Be Careful What You Google For

This morning (which is to say, Sunday morning) before church, I checked my email as usual. In it was a note from Sharon Major, the current editor of the Quantum Leap zine The Observer. She forwarded on to me, and to a Scott Bakula email list, a Google Alert containing text from my recent blog entry titled "Umm...!" It was occasioned by the following block of text:

There are images of Gates Pass, and Disneyland and Las Vegas, trees and lamps, Scott Bakula and Anthony Stewart Head, Randy Johnson and Zorro, and even Sylvester McCoy standing in front of a fan-built TARDIS with Paul McGann. ...

If any Scott Bakula fans rushed to see the entry before I read Sharon's email, then they were undoubtedly disappointed. The litany of photo subjects was just a partial list of what I was seeing on another computer's screensaver that night, which I was trying to relate to what was failing to happen in my brain that night, and how I might help it along. It certainly wasn't a promise to show thrilling new photos (or technically proficient screen captures) to any fan Google might care to send me. But Google's spiders didn't know that. How could they? I deliberately didn't name Walt, Scott, Tony, Randy, Diego, Syl or Paul in my tags/Blogger labels, but that apparently wasn't enough of an equivocation. Now I find myself wanting to apologize for misleading Google, which is clearly insane, and make it up to fans of Walt, Scott, Tony, Randy, Diego, Syl or Paul (never mind the fans of trees or lamps), which is only slightly less so. Still, it's an easy way to fill out tonight's entry, so here we go: archive photos of certain people named above, only some of which are on the other computer's slide show:


Scott Bakula as Archer, and as himself. I put together this photo montage years ago from an Entertainment Tonight preview of Enterprise.

"Professor, it works!" This is a remarkably bad screen capture that I was unable to clean up much. From "Her Charm," a Season Two episode of Quantum Leap.


KFB, Dean Stockwell and Scott Bakula in a composited green screen video made at the 1993 QL convention.


Paul McGann (the Eighth Doctor), Sylvester McCoy (Seventh Doctor) and India Fisher of Doctor Who. (India does Doctor Who audio adventures for Big Finish.) Convention photo from Gallifrey One, taken with the old Mavica camera three years ago. It all came out purple for some reason. I faked in the blue color correction for the fan-made TARDIS, only to wreck India's face.


McGann and McCoy again, at Gallifrey One's Fifteen Minutes of Fame. You see? Purple.


Anya in the terrifying bunny suit, and Giles (Tony Head) with his chain saw. "Fear Itself," Buffy the Vampire Slayer.


Disney's Zorro (Guy Williams). For me he's the definitive Zorro, a man who uses his wits as much as his sword.

Not very good, these shots, are they? They're old technology mostly, from old videotape or a digital camera whose low-res files were recorded on floppies. I did warn you: the photos I spoke of came from an older computer.

Now you know why I call this entry "Be Careful What You Google For"; even a good search string doesn't guarantee you good results, even if you end up with relevant images. And now I'm done. Good night!

Karen

Sunday Morning, 3 AM - and the Depression of the Doctor

Actually, that time was over 20 minutes ago, but I don't want to lose the Simon and Garfunkel reference, which was a Wednesday anyway. This day and night have gotten away from me again; sleeping in, a new Doctor Who episode, beta reading and Wikipedia sure can fill up the hours! I ended up writing most of the synopsis for the episode in the Wikipedia article about it. I also researched citations for films and tv shows made in Tucson, two ships called the U.S.S. Tucson, and Jack Kerouac's visit to Tucson for the Tucson article, stumbled across an article about Linda McCartney's death, and failed to find an online reference to the fact that Ina Road isn't pronounced the same way as the person for whom it was named.

Oh, and I managed to put my back in spasm, just bending over to get a pan lid from the cupboard.

