Deborah Woehr

This is an actual rainbow, taken by an 85 year-old artist/photographer, who happened to step outside during a party on January 13th. There is a fancy term for this type of rainbow, but I’ll let you read the article. These types of rainbows are extremely rare, especially here in the Bay Area.

And, because the link to the article will disappear sometime soon (they always do), I will post another link to a site which has pictures of strange weather phenomenon.

If you were a girl in the 70’s…

You had that Fisher Price Doctor’s Kit with a stethoscope that actually worked.

You owned a bicycle with a banana seat and a plastic basket with flowers on it. My bike had flowers on the banana seat.

You learned to skate with actual skates (not roller blades) that had metal wheels. Yep. I loved the way they clacked on the asphalt when I tried to “walk” in them.

You thought Gopher from Love Boat was cute (admit it!) Yep. He was a babe magnet.

You had nightmares after watching Fantasy Island. Never. I looked forward to hearing Tatoo’s “De plane! De plane!”

You had either a “bowl cut” or “pixie”, not to mention the “Dorothy Hamill”. Long and poker straight because that’s all my hair likes to do.

People sometimes thought you were a boy.

You had rubber boots for rainy days and Moon boots for snowy days.

YEAH! You owned a “Slip-n-Slide”, on which you injured yourself on a sprinkler head more than once.

You owned “Klick-Klacks” and smacked yourself in the face more than once

Your Holly Hobbie sleeping bag was your most prized possession. I had a Holly Hobbie bedroom set in those horrid orange and yellow 70’s colors.

You wore a poncho, gauchos, and knickers. Remember Dittos? I loved them at the time. Looking back, that saddle stitch made everyone’s butt look bigger than it was.

You begged Santa for the electronic game, Simon. I was into playing outside at the time, clacking around with my now-antique skates.
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I watched my first book trailer when I clicked on an author’s link in the Lulu forum last month. That video was obviously an amateur effort, but I enjoyed his creativity. It didn’t make me rush out to buy his book, but it got me thinking about making my own video trailer for Prosperity (or having one done, if my efforts don’t pan out).

I’ve posted another video trailer for The Million Dollar Ghost as inspiration. I loved the way this author incorporated the Poltergeist theme with both haunting and romantic shots. The captions for the synopsis were well written and placed. Potential readers come away with no doubt in their minds what this book is about.

My sons have been off all week for winter break, so I decided to take today off and enjoy their last non-school day before the weekend. I’m going to take them to see Ghost Rider. I watched the trailer both at another movie and on the Sony Pictures website. The special effects look awesome, although I’m not sure about the storyline. Has anyone seen this movie yet?

I’m not sure what we’ll do afterwards. Last night, I was talking to my oldest and noticed that his T-shirts are getting a little snug. Perhaps we’ll pay a visit to the mall.

The first time I heard this song, I was sitting in the car while my husband was driving us through the Grand Canyon area. For some reason, it sat inside my memory all this time. On occasion, my local radio stations would play a song by this band, but it was never this particular song. Worse, the DJ’s never announced the name of this band at the times I was listening. This song’s title and band name eluded me up until Friday, when I happened to listen to the radio at the right time.

Not only did I snag this song off of iTunes, but The Diary of Jane as well.

I’ve added a new link category as well as a very interesting blog on the subject of horror writing and writers. Guy Adams, the author of The Dark Room, is a published author and Senior Editor of Humdrumming Publishers. For those of you who are interested in this genre (thinking of you, Ben and Fred), it’s definitely worth a look.

First off, I apologize for my absence. I know it’s been over a week since I’ve posted anything here. It’s been quite stressful at home lately. I wish some relatives lived two or three planets away.

Last weekend, I went out with a friend and saw The Messengers. I’ve written a review on Supernatural, if you’re interested. I’m also trying out some new recipes that I’ve found online so I can write about them in the Home Cooking blog. You’ve got to try the Inside-Out Cheeseburger.

