This one, from last month, at the Nasher Museum. First up, MamaRay, a sculpture by Wangechi Mutu.
A king’s door by Areogun of Osi-Ilorin.
The Bash Bish Falls by John Frederick Kensitt
Two by Lenold Lamm
Monolith #2 by Brittany Nelson.
Idoma and Igbo headdresses.
At the South Head by Alfred Bricher.
#SFWApro. All rights to images and art remain with current holders.
Filed under Personal
For one of our dates last month, TYG and I went to the Natural History Museum in Raleigh. They had a new exhibit, Dueling Dinosaurs, referring to a t. rex and a triceratops found together. Possibly they fought and died together; possibly it’s coincidence.
The woman is holding a piece of triceratops horn, which is way heavier than I imagined. With a dino that big thrusting a heavy horn into you … yeah, that would be a tough opponent.
Now some more photos from around the museum
That photo above is a diorama.
#SFWApro.
Filed under Miscellanea
My sister bought us a picnic basket as a wedding gift but due to TYG’s insane schedule I think we’ve only used it once. Earlier this month, however, we went out to picnic in a grassy recreation area near a local garden store.
We explored the garden store (the same one we visited in May) and TYG browsed the store.
We wandered around outdoors, too.
Yes, that was a turtle.
There was also an old graveyard on the property which added to my interest in going.
#SFWApro.
Filed under Miscellanea, Personal
Last weekend, TYG took me to a concert: Kristin Chenoweth, with the North Carolina Symphony. A very cool building with gorgeous acoustics.
The seats were fantastic, eight rows back. And Chenoweth was amazing. Very funny (“After jamming with Willy Nelson I wafted home. You always ‘waft’ if you jam with Willy — there’s no alternative.”). Dynamic. Delivering a lot of songs as if she were performing in a musical rather than a concert. And damn, she can sing.
Surprisingly less singing from the Broadway shows she’s been in (though she did “Popular” from Wicked) than songs by women she admires: Dame Julie Andrews (“I Could Have Danced All Night” from My Fair Lady), Barbra Streisand (“The Way We Were”), Karen Carpenter (totally nailing “Yesterday Once More”) and others. TYG rated it one of the best concerts she’s been to.
Alas, the only shot I got of Chenoweth — no photos until the curtain call, of course — has her largely bleached out.
It was still an awesome evening.
#SFWApro.
Filed under Miscellanea, Personal
TYG and I took a walk on the American Tobacco Trail (it used to be a railway taking tobacco to market, now it’s been converted into a public trail) for a recent date. Our neighborhood is about .3 miles from an ATT intersection. TYG, however, suggested going about seven miles down the trail for novelty. It’s where we saw the copperhead. And the cicadas were incredibly loud.
Then we stopped off at a garden store. With a payphone no less.
And some local carnivorous plants, plus other stuff.
I love plant names like these.
#SFWApro.
We took another weekend date walk. Suddenly TYG grabbed me and yanked me back. I was startled, then she pointed at what I almost stepped on.
Copperhead. I’m very appreciative she saw it while I was admiring the scenery.
Thanks hon.
#SFWApro.
A couple of weeks back we took a stroll around a nearby lake for our weekend date. Here’s some pretty pictures.
Here’s a couple of volumes I found in the little free library along the path.
#SFWApro. All rights to book covers remain with current holders.
Filed under Miscellanea, Personal
Sheesh. This was a week.
We had carefully mapped out our schedule to account for various things — business to take care of Tuesday afternoon, TYG to the dentist Wednesday, housekeepers Thursday, me to my next blood donation Friday morning, then probably resting the rest of the day.
(This is a cicada case. It’s rise-and-mate time with them and man, they are loud. By midweek we could even here them from inside our house).
Tuesday afternoon things went wrong and we had to postpone until today. That meant I had to push back my blood donation until tomorrow, but that won’t work either. And TYG’s dentist had to switch her appointment around which complicated her work schedule. I postponed my blood appointment until tomorrow.
On Wednesday I noticed that while our A/C was set to 70 it was running at 76. Wonderful. When they came out Thursday to check on it, they almost couldn’t find anything but the key glitch kicked in at the last minute (and they say there are no miracles). They performed a temporary fix with a pemanent one next week.
Plus the housekeepers closed the stopper in my sink. It turns out the opening lever is broken so it’s closed until we get the plumber in. I’m not sure if it’s the cleaning crew’s fault or that it was already broken and I never close it.
