Deborah Woehr

I’ve been checking out the progress of Jason Evans’s Midnight Road contest, while reminding myself to submit a piece. The deadline is tomorrow at midnight (EST). So if you want to participate, you’d better hurry up.

That’s what I told myself yesterday afternoon. I reread the guidelines as well as some of the stories. Then I experienced a small bout of panic when I couldn’t come up with any ideas.

I stared at the picture on his blog and started writing words that I felt associated with the image. Ray Bradbury does this, and it’s a remarkably easy way to alleviate blocks. From there, the ideas began to flow and I wrote The Death Penalty.

My husband’s story about his gas tank reminded me of another story. This one is funny, I promise.

I don’t know how many of you were alive during the gas crisis when Carter was President. If you were older than twelve, you may remember seeing news coverage of the cars lined up at the gas stations. Back then, gas siphoning was a big problem because drivers couldn’t fill up their tanks on certain days.

So if you didn’t fill up your car on your day, you were either screwed or decided to screw somebody else.

My father worked nights for a major airline back then. As you know, airports have huge parking lots. One of his colleagues had a motor home at the time. He walked out to the parking lot at the end of his shift and saw a hose protruding out of his tank.

Naturally, the expletives flew out of his mouth as he rushed up to his motor home. Several feet away, he sees this huge puddle of vomit. He looks at it and then at the tank which the hose is protruding from.

The gas tank and the septic tank are right next to each other. Needless to say, he was able to drive himself home that morning.

I looked at my blog this morning and wondered if I was going to have anything interesting to write on it today. After 5 o’clock, I decided this was a decidedly boring and uneventful Monday. Then my husband walks through the door and tells me about his day.

Number One

Some loser drilled two holes in the company van’s gas tank several inches up from the bottom. This is how people are siphoning (stealing) gas from parked vehicles because they can’t open the tank door.

Not only does he have to fix the tank, but retrofit that whole area with special steel so this doesn’t happen again. Last year, someone stole the license plate off of the van, forcing him to retrofit the new license plate with tamper-proof screws.

Number Two

Later on in the day, he sees these two guys in a white Honda moving slowly up and down the parking lot in front of his office. Then my brother-in-law and another employee see them casing the back. Suddenly, they speed off.

Moments later, my husband finds out that these guys stole a briefcase from a neighboring business. Fortunately, the business owner didn’t have anything but blueprints in there.

This is the message that the Pacific Palisades High School (California) staff voted unanimously to record on their school telephone answering machine. This is the actual answering machine message for the school.

This came about because they implemented a policy requiring students and parents to be responsible for their children’s absences and missing homework. The school and teachers are being sued by parents who want their children’s failing grades changed to passing grades - even though those children were absent 15-30 times during the semester and did not complete enough schoolwork to pass their classes.

The outgoing message:

“Hello! You have reached the automated answering service of your school. In order to assist you in connecting to the right staff member, please listen to all the options before making a selection:

* To lie about why your child is absent - Press 1
* To make excuses for why your child did not do his work- Press 2
* To complain about what we do - Press 3
* To swear at staff members - Press 4
* To ask why you didn’t get information that was already enclosed in
your newsletter and several flyers mailed to you - Press 5
* If you want us to raise your child - Press 6!
* If you want to reach out and touch, slap or hit someone - Press 7
* To request another teacher,for the third time this year - Press 8
* To complain about bus transportation - Press 9
* To complain about school lunches - Press 0
* If you realize this is the real world and your child must be accountable and responsible for his/her own behavior, class work, homework and that it’s not the teachers’ fault for your child’s lack of effort: Hang up and have a nice day!

If you can read this - thank a teacher!
If you are reading it in English - thank a veteran!

Note from Deb: Some parents actually got offended by this joke.

I found this article while looking for something to post on Supernatural this morning. While the scientific aspect of time travel is beyond me, I found myself drawn in by the author’s discussion about the paranormal aspects of time travel.

