more blog touring

This time with an article about museums, research, and some of the fantastic places I visited while researching Repeating History.

http://veldabrotherton.blogspot.com/2012/01/researching-at-montana-museums.html

while I'm whinging...

I'll whinge about one of my teenage cats, too.

1) Elena is part raccoon, and not just because she's got raccoon-like face markings. She is training me to keep the toilet lids down because otherwise she dunks things (like cat toys) in them, and then leaves them, soaking wet, in places strategically chosen for the likelihood of me stepping on them.

2) Elena apparently can tell the difference between the canned cat food equivalent of dye lots (thank you for the comparison, filkferengi), and won't eat from one and will eat from another, visually identical can (Elli eats from all the cans without any problems). And when I refuse to pander to this and make comments like "well, eat your damned crunchies, then" --

3) Elena becomes a drama queen. Oh, she eats the crunchies, and she's not starving to death by any stretch of the imagination. But she whines and wails and carries on like a small tragedienne. Repeatedly.

I did not sign up for this when I adopted her...

Yeah, I'm procrastinating

Wanna make sump'in of it?

A meme. I haven't done a meme in a while. This one's from dira by way of philomytha: Post a random sentence (or three whole paragraphs) from every WIP you're currently working on, even if it's very short. Then invite people to ask questions about your WIP. With any luck, you'll get talking about writing, and the motivation to take that WIP one step closer to completion will appear as if by magic!

This obviously assumes you're working on more than one. But that's okay [g].

"The Portland arrived in Seattle today, July 15, 1897. I watched it steaming towards the dock, like the rest of the hundreds of people crowded on every bluff and pier. I left Miss Alice in the lurch at the Macombers', and at the mercy of Mrs. Macomber's wrath that her ball gown would not be finished in time, but after reading the newspaper Father brought home last night I could no more have stayed away than I could have flown.

A ton of gold. A ton of gold. I could not imagine such a thing. Surely the battered little ship should have sunk before it had left its Alaskan port with a load that heavy. And that was just the cargo. I could barely see the people packing the space at the railing, staring back up at the crowds gazing down at them.

So far as I could tell, the whole world had gone into a frenzy when the Excelsior docked in San Francisco a few days ago and the stories had flown as fast as the telegraph wires could carry them. A reporter from the Post-Intelligencer had paid an extravagant sum two days ago to be ferried out to the Portland and back on a tug, just to get the story ahead of his competitors. To get his 'scoop' as the ship threaded its way through the Strait and down the Sound past Ports Angeles and Townsend, along Whidbey Island, past Mukilteo and Ballard, where I stood shoulder to shoulder with jostling men, women, and children alike above Shilshole Bay, to the port of Seattle, where doubtless an even larger mob anxiously awaited its arrival."