In which - Dalek!

"We should sit on the lawn. It's probably cooler," Paisley said.

"No way." Aura looked over her shoulder. "That bloody dog next door is out again. And he doesn't know to stay on his own side."

It sounded like a party next door - I don't think barbecue, since I couldn't smell anything barbecuing.

"Pardon me, ladies - has anyone seen Maddy?"

"You mean your Maddy, right?" I don't think he and my person have met yet.

"Of course. She said something about..."








"We're back!"

I don't know if it's that a Gallifreyian accent sounds British, or a British accent sounds Gallifreyian. And I seem to remember Fawn telling me about someone else who had a pet fox.

And what the heck....

"Everyone, this is the Eternal Dalek...." Maddy started, but the Doctor cut her off.

"Maddy, what are you doing? Don't bring one of those things here!"

"Doctor, stop! I'll have you know that he's my friend."

"You can't make friends with a Dalek..."

"I did with this one. If it weren't for him, we would never have gotten off of Cassinus."

"The other Daleks abandoned me. I was of no use to them," the yellow - whatever - said in a grating electronic voice.

"Really?" The Doctor looked at it - him, whatever.

"I had been captured by the Mogul. He sent me to exterminate Maddy when her TARDIS crashed on Cassinus. But she promised to rescue me instead. I had no other choice." The Dalek lowered its eyestalk a bit. "I discovered that she was my friend.


"He rescued LaMarr and got her back to the TARDIS. She was the one who knew how to evade the Mogul's defenses. I wouldn't have gotten off Cassinus without her - or him."

The Doctor's eyes went even wider. "You escaped his Time Lock Beam?"

She nodded. "LaMarr knew how it worked. It locks onto your dematerialization frequency and overrides it. But if you randomly hop between frequencies, it can't lock on, and you can escape."

"I didn't think you could do that."

"You can. You aren't supposed to, but you can."

"I'm just glad you're all right, old girl. We're the only ones left."





















"She hasn't told him?" Paisley said.

"Not yet," The Dalek replied. "I don't think she can yet. She said something about a fixed point in time."

I hope she decides to tell me, though.

















Bonus pic: Maddy and Tonio, her pet fox.

In which - random photos!

So we're doing A Doll A Day on Flickr. Check out some of the photos.

The theme here was "Bright." But click on the photo and check out the cute little feathered photobomber outside.

Someone is threatening to file a formal protest with the ASPCA over getting her cage "Change"-d.

And this is why you shouldn't get "in between" a guinea pig and her food bowl.

Paisley: "Will you wait until I put the food in your bowl before you trample everyone to get to it?"

(No Hittys were harmed in the making of this photo.)

"New" year, new dress and that awesome new CD. And why is it so hard to find pink rocketship print fabric? Can't a girl be a space geek? Just sayin'.....

"Black and White." Not like there was much else in the way of color to begin with. One, it's January, and two, Scaramouche's wardrobe is almost as monochromatic as Maddys.....

"Dark." At least Aura didn't have to spend forty-five minutes sitting on a glass macaw for this one....

And last one for today - "Close Up." What can I say? Scaramouche is almost as much of a rock star as I am. Heck, she's almost as much of a rock star as John Ashton is.....

















Here's the link if you're interested: A Doll a Day 2015

In which - Happy Yule!

We'd like to wish our readers in the northern hemisphere a happy first day of winter (is that an oxymoron?) our readers in the southern hemisphere a happy first day of summer (no oxymoron there!) and everyone else a very happy Yule!

(And that tank is NOT as scuzzy as it looks. It's just algae on the front - again. It was cleaned about five days ago.)

By the way, this is what we woke up to this morning. it snowed off an on most of the day. Just a coating, but enough to make it what Aura calls a totally dreich day.

Bonus pic. :)

In which it's stormy - inside....

"That's weird. I thought I heard - thunder?!" Much like the Spanish Inquisition, nobody expects a supercell thunderstorm - at least, not in the dining room. "Tempest, what are you doing?"

"Okay, please don't let that thing rain on my sewing machine...." Maddy added, coming in.

"Don't worry. It's under control. I haven't let a storm get away from me yet," Tempest said. "But could you open the back door for a moment, please? Just the glass. We need some cooler air in here for this to work."

She did. "For what to work?"

"This," Tempest said. "Okay now, Zephyr, we've got some cold air for the rear-flank downdraft. Pull that into the circulation...."

"Little bit more...."

"And perfect!" She looked apologetic. "It's far too cold to raise one outside. I needed warm air."

"That's what I tried to do back in El Reno." Zephyr looked sad. "But it didn't help. I thought it would do what it did here. Isn't that how you break a vortex?"

"It is - provided you have any cool air to work with," Tempest said. "Which you didn't. You can't work with what you don't have."














Just for the record....

That tornado exploded to just over two and a half miles wide in about thirty seconds. Radar-estimated winds at the base were 296 mph. Right at that moment, it was the strongest force on the planet - and Zephyr was trying to make it play nice and not go across the interstate.

