Yes Virginia, Santa's deer are real!

I was walking my dog when from the corner of my eye

two tiny reindeer I was sure I did spy

then out of my peripheral vision I knew

on the side of that house were another two 

they seemed solid, no moving, I thought they were fakes

then the snow started falling, magical Christmasy flakes

Suddenly the deer sprang from that place

you should have seen the look on my face

 

Then those deer turned towards my dog

and started to hop, one started to jo

they bound through the yard, the biggest one flew

I grabbed my camera, and that's when I knew

Santa was here, in my neighborhood early

he was spying it out, one reindeer seemed surly

he stared at my dog and snorted a bit

my dog started barking, so Rudy's snorting would quit

They had a conversation, they talked for awhile

then my little pooch started to smile

I caught a few words, "can't go", and "need help"

my pooch headed towards home, she barked with a yelp

she was so excited, seems she had a plan

if Santa needed some help, she was his woMAN!  

We returned to our house, and when we went inside

my hound ran up the stairs, came back down with deer pride 

then a loud noise came from my living room

I ran cross the house, I ran with a zoom

I saw my dog ju she pounced and she ran

Practicing, seems my dog had a Santa Claus plan

So when you look up in the sky

this Christmas Eve, 

you just might see something, 

that you won't believe    

Leading that sleigh

will be my good girl

she'll fly round the world

with Santa, she'll hurl!   

 

That Was Then... This Is Now

I was privileged to visit the delightfully treed, copiously gardened, wonderfully architectured, hidden away gem called CA (Colorado Academy) for two days this week to meet, greet and teach kiddoes from itty bitty Pre-K's (My gosh tiny human beings are cute!) up to fifth graders.

The first day was full of assemblies, storytelling and workshops and the second day was full of creative writing workshops with excited, involved, engaged and FUN students!

I love the energy children bring to writing! It is SO much fun to work with their ideas of WHO, WHERE, WHEN, WHY and WHAT and to mold it into a fun picture book stories while they buzz about the room coming up with VERBS that will activate the sentences and story!  There is nothing more refreshing that seeing something appear out of a child's imagination and then to see it bloom and flourish into a story someone might actually want to read in a book!  Magical this job of mine!

FIVE years ago I visited CA for the first time and wished I could go back to school.

It was a beautiful Autumn day and we all decided to do some pictures.  I took a picture with the little children pictured and was presented with a great photograph to remember the day by.  

As I was going through my bulging school files over the summer I came across this picture and thought it would be fun for the folks at CA to see the kids as they were "back in the day" and my host, the AWESOME Allison Peters (librarian), set out to find them to take another picture.  Only one was not at the school any longer.  
 

SO, that was then... 

This is NOW! 

I would say for the first time in a photograph in a long time, I am the least changed of all.  That is a nice thing when the days, weeks, months and years seem to slip by.

Perhaps I'll catch up with them again in five years when they are in their last year at CA.  Now that will be some picture, huh?

Sometimes you just have to find the right place to write.  On a sunny beach. In a remote Colorado lake.  

Anywhere that inspires and doesn't get cell service!  Where's YOUR place?

Water from the hose...

From Spring 2010, just a reminder of a favorite spring and a favorite little buddy.  Might be time to start thinking about a new addition to the family again...

"We have had a cold, rainy, snowy, blowy spring here in Colorado which has made everything lush and green and the trees have been flowering powerfully and then suddenly the past two days have reached into the eighties. It feels like Summer! I spent much of the day planting my veggies and herbs. My favorite basil and cilantro will be great in recipes this summer! We got four heirloom tomato plants which are going to respectively produce black, yellow, green with yellow stripes and red with orange stripes. We were going to opt for the white tomatoes, but were just having a hard time imagining them in a salad. I am pretty sure I am going back to get them this week. My curiosity is peaked and there are still some sunny spots out there.

As I work in my gardens and yard, it is often that I am shadowed by either my Italian Greyhound (Toots aka Batman) or my little Tonkinese Manx cat (Pwowie and the fact that she is a manx is why she has just a tuft where most cats have tails). Toots will generally recline within feet of where I work if there is a nice, shady tree to spend time under, but Pwowie is fairly insistent about remaining under foot and exploring and examining the slightest changes in her territory. She has a large rock in my front garden that is her outpost, where she watches the world go by, called Pride Rock, but if I'm working in the yard, she simply must come and oversee.

