Tag: houston

If I could turn back time

It’s a good thing these stories I’m editing are so enjoyable to read, since…


The other night I went to Murder By The Book because the wonderful Carolyn Haines was signing her new mystery, Bonefire of the Vanities. I’m behind in the series, so I now have two Sarah Booth Delaney mysteries beckoning me from my TBR pile. I’m using them as my carrot: When I get caught up with the editing, I can start reading Bones of a Feather.


In my last post, I mentioned how my aunt and uncle were great storytellers who I wanted somehow to weave into my fiction one day. But honestly, I feel like if I could just follow Carolyn Haines around and listen to her tell stories, that would be as humorous and inspiring. If you ever get a chance to meet her, take it.

One of the things she talked about was how it took her so long to give her character Sarah Booth a cell phone. When she started the series, Carolyn didn’t have a cell phone herself, but as the years progressed (well, in book publishing years; only about a year and a half has passed in Sarah Booth’s life, I think), it became implausible not to introduce a little technology. It reminded me of a time Greg and I were talking about an old Mary Stewart novel, and I said a coincidental plot point couldn’t happen in modern times because of technology. But Greg pointed out that the characters could have stumbled over an Internet news story and acquired the same information.

Still, I have a real longing to strip away technology from a novel I want to write. Sometimes characters don’t need to be able to access Wikipedia and Google. They need to think their way out of bad situations–or NOT–without rescue available at the touch of a button. There are only so many times a person can lose a cell phone or forget to charge it…or the Internet can be down… It’s a writer’s delight to put a character in awkward or perilous circumstances and watch as they use their wits and nerve to save themselves. It’s just not the same if OnStar and Siri and Travelocity do all the work.

Although I suppose technology-rich bestsellers prove me wrong daily, I’m still pretty glad Scout Finch couldn’t point a security camera at the oak tree; Juliet didn’t have face recognition software; and Miss Marple never hid a smart phone in her knitting bag. Though I can’t help but wonder what her ring tone might be.

Legacy Writing 365:172

This is our third Houston home: this time, we rented an actual three-bedroom house with enough space for us to breathe. Oddly, a few months ago when I went into the Northwest suburb where it’s located, I almost never found it. Everything has changed. Old access roads no longer exist, and new roads look so different. Even when I found the house, it didn’t look right. For one thing, that iron gate wasn’t on it when we lived there. Tom agreed that the house looks different from how he remembered it. I know the landscaping has totally changed.

The house is larger than it looks from the front, and it had a good-sized backyard that the dachshunds loved. For the first time they could be outside unleashed and run as much as they liked. There was an uncovered patio, and sometimes I set my little Mac out there and wrote.

Some things I remember about living there:

  • We didn’t have enough furniture to fill it, so we bought a twin bedroom set with a dresser and an additional dresser/hutch for the guest room. We bought a daybed for the other bedroom. My mother moved in with us for a year or so. Though she put most of her stuff in storage, we used her living room and dining room furniture. The only stuff left from all that are the twin beds and the dressers that went with those, which are now in Lila’s room in Lynne’s house at Green Acres. I do wish I still had the daybed. Lynne made a lot of furnishings for the daybed with some Ralph Lauren sheets that I loved. I still have those. We put the pillows on the window seat in our current dining room and she turned the daybed’s dust ruffle into a dining room curtain for us.
  • Either we took some of the roaches with us from the dreadful apartment or there were some already there, because we had to do battle with them the entire time we lived in the house.
  • Before Steve R died, he made arrangements for where his cats should go. That didn’t happen as it was planned, so the cats ended up living in the daybed room with a gate up so they could get out if they wanted to, but the dogs couldn’t get in to bother them. Dachshunds are burrowers, so at night they’d get under the covers with Tom and me, and the cats would wander the house, even coming into our bedroom to say hello, and the dogs never knew it.
  • Someone used a crowbar to try to break into my car, doing a ton of damage to the door. When the crowbar didn’t work, they broke one of the windows. The grand total of what they took: a pack of cigarettes. That was a pricey pack of cigarettes for my insurance company and me. They snubbed my cassettes–obviously didn’t share my taste in music. And they took all my photos and files that were being used to create a booklet for Steve’s memorial service, plus whatever was in the glove box, and spread them all over the driveway. Nothing was damaged other than the car.
  • That house was the first place large enough that we could do any real entertaining. It’s where we lived the first time our friend Amy visited us. When the dogs ran in from the back yard, Pete charged her and she jumped ON the dining room table, I think bypassing the chair completely, so he couldn’t bite her. Later, they became best friends.
  • We were living in that house when Cousin Rachel called to tell us that her mother, Aunt Drexel, had died. I vividly remember standing in the kitchen, talking to Rachel on the phone, and feeling so sad and far away. I really loved Aunt Drexel.
  • One time my mother was going to chop up a leftover pork roast in the food processor to make barbecue from it. She forgot to put the lid on, and pork went everywhere. From then on, whenever they heard the food processor, Pete and Stevie ran into the kitchen with high hopes.
  • We kept getting onto Stevie for turning the trash over. Then one night after we left to go somewhere, Tom ran back inside for something and caught Pete IN THE ACT. We’d been blaming the wrong dog.