As for Prosperity, I’m plugging away on it a little each night and on the weekends. The process isn’t going as fast and easy as I had hoped, but I have a much stronger beginning than I did in the earlier draft.

As for my contract assignment, it’s been extended until late June. More later.

I have absolutely zero interest in football, and neither do the majority of my friends. That doesn’t stop us from getting together every year for the Super Bowl. Compared to last year, we were very subdued. The young boys migrated to the back room of our friends’ house to play video games. I don’t know what the girls did. Most of the adults were recovering from a crab feed we went to last night.

Is it just me, or did the commercials suck this year? The only one I considered funny was the CareerBuilder.com commercial where they toiled away in a jungle. As an office worker, I can totally feel their pain.

Oh, and I just loved the half-time performance by Prince. That pretty boy is almost as plastic as Michael Jackson. Yikes!

Congratulations to all you Colts fans out there.

My son’s report card came in the mail earlier this week, and I’m happy to say that he has passed his science class. I have no way of knowing how well he did on that final because the school’s Internet viewer closed the first semester grade reports. We all breathed easier for a few minutes. Then my youngest announced that his teacher was going to be calling me.

She had assigned the class a major project, which requires them to write a term paper on an American state of their choosing. He chose Pennsylvania because that’s where my husband and his family come from. I got the packet in mid-January, which had a timeline of the due dates of each segment of the project. The first segment isn’t due until the end of this month. The whole thing is due in mid-March.

So, I figured we had plenty of time to gather some good information before we started. While the Internet is a great tool for research, it isn’t everything. For instance, you don’t get the same sense of the culture from a Wikipedia article as you would from an article written in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

My mother-in-law contacted her relatives back east to have them mail travel and historical information to us, and my sister-in-law was going through her vacation stuff. We had planned to get started next week.

His teacher was upset with him because she had wanted him to work on a timeline for some brochure that is to be included with this paper. Fine, I said. I’ll have him do it this weekend. She wants him to work on this project for 30 minutes per night, in addition to the boatload of homework she assigns to him each night.

I hung up the phone, thinking that I never had this much homework when I was in elementary school. Fortunately, he enjoys school and learning.

I had just started writing an article for Supernatural at about nine-thirty when I heard a crash on my front porch. I left the office, saw my husband playing his video game, and walked up to the front door. Someone was outside.

Like an idiot, I opened the door and saw this young guy staggering back down our walkway. My porch reeked of his beer. “What are you doing to my house?” I asked him.

“Ugh,” he said.

“Shall I call the police?”

“Ugh, yeah.” The kid stumbles down my driveway and into the street, where he staggers around in a daze. I hear the party going on next door.

At this point, my husband is standing behind me. “That guy is gone!”

After the door closes, he looks at me and says, “Are you crazy? That could have been an axe-murderer.”

“I guess I am crazy,” I replied.

The kid has disappeared, the party continues, and I go back to my office to work on that article. Midnight strikes, and the party is still going on. At one-thirty, they start shouting. It wasn’t the happy-go-drunkly shouting.

I go back outside to investigate. A shouting match is going on in my next door neighbor’s driveway. There are at least twenty kids, and two boys are wanting to duke it out very badly with each other. Like an idiot, I shout, “Excuse me!”

No one hears me or sees me, and that was a good thing because I was able to slip back into my house and call the cops on them. My voice shakes as I talk to the dispatcher, betraying me for the wimp that I really am. I hate drunks, especially violent ones.

I get off the phone and peer through the blinds. The throng has moved in front of my house. Three guys are pulling one of the would-be boxers down the street toward a parked car.

I hear my oldest son get up as three skanky hobags walk by. Then the street is lit up by the first of three cruisers. The kiddies go running because they know they’re going to get busted. My son watches the scene from his bedroom window.

I don’t know if there were any arrests, and I don’t care. They’re gone, it’s quiet, and it’s time to go to bed.