The episode that aired on the BBC this weekend, "The Lazarus Experiment", featured another scene that had me thinking about the Doctor's more melancholy outlook this season. In the 2006 series, with Rose at his side, the Doctor seemed to enjoy his life most of the time, even taking a moment to enthuse with Rose in "Tooth and Claw" about seeing a werewolf (much to Queen Victoria's disapproval), and laughing with Rose at the suggestion in "The Impossible Planet" that if he thought the place was dangerous, they could just leave. As long as he had Rose with him, even trouble was part of the fun. But then Rose was stranded forever in another universe, a loss that made him even more aware of past losses, and accentuated his loneliness. He soon picked up a new companion, Martha Jones (after being turned down by Donna Noble, which was just as well), but tried to limit his emotional involvement with her, offering her "one trip only."

So far in the 2007 season, the Doctor has repeatedly mourned the loss of Rose in front of Martha ("Smith and Jones", "The Shakespeare Code"), lied to her by pretending that his home planet, Gallifrey, still existed before eventually telling her of its destruction ("Gridlock"), and told a showgirl named Tallulah that his enemies the Daleks "always survive while I lose everything" ("Daleks in Manhattan"). By the time the Daleks attack Hooverville in "Evolution of the Daleks", the Doctor has moments in which he is nearly suicidal. Tired of his endless fight with his oldest enemies, and hoping that it will somehow result in the Daleks sparing the humans, he actively and frantically invites the Daleks to kill him. Later, in the theater, he braces himself for death when the Daleks prepare to exterminate him, only afterward maneuvering the Daleks into siccing the "human Daleks" on him instead, tainted as they are with the Doctor's DNA. Then at his final confrontation with Dalek Caan, he is angrily disdainful of Caan's threat to kill him.

"The only certainty is that you end up alone."

In "The Lazarus Experiment", the Doctor isn't so much suicidal as world-weary. He tells Lazarus that a long life can be a curse, and later says,

"I'm old enough to know that a longer life isn't always a better one. In the end you just get tired, tired of the struggle, tired of losing everyone that matters to you, tired of watching everything turn to dust. If you live long enough, Lazarus, the only certainty left is that you end up alone."

"There's no such thing as an ordinary human."

Yet he also says, with a hint of a smile, "There's no such thing as an ordinary human." He may be tired and lonely, worn out with centuries of fighting in behalf of humans on Earth and elsewhere; but he still stands as their champion, as the Sycorax leader once put it. Nor is this sad speech without an underlying purpose - two of them, most likely. The Doctor has been circling Lazarus, looking around the cathedral for ways to defeat him, and also trying to reason with him about his determination to survive at any price, regardless of how many people he kills in the process. Naturally he's not going to put a happy face on his longevity in those circumstances.

At the end of the episode, we see a more cheerful side of the Doctor, as he and Martha both admit they have had fun in their adventures together. When she insists on returning to the TARDIS as a friend rather than a passenger on a short excursion, the Doctor accepts her terms. Perhaps the Doctor has realized, in remonstrating with Lazarus, that for the moment, at least, he need not be alone after all.

Two episodes from now is the one I've been looking forward to and dreading, "Human Nature." "The Lazarus Experiment" concluded with a trailer for the second half of the season, featuring several scenes from the two-part story, Human Nature / The Family of Blood. One of these seems to imply that the Doctor becomes temporarily human for some urgent, desperate reason, and depends on Martha to restore him when the time comes. Another one shows the humanized "John Smith" speaking with innocent wonder of a dream (I assume it's a dream) that "all took place in the future." A third excerpt has Smith much less happy as he urgently asks Martha, "What exactly do you do for him? Why does he need you?" Perhaps he suspects by then that his Time Lord alter ego will soon supplant him.

I hope that along the way, the Doctor will recover a bit from his melancholy, but it's hard to say that he will, given the anonymous description of the Doctor that ends the trailer: "He's fire, and ice, and rage. He's like the night, and the storm in the heart of the sun." Yes, well, I hope he's more than that. Cheer up, Doctor!

Karen

Next time: "Be Careful What You Google For."

Umm...!

It's 3:25 AM. I spent the day in bed with this virus-y thing, and managed to watch my way through almost the entire 2006 series of Doctor Who today and tonight. Now I need to get my blog entry in, and I have no clue what to write about. What trouble can we get in together?

