A Catherine Noon

Welcome to the Summer Solstice Blog Hop!

Welcome to the Summer Solstice Blog Hop! I’m glad you stopped by. I’m Noony, and I’ll be one of your hosts during your visit. Remember to stay inside the hop; if at any time you lose the navbar then go back to the website, here, and start over. Be sure to comment on each blog to be entered to win a number of prizes, including a NOOK Simple Touch with Glowlight!

For this hop, I decided to accept Alanna Coco’s challenge and use the JustRomance.me scene generator! It gave me the following scene:

These are your characters:
Veterinarian, Butler, Astronaut

These adjectives describe them.
Assign one to each character.
Wise, Creepy, Sweet

This is your setting:
Studio set

See if you can guess which adjective I assigned to which person. Have fun!

“Channel five news tonight with Cari Ann Layton and Steve Talman. In suburban Redwing today…”

Chandler tuned out the rest of the droning voice as it went through the litany of the day’s highlights. He didn’t like the unfettered negativity. He came around the corner of the snack table and almost ran into Sandoval.

“Pardon me, sir. I didn’t see you there.” Sandoval’s hands, full of four neat stacks of papers clipped with black binder clips, spread in apology.

“Do you need a hand with that stuff?” Chandler reached out to catch the top pile as it leaned toward the floor.

“Thank you.” Sandoval smiled, his brown eyes tired. “They’re for Mr. Kincaid’s butler.”

“Oh.” Chandler tried to keep the distaste out of his voice. “I see.” The trouble with that lay with the fact that Chandler didn’t want to see William, the butler, but avoiding him meant he’d lose out on spending time with Sandoval.

Sandoval, though, seemed oblivious. “Well, you have a nice evening.”

Chandler slipped the top stack off the pile and held it. “I’ll come with you and help.” He started walking, just to get Sandoval moving. “What is all this stuff, anyway?”

“Breeding records for the stable that Mr. Kincaid is thinking of buying. I’ve been chief veterinarian there for the last eight years and have all the records since its founding.” He paused, mouth twitching like he’d frown. “It took me three hours to copy everything, but I didn’t want to give any of the originals to William.”

“Wise thought.” Chandler glanced at Sandoval out of the corner of his eye, trying to be subtle, and caught Sandoval watching him. The vet flushed a rich red, like a strawberry margarita, and looked away.

“What brings you to the station?” Sandoval asked.

“I had an interview today about my time on the shuttle.” Chandler scratched his chin, the makeup they’d made him wear still itching even though he’d washed his face. Twice.

“Your skin bothering you?”

“I wore that crap they make you wear on camera and it won’t seem to come off.”

Sandoval watched him for a few steps and then looked down, as though he wanted to say something but didn’t quite dare.

“What is it? You can trust me.”

“I have something that will help, if you’d let me use it on you.” Sandoval flushed again. “It’s not like it…” He trailed off. “It’s a facial steam with some herbs.”

A facial steam? What did Sandoval think he was? Of course, his skin really itched. Then the light bulb went on. They’d get to spend time alone together. In Chandler’s bathroom. Alone. “Okay.” He tried to act casual, not let on the way his heart thumped in his throat or his palms started to sweat. Casual.

Right.

Man, that butler better hurry up.

Thanks for stopping by my blog during the blog hop. Be sure to visit our other participating authors over the next several days. The hop runs from Wednesday, 06/20/2012 through Sunday, 06/24/2012.

Happy Summer Solstice!

Setting the Scene

For the blog hop, here’s what the scene generator gave me:

These are your characters:
Veterinarian, Butler, Astronaut
These adjectives describe them.
Assign one to each character.
Wise, Creepy, Sweet
This is your setting:
Studio set

We shall see what this prompts. ~typity~

It’s Coming…

We are gearing up to do another Blog Hop! I’m very excited. This time, we’re doing a Summer Solstice hop and giving away another e-reader! Wowsers. Plus, individual authors will give away stuff too. It’s a lot of fun.

