A Wintery Sunshine Blogger Award

Yes, it's true.  I'm here with another Sunshine Blogger Award post!  This time, I was nominated by Astrya of Inkling Corner.  Thanks, Astrya!  I have such fun with these sorts of posts :-) 

Here are the Sunshine Blogger Rules:

1. Display the award’s official logo somewhere on your blog. 

2. Thank the person who nominated you. 

3. Provide a link to your nominator’s blog. 

4. Answer your nominator’s questions. 

5. Nominate up to 11 bloggers. 

6. Ask your nominees 11 questions. 

7. Notify your nominees by commenting on at least one of their blog posts.

And here are Astrya's questions!

1. What was the last book you read? 

Snowhawk by Deborah Koren, book two in her Dark Throne duology.  These books are high fantasy, meaning they take place in a fictional world (as opposed to low fantasy, which takes place in our world but with magical elements).  They're edge-of-your-seat, high-stakes adventures with ordinary people stepping up to save their kingdom from those within and without who are poised to destroy it.

You can read my review of Balefire here and my review of Snowhawk here.

(From my Instagram account)

2. What are you looking for in a ‘perfect’ movie adaption of a classic?  

The same thing I'm looking for in a good movie adaptation of a modern movie or play:  capturing the characters in a way that feels true to the characters in the book, and portraying the story in a way that makes sense for the medium.

It's no secret that I'm not a "purist" when it comes to movie adaptations ;-)  I even made this little button illustrating that fact years and years ago, and it remains in my blog's sidebar to remind people of this.  You cannot translate a work between two different mediums without changing things, because every medium -- be it print, radio, stage, or film -- has its own peculiar restraints, its own strengths and weaknesses.  A slavish reproduction in a new medium of a story created in a different medium will inevitably fail to work in some way or other.  And what is the point of creating an exact replica of a story in a different medium?  Bring something new to the story!  I have learned more about Hamlet from the 20+ stage and film versions I have seen than I would have from only reading the text itself (though I usually pick up a new nuance or detail when I reread it, too).

3. What’s your favourite season of the year and why? 

Winter!  I love snow.  And, yes, I know whereof I speak -- I lived in Iowa and Michigan as a kid (and in the Thumb of MI, where Lake Effect snow is magnificently mountainous), and in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Connecticut as an adult.  I've had to drive to work through snowstorms, I've had to shovel my driveway more than once in the same day, and I've had to help get my car out of a ditch.  Yet I still LOVE snow.

4. If you could go anywhere in the world for one week, where would you go? (This could also be a fictional place.) 

New Zealand so I could see all the Middle-earth filming locations and sets and so on.

5. If you could choose your own name, what would it be? 

Reid James.  I might use that as a non de plume at some point.

6. If you had to write a short story about anything, what would it be? 

I've written more than a hundred short stories over the past 30 years.  And I'll be writing another beginning in January.  If I want to write a short story about something, I do it, or I plan it out to write in the future.  

My next one will be about a fur trapper who's left a poke of gold by a deceased friend, but discovers the gold is being held in the safe of a greedy saloon owner who is unwilling to let go of it (or all the other semi-legally-gotten money in his safe).  It'll be part of an anthology of western short stories being put together by Allison Tebo.

Meanwhile, I do have ten short stories out in a collection called Prairie Tales: Volume One.  You can learn more about my books here.

7. What was the worst movie you watched this year and why? 

Probably Pan (2015).  I didn't care about any of the characters, a lot of the special effects were kind of kludgy, and even though I love Hugh Jackman very much indeed, he actually managed to annoy me in that movie.

8. British or American spelling? 

Well, I'm an American, so I tend to stick to American spellings, except for the word 'grey.'  I much prefer the British spelling, 'grey,' to the American spelling, 'gray.'  It simply looks more grey.

9. Desert or Forest? 

Forest.  I love forests, but I hate deserts.  Well, actually, I just hate both heat and dryness, but that means deserts are a huge NO from me.