After working in the vegetable garden it was time to pot some flowers in the front pots to adorn our wonderful front porch, where we like to sit and take in evening and is my outside writing office often during the day. My mind drifted as I listened to Hall & Oates covers on my iphone (by THE BIRD AND THE BEE, which I highly recommend) and watched my cat following me from place to place as though she were really doing something to assist rather than just sniffing everything and looking at me curiously. After potting several pots and making a wonderful mess on the porch, I hosed it off and filled the watering cans getting ready to tackle my next project.

As I came around the corner, back up onto the porch I caught my little buddy Pwowie in the act of taking a cooling summer drink off the freshly filled watering can and I was suddenly reminded of two things; illustrations in Beatrix Potter's wonderful Peter Rabbit books and those long ago days as a boy when "stolen" drinks from the hoses connected to houses up and down the street was simply the premium refreshment, even rivaling many a mom's lemonade or Kool-aid (though for me, NOTHING rivaled grape Kool-aid!)

I remember summer days when we came home so hot from our adventures in the fields, at the fishing holes or riding in our gang on our stingrays when we felt like we were somewhere near Hades. The August sun baked the skin a dark brown and parched the throat so dry. The water that ran in the ditches was cool on our feet and fun to play in with hours of digging out holes where crawdads backed in trying to get away from a bunch of rascals or having water skipper races, where we each picked ours and tracked it up or down the ditch as it skittered across the top of the water either going with the flow or racing upstream against it. But somehow we all knew the chocolate milk looking water wasn't water we needed to quench our unbearable thirst. So we would hustle to one of our houses and turn the water on at the spigot and wait until it ran all the sun-heated water out of the hose and went cool to cold. Then we would drink so deeply that our stomachs would bloat, impatiently pushing each other aside to get a drink and invariably turning it into a cooling water fight, with the lucky one in control of the hose tethered to the house and hose as we scrambled to find other sources to drench him or her and steal away the hose. There simply has never been a more refreshing drink of water in my life that those. The water flowing out of that hose was like nectar.

So, this summer as I toil in the gardens, I will make sure there is plenty of cool water for my little buddy in the watering can and I will be drinking from the hose. Now I am off to my favorite gardening center to pick up some white tomatoes and I just thought of a place where I could put a catnip plant for Pwowie."

Squirrels checking in...

LET'S ALL GET OUT AND SEE SOME OF THAT AWESOME WORLD OUT THERE! GREAT ADVENTURES AWAIT IN 2012!




It has been a looooong time since I blogged about squirrels, so I thought we'd check in with some of those we moved to greener pastures.
If you go back into the annals of my blog you will see that Tootsie (my beloved Italian greyhound) and I have been fighting a squirrel situation for many years. We finally got the best of them and they seemed to have moved on (for the most part).

We relocated them to greener pastures and had some funny trapping stories (no animal was hurt in the relocation process).



Then I find out they not only went on to a better place to live, but took up some awesome activities. This Christmas I got some postcards from them, thanking us for getting them out of their humdrum existences and onto exciting lives, all of them.
















Here are just a few shots of their new adventures since they left my back yard. I hope 2012 brings GREAT ADVENTURE to you and yours. I know I plan to go on some and will surely blog from some exotic locales as I "research" my next books.











Go to the right hand side of this blog and find the word cloud down aways.


Hit Squirrel and it will bring up all of the entries about the
'GREAT SQUIRREL ERADICATION PLAN'. Some have gone peacefully
and some have been "drama kings and queens."

Guess which one this dude was????

CATCH THE READING BUG!

THIS IS A READING BUG! I'LL EXPLAIN...

So, I was having a meeting at The Tattered Cover and as I prepared my stuff, in my overstuffed vehicle, one of my new books hurtled to the ground. I had to put a bunch of stuff together so I just left it sitting there on the ground (actually three moms and four reading age kiddoes were heading down the sidewalk right toward the book and I thought, "Hmmm subtle marketing technique! They will see it, pick it up and realize I dropped it!", since it looks just like the case full that was sitting still opened up in my car trunk and maybe ask why I had so many of the same book."

