Birthday Boy

[lydamorehouse]

Mason’s birthday was yesterday.  Shawn took the day off work and my folks came up from LaCrosse (ah, the joys of being a retired graphic artist and a college professor with summers off) and the whole family went to the zoo.  Mason broke with his usual tradition by zipping past the tropics trail and ran straight to the new “Minnesota trail.” 

 

The Minnesota trail is, in the words of Elizabeth Bear, a whole lot of awesome.  The trail is structured as though it was a lodge, so even though much of it is covered by a roof, it’s also open to the elements.  Think of a long, extended porch.  The animals are outside and you mostly look at them through mesh/fencing and occasionally glass.  Tall grasses and flowers grow right up to where you’re walking and birds and insects are all able to wander through.

 

The fences and such might sound crude, but the illusion is really that you could reach out and touch the animals and that you’re peeking into their lives surreptitiously.  Plus, there is a web cam into the beaver’s lodge and one-way glass into the coyote’s den.  The eagle, which was injured and can no longer fly, is probably the most impressive.   You’re almost eye-to-eye with him.  An unintentional cool thing is that some song birds apparently had snuck under a slender gap at the bottom of the eagle’s cage because there was evidence of, shall we say, bird lunch.  I don’t know why, but it kind of made me happy to think the eagle, even well fed as I’m sure he is, couldn’t resist the opportunity for live prey. 

 

My favorite was probably the lynx.  It’s such a rare animal to see, and, despite yesterday’s stifling heat, it was up and about prowling the edges of its territory.  They’re so lanky and mangy – not like anything I’ve seen.  Cool.

 

We also took in some lunch and then watched the bird show, something Mason and I had only seen once before.  The show is pretty much the same every year, but there are some truly amazing birds.  The fishing eagle from African was cool, if a bit scary.  Some people decided they couldn’t stand the heat and were making their way out with their baby in a carrier when the fishing eagle was perched in the tree.  The show’s host had to ask the people to sit until the bird was back with one of its handlers. I’m sure they couldn’t understand it, but Africa is also home to the monkey eating eagle, the ancestor of which scientists say very likely fed on early humans.  The handler/host didn’t say all this, but Mason and I knew about it from having read “Yikes!” a fantastic picture book about dangerous animals.

 

After that we tried going out on the lake in the paddleboats they have at the zoo, but it was just too hot, particularly with the life-preserver around our necks.  Grandpa and I gave up pretty quickly.  Then we all went home and hid in the air-conditioned room (Mason’s.) 

 

Mason got a lot of good loot.  A bunch of new dot-to-dot books, a couple of Thomas Trains, and some really fun games – a motorized fishing game and a gear puzzle game grandma and grandpa found.  I also got him a sticker book about bugs and shark jigsaw puzzle.  I think his favorite is the gear game.  Grandma and grandpa really scored with that one.

 

We also made Mason his traditional birthday cake – with a plastic mouse hidden in it.  This all started because just before Mason’s third birthday, he imprinted on a Sunday morning Garfield comic strip where Garfield bites into a cake and ends up spitting out a mouse he finds in it.  It’s not particularly funny to me, but Mason made us (actually grandpa, because we were visiting them that weekend) read the thing fifty times.  He started asking us if he could have a mouse in HIS birthday cake.  We have this mouse bath toy that Shawn figured out how to insert into the cake (she just cut a hole in the the bottom cake after it was baked, put it in and put the second layer on.  She puts a toothpick in the spot where the mouse is hidden so we don’t loose track of it.)  Mason was charmed!   And he asked for it again this year. So, we did.  This year the cake was yellow with purple trim (last year it was pink and purple, EXACTLY like the comic strip.)

 

My folks left around 4:30 pm.  I checked my e-mail in Mason's room and discovered an e-card from our friends the Jacksons.  Mason loved it so much I had to play it for him five times.

 

After that I was up late last night working on the *&%^#@! revisions.  I wrote a bit about my struggle over at Wyrdsmiths if you’re interested in keeping up with my writing woes.   I’m losing a lot of sleep, literally, over this dang book, but I think it’s becoming significantly better so that’s good.  I’m going to have to miss Wyrdsmiths this Thursday because our neighborhood is having a crime wave and we’ve organizing a meeting to talk to the police about it.  I’m actually going to stay home and write while Mason sleeps, but Shawn will go to the meeting.

 

Oh, and my Free Mouse shirt showed up.  It’s cool.  I’m going to buy about six more.  I wore it out the other day, but I have no comments to report.  I think people expect me to wear weird clothes.  I only rarely get comments when I wear my “Metaphors be with you” National Writer’s Union tee-shirt, other than a few looks of bafflement.  A couple of days ago, I wore my “Kerry / Edwards” campaign shirt and no one even looked at me cross-eyed.  Yet people feel free to comment on my cut-offs.