10. What is your favourite piece of music (or two, or three, because I know how hard these questions are)? 

Well, I'm always partial to "Mack the Knife" when sung by Bobby Darin, I've been jamming to Harry Connick Jr.'s "We Three Kings" rendition on repeat this week, and I never get tired of the main theme from The Magnificent Seven written by Elmer Bernstein.

11. What was the last movie you watched?

Horizon: An American Saga, Chapter One (2024), which I rewatched this week while chatting online with my best friend while she watched it too.  I loved it when I watched it twice in the theaters this summer, I loved it again this week while watching the DVD at home, and I am ridiculously impatient for them to get a move on and release Chapter Two already!!!

Also, I've realized that my favorite character in the whole thing is Sgt. Major Thomas Riordan (Michael Rooker).  I thought he was my second-favorite, but this third viewing made me realize I really love him best.  (But I still have high hopes for Junior Sykes [Jon Beaver] to get a cool redemption arc of some kind.)

Now it's supposed to be time for some nominations.  However, I just tagged a whole lot of people with The Christmas Movie Tag, and this is a really busy time of year, so... I'm actually not going to tag anyone.  However!  I WILL provide eleven questions for anyone who wants to join the fun.  If you like my questions, you can consider yourself tagged, fill out the questions, link back to this post, etc.  If you do that, please leave me a comment here with a link to your post so I can see your answers!

My Questions:

1. Movies or books?

2. Singing or dancing?

3. Walking or swimming?

4. Cotton candy or popcorn?

5. Road trips or airplane rides?

6. Snow or rain?

7. Fantasy or sci-fi?

8. Ketchup or mayonnaise?

9. Elephants or polar bears?

10. December or July?

11. Hot dogs or hamburgers?

Play if you want to!

Winter Wonderland Tag

I found this on Write On, Cordy! and decided to fill it out because you know what?  I'm really in the mood to fill out tags right now.

Tag Rules: 
Link back to The Storybook Journal
Answer the questions; think Winter-y thoughts! Include pictures, if you like.
Tag at least 3 other bloggers, or more if you're feeling ambitious. :)

1. Name a few things you love about Winter and a few things you don't love so much about it.

I love snow and the absence of hot temperatures.  I love Christmas and my daughter's birthday and my husband's birthday.  I love a nice fire in the fireplace.  I love hot chocolate (though, truth be told, I drink it all year 'round). 

I don't love living in a place where we don't get much snow.  I don't love icy roads.

2. When you were a child, did you "believe" in Santa Claus?

Why is "believe" in quotation marks?  As a kid, I literally believed in Santa's existence.  As an adult, I fiercely insist upon it.

3. Is there a book or movie that you really love to read in the Winter as opposed to other times of year?

I really only watch White Christmas (1954) in the winter.

4. Is there a particular Christmas movie that you watch EVERY year as a tradition?

Alas, no.  I kind of cycle through a bunch of them, watching ones that I haven't seen for a while or am just in the mood for at the moment.  Which ones?  These ones!

5. Do you usually get a real tree or a fake tree for Christmas? Who's in charge of decorating it at your house?

We have had fake trees all of our married life.  Now that our youngest is 6, though, and not liable to pull the tree over... and now that our current fake tree is getting really wobbly... we might just get a real tree next year.  I love real trees.

As for who is in charge of decorating it?  I am, naturally!  I hand out the ornaments to the kids, and they hang them where they please.  I do the lights and garland first, though.  Otherwise, we descend into madness.

6. Does your family usually stay home or go visiting (relatives, friends, etc.) on Christmas Day?

Since moving here in 2011, we have been hosting Christmas Day festivities at our house after church.  However!  My brother and his family bought a house this year, and so they have the honor of hosting us this time instead.

7. What does your family usually do on New Years Eve? Any traditions? Do you ever stay up till midnight?

Well, Cowboy always has New Year's Day off, so we usually watch a movie.  Sometimes we stay up until midnight, sometimes we don't.  Now, back when we both worked third shift, we were ALWAYS up to ring in the New Year, which amused us greatly.

