and had it hesitated, waited a couple of hours more, the Palace would have been full of young lovers holding popcorn and each other on a Friday night. Maybe somewhere near the back row there would have been young fella with a fresh shave and clean fingernails escorting his ash-blonde sweetheart to her seat.

Maybe.

All I Need is this Stapler...

I guess it's just that time of year, but I've got a serious craving for office and school supplies. I want fancy pens and odd paperclips and fresh piles of yellow legal pads, college-ruled.

There's absolutely nothing I actually need besides a few Parker gel refills (perfection), but that's not put a dent in my irrational hankering for a little something more. It doesn't help that a new Staples store opened up here not long ago, either. I can hear the notebook-and-journal sirens' song clean through the walls of this house.

And that's just the new stuff. I'm an avid gatherer of all things vintage. Ebay has become a curse and a blessing, because where else are you going to find those old pop-up phone indexes and boxes of air mail stationery? I've hunted like a fiend and it appears everyone in Arkansas is either still using them or threw them away when Nixon left office. Someone has to literally die and have their secret office drawers up for inspection at estate sales around here, which is too morbid and sad even for an addict like me.

I want an two-toned Swingline stapler, but not enough to dig through the used casserole dishes of some lovely woman who's just gone to her Great Reward. That's just wrong.

So tomorrow I'm heading out and won't come back until I have a clipboard, post-it notes, onionskin paper - something - in hand. A cursory look around tells me I'm a little low on snazzy designer file folders and that won't do.

I. Must. Replenish.

A Room of One's Own

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
~ Virginia Woolf

This has always been one of my favorite quotes. Not because it's true, mind you, but because it's amusing. If it were really true, there would be four, maybe five women in the whole world who had the ingredients necessary to write even flash fiction. Forget writing a novel.

I know a lot of women who write and they work the whole business piecemeal - half an hour here, fifteen minutes there, maybe an hour after the kids go to bed and if they don't fall asleep on their keyboards before page three. Most of us sneak writing in between loads of laundry and incessant interruptions about Where Things Are. We are the keepers, we gals, and that always manages to come first because the guilt our mothers taught us stuck. Hard.

A room of one's own? Unless she's got one of those creepy "safe rooms" that locks hydraulically and requires a secret code to enter, she'll never find a room no one else feels free to enter. And it doesn't even matter if she's got one of those, because no amount of expensive sound-proofing will drown out the pleading on the other side of the wall.

Here's the thing: I'm not complaining. I generally love interruptions because they mean my house is full of life and love. It's impossible to get deeply into a story that way, so I schedule my heavy-duty writing time in the early mornings for that very reason. You wouldn't believe how much I can write in an hour and a half of complete quiet. The rest of the day belongs to other things and plenty of them.

It's not the room, you see, it's the silence.

The money thing is shiftier. Sure, I can imagine having enough money to buy time away from work. I think about this often when passing through states with lottery tickets for sale at gas stations (by the way, we're beginning a state lottery here soon and I'm VERY excited). I'm not much of a math person, but I can wrap my head around the astronomical odds of winning such a thing as enough money to write fiction. It's fun to think about, but it's not going to happen. I'm guessing Virginia needed less money back then.

My theory about women and piecemeal writing is that we've all found something that fits our interruptible lives - blogging. Short pieces and instant publishing gratification between dentist appointments and fighting children...no wonder the blogosphere is awash in mommy blogs.

And I say, attagirl.

Maybe all of us aren't producing Woolf-level fiction, but we get the writing done with a sense of accomplishment and a saucy pop when we hit "publish." Nothing wrong with that. For heavy-lifting fiction there are always stolen hours late and early. I don't know about you, but I'm not missing a hug from The Perfect Grandson just to get my head more deeply into a plot. The plot will wait for silent hours, but the boy will be a man in an instant and give his hugging to someone else.

(Note: During the process of writing this post I made two pitchers of iced tea, took one phone call, found a lost book, switched out the laundry, and comforted my daughter. Just so you know.)

My Life is So Exciting, I Should be Arrested

(Oooh la la notepad courtesy of my friend Stephanie who always manages to find fabulous vintage whatnots for me. In French flea markets, no less.)

First Day of School

Tomorrow is the first day of school for everyone in the No Telling household. I'll meet my nervous freshman comp students for the first time and Em will be all over the same campus taking this and that as she feverishly works at getting that degree under her skinny belt.