I continued to ready myself for the meeting, pulling things together when one of the kids yelled, "WOW, HOW COOL!!"



I started to smile and my eyebrows wiggled up and down as if to say, "OH YEAH, THE NEW BOOK'S A HIT!" I closed my car door and said, "Pretty cool cover huh?" The four kids looked at me like I had two heads. "LOOK MOM!" The sole girl pointed down at a Praying Mantis slowly walking across the sidewalk. Soon it was walking right over my book, seemingly pausing to admire the artwork by the stellar David Schiedt!

I wanted to say, "Well, the bug IS cool, but check out the book!" But I didn't. No, instead I whipped out my iPhone in modern fashion and started to snap pics of the beautiful bug and the beautiful book. The green beauty held my attention long after the kids walked off far enough now behind their moms not to worry that I overheard, "Jeez, you'd think that dude'd never seen a bug before."


Well, at least my initial reader paused long enough to see the cover. After the Mantis' long journey, it, he, she, headed toward the parking lot. I picked it up and carried it to a nearby grassy knoll, thinking it would have taken it the rest of the day across the hot, busy parking lot and set it on a nice clump of flowers. I walked back to my car where the book was still sitting squarely in the middle of the sidewalk and people were just walking around it, not really giving it much of a look... I shrugged my shoulders and went into the great coffee shop at my neighborhood Tattered Cover and had a great meeting. I kind of forgot the whole incident until I plugged my phone into my computer and the photos uploaded.







That very night as I came home in the twilight after a nice evening walk with Andy and Tootsie, right next to my front door was this dude. Apparently the Praying Mantis had spread the word and the other eager readers were trying to get a glimpse of my new book. At least someone had caught the reading bug!

THIS IS A READING BUG.

What are you reading?

Just Peachy, but the squirrels are STILL the PITS!

About five years ago someone kindly gave me a box of Palisade Peaches (awesome) from the western slope of Colorado and I saved all of the pits.

I pushed the pits down into composted soil around my vegetable garden as I had seen my father do when I was a boy.

I now have seven peach trees growing in my yard and four of them are HEAVY with peaches!

This is our second HUGE year of enjoying a HUGE yield of peaches here in mid-August and they are EVERY bit as good as the original peaches we got from Palisade.

Compost and peach pits! Water and pruning! = Shade, beauty, privacy and PEACHES GALORE!

As I write this I am eating a bowl of juicy peaches and real cream for breakfast! All from a handful of pits. This is one bowl of 14 so far from one tree.

There are still as many on the tree and we haven't even harvested the others (but the doggone squirrels sure love their little trick of pick one, take a bite, throw it onto the lawn and scale the tree again)... I wouldn't really mind if they picked one, took it to their nest and came back only when they were hungry again. Because I spend so many hours monitoring the door for Tootsie, my greyhound who sits and whines at the windows and door when she sees them scaling the tree... I AM SUPPOSED TO BE WRITING A BOOK!

Anyone want to trade a bowl of peaches for a high powered squirt gun? I have spent too many hours relocating the squirrels...

DAD

This year, this time of year is particularly bittersweet for me. I have grown used to not talking to Dad every Saturday morning since he died last fall, but I haven't and likely never will grow used to not sharing the wonders of our world with him.
My Dad's favorite day was the day of Winter equinox, because it meant the days would grow longer and the sun would burn brighter. His mood lifted on December 21 and joy, as it was interpreted by him, would begin to creep back in and melt the ice around his heart (truth is he got pretty grumpy on cold, dreary, cloudy winter days) the way the sun begins to do on permafrost and regular above ground frost.

I have always LOVED spring the most of all of the seasons. It is something I learned from Dad. He loved Spring so much. He loved to talk about the emerging garden, the animals awakening, the new babies in his barnyard, the poems and stories written in tribute to spring. He would sometimes just launch into a poem he had long before had committed to memory. No matter what he was, he was always the English teacher with a PhD and depth of understanding about language which he loved as much as his simple iris.