The focus of this blog hop is to either post an excerpt or short story, or to use a scene generator and write a flash story specifically for the hop. I think I might try that. o.O… Stay tuned, the festivities start Wednesday and run through the weekend.

If you haven’t participated before, the way it works is that the hop will go live on Wednesday, 06/21/2012. Readers go through the hop, visiting each blog and leaving a comment. Everyone who comments on each blog is entered in the grand prize drawing, and one lucky someone will win their very own e-reader. Plus, you get to read some new material from favorite authors, and meet some new authors you haven’t read before. It’s a lot of fun and a good way to find out what’s available to you as a reader.

Stay tuned!

Into the Field for Father’s Day

Happy Father’s Day to all you dads out there! We’re going to the Field Museum today. I want to see their exhibit on rubies from Myanmar (Burma).

What about you? What’s up for your Sunday?

Friday Funnies

Bookshelf – Recommended Reading

I’ve recommended this before, but since I’m using it to design the Bryce Canyon Shawl, it deserves another mention: Barbara Walker, A Fourth Treasury of Knitting Patterns. This time, Ms. Walker gives us mosaic knitting, cable and lace samplers, and her usual dry wit and sage advice. I love her books, and this one is particularly fun to use because the leap to designing your own projects is an easy one to make.

Thursday 13: Thirteen Images from Lunch

Not actually images of food, but images from my walks during my lunch break. I’m fortunate to be working along the Chicago River and the weather has been absolutely fabulous lately! Take a look:

This is the medallion in my elevator, actually. I’m fond of it.

I love flowers. Never know what they’re called, but I love ’em.

This is actually a shot of the train platform in the morning before work; this is one of the stations that’s at street level (they’re in the more residential areas as opposed to downtown, where it’s either the elevated “L” or a subway). (We still call the subway the “L”, go figure.)

I love this view in the morning! We zoom over it pretty fast, but I would love to have one of the houses on the bank and a little dock so I could take my boat up and down.

The parking structure is almost all gone. Looks like a scene from some big space exploration, like a robot lost a bucket or something.


Trump tower is in the center. You can’t really see it very well (my camera on my phone doesn’t have a zoom), but the metal superstructure at the top is a crane for the window washing crew. !!!! D00d. I will never complain about my day job again! Sheesh!

I love this one. It isn’t great from a composition standpoint, but it captures everything I like about my lunch walks: the flowers (these weird cabbage rose things that look like colored Brussels sprouts, huh?) and the water with the boats.

This is a prior shot of the demolition, where you can still see the building, parts of it. This was just 2 weeks ago. It’s startling how fast a brick structure can just disappear.

Purdy!

I love they have mint planted along the river!

More greenery. This is right in the midst of downtown, too! (See the next shot for context.)

This is the bridge by my office, and you can see the river and flower edging. Cool, no?


I love reading signs about things; it makes me feel more like I know what’s going on.

MINT! It has lovely purple flowers, too. I just love how exuberant this plant is. ROWR!

Humpday Update: Designing the Bryce Canyon Shawl

The design of the Bryce Canyon Shawl is coming together. I selected two more lace diamonds to incorporate; they’ll start at the midpoint of the center medallion. I’m estimating the shape on the fly, rather than working it out mathematically; I decided I didn’t want to draw it out but am trusting my gut. We shall see.

I’m loving the colors and the way the yarn looks in the pattern. Lion Brand did a nice job with this fiber.

As an aside, my birthday present arrived from KnitPicks and now I’m all excited. I want to play with it (16 balls of electric dark blue and 16 balls of maple syrup brown), but I’m staying focused on the shawl at the moment. I don’t know if I want to make one blue sweater and one brown, or do two mosaics with both colors. We shall see.

