Thursday
Just finished working on this month’s newsletter essay about designating and designing creative sanctuaries in both our physical homes and metaphorically in our minds.
It took me four hours to draft it.
I have an essay coming out on a fellow Type M for Murder blogger’s personal author blog tomorrow. I spent time last week working on that one which is about my love of Barbie dolls.
I’m still having trouble getting motivated to work on fiction.
With the new JFK documents being released, I realize I might have missed my chance to write/publish my novella series connected with that history. I mean, I had this idea well over a year ago. Yikes, actually two years I think now. Sigh. I’ve been doing a bit of research here and there. At the back of my head, I thought, “I better hurry up because something is bound to happen and I’ll miss my edge.”
Yep. I mean, it might not be TOO late, but it might be. I hadn’t completely let it go, anyway. Just last weekend I picked up a book at the Navy base library with some information that would be useful to the series. I’m enjoying the book and taking notes.
Strawberry Moon Mystery: I deliberately did not pick up my phone when I woke up yesterday. I just lay in bed thinking about my mystery story and tried to remember what the heck I wrote on that draft. Amazing, I actually remembered something! And then I think the entire ending came back to me, not in detail, but a tantalizing glimpse. I’ve been ruminating on it ever since.
Maybe this weekend I’ll take another stab at it. I have been going through what I’ve already written, polishing it up, so time isn’t totally wasted.
Guam: We went to the night market at Chamorro Village again because I needed to pick up the three pair of earrings that didn’t get put into our bag last week. The shop owner was very nice. We tried out a different food vendor, Kris BBQ, as the lines there were very long last week. Although the actual “fiesta plates” were incredibly similar to the other vendor, we had to admit the food tasted better.
I also tried a Buko Pandan drink–the green stuff. Unfortunately, it turned out to be not my favorite. It was milky, too sweet, and there were slimy strings of something pandan in it which didn’t bother me too much but I can see others being grossed out. Craig thought it tasted like it had coconut milk in it. I thought it tasted like dairy milk. (Looked it up. We were both right. Coconut milk/water plus condensed milk! Also, buko means young coconut, lol) In some recipes, jellied Pandan cubes are used, so I’m assuming that was the slimy stuff. It really was the over-sweetness of it that turned me off.
Close up of a carabao! They were giving carabao rides at the market. C asked if I wanted to take a ride. Ha! No, I wanted to take a picture. I think this guy is incredibly cute with his plodding hooves and upturned horns and wide-spaced eyes.
Oh, today a hornet 2/3 the length of my index finger and carrying one of those pale green tomato hornworm-looking caterpillars landed on my balcony while I was drinking my coffee and innocently reading. Yikes! I didn’t take a photo. The thing looked lethal–and it was to the worm because I’m pretty sure it was eating the poor thing!
I hightailed through the glass sliders and into the living room. When I turned around to look, it was gone. Also, there was a little brown sparrow perched on the typhoon shutter next door, watching all this with great and twitchy interest. If I’d seen that thing swoop in to eat wasp AND worm, that would have been something. Nature. Eat or be eaten, man.