 

That’s all the news that’s fit to print, except to ask the other writers out there:  are there times when you prefer the unwritten worlds in your head to the ones on paper?  I’m totally preferring to hang out in the worlds in my head these days.  I’d much rather just play pretend than actually write.  Am I alone?

Comments

[naomikritzer]

Ha. What I really want to do of late is play pretend about boy (and girl) wizards at the magic boarding school.

That is adorable!

[ravenfirestorm.livejournal.com]

The mouse in the cake is so cute. I'm glad Shawn figured out a good way to get it in there. I don't remember anything really stunning about my early birthday cakes, so this will be something for him to remember. Happy birthday Mason!
Which of your folks teaches in La Crosse? At which school? I used to work in La Crosse and both my parents went to school there, so I'm curious.

Mort Morehouse, PhD

[lydamorehouse]

My father is the chair of the psychology department at Viterbo University (formerly college, before my dad started a Ph.D. program) -- yeah, I'm braggin'. I think my dad is cool.

[sbarret.livejournal.com]

Hah! The stories are always sooo much better in my head. The themes are creatively woven throughout the story, the characters real, scenes vivid and sensual...

yep..much better inside than out ;-)

[frost-light.livejournal.com]

"are there times when you prefer the unwritten worlds in your head to the ones on paper?"

YES. Because then I don't need to worry about pacing, marketability, failure fears, genre rules, or anything except what *I* see my characters doing. It's like a vacation for them - and for me.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

Here's a weird thing on t-shirts: There was a guy at work who wore these shirts with all these weird and completely nonsensical words, phrases or proper names I couldn't place on them. I asked him about them, and he had no idea what I was talking about.

To be clear: It's not that he didn't know what they meant (which he didnt'); he did not know what I was referring to. I had to point out that his shirt had writing on it, and then he had to look and verify that it did. He said that he gets all kinds of shirts and doesn't even really notice if they have writing or not.

It blew my mind to think that he could have text right in front of him and not read it, and that he would wear a shirt without examining the messages on it. (I may be on the other end of the scale in that for the last Christmas, I received a really nice sweater that had a British Alpine Racing Team patch on it, relatively unobtrusively and in a "this is just a thing to put on the shirt to jazz it up" way, but realizing that I had never watched the British Alpine Racing Team and had no idea if I'd want to endorse them or not, when I got home I sat down with my sewing kit and removed the patch.) Even more so that not only did he not read it -- he had never even really noticed it was there. It was like letters were just shaped unless he sat down and thought of them explicitly as letters. We had a long discussion about it.

So there you have it: There really are people who can see shirts with all kinds of text on them and not read it at all. (Me, I'm just always worried that someone will think I'm staring at their chest, because I read slowly and find the text on shirts often hard to figure out at first, but I can't not read it.)

[lydamorehouse]

Right.

I forgot that most people don't read.

[naomikritzer]

Isn't the "FREE MOUSE" part in Russian?

I could stare all day long at a shirt written in Russian and not read it. Nooooo problem.

[holy-toledo.livejournal.com]

Well, living in Guatemala where they get most of the cast-off or "mistake" t-shirts of the US, walking around a city street can be extremely... interesting. Just the other day, a guy was wearing a maternity shirt and probably had no flipping idea that it said "Mommy to Be" or something to that effect. I see sappy shirts about being a grandma on strapping young boys all the time. You're afraid to laugh, or to point it out to them, but GOD it's funny.

-Mel

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

Also, I absolutely often prefer to listen to the music in my head rather than the music I've written. (Also, I prefer to write new music than edit, mix or master existing music that needs editing, mixing or mastering.)

[xochiquetzl]

My favorite comment on my Free Mouse shirt was the guy who insisted it was some kind of kinky bondage thing. I may have to brandish enormous swaths of Cat5 and leer at him next time I wear it. ;)

And yes, I sometimes prefer the unwritten worlds in my head to what I'm putting on paper. If only I could just download it directly from my brain... along with what makes it compelling to me. That's the tricky part. Sometimes I just want to be really, really nice to a character for awhile, only no one wants to read that unless it's smut. And I can't go to the effort of typing it out and not show anyone. I've tried. It's a disease.

But it sounded so loffly inside of my head . .

[warriorofworry.livejournal.com]

Oh, not at all alone. Sometimes I turn off NPR on my commutes and "story" my way home. All of the awkwardness of the actual WRITING IT DOWN is thereby eluded.

And it really does sound brilliant in my head.

[holy-toledo.livejournal.com]

I much prefer the story when it's in my head because it NEVER comes out as clever on paper.

-Mel

PS: Apparently, August 1st is Lughnasa, which according to Nancy Antenucci the FABULOUSE tarot lady, comes with "that sinking feeling that Fall is coming like a freight train." I think this is just the time of year for a little trepidation.