My flower gardens are sprinkled with Dad's Iris. That man could grow iris like no one I have ever seen. His house was on a busy corner in my hometown and was surrounded by gardens and in those gardens literally thousands of iris blooming at once at the onset of Spring, scenting the air and bringing a cornucopia of color to the world that passed by.

Often when Dad was weeding or tending someone would just stop to compliment his artistry. He would lean on his spade, share a class or ice water and on a few occasions a shared ice cold beer and soak in the praise, then promising the admirers that on a weekend coming soon, they could come and get some of the iris for their own yards. Cars pulled over daily when the iris were in bloom to take lover's photographs amongst the tall beauty he cultivated and more than once photographers came with tripods and cameras to tour his gardens.

Once a high school senior had her photos taken in his lovely front border garden (he was so proud of that). He would tell me in detail, usually several times the specific quotes he heard about how his handiwork brightened what according to the woman would have been an otherwise fairly bleak day (for her, he cut some of the beauty to take with her, my Dad was often a very thoughtful man).

When the iris flowers were spent and needed to be separated he would set the rhizomes out along the sidewalk with labels of what color the lucky recipient would be receiving. Within hours every iris start was gone. Often people would ask my Dad if they could pay him but he always refused, just reveling in the idea that he had spread something beautiful that day. My favorite thank you story, one he told me during one of our Saturday morning talks, was about an anonymous someone who had come and gotten some of dad's iris and in the place in the garden that held a rare empty spot had left a six pack of premium, expensive signature brewed beer and a note thanking him.

Dad shared his art this way every Spring season and I know this Spring people are saddened that Dad's once rich and beautiful border garden is no longer. Some people when they buy a house, don't understand the treasure that is just under the soil and cover it over with rocks to park on (though this crafty son saw it coming and when the house was selling went up and helped myself to a pick-up truck load of Dad's rhizomes which are now in various gardens in my neck of the woods). But it sure makes it easier to drive by his old house not to see the gardens that only Dad could tend the way he did.

The beauty is that now Dad's iris are in border gardens all over my old, beloved hometown and beyond. My personal gardens are beautified by them and they are just now beginning to bloom. Perhaps someday in the not too distant future I will set some rhizomes out on my curb with a note to denote the color and Dad's legacy will spread just that much further.
Now Dad is gone. The flowering spring trees and my tiny plants pushing there way up through the sleepy winter-kissed soil in my vegetable garden are reminders of dad's passion for soil. He gave me the gift of loving the earth and toiling in it through the seasons. I miss my Dad!

There are two reasons I am not getting my chapters finished...

SPRING HAS SPRUNG! It is my favorite season as it is many peoples. Colorado in springtime is just a cul de sac from Heaven!

The robins are busily tending to their young hatchlings. The other birds are singing merrily in all of my trees. The bees are gathering pollen from the wonderfully flowered out fruit trees and lilacs. The sun is shining and warming the earth. The dandelions are popping up in assorted polka dots across my otherwise beautifully greening lawn. The mountains to the west, just outside my office window are snow-capped and beautiful and the air is perfumed with the essence of new life!

Ahhh... it is perfect... almost, with the exception of my new adult onset allergies... mating, noisy, destructive woodpeckers who have an affinity for the wood around my chimneys, Mama raccoon foraging in my yard (I compost) for goodies, and the doggone squirrels who seem to love to ravage my vegetable garden, steal the bird seed in the feeders, make weird screeching sounds in the trees just outside my bedroom, run and play noisily on the warm roof tiles and DRIVE MY DOG ABSOLUTELY CRAZY!!!