But for now, here are some pictures of the Bryce Canyon Shawl so you can see how the design progresses:

This is a picture from last week, and you can see the start of the center medallion. It will be a diamond and has a 3 stitch border in plain stockinette stitch on either side, with a yarn over (i.e. a hole) just inside that.

The two small clear crystals aren’t beads, those are stitch markers and they sit on either side of the medallion (this is one way you can keep track of knitting pattern changes). They don’t have to be fancy, and in fact I have several plain steel rings on the needles but I wanted to use my fancy rings for the medallion since I have them and they’re pretty.

They’re actually a little annoying to work with, to be honest. There’s a bar that hangs down from the ring, and it’s twisted metal. That’s what is used to attach the crystal. The problem is that a) it attaches to the stitches sometimes, and b) it gets in the way of the needles when I’m knitting. I make it work, because I like the way they look as I’m working, but they’re not the most practical of beasts. I prefer the plain steel rings my husband made for me from heavy-gauge steel wire.

Here is how it looks today. The faux cable look of the center “V” is deceptive; that’s just because the needle isn’t long enough to let the pattern lay flat. But in this view, you can see the center medallion progressing up to its middle panel (a helix laying sideways that mimics the vertical one you can see).

The little white bit that looks like a scrap of paper on the left is a scrap of paper. 🙂 I was knitting outside yesterday, sitting on the grass by the river, and dropped one of my rings. The grass ate it. I spent quit a while looking for it, too, but no luck.

I decided to stop increasing the lace lattice that is on the outside. Since I’m adding two medallions and they have their own increases/decreases, I stopped adding stitches at the sides and will let it grow from the stitches within the medallions. I may change my mind once it grows some more, but we’ll see. (That’s the geometry I mentioned earlier.)

This final image shows the right-hand medallion just beginning. There are only about 6 rows so far, so it’s not easy to see in this image, but you can at least get an idea of where it will go. The lattice will continue between the medallions on the sides and the center panel, to keep the overall feel of the shawl consistent.

That’s our Wednesday update. Happy knitting!

Walking In This World – Promptly

The 2nd and 4th Wednesdays of the month are the Prompt Group meetings for the Evanston Writers Workshop. It’s funny, but I find that on prompt days, I don’t usually do my morning pages in the morning. Today is no exception; I wrote this morning instead of doing the pages (by that, I mean I worked on a WIP and not my journal). I think that says less about the pages or Prompt Group than it does about me and my feelings around having lots or too much to do, but there you go.

What do you do on your lunch break? Do you take a break at lunch? I learned many years ago that for my own sanity, I have to have a break in the middle of the day. Today I took care of some housekeeping tasks and then went outside to knit for a half hour. Having to deal with the odd man babbling loudly on the sidewalk, while annoying, kept me in the moment. What was he doing? Why was he babbling? Did he know I sat on the park bench above him? Did he know the stairs led around a switchback and he’d be practically in my lap? Was I safe? Was I being judgmental?

I find those kinds of monkey-mind questions happen more on days when I skip my morning pages than on days I do them. That’s not to say I float through my morning page days all serene, like a yogi; I’m just more aware of them when I don’t put them on the page. It’s as though my thoughts, expecting to have been put down on paper, are waiting for the attention I normally give to them. Meanwhile, I knit. I got a row done on a shawl I’m designing.

There’s some kind of universal lesson there, I think.

Hair Tea – Emerald Fire and Herbs

In writing, we get to use what we know. This used to intimidate me (what if I don’t know anything??) until I realized that’s my inner critic talking. I do too know stuff.

So. What do I know?

The airspeed veloc… Nevermind. Hair tea! I know how to make hair tea. Not tea you drink, though I do know how to make that too, but tea you put on the hair to make it healthy and shiny – and augment the color. In writing Emerald Fire, Rachel and I got to put that knowledge to use and give it to the Keepers.

I figured I’d share some of the secrets today at Torquere Press:

“Research and World Building – Teeka’s Special Hair Tea Blend“

I hope you have a moment to stop on by!