Astonishingly I got good work done. I went over the final section of Southern Discomfort though I didn’t finish editing it. I got a lot of editing done on Savage Adventures though again, not finishing. And I got another chapter finished on the Let No Man Put Asunder rewrite
I turned in a short Local Reporter article on renovations at a local-government building and two Atomic Junk Shop posts, one about some stories by one of my favorite Silver Age writers, Gardner Fox, and one about the changes in comics and pop culture as the Sixties came to a close.
A frustrating week, but overall a definite win.
#SFWApro. Cover by Gil Kane, all rights to image remain with current holder.
TYG took some time off recently and went gardening (hopefully everything survives this weekend’s turn to cold temperatures). As the dogwood in our yard kept poking her while she worked, she trimmed it back and brought the trimmings inside.
They have now died but it was quite decorative for a while. Here’s her table of seedlings from before she planted them.
This was a good week. We’re still giving Plushie a lot of drops for his glaucoma and related issues (antibiotics for a scratch on the eyeball) but he’s doing well and we’ve finally got the rhythm down: it’s still a chunk of time but I’m finding ways to read or write between the drops. After his coming recheck we’re hopeful we can cut the antibiotics and maybe reduce the length of time between doses.
Despite the drops, I did get a lot of work done. I completed edits on Savage Adventures through 1940 so that April task is done. Mostly I’m going through the books to clarify any points where my synopses or comments were unclear — did I have the correct spelling of Pharaoh Pey-deh-eh-ghan in Resurrection Day, for instance? After that comes one final round of edits. I was going to ask a friend of mine to do the cover but I missed our coffee date due to one of Plushie’s eye appointments and I haven’t caught up since. Darn it.
I printed out the next 100 pages of Southern Discomfort and went over it, marking misspellings, errors (when I switched Maria’s POV to first person I didn’t change every “her” to “I”) and simply places where the writing needs tightening or clarifying or changing to avoid repetition. As I mentioned last week, I’m way overfond of compound sentences linked by “but.” Next week I’ll go over the manuscript and start making the changes.
I also read a chapter of the book to the writing group. I’d picked it partly because I’d rewritten that chapter to provide more context for some of the period references. It worked better than previous readings but a couple of the group members thought it could still use added context. I must think about this.
I got about 3,000 words done on the rewrite of Let No Man Put Asunder. As the group has suggested, I’m slowing down and giving Paul and Mandy chances to catch their breath and think. I’m also working to provide more context, based on feedback from last year. When Paul talks about the mysteries he found in the used book store, rather than just rattle off names it’s “three Shell Scott hardboiled PI mysteries, a John Dickson Carr locked-room mystery and two Agatha Christies” (I don’t think anyone needs context for Agatha Christie). Will that do the trick? We’ll see next time I beta-read it.
I do wish I had a firmer idea of Asunder‘s plot arc. I’m not sure now that I did enough rethinking and replotting before starting round two. However I can always stop and think some if that’s the case.
I submitted my proposal for Jekyll and Hyde Adaptations in Film and TV (I imagine the title will be something close to that) to McFarland. Now I wait and see if they like it. I think my sample chapters were excellent so fingers crossed.
I posted one article at Atomic Junk Shop on how comics handled women in 1968 (spoiler: not well) and on the introduction of George Stacy, Gwen’s retired-cop father and of Earth-Prime, the world where we live in the DC multiverse. I also published a Local Reporter article about Chapel Hill Public Library competing for a national award and how the Carrboro PD is working to avoid incarcerating the mentally ill.
And that’s about it, but I think that was more than enough. Whoot! Have a great weekend, y’all.
#SFWApro. Resurrection Day cover by James Bama, Spider-Man art by John Romita.
I used to do deep, thoughtful birthday posts. I used to schedule my yearly goal-setting around my birthdays too. Eventually, however, I defaulted back to New Year’s for goal setting. And I’m less thoughtful because since meeting TYG I no longer sit around brooding about what’s wrong with my life.
I’m married, I love my wife (and vice versa), we have three wonderful pets and I write full-time (admittedly not enough to pay my bills if I wasn’t a two-income family). We have a roof over our head. My health is good. I learned last week I might have been exposed to Covid during a recent trip but I took the test and I didn’t catch it.
Since meeting TYG (as I said in my first birthday post after we met) I’ve felt incredibly lucky. I know nothing lasts forever — if nothing else, sooner or later we all go over the Rainbow Bridge — but that’s all the more reason to appreciate it while we’ve got it.
#SFWApro.
Filed under Personal
