Barbara's Blog

Just got the news. Here she is, as a volunteer auto mechanic and driver towards the end of WWII. What an amazing life, and time - the Second Elizabethan Age indeed.  

  Saw this pretty lady - or one very like her (I snitched this picture off the Internet, since I'm beyond lousy with a cell-phone camera) - as I took my walk before sunup this morning. She's the second mantis I've seen in the past month - I saw one of exactly her dust-brown color sitting on a wall in Chico on my road-trip. They were all over the place when I was a little kid, in several colors - usually leaf-green, but often golden, or a darker brown than this. We had them as pets. My sister had a white one. Later this morning when I went to the campus I saw a full-grown and DAMN BIG hawk flap down onto the seat of a chained-up bicycle, and case the surrounding area like he'd paid for smorgasbord there. It's still hot - the temperature plunged clear down to 106 for today, though I'll bet it tops at 108 like it did yesterday (Sunday was 112). I'm still resting between projects (though I admit I'm working on another Further Adventure). The final page-proof...

  My dad used to use the expression, "We're off like a herd of turtles," which was a good description of my vacation last week.  It was my first road-trip in 4 years - postponed from last month. The dear friends I visited I hadn't seen in 4 years, though because I've kept in touch it didn't feel like 4 years - and I hope never to have that long a hiatus again. Both destinations were in the deep woods of northern California. I did a lot of walking, and a lot of endless driving on those miles and miles and MILES of northern California two-lane highways that are completely unmarked ("Am I still on 99? Am I headed in the correct direction?" I had GPS maps but couldn't get Siri to work on my phone, despite coaching from the lovely young lady at Enterprise Rent-a-Car). And once you get into the gold country, a lot of those little mountain trails have no signs on them. And I came home to find my computer wouldn't boot. I spent a couple of days dozin...

Just a little shout-out, happy birthday Mom, on what would have been her 94th birthday. (This is her in the church hall before my wedding).  

Although forced to re-schedule my vacation trip, I DID get to keep my research appointment at the Margaret Herrick Library, i.e. the research library of the Academy of Motion Pictures. And thanks to the advice of a friend about the best way to get there that didn't involve freeways and rush hour (my appointment was from 10-3, i.e. going into downtown during the morning rush hour and leaving during the afternoon rush hour along with several million other drivers going in the same directions), getting there was fairly painless and un-stressy. The library itself is LOVELY. The staff is helpful, friendly, extremely knowledgeable and scrupulous about COVID protocols. And, I got to look at silent film scripts (which showed that my portrayal of them in Scandal in Babylon was accurate, insofar as at that point there were evidently SEVERAL different ways of numbering scenes), and sources that clarified various other small points. When you're writing a murder mystery, or in fact any fict...

It's been four years since I've had a vacation. I almost got to take one this week - and I apologize (as usual) for being dilatory about posting, because I was prepping to take a road trip to visit friends. I arranged some rather complicated scheduling of who was going to be home when, turned in my manuscript, tidied my house so the cat-sitter wouldn't think I'm a slob, arranged car rental because I don't want to worry about engine-trouble halfway between East Jesus and Mordor, arranged massively long playlists, re-arranged my research appointment and had the requisite number of nightmares about getting lost on cliff-tops or the cats escaping. Late in the afternoon of the day before my departure (which was scheduled for 9 a.m.), about an hour after I had cleaned out the refrigerator, horrible noises from within the walls informed me that the air conditioner had died. (Or that something extraterrestrial was attempting to materialize in the laundry-room). For a number...

  Way back in the day, I attended the University of Bordeaux (the campus outside the city, not the downtown campus). There were a whole gang of UC students living in the dorms on campus, and nearly every evening one or another of us would  "take a study break" and go roving up to the kitchenettes (on the 2nd and 4th floors of our building, Building B) to see what other UC students were also "taking a study break" - i.e. sitting around talking and drinking tea for an hour before going back to our rooms. The French students didn't do this. So, I'm taking a study break before going back to what I hope is the final polish of "One Extra Corpse," the second Hollywood murder mystery. (It's due in 2 weeks). Classes are done for the summer - I'm allegedly teaching a class in Fall, if it makes the minimum enrollment (community college enrollments are down substantially all over the country). After eighteen VERY crowded months, I'll be able to ret...