In Which it's New Year's Eve 2023

 

...and going to be a quiet one. Beth, our person, managed to avoid it for close to four years, but COVID finally got her just before Christmas. She's pretty sure she knows who it was that came to work sick when they shouldn't have and needless to say, she is NOT a very happy camper. She didn't get super sick or anything - just a lot of sinus drip, a LOT of sneezing and an extreme amount of Samuel L. Jackson style cursing when the second line appeared on the little test thingy. She's been feeling better since Tuesday but still had a positive test this morning. She would tell you all to wear masks, although that train apparently left the station week before last. (And yes, she is indeed fully vaxxed and boosted, which is why she's up and about making peanut butter cookies and complaining about it rather than being in the hospital or worse.) I get it, though. Man, I'd be pissed, too. 

These weird things are some leftover Orbeez, by the way. I think she had the idea of using them to maybe root cuttings. She said she had some that were actually pretty (blue and purple) but she used them a few years ago in a failed attempt at keeping lucky bamboo happy. So these are apparently the ugly ones she's hydrating. These things are weird. Kind of like the love child of one of those Superballs you get out of a gum machine and a Jello shot. Don't tell her I know what Jello shots are, okay? You do learn some stuff being on the web. 

Speaking of learning stuff....

Lenore: I thought it was supposed to be sunny today.

Fawn: It was. *Supposed* to be. When was the sun out last, anyway?

Lenore: Christmas day....

Fawn: What were you asking Jamie about?

Lenore: I asked him if he'd asked Miss Beth about his sister coming here, and he said he hadn't yet. He also said there's a Miss Torrance who's going to be joining us. I think she's older, though. Like him. 

Fawn: Jamie isn't that old!

Lenore: No, but he's older than we are. And did you find the website?

Fawn: Right here. Archive of Our Own. That's the one Beth was talking about. 

Lenore: So where's this story?

Fawn: There are a bunch of them. This one's really funny, though. One of the characters is reading one of those really dirty books, but it's really badly written.

Lenore: It looks okay to me.

Fawn: No, the story isn't badly written. The book he's reading is badly written. and they wrote a bunch of excerpts. 

Lenore: Like the one Miss Beth wrote where one of the characters was reading that really awful romance novel?

Fawn: Yeah, except this one's really explicit. And funny. Like this. "My demon lover approached me and shredded the clothes from my body, scattering the shredded rags about the library like autumn leaves to the wind..."

Lenore: I hope he brought a change of clothes or that's not gonna be a fun commute home from work...

Fawn: I'm sure he thought of that somewhere along the line. He did plan this, you know."

Fawn, still reading several hilariously painful paragraphs later: "With this power from our coupling, I can replant the entire Amazon rain forest!" my demon lover declared as he vanished, leaving me sated and spent. It was then that I realized I had nothing to wear to get home..."

Lenore: Told you he didn't think it through.

Fawn: Well, I guess he could have worn a garbage bag. But that still would have been embarrassing.

Lenore: Not to mention that kind of went out of style awhile ago. And if the library has garbage bags like Miss Beth's office, they're all clear. So that wouldn't have worked either. 

Fawn: Yeah, he *really* should have thought that through. 

(For the record, Beth said "yeah, they're about the age I was when we started reading stuff like that, but we didn't have fanfiction. We had to make do with sneaking actual books. As long as they come to me with any questions, it's fine." She also can't remember the name of the one everyone was passing around like seventh-grade contraband, which, some to think of it, it probably was. She also said it was just about as comically bad, except it wasn't supposed to be funny. I think she enjoys playing benevolent cool aunt to a couple of twelvish-year-old girls.)

Lenore also got a guitar for Christmas, but she eschewed the "Campfire Sing-Alongs" book it came with in favor of looking up the chords to "Rock And Roll High School." Like Beth at that age, I think she's decided she wants to be Riff Randall when she grows up. 

Meanwhile, back in the living room....

Maddy: Okay, these things are weird. What are they again?

Hawthorne: Cool! A ball pit! COWABUNGA!!!!

Maddy: Hawthorne, wait up! This isn't a....

*SPLAT*

Maddy: I tried to tell you....

Barbie: Oh for the love of - Hawthorne, are you okay!?

Hawthorne: I thought it was a ball pit!

Hawthorne is fine, by the way. But we had a very long talk with her about (literally!) looking before you leap, and asking questions - and permission.

And no. I have no idea what Beth was planning to do with those Orbeez, but pixie ball pit probably wasn't it....

Anyway, Happy New Year!

In which we discuss the varying degrees of awesome in fan fiction....

....who might then link to your deathless prose...

"Hey, Maddy? What's "deathless prose?" I'd read that a bit earlier in one of the books on blogging we bought today and now I was wondering.

"Just a weird old expression." She looked around. "I don't know about it. It kind of makes me think of zombies blogging or something. Zomblogs."

"That might be awesome," I said. I was rereading the description of the original Hitty's Charles Dickens outfit. I'd love to have it in pink, but Maddy looked at me like I was slightly nuts when I suggested it. I think it had more to do with her self-perceived lack of sewing ability than anything else.


