Gratitude Monday -- Pizza By Phone Edition

I like delivery pizza. It's quick, easy as all get out, tasty, and fun.
Clean up after delivery pizza is also quick and easy.
We had a stretch of gloriously warm weather here last week. I didn't feel like cooking most days and neither did I have to. My husband has been working out of town the past two weeks. I am left to my own devices.

A homemade deep-dish pizza that husband and I made. He wasn't home and I wanted pizza. What choice did I have?

 Yes, I can cook. Yes, I do cook. I even make cupcakes last week with the chocolate that my poor husband can't eat.
But one day I wanted pizza and it was too gloriously hot to make it from scratch.  I checked a few of the local places out and decided that I'd have Panago*.  I have wheat and dairy intolerances and I have really good luck with that company.
I had them make me a thin crust multigrain with goat cheese, spinach, and grilled veggies. In a moment of  uncompromising self-sufficiency I drove over and got it myself.
It was so tasty that it is all I want to eat now. I almost got another one yesterday.
Thank you pizza and inventors of same, and Panago for being so easy on my food issues.

* I don't work for Panago. No one paid me to say anything good about the company.

Photo-Finish Friday -- The Lonely Fence Post

This lonely scene is in the Falkland Islands.
The post has one end of a boundary marker on it to keep the tourists away from the penguins.

They've Lived Long and Prospered

William Shatner at ComicCon in Calgary, June 2011

Leonard Nimoy in Vulcan, Alberta, April 2010

Star Trek premiered 45 years ago today, September 8, 1966.
It's my favourite show ever, and it was more real to me then than anything I ever saw on the news.
Full confession, it still is.
Thank you, Mr. Roddenberry.

Two Sentence Tuesday -- Two On The Go

I'm back in the flow.

 
After a bit of a break I'm back writing some original material. I have two works on the go right now, plus I'm  doing a hard-copy edit of BloodLovers.
I'm not sure what either WIP is really about yet. It's an odd thing to say as I am their creator,  but I mean they haven't clarified themselves to me yet.
A few days ago I finally got a proper idea for a story that first occurred to me last fall. I let it rest as I was busy with something else.
I started it twice and let it go. Last week I realized I'd started the story too early and my character names were all wrong.
I'm more than 1800 words in on The Font. Another reason for abandoning it was it was stepping over the line into horror. It's leaning that way again. Instead of resisting I'll go with it and see what comes out. It may not want to tread there at all.
The other is The Reluctant Psychopomp. A psychopomp is a being who escorts the dead to the afterworld.
The reluctant part hasn't made itself known yet. All I can do is write and see what happens.
I worked on The Font yesterday morning, edited BloodLovers in the afternoon, and added a bit to the psychopomp's story last night.
It was a good day of work and I still found time to read. I started Lolita on Sunday. I bought it 30 years ago and for whatever reason I didn't read it. I think I may have read the first page, then set it aside. I'm kind of glad I waited. I'm not sure I would have appreciated Nabokov's rich use of the language back in my twenties.
Here are two from Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, (Berkley Books, 1981):
"Last night we sat on the piazza, the Haze woman, Lolita and I. Warm dusk had deepened into amorous darkness."
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And from The Font:

"The Mother faced them holding up a long, thin object that reminded Brundel of the knife her father used for deboning meat and fish.

What were they doing? This was a casting ceremony."

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Gratitude Monday-- Phoning It In

I'm grateful for the telephone.
Sure, we have many ways to have a conversation these days. Many of them are terrific.
The downside is with Internet chat or email we don't hear voices, tones, inflections. It's too easy to misinterpret a comment.

Phoning is almost mouth to mouth and ear to ear. It's like an intimate conversation though there's no face to face contact. But we can hear a voice and know the sarcasm from the sincerity.
It's as close to personal contact as we may be able to have, and that counts for a lot.

Photo - Finish Friday -- The Other Side of the Story

The opposite bank of the Nile.
You'll notice the green belt is quite narrow.
Because of the dams, the Nile doesn't flood the way it did in the past. The silt from the flooding was rich in nutrients.
Those days are over.

Frost, the Other F Word

Is the one in the middle waving?

We had a frost warning last night so I harvested our tomatoes.
There weren't many this year. I collected 35 of varying sizes and left about a half-dozen small ones on the vine as sacrifice to the frost gods.
They're resting comfortably under the bed in the spare room, covered by newspaper.  At some point in the future they'll be ready to eat. And we'll enjoy every bite.
Happy September, everyone.