Knowing What You Want

Early in my cat life I bought her a catnip carrot. The carrot was fabric, stuffed with stuffing and catnip, with a few green faux feathers acting as the carrot top. It was an immediate hit. Cat people know cat toys are a lot of hit and miss. I brought home other catnip vegetables. They often got sniffed, occasionally even licked, but nothing was as successful as the carrot. 

So I just bought a catnip carrot every month when I stocked up on food. Until one day there was no catnip carrot at the store. I found some online, but they were from a different company. I ordered them anyway, but my cat deemed them uninteresting and ignored them. I set up a basket with all the ignored catnip toys in the hopes that one day one would be found acceptable. 

The catnip carrot came back, but they must have changed something because it no longer sparked joy for my cat. 

Well, yesterday I heard something. And looked over, and my cat had dragged the catnip banana out of the basket and was doing the full wrestle it and bunny kick it thing. (For non cat people basically the cat grips it in their front paws while laying on their side and kicks at the toy with their back paws.) 

So now I guess I need to stock up on some catnip bananas.

Three Interesting Things

1. This man and his wife shared the story of how they discovered the Social Security Administration had decided he was dead, and the process for fixing that.

2. This post about "Love is Blind" is really about how relationships are all about politics. 

3. I have been so excited for "Boop! The Musical" since I saw the very first (and so far main song) made available to press.  Sure sometimes one song is really the highlight of the show, and sometimes you think, if I just get to see this song it's enough.  Anyway, NPR reflects on the first time they met Boop star Jasmine Amy Rogers. 

Things Unseen

I got a new pair of glasses. I guess I should back up. I have had glasses, for quite some time. But initially I only needed them for distance. So things like driving at night, watching sports in a stadium, watching live theater. Which meant some people knew me and hardly ever saw me in glasses. And some people only ever saw me in glasses. It was interesting. 

Anyway, a few years ago an optometrist told me my close up vision had actually gotten better but some people after a certain age found bifocals helpful, so I should consider them. I was confused. If my close up vision was better, why would I need to. So I got another pair of distance glasses and carried them around, using as needed. 

And then about two years ago, I was at a restaurant with a friend and caught myself doing that maneuver I had seen my mom do many times, where you trying to hold the menu closer, then farther, trying to find the right distance. And I thought, okay, yeah, it might be time to consider multi-focal glasses. 

So got an updated prescription, talked the the optometrist about options, texted friends. And I got myself progressive lenses. 

And the first time I wore them, they made me dizzy. It was weird. Things that used to be clear were now fuzzy and some things were clear, but depending on how close they were. I took them right back off. But I experimented with putting them on and immediately leaving the house, and that seemed to work. So I started with that, and now I wear them all the time.

So this new pair I just got is photochromic. And the first day I wore them it was dark in the morning, and so it wasn't until I was headed home I had a chance to show them some sunshine. And I was looking around, and annoyed that they didn't seem to be working. I had been using clip on before. They made a dramatic flip closed when I put them on, and gave great sun protection. I pulled out my phone and doubled checked that I had really ordered the photochromic. I had. 

And then I switched on the phone camera to take a selfie to show the glasses people and noticed that, uh, then lenses were dark. They were working. The shift had been gradual enough that I just hadn't seen it. They were doing the thing, quietly, without fanfare. 

I think sometimes the federal government can be like that. Sure we all complain about potholes. But like monitor and repairing roads is a huge thing, and I am glad that some group is in charge for that. Someone else monitors the signs. Trims the trees that are pressing against power lines. Handles fire engine maintenance. The grants that help fund arts. The library that maintains huge amounts of documents and instruments among other things. Museums. The National Parks. Okay, I don't mean to list everything the government does because we'd be here all day. I read a study once that most people think they use no Federal government programs, and the average person is on seven. We all use roads. I use public transit too. I visit museums and National Parks. I get mail.  I'm sure there's more I'm overlooking. Because a lot of it is just kind of quietly there. So it's not a big deal. 

7 Things: I Belong to You

1. I did not think that setting a story in a National Park was a thing that would turn out to be remotely topical. Wow, this timeline. But I do adore Rock Creek Park, and it has a mill, and well, there are a lot of fairytales about mills as it turns out. 

2. One of the discords I'm in had the idea to each take a Grimm's fairytale and remix it as a romance. I wasn't super familiar with The Nixie and the Mill Pond, but making magical deals, the woman completing challenges to get her beloved back, yeah, I had ideas about that. 

3. I have been trying to write a story about a mo'o for a while. Because I love geckos, and the idea of a water protector with a gecko and a dragon shape. And nixies, as far as I could tell hung out near mills mostly because mills were on the water. So a mo'o nixie combo seemed sensible. 

4. I've been working a lot of museums into my stories, because DC has so many. (I briefly referenced the Zoo in this one.) But DC also has a ton of parks. There's a guy trying to visit all of them. Rock Creek Park is basically next to my back yard. I sometimes forget that it's right there, that I can just wander through it whenever I feel like it .

5. I don't always make playlists for my books, that's just not how my brain works. But nixies are known for their music and well, for reasons, I made the male protagonist a tour manager for his dad's rock band. So there was a lot of music research for this book. 

6. I also got to do a little cavern research for spoilery plot reasons. There are so many caves, caverns, and other underground spaces around here. Nature is amazing. 

7: I Belong to You - A Fairytale Remix

Makena meets Leif at an open mic night. They hit it off and she feels comfortable sharing about her mo'o and nixie abilities - her attachments to Rock Creek, where she has taken on water protection duties. Leif never stays in one place too long, travelling most of the year as tour manager for his dad's rock band. But for once he's considering what he might be leaving behind. But his parents are concerned once they learn he's been hanging out by the old mill. There may be a bargain left undone, and Makena and Leif together may have reminded the gods to finish things. Links to buy here: https://books2read.com/u/4XkO19

A Mill Story

I'll talk more about this on release day, but this is Peirce Mill. (Spelling intentional.) Growing up in this area, I had gone by this structure and wondered what it was. I knew there were mills. After all we've got a road named Viers Mill, there's Kemp Mill, there clearly were mills. There's an old saying that gets attributed to various people that when you are ready to learn, a teacher appears. Because often it's easy to be like sure, something mill road. Or sure, there's a historical sign that there used to be a mill here.

This mill is in Rock Creek Park. It's near a stretch where the water is deeper, and a little more serious seeming than some stretches that seem more suited to dunking your toes in. The National Park Service, along with the Friends of Peirce Mill, have kept the mill alive and in tact. It's set up for students to come visit. 

Why my sudden interest in mills? Well, some folks and I had talked about writing some fairytale retellings and one of them involves a mill. Of course magical creatures can adapt to a mill free life, I'm sure plenty have. But it turned out, we do have a mill here in DC. I didn't have to plant or revive one, it already was. 

In this time when some people think we don't need to keep parks, or historical sites alive, it was a great reminder why these things are useful. Why letting school kids and adults walk through and look at something, and think about the older ways of flour and other milling. 

It can be easy as a modern person to wonder why there are so many fairytales about mills. But of course just about every town would have had one. And pounding wheat into flour. There are mills and bakers because those people did their own kind of magic. Transforming plants into food.

Tara Kennedy

Note: If you are reading this outside of your normal work hours, feel free to hold off response until your work hours.  

~To the world we dream about, and the one we live in now. 

"Hadestown", book and lyrics by Anais Mitchell