In and Out

IN.

A week or so ago–that day I made biscuits–I decided to embark on another culinary adventure. There were only two of us for dinner and three chicken legs in the freezer–just enough for two people (Tom ate two; I wanted only one). Even though I’m not the biggest fan of barbecue, I decided to make my own sauce using half this recipe.

Do you guys save all your extra condiments when you get fast food or takeout? ‘Cause that’s what all these packets are about–I used packets of butter, ketchup, and mustard for my sauce.

After letting it simmer for twenty minutes, I brushed it on the chicken legs after I removed their skin.

Tom’s plate with a garden salad, fresh corn on the cob, and a couple of those biscuits.

He liked the sauce. I think I might use a little less vinegar next time. But we had enough left over that we used it on some ribs we grilled a couple of days later.

and OUT.


Then last week, I went to Kimberly Frost’s signing at Murder By The Book. As usual, she was a crowd pleaser. She was there to sign her new release, All That Falls, the second in her Etherlin series. I’ve been reading it all this week…who can resist a sexy fallen angel?

Kimberly does a lot of world building in the paranormal Etherlin novels, which present serious struggles between Muses, Demons, Angels, and mutated Vampires that could affect all of humanity. But when she was asked about creating the town of Duvall, Texas, for her other series, the Southern Witch novels, I had to laugh. As soon as Kimberly began talking about Tammy Jo Trask’s world, her voice and accent changed dramatically. It was easy to see the affection and connection she feels for and with her main character.

All three Southern Witch books, as well as the novella and first two novels of the Etherlin series, are available from your favorite booksellers.

Legacy Writing 365:160

Warning: This post contains gross stuff.


This is the second Houston apartment complex where Tom and I lived after we were able to pay off our tax debt and become renters again. The floor plan wasn’t really that different from the first place, except we didn’t have a fireplace. We added our little dachshund Stevie to our family while we were living there, and she promptly developed a taste for carpet. Nothing would deter her–pepper water or bitter apple sprayed on the place she wanted to chew–she just thought that added a bit of seasoning. Needless to say, when we moved out, we didn’t get all of our deposit back.

While we lived there, I spent more hours at work than at home because things went a little crazy at the bookstore (the life of a retail manager can be a challenging one). Also, I couldn’t bear to have anyone over to this apartment because it had ROACHES. We did everything we could to try to get rid of them, but of course, unless the entire property is thoroughly treated, they just move around and come back when the poison wears off. A friend from Alabama who’d moved to Galveston came to see me once, and I think she thought I was being cool to her, but really I was just terrified the entire time she was visiting that Pete would bite her child or an army of roaches would march through the room. If you ever saw the MTV short “Joe’s Apartment,” that was my fear. And in fact, once when Tom’s parents and two of his siblings came to spend a few days with us, a roach fell from the ceiling onto my father-in-law’s plate of food at dinner one night.

So proud.

This gravel road was behind the complex.

The fence didn’t used to be there. I would never walk the dogs down that road because there was a kind of scary family who kept a huge Doberman on a chain, and the dog barked all the time. Chaining a dog is one of the things I abhor most in the world–and so is training a dog to be vicious so that he has to be left outside and chained. This was also the House of Guinea Hens, and those bitches were as vicious as the dog–but they weren’t chained. I’ve often shared the story of the time the “gang of marauding guinea hens” chased me across the parking lot when I was trying to get from my car to my apartment door. Straight out of Hitchcock. NOT FUNNY, COUSIN RON. But I put a menacing flock of them in A Coventry Wedding just for him.

Needless to say, we bolted from that place as soon as our lease was up.

Legacy Writing 365:147

Back in April, I spent some time driving by and taking photos of places where I’ve lived and worked since moving to Houston in 1989. When Tom and I first came here, we lived in the suburbs northwest of the city in a two-bedroom apartment. The complex was actually pretty nice at the time. I don’t remember using any of the amenities like the swimming pool or the party room, but it was a good place to walk Pete, and there was a post office, large grocery store, and mall all very close to us.

We had two good-sized bedrooms and a little patio for our grill. But my favorite thing about the apartment was the fireplace. Though we don’t get extended periods of cold weather here, there are a couple of months when it’s nice to have a fire–and I built one every time I could.

The WORST thing about the apartment was the family who lived upstairs: husband, wife, and infant. We rarely heard the child, but the couple fought like crazy–not just screaming, but physical fighting. That would drive me out of the apartment in nothing flat, and we, as well as other neighbors, consistently called the constable and complained to the apartment manager until they were finally evicted. It was easy to assume that he was the aggressor, but I’m not so sure. Judging by some of the things we heard, it could have been her. The sounds of that kind of fighting are awful.