Nothing new there.

What's new is that tomorrow morning The Perfect Grandson will attend his very first day of daycare/preschool. He's two years old, a charming rascal beloved by all, and has never been taken care of by anyone outside of our close family. Oh my.

You mamas out there know exactly what I'm talking about. Em's already worked herself up into a pre-first-day state where she envisions the worst - choking hazards, split lips, crying jags - the whole shebang. Why, she's even thrown herself past the immediate and well into the future. Soon, Mom, he's going to be in kindergarten, and then high school and then some wench [sic] will take him away from me forever.

And she's right. That's exactly what will happen, but not tomorrow. My experienced motherhood tells me that she'll drop him off in the morning and cry much harder than he will, because kids are funny like that. When class is over she'll fly to the daycare to hug him more tightly than he'll want or allow. He'll show her around, punch his new friends affectionately, come home with a few new words and nasty habits.

That's how it works. There are women all over the world dropping their womb-babies off with strangers for the first time. All that common umbilical cutting doesn't make it less excruciating for a first time mama. It doesn't get any better, I suspect, with the second or the third.

I will not be a part of the dropping off and picking up tomorrow. That's Em's moment and she has a right to the love and pain of it. My job will be to comfort a weeping daughter, to give her a solid place to lean when the ground starts slipping underneath. It'll be all right.

I'll make sure to to schedule my own moment behind a locked office door, neatly timed so I come out looking fresh for class. And for my daughter, who will never know I'm not the rock she believes me to be.

Get Out the Umbrella, it's Going to be a Bumpy Ride

What I like best are the five or so minutes just before the storm. You know, when the lightning hasn't caught up to the thunder just yet and you can smell the rain coming. I took this picture with my out-of-date cell phone and even so managed to catch a little unexpected majesty. Nothing like the great beyond working itself up into a tirade just over the subdivision rooftops of forty or so aging widow-women and their little snappy dogs.

I live in a "garden home" complete with a tall brick wall snaking its way all around us, keeping us protected from - I don't know - maybe young people with sex drives and fast cars and bigger dogs. It's not my fault. As I've mentioned before, I moved here in the early building stages and was blinded by 12" moldings and shiny marble counter tops. You would have fallen, too. Admit it.

I'm now among the youngest living here. My daughter and grandson who live with me are the other two. This is most obvious in the mornings when we seem to be the only people in the world leaving to go somewhere. It's also obvious when, like tonight, a storm blows up and there's no one but me standing in the middle of the street in my house shoes, trying to catch a tornado on a cellphone.

Make no mistake, the old gals are locked up tight clicking between the Weather Channel and Fox News.

Let's hope they weren't watching me, because when a good dose of lightning sprung out of the north I nearly lost both the cellphone and my ability to walk by falling up my own front steps. They've been a little wary of me since The Obama Conversation anyway. That's okay. I know better than to shout "Medicare!" in a crowded garden home subdivision. I can handle these gals.

I'm going back out there. I don't care if they're watching or not.

The Age of Aquarius and Mimeographed Worksheets

(Scribbling Paradisio by Dore', with a little help from me.)

I taught at a traveling writing workshop this summer down in Harmony Grove, Arkansas. School teachers, tired ones, met with us in that sweet but woebegone way public teachers do at the end of the school year. This is when they love their students the most but are cheerfully able to say good-bye for the summer. The workshop was splendid, and you can read about it here and here.

We used a book I've had in the workshop arsenal for a few years called The 9 Rights of Every Writer: A Guide for Teachers. It's geared towards educators, but it's a fine fist-in-the-air book about what every writer needs/deserves. These are breathtakingly simple. Every writer has the right to:

• reflect
• finding personally important topics
• go off topic
• personalize the writing process
• write badly to unearth and clarify meaning
• observe other writers at work
• assess constructively - and well
• experience structural freedom
• unearth the power of each writer's voice.

This is a powerful book for teachers. You see, most of them are scared to death of students' writing because many teachers don't see themselves as writers. That's an important hurdle during the workshops.

As an opening scribbling prompt, my partner-in-workshop-crime Stephanie asked all the teachers to pick one of the rights they wish they'd had as students. Good opener. We all began writing. Kind of.