This blog has had a higher hit count than usual this week, presumably because of the post about John Scalzi in Scottsdale as well as the usual Round Robin Photo Challenges influx. To those of you who may have found your way here in the last week or two: welcome! I'll try to keep things interesting.

Umm....

As I sit here listening to my ears ring, I'm reminded of the sound of a conch shell held to the ear, the whistling roar of emptiness, of nothing. I know that my head is not, in fact, empty; it's full of all sorts of things: guilt for calling in sick, even though I was sick; a fan letter to David Tennant that I've been writing in my head; a whole list of things I should be reading or writing or doing. Most of it is under the surface, though, not strong enough or interesting enough or enough a part of my conscious mind to motivate me, especially when I'm not feeling well. And below all that is the stuff I don't even know about: fragments of dream or fever or nightmare, bits of story simmering (I hope!) for later synthesis, countless memories and concepts and emotions stored in synapses, needing only the right stimulus to bring them forth.

Karen's Fried Brain, February 2007

Our brains are full of all sorts of fascinating things, most of which hide from us, most of the time. Reason and emotion, sanity and madness are all there in the things we do and say, influenced by what our brains have stored away. Maybe this blog entry has its roots in something that happened when I was 6, or 16, or 46. I'll never really know, and in a sense it doesn't matter. We are all the product of our accumulated experience. I could call up a dozen memories right now, the gamut of love and rejection, joy and desolation, and they would still be only a tiny part of the enormous puzzle labeled Karen's Brain. It doesn't really matter which puzzle pieces I pull out first to build tonight's bit of sky. It's all part of the big picture, sooner or later. All we have to do is take the result, and make sure it all fits together in a way that makes sense.

Still, there is only one thing I required from my brain tonight: an idea for this blog entry. My brain essentially whistled back at me, revealing nothing. Instead we're stuck with this rather pointless musing about the human brain itself. Best I can do for tonight, I think.

Maybe it's because I've been sick. Maybe it's because I actually got some sleep today. Weird stuff tends to surface more often when I'm sleep deprived than when I'm well-rested, which is one factor in my bad habit of not sleeping enough. If I didn't have to work for a living, I would probably stay up all night, every night, and into the next day, until the barriers between conscious and subconscious would start to fail and I could harvest ideas for later use before going the heck to bed. As it is, though, even though now we're up to 4:22 AM, I'm not tired enough to produce such effects.

Gates Pass sunset, March 2005

On the old laptop, currently up and running just a few inches from this one, a slideshow screensaver is showing me all sorts of images that were stored on my computer as of two years ago. There are images of Gates Pass, and Disneyland and Las Vegas, trees and lamps, Scott Bakula and Anthony Stewart Head, Randy Johnson and Zorro, and even Sylvester McCoy standing in front of a fan-built TARDIS with Paul McGann. In a pinch, I could tap into these technology-assisted memories, and write about some of them. But not tonight.

And maybe by tomorrow, my brain will have something more interesting to say. Maybe I'll analyze what makes certain heroic characters more appealing to me than others, or report progress on the agent query front, or consider whether the Doctor is clinically depressed this season on Doctor Who. We'll just have to wait and see, won't we?

Karen

P.S. Apparently my listing of images on that screen saver has Google promising images of Scott Bakula in this entry. Let's see what I can rustle up! I'm pretty sure these are both Billie Mason's work, not mine, but here you go anyway. - KFB

Good Morning Peoria

Shock Theater

I'll follow up with a proper entry about this before the weekend is over. - KFB

Look What I Found, in the Sky!

Weekend Assignment #163: "Take a Picture of Your Local Weather." (As suggested by Betty of My Day, My Interests)

In keeping with the simplicity of this assignment, I will not be writing a "novel" tonight. The fact that I've come down with something intestinal and fever-inducing has a lot to do with this. I've spent most of this evening sitting around reading Old Man's War, which helps. Had I known I'd actually like the book, I wouldn't have resisted reading it for so long.