Quoted from Visionary Articles from Rosemary Ellen Guiley

Tunneling may also account for some ghost experiences. Some ghosts may be remnants or recordings impressed in psychic space, but others may involve living people. Perhaps someone in another place in time doesn’t come through entirely, and so we see an apparition instead of something solid.

That last sentence made me sit up straighter in my chair. Living ghosts? Now, that’s an idea for a story I’ll have to explore.

This article reminded me of the discussion that occurred several months ago about time travel, although I’m not sure if it occurred on Karen’s, Melly’s, or Lee’s. I remember Lee pointing out that if we traveled back through time, we may wind up erasing our present and future.

What this lady talks about is time travel via our higher consciousness. It was a very good article, but I’m still rather skeptical of the whole time travel thing. It has, and still does, make for great time travel and alternative history stories.

I just found this great website for generating printable yearly calendars that go back to the year 1900 on up to 2039. This comes especially handy with God’s Last Twilight, which is written in diary form during 1918.

Man, it has been Hot around here since Saturday. I’m so thankful for my central air, but it doesn’t help when I have to go run errands. Simple things like grocery shopping sap my energy to the point where I have to take a nap to rejuvenate.

Despite this, I’ve managed to get some writing done on my blogs as well as my WIPs. Yesterday, I signed up at the Absolute Write forums. It’s been a long time since I’ve participated in a writer’s forum, and now I’m hooked again.

In other writing news, WBA is holding its first blog carnival. If Sci-Fi isn’t your thing, I’ll be hosting other genres in the future.

I’m amazed if I can keep a regular houseplant alive for longer than two weeks. My mother-in-law dubbed me a black thumb when I managed to kill a cactus (ten years ago) by overwatering it. She would be thrilled to know that I’ve been watering her overgrown garden for the past few weeks while she’s been on vacation. This will be our little secret, okay? Yes, the plants are still alive, but only because we’ve had cool weather.

Although I’ve gotten better with not killing houseplants outright, I haven’t mastered the watering technique (too much or too little). This is why I prefer cactus because they are such a low-maintenance plant. The one on the right is a Moon Cactus. I picked up two of these yesterday on our family outing. One looks like the picture, and the other is yellow with fingers instead of bulbs.

I also picked up one of these. They’re called String of Pearls. I would have never considered them a part of the cactus family, but apparently they are. They’re supposed to bloom into fragrant white flowers. When they will do this, I don’t know. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep this plant alive long enough to find out.

My husband is one of the most difficult people to buy a gift for. The things he wants usually involve specialty car parts or accessories, which I know nothing about and which he’d rather buy himself. The last major thing I bought for him was a car cover for his Corvette.

Yesterday, he barbecued for the company we had over that afternoon and last night. The second time around, he couldn’t get the burners to light on our ancient propane barbecue. Bingo! New idea for a gift!

While he was barbecuing our dinner while simultaneously fixing our back sliding glass door, I grabbed my oldest and did a search on Amazon for barbecues. Most of them cost around $750. I decided to take the boys to Orchard Supply today.

This morning, I mentioned this to him but didn’t say why. His eyes squinted with suspicion because I am not a handywoman unless forced to be so. So I broke down and told him what we had planned.

“You don’t need to do this,” he says.
“Yeah, well. We’re going to do it, anyway,” I reply.

We made it a family outing. He picked out his barbecue, which is still sitting in the box on our patio. As I’m writing this post, the front door slams repeatedly as he is trying to adjust it. It’s the original door and needs replacing, but that will have to wait until next year.

In the meantime, he’s got a zillion other projects on his list, all of which he looks forward to doing. I hope all you dads (and single moms) are having a wonderful Father’s Day.

Update: The barbecue is together and is better than the old one when it was new. It’s got a battery-operated starter button, which means that the hubby doesn’t have to singe his face (and remaining hair) every time he wants to grill some burgers.

This was the only story that I’ve managed to get published. The story is about a little girl whose imaginary friends become very real when she can no longer dodge her step-father’s fists. Imaginary Friends will be republished in John Evans’s Naked Tales Anthology, which is due to be published on May 21, 2007.