I think during the time we lived in that apartment, the only visitors we ever had were Mother, when she came for Christmas, and Lynne, Craig, and Jess. We didn’t really know anyone else except friends of theirs, who we usually hung out with at their house, and people we worked with and saw mostly at work. The reason we ultimately moved was because when we filed our income taxes after our first full year as a married couple, the money we owed was catastrophic to our tight budget. Craig and Lynne graciously let us–and Pete!–live in their guest room for a few months until we could pay off our tax debt and save enough for all the deposits necessary for a new place.

It’s a recurring theme, I think, the times others have helped us, and we’ve helped others, over the decades. I don’t know about other parts of the country, but for Southerners, that’s what having family, and friends who become family, means. You can always set another plate at the table, provide a bed when one is needed, give somebody a ride somewhere, or sit in a waiting room for them or with them.

And also–at least with my family and Lynne’s–there existed the love match I haven’t mentioned. It began in this big field which is still next to that apartment complex.


It’s where our boy Pete used to run with his girlfriend Heidi. Well, sort of. Remember, Pete weighed in at about ten pounds.

And this is a photo of Heidi, who was Craig’s dog, Lynne’s companion, and Jess’s protector.

Heidi would run in big sweeping circles around the perimeter of the field, and Pete would run from the center in whatever straight line took him closest to her. She was infinitely patient with him–he could even hang off her lip and she’d just walk along and let him. They ate together, napped together, rode in the car side by side: Wherever you saw one, you saw the other.

Love’s a crazy thing–and no one ever had to call a constable or landlord about those two.

Randomness

Some random things to show I don’t live completely in the past.

Writers.

Recently, Tim and I attended Michael Thomas Ford’s signing at Murder By The Book. MTF looks very solemn in this photo, as he was listening to a question from a reader. But there were a lot of laughs at the event, because he’s a funny man. He was there to promote the third in his Jane series: Jane Bites Back, Jane Goes Batty, and Jane Vows Vengeance.

Current-day Jane Austen as a vampire whose nemesis is the undead Charlotte Brontë; who finds love and unusual potential mother-in-law conflict in upstate New York; and who can talk to three-legged chihuahuas and ghosts: What’s not to love?

Aesthetics.
Coke introduced the white polar bear can to raise awareness of the threat to the polar bear and its habitat due to climate change. In partnership with the World Wildlife Fund, Coke committed three million dollars to the campaign. Consumers reacted poorly to the Coke can, either because of their devotion to the color red or because they confused the white can with Diet Coke’s silver can. Coke stopped production of the white polar bear can and now shows the bears on the traditional red can. I’ll bite my tongue on all the things I could say about this–except to note that I loved the white can.

Art.

We had an honest to goodness Craft Night last week! Lindsey and I both painted. I’d vowed that when Project Runway All Stars ends, I’d return to working on the Bottle Caps and Friends series.
I hope to hang it somewhere this year.

Adorability.
Last October, I spied this tiny Starbucks cup at Target and shot it (left). As adorable as I found the shot-glass sized cup, there was no point in sharing the photo because of the lack of scale. Then on a recent drive-through, I was given a little sample of Starbucks cherry pie in one of the shot-glass cups. Notice how the logo has changed in the interim, with the Starbucks name vanishing to leave only the mermaid.

Family. Our nephew Aaron is visiting for a few days. On Monday, he, Tim, and I went to Houston Camera Co/op so Tim could look at external flashes; Aaron could look at potential new cameras (he’s going Canon, because that’s what he’s learning on, and Canons still make me drool, even though I’m a Nikon owner); and I could learn what to do about the smudge that I keep having to photoshop out of all my pictures. The REALLY helpful gentleman (pictured with Aaron, beyond Tim in this photo) who assisted me has SOLVED MY PROBLEM by showing me how to get to the innards of my camera (if ONLY I’d read the manual–bad tech writer!) and delicately clean away the smudge. This will save me a lot of time with my photos, so I’m quite happy.

Home. I saw a photo online of a grouping of globes displayed in a home. I liked it, but I have only one globe. I moved it from my office to my living room and added some of my crystal balls, my Manhattan snow globe, Tom’s childhood marbles, and other globe-shaped items next to it. There are twinkly lights there, too, so the crystals glisten at night.

Friends. In addition to being my nephew Josh’s birthday, March 12 is my late friend Tim R’s birthday. We dropped by the cemetery to leave wind chimes on his crape myrtle. I wonder if they’ll still be there the next time I visit? I say that not because people steal things, the way they stole from my parents’ gravesite. The other things left over the years are all still there. I just don’t know if it’s too big to be allowed to hang from the tree. We’ll see!