What's on my desktop

It's fun and creepy to research mannequins. I love the sites that have used ones for sale: "Just one crack on this toddler's skull," like that's a real plus. Considering that other descriptive phrases include "headless" and "hangable", perhaps it is.

I am using the word research to make it clear that I'm not just googling broken naked dolls. At least it is not puppets, although I dread the day that my brain will decide that puppets are in the next story. Marionettes = nightmarish. They collapse in a buglike way, a jerky centipede/spider way, and lie there with painted garish human faces and strings and sticks, like they have been smacked with a supersized magazine.

The so-called writing business

Got a slightly personal rejection for Putty Brother, which is both encouraging and a rejection.

I have now sent the enrollment form for TNEO, as well. I have no earthly idea how we will manage to coordinate things this summer, but I'm going ahead with it anyway.

Fewer daisies today

More Daleks.

Travel... in time!

To 1978, or thereabouts, when Marsh was starting to mix a few Daleks in with the daisies.

I know what I want

listeme (9:08:05 PM): ok, so here is a farfetched and ridiculous question
SISTER (9:08:11 PM): k
listeme (9:08:24 PM): is the meatball recipe by any chance handwritten?
SISTER (9:08:41 PM): party meatball recipe?
listeme (9:08:43 PM): yeah
SISTER (9:09:07 PM): frozen meatballs, jar of grape jelly, jar of heinz 57 chili sauce, jar of banana peppers
listeme (9:09:10 PM): no, no
SISTER (9:09:10 PM): heat
listeme (9:09:12 PM): HANDWRITTEN
SISTER (9:09:19 PM): that is handtyped!
SISTER (9:09:21 PM): :-D
listeme (9:09:22 PM): i need a handwritten version
listeme (9:09:27 PM): you are NO HELP
SISTER (9:09:30 PM): whut
SISTER (9:09:46 PM): you want me to email it to you...?
listeme (9:10:45 PM): gah

(I was looking for a specific physical/graphical thing. I'm really not a maniac.)

Upcoming titles

1. On being the mother of children who also have a stepmother: Turning small blobs of biology into good human grownups

2. My neighbor puts his trash out a day early: Sharing an ecological niche

3. Apocalypse Tomorrow!

4. What should we do with the newspapers? The ones stacked by the fire and the ones perching precariously on the edge of yesterday's technology

5. "Does this one have gentoo?" What bogglers could teach the NSA about dictionary compartmentalization


AND MORE!

You know, it's about the tangibility right now. If I were in the scarf business, for example, I would be feeling more valuable as a scarf maker than as a scarf designer. I would have proof in my hands, warm fuzzy proof.

This turns my normal priorities upside-down, but I don't think this is a bad thing. On Monday at some point I proclaimed that I just needed to "make something, anything. Clay pots!"

There are very good clay pots in this world, and I am not a pot maker. So it was just rhetoric.

Which is the whole POINT.