My pen hovered over the page for a bit. It had been a few years (coughcough) since I was a public school student. I tried to summon up something, some writing experience gone awry or pinch-nosed schoolmarm with a bleeding red pen. Nothing.

The thing is, I was a public school kid in the Age of Aquarius and Mimeographed Worksheets. With the exception of one senior-year research paper, all I did was fill out purple-inked (you know you can smell them) grammar and punctuation mimeos. They were like a puzzle, really. All you had to do was figure out the pattern.

In public school, no one ever tried to teach me how to write. Huh.

But the writing happened anyway. I began as Harriet the Spy and became the girl with the contraband poetry books in her locker and a Secret Notebook in her purse. I wrote incessantly, mostly terrible poetry then published in the high school literary magazine, but would never have devalued my late '70s coolness-mystique (good lord) by being on staff. My plan was to be Gloria Steinem and Sylvia Plath. Simultaneously.

That morning in Harmony Grove I ended up writing about the freedom students need to scribble outside of standardized testing and five-paragraph nightmares. I wrote about the freedom to be left alone with the words, to develop fearlessness and a casual attitude because everything we write isn't stark reflection of our worth. It's practice. It's play. It's necessary.

They're just words. We can always make more.

So go write something.

Note on the Fridge to the Retail Giants... (you know who you are)

Dear Retail Mucky-Mucks,

While other parts of the country religiously begin school just after Labor Day, around here the powers that be want school to start this week. You know, when it's a nice and sultry 100+ degrees and the humidity makes the air palpable. It's like breathing hot jello.

I'm trying very hard to remember what it was like as a school child in all those unairconditioned 1960's classrooms. I know one whole wall was nothing but crank-windows and they were mostly open, but that's because I recall fighting off errant wasps instead of the heat. Is this truly a sign of global warming, or was I too worried about playing on the monkeybars to care?

Regardless, I was reading a post about the horrors of back-to-school clothes shopping at Crazy Texas Mommy (I love her) and she brought up the tricky business of out-of-season shopping. She's right, your stores are filled with sweaters and long pants and all manner of Fall bits, but Fall won't happen around here until late October. Maybe not even then.

So what happened to all those summer clothes? They went on half-of-half sometime in late June. They're gone, baby, and you're not reordering. The Recession ate our school clothes.

It's a double whammy. Somewhere all you retail CEOs are sitting around in turtlenecks and throwing back hot toddies. I'm guessing you're enjoying mid-August somewhere in the Berkshires where folks have four distinct seasons. Down here, we can only dream and sling sweat.

In ragged old Summer clothes, no less.

Sincerely,

Monda

Here Comes the Bridal Shower

I'm supposed to be at a wedding shower in a few hours and forgot to buy a gift. Down South that's a real faux pas. I'm sure they have the same rules of etiquette up North, but down here something like this can severely damage your reputation. Permanently. Social mistakes are somehow written indelibly on your DNA thereafter like a fow-pah tattoo.

"You know Monda over there? She teaches over at the college...writing or literature or..."
"Oh yes. She's the one who showed up empty handed at that Bannister girl's shower."
"1988. That's her. Here she comes..."

I can't let that happen. Luckily, today's brides register everywhere, even Wal-Mart although I find that practice too tacky to even acknowledge. Target is perfectly fine, Wal-Mart is NOT. You might as well put on the announcements that you're registered for linen and china at The Dollar Store.

Or change your last name to Duggar. They registered for Gatorade and beef jerky at Wal-Mart.

In my mother's generation, young brides registered for china and silver - real silver - and that was it. Girls in the '50s expected to get four toasters and odd clocks. That changed a little for those of us Generation Jonesers. We made it more casual by registering for "everyday" dishes and flatware. While we sere more casual, we still had to sit through "tomato aspic" bridal showers thrown by our mothers' women-friends. The rules were strict and the etiquette, unbendable. Legs crossed at the ankle and embossed thank you notes, that sort of thing.

These women are still around. In their golden years, all they do is go to church and rattle their pearlsls at showers. And they still scare me to death. Besides, these old gals remained married to their high school sweethearts while most of us Gen Jones brides made more than one trip to the altar.

Gen Y brides aren't afraid of anybody. I love that about them. They register everywhere and run around with little electronic guns shooting a very specific gift list onto the internet. No worries about four toasters for these young women. They show up to their bridal showers in flip-flops and bring their men. Whoa. Maybe they learned something from our mistakes. I hope so.