Anyway. I took all these pictures after I left work today, a little early because of being sick. These first two I took around 5:30 PM:

I believe that's called a halo. I've photographed one before,
but it's been a while, and I don't feel like looking it up again.

And I think this is a halo with sun dogs, a first for me.

I had no idea that these phenomena were in the sky for my camera to find. I only saw that it was sunny and bright. I deliberately shot at the sun to see what would happen, but the sky was too bright; I couldn't even see the sun in the LCD display. But I've darkened these two photos quite a bit, and voila!

Almost sunset. Look! A wisp of cloud.

And I saturated the heck out of this one, because,
you know, sunsets are pretty! And I didn't want to
hang around outside while sick, waiting for the
prime sunset moment.

That's it for now. Good night!


Karen

Same Game, New Rules: How Do I Play This?

I could make a metaphorical connection between Tuesday's sunset (above) and the text of tonight's entry (below), but let's not.

As many of you know, for the past fourteen months I've been waiting for Tor Books to respond to my three chapters and synopsis for Heirs of Mâvarin, with a yes, and no, or a "Let us see the rest." I've sent a follow-up letter, and a friend has asked in person; but still there's been nary a peep, apart from word that Tor editor PNH was familiar with the submission.

About two weeks ago, Wil pointed me to a blog entry by A.C. Crispin, which essentially advised against doing what I've been doing. Crispin said that rather than wait for "months and months" to hear from a publisher or agent, without a word in reply, a writer should at some point count the non-response as a rejection, and go back to querying. I sorta meant to follow that advice, except that I really felt that I owed Tor at least a courtesy letter saying that I would now be submitting it elsewhere. And frankly, I dread revising the cover letter yet again. So I haven't done anything yet. Yes, I know: bad writer, no biscuit!

Then a few days ago, the friend offered to mention it to Patrick again, and advised that Tor is kind of a "special case" with respect to that particular piece of advice. He felt I probably shouldn't give up on Tor yet, and frankly I found this advice more appealing than its opposite.

Well, then. Tonight I got a bit of a shock in the form of new information from Tor itself. No, they haven't sent me anything - nothing that I've received, anyway. But Sara (no h) told me that John Scalzi mentioned in one of his blogs that the Tor website had been redesigned. Sara had checked it out, and found something that wasn't there the last time I looked. In place of the submission guidelines I followed back in February 2006 are new and very different ones. They say, in part:

Generally we respond to unsolicited submissions within 4-6 months. Unfortunately, your manuscripts and our replies sometimes go astray in transit. Because of the volume of submissions, it's not possible for us to track down any individual project; please don't call for a status report. If you have not heard back from us after six months, please resubmit.

Great. That tells me three things I didn't know before:

1. Their policy is not to respond to my follow-up letter (or my friend's personal contact) asking about the status of my individual submission. This is very definitely not what the guidelines used to say. It used to say that after the 4-6 months one could send a letter referencing the title, date of submission etc., and that it would be responded to promptly. I sent the letter after a year and nothing happened - and the new guidelines say that nothing is supposed to happen.
2. Either they rejected the proposal months ago and the reply never reached me, or it's still under consideration, but way outside the time window. I have no way of knowing which, but the former now seems more likely than the latter.
3. If I insist on hearing back from Tor, my only option at this point is to send a new package, which under the new guidelines will not be returned. I am to enclose a standard SASE for the reply only. I actually don't mind not getting all that paper back. The question is whether it's worth the effort and expense of submitting it again to this publisher, as opposed to, for example, DAW.
   

If I go with #3, am I a total fool? 'Cause that's the way I'm leaning on this. Meanwhile, I've got to get moving again on submitting to agents. This slush pile business is a whole lot of no fun.

Let me hasten to add, since I'm not big on burning bridges (and because I really believe this), that I don't blame Tor's editors and publisher for changing the guidelines in this way. Rather than leave someone like me hanging, waiting for a response that may never come, it's better to tell people up front that certain things aren't feasible and not to expect them. They even explain most of the whys and wherefores. But oh! It is discouraging!