My dog, Tootsie aka Batman, is going nuts again! Some of you who have followed my blog in the past have read about my squirrel situation. I have many, many peach, apple, ash, fir, pine, crabapple, aspen and other assorted trees in my yard which is a lovely playground for pesky varmints like these two. In the past I have had a pretty good relocation plan for them, moving them to nicer habitats where they can run free and not worry about my dog constantly running from door to window to door to window to door to window to door to window to door to window to door to window to door to window to door to window door to window to door to window to door to window to door to window door to window to door to window to door to window to door to window door to window to door to window to door to window to door to window, well you get the idea. Tootsie aka Batman is already high strung because of her Italian Greyhound background. My Italian friends talk with their hands, Tootsie talks with her entire being. Squirrels are her nemesis. Just the mention of the word SQUIRREL (dog gone it, just typing it made her spring off the couch in my office and run from door to window to door to window to door to window to door to window door to window to door to window to door to window to door to window door to window to door to window to door to window to door to window door to window to door to window to door to window to door to window door to window to door to window to door to window to door to window, well you get the idea. It's funny, even the word girl or any other word that rhymes somewhat with squirrel, there she goes again, will make her spring to attention, stick both ears straight in the air and ruffle her spine "fur". After talking to others who have relocated the squirrels like me, I have found now that it is true. If you move them, others will come to take his or her place. SO, what are Tootsie and I going to do to make peace here? SUGGESTIONS?

Other than her manic behavior about those furry, brown creatures in the yard, Tootsie is a good girl, NO! NO! BATMAN, I SAID GIRL!

Squirrel # 9 for summer '09

After days and days of rain and the trap being out of commission, I was
working in the garage, set the trap outside with NO bait...WHAM! COMES FROM THE BACK YARD--- Curious George Gets A New Home!

Critter Count Summer 09, 4 Squirrels, make that 5, NO WAIT 6! 1 Raccoon, 1 Bird

This dude or dudette seems to be mooning me...

MORNING NEWS: Squirrel # 4
So, no kidding, when I let this dude or dudette go in the open space he or she sprinted toward a huge blue spruce and as my eyes followed him or her I saw that he or she was joining two other squirrels foraging beneath the tree for pine cones. With peanut butter and apple breath he or she joined them. Bet they are jealous.

Here is something that strikes me odd: everyone that has talked to me about my little squirrel relocation process (adults) have been perplexed that I would take the time to move them. I have heard very creative and brutal methods of dispatching them and I am curious to know what you, my reader thinks about this. Would you relocate or ahem... remove them?
Is it a coincidence that this dude or dudette had a greeting party? Are they playing me? Spying on me? Setting a bigger trap for me?

Trivia Question: In my Go Ask Mom series, who is the villainess that gets her corn stomped down by Gabe and his friends?


LATE MORNING NEWS: Squirrel # 5Now I am just plain lazy. I am putting a little peanut butter on a disposable plastic fork. No more bread for these critters! WHERE ARE THEY ALL COMING FROM???? WE BETTER HAVE A TON OF PEACHES THIS YEAR! I am supposed to be writing, not relocating varmints!!!!! By the way, is this interesting to anyone other than me? Is Critter Count something I should be blogging about? You tell me, but I will tell you that in book 4 of the Go Ask Mom you will see squirrels and bees... inspired by real life events!

NOON NEWS: Squirrel # 6

Okay, I surrender. Wife says, "Well, you don't have to keep setting it!"
I say, "But, if I don't think of the peaches..."
Wife says, nothing, just an eye roll.
I say, "You wanna go with me to let this one go?"
Wife says, nothing again, death stare.
I say, "Be back in a few..."

Could it BEE?

Well, after such an eventful critter catching day yesterday, I must say I was a bit disappointed that my quarter of a red apple attracted no one but a handful of small ants to the trap. I think a peanut or almond butter smear on it might bring some company. Just when I thought the morning would remain uneventful, a run, a quick trip to the gym and Starbucks and back for a session on my laptop with my new book I saw something I haven't seen before on the "trail"...

Amazing things you see in a pair of running shoes, itunes on the ipod, an Italian Greyhound at your side and a trusty little camera in your pocket...

Coming back from a nice, spring run, I was nearing my house when something caught my eye. From a distance this looked like there was a canvas bag hanging in the tree. I am always on the lookout for something unique so I kept my eye on the prize. As I neared the "bag" it seemed to be moving and so I crept up into the neighbor's front yard to get a better look.

WOW! There must be a thousand bees there. They were diving in and buzzing out and swarming. It was cool because of the overnight rain so they were huddled in together to keep warm and didn't seem to mind me standing there at all. I wonder what the homeowner thought if they saw me through the window snapping pics of her front yard?