"That's it," she said. "Even I couldn't quite see the outer circulation. The other devas had made it transparent. And it was going so fast. I thought I could dissipate it or turn it or something, but then it was on us - and I saw the truck get picked up. I tried to stop it, but it still rolled. And it was so big. I wasn't close enough to the other car..."

"And you saved everybody in the Yukon," Tempest pointed out. "That was very quick thinking."

(I think Tempest is happy to have a wind deva to work with who thinks the same way she does.)







Bonus pic:

Christmas dresses!

In which - just some random photos

In a straw maze. Did I mention that my hair seems to be a magnet for straw?













Rats!

Actually, this guy only looked scary. Rats are, in fact, pretty cool.

"There's a ship......the Black Freighter....."

If you haven't Nina Simone singing "Pirate Jenny" then go check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7awW5nrDHk

The Pumpkin Queen.

Just a seriously cute sparrow, presumably not named Jack.

Why taking photos under the gerbil cage is a bad idea.

On the other hand, Spike should kick for the NFL.

A deva and her spider.















"That's not a carrot, mate. THIS is a carrot!"

The paring knife is as long as Aura is tall, so yeah, that's a whole lotta carrot.

Daisy with the perfect Christmas tree, courtesy of Norm's Dollhouse. Yes, that is the dollhouse from downstairs. It's upstairs now and in the process of being renovated. More on this to come...

And finally - Happy Halloween, everyone!

In which we're keeping an eye to the sky because it looks better than the ground....

Someone (I assume it was my "Woodstock fella," John Ashton) posted a charmingly cryptic post on the Satellite Paradiso FB page: "Keep an eye to the sky."

 Sounds like a plan to me......

Because it's better than looking at the yard right now

What started out as a simple "fix the leak that soaked the drywall downstairs" culminated in most of the side and back yard being torn up to fix the curtain drain last week and early this week.

Maddy *thinks* her poppies were spared - she told them to keep the backhoe well away from that flowerbed and they did - mostly - but there's not a heck of a lot else left. The worst part is that we don't even know for sure if all this really did anything or not. The back and side yard don't seem quite as squishy - the ground's usually kind of wet, but it seems drier. But then again, we're nine inches short on rain right now and it's been dry for almost two weeks.

And where it wasn't dug up, there are tire tracks. Everywhere.

Where's a deva to even start?

"If we find out they didn't have to do this...."

"Smackdown time?" I think Scaramouche was going to say something else, but decided to keep it G-rated.

"You better believe it."

Aura thinks the poppies are fine, though. They're normally dormant by this time of year, anyway.

"You're going to need to seed it with winter grass and cover it with straw," she said of the rest of this mini-disaster. "If you don't, the spring melt's going to just wash it all away. Maybe you can ask the fella who does your leaves for you if he can do it."

"Or maybe you come with me to Lowe's and help me pick out grass seed," Maddy said.

"We can try. Get some bulbs while you're at it and I'll help you put hyacinths in," Aura suggested. "Hyacinths and hellbores. You need some early spring color around here that isn't daffodils. and see if you can order more of those poppies, maybe."


Leave it to a deva to see an opportunity when most people just see a ginormous mess. But I think this is going to take more than a couple of bags off grass seed and some bulbs......

In which - introductions and random pictures....

I think I'd like autumn better if it went right back into spring, but it is a pretty season.....

Leaves won't be changing for another few weeks, but we have some color.

Although Maddy insists that green is a color, too.....

Aura said it was good fishing weather. If - no, let's say when - I'm ever lucky enough to meet John Ashton, I'll have to ask him about that. If he and Aura don't end up talking hooks and lines, the whole time, that is.

Someone, however, forgot to tell the fish - or maybe warned them, I'm not sure....

"Aw, come on, fishies, Why don't you want to eat this nice, fat, juicy worm?"

Besides the obvious, she means? And you really have to hear that last line with Aura's Scottish accent.

The sisters....

Even storm devas like to just watch the clouds go by sometimes.

 And now some introductions....

Meet Kira. She's the sea star (aka starfish) deva who Scaramouche met down in Australia when she was trying to help find that missing Malaysian plane. Kira's hoping to learn how to communicate with - well, just about everyone and everything, the way Scaramouche does.

Kira's very outgoing, outdoorsy and down to earth, as they say. I think winters here might be a bit of a surprise, but I think she'll be able to handle it just fine. And I just love the color of her eyes.

And this is Tempest's friend Zephyr - yup, like the fish :). Zephyr is, appropriately enough, a wind deva. She's very, very shy and hasn't told us much about herself. I think John-John, our intrepid stylist, may be planning his first devic makeover on her. His first words to me were "The poor dear is so cute, but her hair just isn't doing anything for her face!" Don't get him wrong - he's not being nasty. Anything but.

"The only really ugly people - or dolls - I've ever met were ugly because of their personalities, not their appearance," he told me once. "I have, however, met a lot of people - and dolls, for that matter - who have no idea how beautiful they really are. Sometimes you don't even really need to change anything about them. You just have to make them see themselves the way they really are."

And people actually wonder what Shel sees in him.....