Karen

RR: Friendship, Digitized

It's Wednesday morning, 1:11 AM (better than 3 AM!), and time for another Round Robin Photo Challenge! Teena of "It's all about me!" has chosen "Friendship" for this week's topic.



Listen, I don't have anything clever or offbeat this time out. All I can do is show you a bunch of friends. First up: this group above, enjoying each other's company at Coffee Hour after the 10 AM Mass at St. Michael's. Many of them have known each other for years and years. They're in ECW together, or the Altar Guild, or the choir. They're friends. I didn't ask most of the people in the shot for permission to photograph them for my personal blog, so I've put it through a filter or two. The point is not who these people are specifically. The point is to show the type of friendships that arise from community - in this case a church community.

And here are some people at coffee hour who are my friends, specifically:

This is Jan. She likes science fiction and mysteries. Jasper Fforde is a fave of hers. She's had heart problems and lung problems and an injured arm over the past year or so, but she seems to be doing all right at the moment.

Here's Kevin. He was in the local Doctor Who club with me a decade ago, and now I give him a ride to church. He's intelligent and funny and very shy, has a fantastic baritone voice, and writes fiction and poetry.

Toni Sue was only baptized just short of two years ago. Now she's considering a vocation to some form of religious order - whether to be a deacon, priest, or something else, I'm not sure even she knows yet. She's a cancer survivor.

Let's leave coffee hour now, and consider other places one meets friends. Here is my new friend at work, Fran. She's another cancer survivor, a widow, and she knows more than a little about wolves. She likes Heroes and House and Doctor Who, and just today she brought me a couple of back issues of Fantasy & Science Fiction (F&SF).


Not shown here is my best friend, one John W. Blocher, the love of my life, who says he will roust me out of bed at 4 AM if he gets up and I haven't done dishes as promised! He doesn't like me to post his photo, so here's a picture of his chair, and his other chair.

If you're reading this, you know the other major source of my friendships. It's you folks online! Over the years I've met very few of you, save for those I knew in real life first. Julie, which came first, Prodigy or the cons? I forget. The only recent photo I have of an online friend (aside from arguably John Scalzi, who can be seen in the entry below this one) is this rerun, taken a year ago when Sarah (that's Sarah with an h!) came to Arizona. We met on the H2G2 boards on Prodigy in the early 1990s, when Sarah was still in high school. My friendship with Sara (without an h) comes from the same time and venue. I hope to meet her next year. Sarah is a vegetarian, a fiction writer, a poet, a thespian, a cat lover (as is Sara), and a sometime volunteer at a wild animal shelter.

That's it from me, folks! Here's the Linking List: go and meet some friends!

Karen

Linking List

Teena - POSTED!
It's all about me!
http://purple4me.blogspot.com

Carly - POSTED!
Ellipsis... Suddenly Carly
http://ellipsissuddenlycarly.blogspot.com

Marie - POSTED!
Photographs and Memories Too (AOL)
http://journals.aol.co.uk/mariebm56/PhotographsMemoriestoo

Karen - POSTED!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com

Nancy - POSTED!
Nancy Luvs Pix
http://journals.aol.com/nhd106/Nancyluvspix

Kerrin - POSTED!
A New Day
http://kerrinsdailyphoto.blogspot.com

Cosette - POSTED!
Pandora's Bazaar
http://pandorasbazzar.blogspot.com

Suzanne R - POSTED!
New Suzanne R's Life
http://newsuzannerslife.blogspot.com

Gina - POSTED!
Gina's Space
http://journals.aol.com/rbrown6172/Ginasspace

Renee - POSTED!
Ode to the Muse
http://harmonysnaps.com/blog

Tammie Jean - POSTED!
Long Drives To Nowhere
http://tammiejean.blogspot.com

Steven - POSTED!
(sometimes photoblog)
http://sepintx.blogspot.com

Gattina - POSTED!
Keyhole Pictures
http://gattina-keyholepictures.blogspot.com

Scalzi says hi!