Since I've procrastinated, I'm scouring this bride-to-be's online gift registries and wondering what opens at 9:00 so I'm not socially banish-ed forever. It seems she's signed up for everything but a perfect life. Bed Bath and Beyond probably doesn't carry that, though.

Someone should.

No Pressure

This Blog of Note business is mindboggling. Last night I watched my stats go astronomical, cheered, answered email, and celebrated with sushi from Kroger. Yeah, I'm a wild one.

This morning, still hung over with delight, I sat in front of the computer, opened a new empty post, and stared at it. For a long time. Damn. See, my blogging philosophy has always been to slam it out, sling it up, and clean up the typos later. I'm a one-draft blogger. In fact, the whole point of this blog was simply to get my butt in the chair and writing every day.

But now there are people actually reading it. I'm suddenly hyper audience-aware. If I'm casual, who will I offend? What do all these new friends want to read? Should I do a little research and see what they like best, tailoring topics to previous posts? I stared some more. Another cup of coffee. Checked my Ebay watchlist.

I teach writing for a living, and much of what I teach centers around this mantra I repeat about No Such Thing as Writer's Block and Just Go Write Something. I can honestly say that this is the first time in recent memory that I've found myself stumped. Physician, heal thyself and all that.

So that's what I'll do. Just dive on in and slam it out and devil-may-care. If you find typos, be kind. I'll fix them in a bit. If my politics/tomato snark/social networking cluelessness offends you, let me apologize right now and be forever done with it.

I'll just keep scribbling like nobody's watching. Kind of.

Wow. Thanks, Blogger!

And a big Thank You to everyone who's visiting. This took me a little by surprise, folks, so I don't have a speech prepared. I'm waving, though, just like a Miss Toadsuck Beauty Queen.

Fingers together. Wrist, wrist.

There's iced tea in the fridge and I'm working on a plate of deviled eggs. Make yourself at home.

A Blight on Your House

(Dante's Tomatoes by Dore', with a little help from me)

Or on your tomatoes, thanks to "Southern growers" and according to The New York Times. I was alerted to the tomato pandemic via a bit in the Arkansas Times, and while there are no fingers specifically pointing Arkansasward, we know who they mean.

We've unwittingly contributed to the disaster by shipping plants to unsuspecting northern farmers who, if you can believe such rumors, actually grow tomatoes for sale. Why anyone would want a tomato grown in outdoor temperatures of less than 105 degrees is beyond me. That's like importing watermelons from Canada. Ridiculous.

I guess we know how to get even, though. The NY Times says,

"According to plant pathologists, this killer round of blight began with a widespread infiltration of the disease in tomato starter plants. Large retailers like Home Depot, Kmart, Lowe’s and Wal-Mart bought starter plants from industrial breeding operations in the South and distributed them throughout the Northeast. (Fungal spores, which can travel up to 40 miles, may also have been dispersed in transit.) Once those infected starter plants arrived at the stores, they were purchased and planted, transferring their pathogens like tiny Trojan horses into backyard and community gardens."

I can envision thousands those baby Arkansas plants flinging killer spores like confetti-tears all the way to New Jersey. Sounds more like a pitiful cry for help. Remember Hansel and Gretel and those breadcrumbs? Exactly.

(Titans Recoil by Dore' and Monda)

So does this leave us tomatoless down here? Hmmm....

"So what’s going on here? Plant physiologists use the term “disease triangle” to describe the conditions necessary for a disease outbreak. You need the pathogen to be present (that’s the late blight), you need a host (in this case tomatoes and potatoes) and you need a favorable environment for the disease — for late blight that’s lots of rain, moderate temperatures and high humidity."

The emphasis is mine. Clearly, if God meant for tomatoes to flourish in places like Vermont she would've turned up the heat considerably. In fact, I suspect this may be God's way of telling those folks to grow Brussels sprouts instead.

There's talk that we might have a shortage down here, but barring some apocalyptic meteor-disaster climate change or salmonella outbreak, anyone living in Arkansas could reasonably put in a few plants right now and harvest tomatoes clear through Halloween. How's that for trick or treat?