"Awesome with zombies," Maddy agreed. "Did World War Z open yet?"

I had no idea. "Would that be awesome with Brad Pitt and zombies?"

"That's a whole other degree of awesome. Now all we need is ninjas," Maddy said. "Awesome with zombies and ninjas. And Brad Pitt."


"Okay, so how about with ninja zombies?"

"I think it would be more awesome if Brad Pitt were the ninja fighting the zombies."

"How about with John Ashton instead?"

"Instead of what?" She looked around.

"Brad Pitt."

"Okay, wait. John Ashton as a ninja fighting zombies?!"

"Yeah! Now that would be awesome," I said. "With unicorns!"

"Wait. John Ashton as a ninja---"

"In black leather."

"Wait, what? John Ashton as a ninja in black leather fighting zombie unicorns?"

"No, the unicorns are separate. They're on his side."

"Are the unicorns wearing black leather, too?"

"They could. And me of course as the girl he rescues and falls in love with. Of course, I'm a butt-kicking ninja, too and I can usually hold my own against any zombie, but not a bazillion of them."

"Wait, why are we trashing zombies? I thought Ghoulia and you were friends."

"We are. But she'll be the first to admit that not all zombies are as cool as she is."

"So she's on---"

"Our side, exactly. She's a zombie double agent."

"Oh man..." Maddy shook her head. "That sounds like something I would have come up with once upon a time."

"Did you?"

"No, just the double agent part. I got it in my head once that I was going to write a spy thriller. Well, my friends loved it, they all read it and begged me to keep writing it. Even a couple of the teachers thought it was great. There was just one problem."

"What?"

"They thought I was writing a parody of a spy thriller, but I wasn't. At least, not intentionally."

"What did you do?"

"What could I do? I went with it. At least they wanted to read it."

~*~

Hmmm.......

Maybe I should change the title of this blog to Hitty Caroline: Zombie Hunter....

Maddy: Or not.

In which I learn about vinyl, Cheap Trick and science-fan-fiction epics....

"Hey, this song is awesome!" I looked around at Maddy. "Did you just download this?"

"Yeah. I have the CD - or I should - but I can't find it anywhere." Maddy looked around.

"Did it just come out?" The last CD she bought was a month or so ago, and that was Big Country's latest. (Which rocks, BTW. Check it out.)

"Oh Gawds, no. And that 1998 is for the CD. The album was recorded in 1978, I think. It was one of the first albums I ever bought."


"Was it the first?"

"No, that was the soundtrack to Grease. Which I still love. Did I ever show you what vinyl records look like?"

"No."

"Here's one." She found it and took it out. "This was how music used to come. Sounded good, but not very portable. Plus, records had a nasty tendency to 
get scratched and/or skip - sometimes right out of the sleeve. One album I had - Panorama, by the Cars - I had no idea it was skipping one whole line of the title track near the beginning of the song until years later when I got the CD. I think out of all the labels, Chrysalis was the worst. Any album I bought on that label was guaranteed to skip right out of the sleeve somewhere."

"They did have awesome covers, though. At least some of them did."

I looked. "Are those Harleys?"

"I have no idea." She gave me an odd look.

 "This was how you made your music portable back in the vinyl days. Tapes."

"This is one of the original Sony Walkmans, I used to sneak mine to school all the time along with a bunch of mix tapes. I had to carry a ginormous bag to keep it hidden, though. I wasn't supposed to have it with me. Nobody ever caught on, though."

"Then along came the CD...."

"And the MP3 player. I think I have almost six hundred songs on that and I still have room for more. I could never have done that with mix tapes. And now I can just download a song I like right away instead of waiting until I can get to the record store to find the album - if they even had it, that is. I can even Google an awesome song on a commercial and download it before the commercial's over. Very cool."






"How did you first hear these guys?" The album wasn't bad.

"On an old TV show called Pink Lady and Jeff. They had some really good bands on, That was where I first heard Blondie and Alice Cooper, too." She made a wry face. "Back then - I guess I was about eleven or so - I was pretty much convinced I was going to marry Robin Zander. Me and about a bazillion other girls..." She rolled her eyes at herself. "At the time I was also writing a very convoluted fanfic story about the band. Some kind of overwrought science fiction epic. At one point I think it had a plot somewhere, but I think I totally lost it about a chapter and a half in."

"What was the plot?"

"It was supposed to be something about the band getting magically transported to the year 4001 and finding out everything had been destroyed in a nuclear war and then traveling back through time to figure out what happened so they could stop it, but meeting me and some of my friends and we started traveling with them and then well - bye-bye plot. I think Flash Gordon and Ming the Merciless made an appearance somewhere along the way and there were a bunch of talking winged cats and Robin becoming the High Priest of Rhythmic Noise....I think I was on a lot of Benedryl when I wrote most of it."

I somehow don't think it could have been that bad. It sound kind of weirdly cool. Surrealist fan fiction.....