8. Do you get snow where you live? If so, have you ever built a snowman and named him Olaf?

We do get a bit of snow sometimes!  In fact, all of the pictures in this post are from earlier this month.  (Some are of snow in my back yard, and some are of Christmas decorations at Colonial Williamsburg.)  I'm always excited if there's enough snow for us to build a good-sized snowman with the kids, but I don't think we've ever named him Olaf.

Last week, my son Sam made a tiny snow mouse face and put it on top of our wind chime.  Because he's cute.

9. If it's snowing outside, would you prefer to go outside and build snowmen and enjoy it, or would you rather stay inside with a blanket and something hot to drink and maybe a movie or a book?

I love to play in the snow!  But I also love to read books while it's snowing.  Ideally, I would choose both.  And I miss living in a snow-filled world where I didn't have to choose one or the other, but could do both.

10. When do you start looking forward to or getting excited about Spring?

Usually in February.  I get creatively stagnant as winter progresses, and I start to long for the changes of spring that will reawaken my hibernating creativity.

I wasn't tagged with this, so I'm not going to tag anyone.  If you feel like doing a Christmasy tag, go for it!

We have snow! Lots and lots of snow! More than nine inches, and more heading our way :-D Woo! I've done about 19 Dances of Joy, as you can imagine. And you should see Dano playing in the snow! He's practiced walking in his new boots since that first snowfall a couple weeks ago, so now he can run about like a tiny mutant snowman. He spent this morning picking up chunks of snow, helping Cowboy brush off the car, and scaling the new snow mountains along the edges of our parking lot. We'll proably do it all again tomorrow. And as soon as there's good packing snow, we'll build his first snowman!

Of course, this means Mom's trip up here tomorrow might turn into an Adventure, but you need one of those every now and then, right?

If I wrote a novel about this trip, it would seem so preposterously aggravation-ridden that it would have to be a comedy.

We didn't get everything loaded and hit the road until like 2:30 Tuesday afternoon. By then, it was snowing, so MamaRuth generously offered that she and Banana would clean our apartment so we could get on the roadahead of the storm. But we had to drop the piano off at Banana's home first, and by the time it was unloaded, the roads were pretty awful. We ate supper at her place, then got a hotel and watched Amazing Grace on pay-per-view. I'll try to blog about it some time -- for now I'll just say Ioan Gruffudd is getting even better looking, if that's possible!

It's a good thing we stopped when we did, because we saw 2 semis and several cars still in the ditch when we set out yesterday morning, and lots of tracks where others had already been rescued. We ran into the storm again in IL/IN and that slowed us down for a while. But we survived it. We have to stop about every 2 hours to fill up the truck/clean someone's wiper blades/go to the bathroom/get food, so we don't make the greatest time. Plus, the truck can't go above 70.

By supper time last night, Dano was ultra-cranky (he cried for almost 45 min straight -- he loathes his car seat), Daddy and Cowboy were pretty tired, and we were going to have supper with the Chameleon and her Gonna-Be Preacher Man yet, so Dad started calling hotels to see if we could get rooms for the night. All the ones he called were full, so we decided to pull off at a La Quinta we spotted because Dad had liked the one we stayed in the night before.

And that's when we encountered the latest glitch for this mission: Dad nicked a car in the parking lot with the step that sticks out from the passenger side of the truck cab. All it did was make a scratch on the car's wheel well, but it turned out the car was a rental. Thankfully, the guy turned out to be super nice (he's from the Bronx -- guess the good guys didn't all leave with Bobby Darin and Vic Morrow). He said if it had been his own car, he would've said forget about it, but since it was a rental we had to report it, of course. Calling the rental company and the insurance companies dragged on and on, and the cops took forever to show up to make their report, so Daddy finally told us to go ahead and go to supper without him. That was really sad because we were going to this restaurant he and Mom loved when they were in the Seminary, and now he had to miss out :-( We had a nice time with the Chameleon and her Gonna-Be Preacher Man and got to see their apartment afterwards because it's really close by, and we got a piece of German chocolate cake to go for Dad at the restaurant, so he didn't miss everything, at least.