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Wave hello! It could be you waving, or some of your family, or a group of friends, or complete random strangers. I just want to see those hands waving.

John Scalzi says "Hi!" Note the T-shirt, a recent gift from a fan.

I got a little help from the Blogfather himself on this one! Here's John Scalzi, waving to you all from the Poisoned Pen bookstore in Scottsdale this evening. I told him it would be "delightfully recursive," or words to that effect; and he was happy to do it.

I also tried to get a picture of him taking a picture of us waving, but somehow I ended up with a timing delay and a shot of the floor. Ah, well. He said to say hello, and he'll see you soon.

Actually, his wave - as well as his appearance - was part of a double bill. Here's the (relatively) uncropped version of the same picture. The other writer here, waving for my camera at Scalzi's request, is Jane K. Cleland, a mystery writer currently touring in support of her novel Deadly Appraisal. As with Scalzi and One Man's War, Cleland is up for a major award for her debut novel, Consigned to Death. Scalzi won the Campbell Award; Cleland is up for an Agatha.

Jane Cleland spoke first, for which she was interviewed by a local librarian who was a fan of her work. Cleland's amateur sleuth, Josie Prescott, is an antiques appraiser, which sounds like a fun and original angle for a mystery series. My appreciation of the mystery genre pretty much begins and ends with Sherlock Holmes, but she spoke with such affection about her characters that I bought Deadly Appraisal anyway. After all, I like Antiques Roadshow as much as the next former eBay seller. And I'm a sucker for good, likable characters.

Then it was John Scalzi's turn, doing his solo act. He joked that this included "interpretive dance." When someone called him on it, he did a bit of what an old social studies teacher of mine used to call "polka in place" - that is, he danced from the waist up, kinda. He then proceeded to explain that he does know how to dance, and why (basically it involved meeting girls), and how he met his wife on the dance floor. Aww!

Anyway, he was highly amusing and somewhat informative. He talked about his market-driven decision to write military sf, the premise for each of the books in the Old Man's War trilogy, and the fact that he started the third book in the series, The Last Colony, three times, trying to get the right focus on the right characters. He also mentioned his belief in a strong opening sentence, and told the story of his first book tour, in support of The Rough Guide to Money Online, a book that tanked due to the bursting of the Internet bubble.

It quickly became clear that most of the somewhat modest audience was there to see him. Cleland's reception was cordial and insightful, but there was definite fandom going on for Scalzi, and rightly so, as far as I'm concerned. The bad news was that it was over way too quickly. Each author had only half an hour to talk, and therefore did only tiny snippets by way of a reading. I personally could have interviewed each of them for half an hour more. For Scalzi, maybe an hour more. But I limited myself to one question, which was not the question I thought of in advance. I asked whether there's another genre or subgenre he'd like to try, and whether Tor would be interested in publishing it. He mentioned a great premise (in my estimation) he'd come up with about the incarnation of an idea, and that it got a politely unenthusiastic reception from his editor. Nevertheless, it sounds as though he probably will be writing some interesting stories outside the niche his current novels are in, with Subterranean Press on hand to publish some of the more "experimental" stuff.

This is going to sound kind of odd, but for me the wonderful surprise of the evening was how darn nice John Scalzi is in person, and how nice he was to me in particular. Yes, we can tell from By the Way that he's a good guy as well as an amusing one, but somehow I didn't quite expect him to be quite that friendly and bouncy and generous. Remember, it was almost exactly a year ago that I last drove up to metro Phoenix to see a major author, and that experience was pretty much the opposite of this one. For all his talent and energy and charm, Harlan Ellison is not a terribly nice man. He's perfectly capable of being rude, harshly unpleasant and even a bit unfair to people who like and respect him, even if he likes and respects them in return. Harlan said some very warm things to me last year, but he also ridiculed me in public, and not in a gentle or funny way. Having actually met him now, I can't imagine Scalzi ever behaving that way. Yes, he may sometimes repay rudeness and boorishness with sharper words than any I heard tonight; but otherwise he's pretty much a friendly teddy bear version of the Algonquin Round Table - witty, but nice. That's pretty much in keeping with both his By the Way persona and his slightly edgier Whatever persona.