Say it Ain't So, Twitter

Millions of people clicking feverishly on their Iphones. The panic, the frustration, the rock-bottom realization that they were all disconnected. That's an exi-twitter-stential moment, folks. Lives hung in the balance as the masses frantically clicked and reclicked.

I learned about the TwitterCaust on CNN this morning. Breaking News! Twitter. Is. Down!

So I sat there with my coffee and tried very hard to hear the collective wailing and gnashing of teeth. I imagined all sorts of world-wide panic and and falling stock prices and declarations of war. Seriously, how long would Twitter be down before we began hearing the thundering hooves of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? Then I made another cup of coffee.

Look, I'm not a complete geezer. I've got a Twitter account and I post to it when I remember. Sometimes I forget, although it doesn't really matter. My tweets are unremarkable and I don't post via cell phone because it's too much trouble. I do realize Twitter's important to many people. Yadda, yadda.

The thing is, I signed on after the scare was over and found that all anyone wanted to tweet about was...well, that Twitter was down this morning. Twittering about Twitter seems a little pointless. I'm thinking maybe it's time we all rediscovered our walking-around lives, our priorities, our inner monologues. Something.

(Note: I'm tweeting a link to this. Full circle, darlin', full circle.)

Step Right Up

The First Carnival of Pen, Pencil and Paper is on and there's much to see. Anyone who's addicted to writing tools and paper needs to stop by to take a gander at the notebook and pen reviews, as well as pieces on paper obsession. Love this!

Not familiar with a blog carnival? Step on over to Notebook Stories and take a look at the submission requirements. Next month's carnival is hosted by The Pen Addict, so scribble a little something and use this submission form to enter your post.

A couple of ditties of mine - this one and this one - made it onto the midway, so get your post on and enter September's Carnival of Pen, Pencil and Paper.

Deadline: Sunday, September 6 at 5:00 pm.

Lost and Found or Where Do I Put the Bookplate on this Kindle?

(from Bookplate Junkie)

I've spent a few weeks trying to justify buying a Kindle. So far there are only two entries in the plus column: storage and techno-fascination. Neither are strong arguments for dropping $300 (or thereabouts) on a new gadget.

The minus column is long and includes many tactile reasons I love books in the first place - the feel of the pages, writing all over the margins, the ability to sling a bad book at a wall and still have an intact, readable book to give away. Now I have the best reason not to own a Kindle: bookplates.

No, I'm not one of those who meticulously labels ownership in each new purchase. I appreciate those who do, though, and love finding an old book with a gorgeous bookplate glued inside the front cover. Oh, the history! Try recreating that, sleek and pricey Kindle.

I've found a bevy of gorgeous bookplates, obsessive collectors, and Etsy recreations. Waste a little time sifting through these sites and luxuriating in the art of the bookplate.

• Oiseaux's Etsy shop is filled with dozens of bookplates sold either blank or personalized.
• Le Coeur Humain's shop is beautifully bizarre source for vintage anatomical art. I plan to buy the uterus bookplates, just because.
• Vintage Necessities only has two designs, but they're art deco classic - a little more gender-neutral than uterine bookmarks - and inexpensive.

For the serious collector there's always The American Society of Bookplate Collectors and Designers. Here, you can actually commission a personal bookplate and the art is stunning. I'm sure the price is, too. It's all about the math, really. How many books and commissioned bookplates can you buy for $300 (or thereabouts)?

Go crazy at Flickr. The Exlibris pool is an ooo-la-la collection of vintage bookplates, and Heraldic is another. My favorite, though, is the Pratt Libraries Ex Libris Collection. These are To. Die. For.

So it looks like my spare change will go elsewhere now. Sorry, Amazon. Until the Kindle is made of magic paper I'll stick with the real pages. It looks like I've got some shopping ahead of me.

And so it begins...

The indoctrination is complete. After a quick trip for supplies, The Perfect Grandson has his first notebook. He wrapped his chubby two-year-old fist around a blue crayon and moseyed from room to room waving both the instrument and his 3x5 notebook, stopping occasionally to add this or that to the pages. Just like...well, everyone else in this house. We're a notebook-waving, scribbling family, and he's officially joined the ranks.

Clearly, his genre is fiction. There was a great deal of plot that didn't make it to the page, but I was fortunate enough to hear it all. Trust me, it's an action/adventure piece thick with tension and twists. There's also something about a bug with spots, but I don't want to give it all away.

I burst with pride.