This morning, Dano woke up at 5am again, so at 6, I came down here to the lobby because that's when the continental breakfast starts. So I'm checking email and sipping coffee mixed with hot chocolate and nursing Dano and waiting for it to be time to wake Cowboy and Daddy up. They have to go see a State Farm insurance agent this morning, so that will be another delay. The big question now is: will we get Daddy to the airport in time for his flight tomorrow night? It doesn't matter that we most likely won't get the truck unloaded while he's here, because Johnnycake and Dimples are coming up on Saturday, so they can help with that.

Never move in winter.

The parking lot at work has been plowed and plowed and plowed some more, so often that we now have these giant grey mounds of snow that look like the slag heaps of Mordor. And it struck me that if you live in an urban area and that's the only kind of snow you see most of the time, then no wonder you'd hate snow. Because slag heaps are ugly and horrid and you can't even have fun climbing on them because they're so dirty.

But I get to drive home through mile after mile of countryside, with pristine snow-covered fields and forests on either side of the road. And when the sun is rising like it was this morning, filling the eastern sky with flame-tongues of orange and pink and the western sky with frosted rainbow layers, and the snow reflects the sunlight just enough to turn into a broad expanse of fairy dust, how can I not love snow?

And I realized that it's things like the sight of a snow-dusted forest that make me categorically refuse to believe in evolution. I can't believe that something that wondrous and beautiful could just happen by chance any more than I can believe that the Mona Lisa was created by someone dumping a bucket of paint over a canvas or that the "Rhapsody in Blue" was written by a cat running across a piano keyboard. God created nature as surely as DaVinci and Gershwin created their works of art.

Hmm. I seem to recall blizzards being more exciting when I was a kid. We had a blizzard here tonight, in that we had winds and snow. Whenever I looked out the window, I could still see the house next door, and the snow was never blowing at a more than 45 degree angle. Guess blizzards are different in town than out on the flat MI farmland where I grew up. But we got quite a bit of snow, or so it seems -- I haven't been out, as I'm just getting over a cold and would like to continue getting over it. But they were predicting 7-10 inches for tonight... and we got almost a foot last night too....

Cowboy's not home from work yet (I didn't go to work at all cuz of the snow), but it doesn't look like they've plowed our street yet, so he'll probably have to park out on main and walk the two blocks down to our house like he did yesterday.

And to think it was in the 50s earlier this week!

Update: Cowboy is home and shoveling the driveway. He estimates we got another 10 inches, which means at least 20 inches total for the past two days. And it's snowing again. They say we'll get another 3-5 today, then an inch or so of freezing rain on top of it. Yeah. Snow, I like. Freezing rain, not so much. They've closed the interstate, one of the roads I use to get to work, and most of the town where I work is shut down. The cops say that unless it's a medical emergency, they're not coming. If you get stuck in a ditch, it's your own fault for being stupid. And if the cops in their Crown Vics with studded tires don't want to be out....

Baby, it's cold outside! As in, the bank said -22 when I drove past a little before 7am! Yikes! And the windchill is supposed to be anywhere between -25 and -35! Double yikes! It's so cold that the last time I heard, 150+ area schools are closed for the day! Boy howdy, I sure wish they'd close down my Wal-Mart so I wouldn't have to go out tonight -- when it's supposed to be even colder!

I got snow for Christmas! Woooo! Okay, it's not exactly Christmas yet, and it's not exactly the kind of snow I wanted, but it's Christmas Eve and the ground is white, so close enough! Actually, it's a really hard frost with a light dusting of snow over it so, as I drove home from work this morning, the grass and trees and rooftops looked white, and if I squinted it looked like real Christmasy snow :-D And stretching above the whiteness was a dawn as rosy-fingered as any that ever glowed over the fields of Troy. The whole morning was like a Christmas present from God just for me.