So the niceness shouldn't have been much of a surprise. What really got to me was that he instantly recognized Karen Funk Blocher of Tucson in the audience, said hi, and asked about my car. I was flummoxed for a second before I realized what he was asking about. Then I said, "It's gonna cost me another $450 to fix," because it is.* (It needs bushings on tie rods, an alignment and some freeze plugs.) He then proceeded to explain to the audience that he blogs for AOL, about the Weekend Assignment and the Monday Photo Shoot, and that Karen writes "novels" in response, which he then has to precis. Well, yes. Sorry to put you to that extra work, John, but it doesn't sound as though you mind too much. (Thanks for mentioning the tengrem, by the way.)

So that was all wonderful, and later during the signing I got to tell him that I finally started reading Old Man's War and liked it. He seemed amused rather than disappointed by my admission that I hated the first page of The Android's Dream, and he was glad to personalize my copy of Coffee Shop, which of course was already signed. I even got a hug - actually, more than one. He was genuinely happy to see me, and I him.

There you have it. After three years or so of all this interactive online wackiness between us, John Scalzi and I have finally met, and officially like each other. Yay!


I wanted to bring him something from In-N-Out Burger, but there really wasn't an opportunity, and he said he'd get a shot at visiting the chain tomorrow in San Diego. Nevertheless, I sought out the Chandler location after the bookstore appearance, basically in Scalzi's honor. I don't find the food overwhelmingly great, but I like their retro designs. A Tucson location just opened last week, with a reported waiting time of two or three hours to sample the food. Shades of Krispy Kreme (which later tanked and closed)! Meanwhile, back in Chandler, I read a little more of Old Man's War as I waited just a few minutes for my #1, no onions.

Finding the Chandler location of In-N-Out from memory proved to be a little tricky. If you ever get a telepathic message from me, wondering which exit has the In-N-Out Burger, send me vibrations to the effect that it's on Ray Road, not Chandler Blvd. I had to double back for it. Just as I pulled into the lot and got out, John (Blocher) called to say that he'd just discovered that many of our oldest and/or most expensive, irreplaceable clothes, which were stored in a cedar chest, have been eaten down to clumps of tattered thread by some furry black bugs that have been infesting my bathroom recently. We had no idea that they ate wool! So John's 1960s serape is gone, and a wool jacket, and a replica Tucson Cowboys uniform, and a wizard robe and our cowboy hats and so on. Drat!

That wasn't the only disaster of the day and night. First there was the car, of course. I dropped it off the first thing this morning, took the bus up Craycroft to Fifth and walked the rest of the way. My friend Kevin was on the bus, but I had no idea this was the case until he said hello as he got off. As I walked up Fifth, I came across some colorful, fun tiles in the sidewalk in front of an elementary school. I took a picture of this one for you, Pat, because it reminded me of your mascot, Myrtle Kelley.

But the disaster of the day came after the news of the tie rod bushings, after the missed exit for a double double, after word of the destroyed clothes. I ran out of gas in Marana! Enterprise (which wouldn't pick me up until I moved the reservation to a different location) had upgraded me to an SUV, saying it would be safer than a compact for my drive to Scottsdale. Maybe, but what a gas hog! I started with almost half a tank, spent $20 on Toltec Rd., and still ran dry on I-10 at midnight, halfway between the Marana exit with gas and the Cortaro exit with gas. The Highway Patrol gave me a ride to the gas station, and I hoofed it most of the way back before a nice man gave me a lift the rest of the way. But here I am, home again, safe and sound. Good night - or should I say, good morning! Darn good thing I arranged to take this morning off!

Karen

*Update: the garage called me this morning. They can't get the bushings, and have to get the inner tie rods themselves (or something), which just doubled my repair bill. Ack! Apparently the repair is not an optional one. If I don't want to buy another car, I have to spend the $800.