Do you know what it is doing outside the Crypt right now? It is raining. Flamin' raining! On December 21st! The grass is turning green! It's 40 degrees out! Pretty soon the trees will start to bud!

This is completely not fair! What is the point of living all the way up in flamin' Wisconsin if I can't have a white Christmas? I might as well move back to North Carolina!

Hmph. It's almost enough to make me feel a little Scroogish.

Ugh. It's been obscenely warm these last few days. Actually, since Christmas, we've only had actual snow on the ground once. Several times it's been in the upper 40's or low 50's, including yesterday. So of course, with no snow to keep me happy with Winter, I am now eager for Spring. Especially because if it was Spring, I could be playing in the dirt. My flower bed below the front window is all bare and empty, except for a bunch of dead leaves. I want to dig around in it and finish getting rid of all that nasty sand now that I have an actual trowel and don't have to do all my scooping with my fingers (thank you, Daddy!). And then I want to put flowers in it and water them and weed them...I can smell my earthy fingers already!

If I was in North Carolina, I could conceivably start planting things in February. But I'm not, dash it all. I'm in Wisconsin, and I don't dare put one plant in the ground before mid-May. Grr.

Baby, it's cold outside! Both yesterday and this morning as I came home from work, the bank thermometers read -6!! Yesterday there was a windchill of -19, but I think it's less today. Yikers! When I stepped out into the parking lot this morning, my first breath felt like it frosted the lining of my lungs. I think I've been watching too much CSI: Miami, cuz I had a sudden vision of frosty air entering my nostrils and whooshing down my nasal passages and into my lungs, turning everything it passed white and crackly. On my way to the car, I passed some frozen eggs. As in, someone had dropped 3 or 4 eggs on the parking lot, where they had then frozen. Ever seen frozen eggs? The yellows kinda shrank and wrinkled up, but the whites got foamy, like mildy-melted styrofoam. And yeah, I do know what styrofoam looks like when it gets a little toasty...let's just say my brother and I were very experimental and creative...

Hey, on a totally different subject, I finished the first draft of my Combat!/Angel fanfic crossover mystery! No, Housekarl, you can't read it yet. Not unless you want to beta it, that is ;-) But my C!-fanfic-list pal DII (aka Doc II) is beta-ing it for me. I think this is the first time I've had her beta anything for me, and I'm hoping she doesn't just do a "this is nice, I like this, this is nice" kind of beta. Not that I don't like finding out what parts work for my beta-er (and thus will probably work for my other readers)...but I really need to know what doesn't work. I don't feel I've been well and truly beta-d unless they've gotten me to argue with them over something, at least in my head.

Cowboy (aka Orance to some of you) is hungry, supper's ready, to the Angelmobile! Away!

I'm afraid the trees will start budding soon. It's still so dogburned warm! We did get a lovely bit of snow on Christmas Eve (my hubby and I went wandering through a graveyard while it snowed...very peaceful), but now there's not a speck to be found. Grrr.

I'm off work today, and I must admit I'm a bit bored suddenly. I think it's the jeans. All my (3 pairs of) jeans need washing, so I'm wearing the ancient pair with gawking holes in the knees. I used to love these jeans. But today they're assuring me that I have indeed gained weight this winter (I wish I didn't love to bake and cook so much), and that's made me a bit irritated with myself, and this led to not wanting to do anything and that led to being bored. I baked blueberry muffins this morning and watched L A Story (ED loaned it to me over break) and now there's nothing on except a John Wayne movie I've seen recently. I should drag the laundry down the hall and wash it, but it's full and heavy and I want to wait with it until noon when Cowboy comes back and can help me with it. He has to work today :-( But not tomorrow! I kind of want to watch a movie, but one I've never seen before. But I have several of those, and can't decide between them. Hmmmph. Hey, just noticed that it turned a new hour, so maybe now there's something on. Or I could figure out what to make for lunch.