Twig is also the name of a genre of decoration. Twig tables. Twig chairs. Twig frames.

Those enormous Adirondack camps, white birchbark stuff, bent willow rustic chairs? All twig.​

I picked up a reference book on the subject at the library book sale over the winter and took the instructions at face value.

And then re-measured and cut most of them again, using my trusty loppers and a measuring jig Daddo would have been proud to see.

​Precision is not my middle name, but I was quite careful.  

Even knowing that the instructions were crap, I couldn't help but bemoan the injustice of it.

​Instructions that don't.

Measuring guides that don't.

Reference that isn't.

Jeesh.  

Eventually I wandered over to the square yard or so of good cell coverage at the Would-Be Farm –– in the middle of the field –– and Googled some help. Huh. Common theme of the Amazon reviews of the book:  

So, okay, maybe the big raptors like Bald Eagles and Snowy Owls are more impressive, and coming eyeball-to-eyeball with a Sandhill Crane is even more alarming, but Great Blue Herons are darned impressive birds. 

In my Shell Island Shuttle days, when we'd rescue birds  –– mostly untangling them from fishing line, but sometimes popping them into a pet carrier and ferrying them over to the local rescue outfit –– the Great Blues were among the most challenging to help.  

They are fierce, even as they are fragile. Those long legs ––!  They aim those impressively big beaks RIGHT for your eye, and they have quite a reach.  

They do not give up after they've been caught.

Magnificent, cranky creatures.

In a book whose heavy style I enjoyed a lot –– though, sadly, after my godfather Dan complained about the many factual errors he'd found, and I did my research, I too, became less enchanted by the novel –– here's a lovely passage including a blue heron: 
​
In his mind, Inman likened the swirling paths of vulture flight to the coffee grounds seeking pattern in his cup. Anyone could be oracle for the random ways thing fall against each other. It was simple enough to tell fortunes if a man dedicated himself to the idea that the future will inevitably be worse than the past and that time is a path leading nowhere but a place of deep and persistent threat. The way Inman saw it, if a thing like Fredericksburg was to be used as a marker of current position, then many years hence, at the rate we’re going, we’ll be eating one another raw.
            And, too, Inman guessed Swimmer’s spells were right in saying a man’s spirit could be torn apart and cease and yet his body keep on living. They could take death blows independently. He was himself a case in point, and perhaps not a rare one, for his spirit, it seemed, had been about burned out of him but he was yet walking. Feeling empty, however, as the core of big black-gum tree. Feeling strange as well, for his recent experience had led him to fear that the mere existence of the Henry repeating rifle or the éprouvette mortar made all talk of spirit immediately antique. His spirit, he feared, had been blasted away so that he had become lonesome and estranged from all around him as a sad old heron standing pointless watch in the mudflats of a pond lacking frogs. It seemed a poor swap to find that that the only way to keep from fearing death was to act numb and set apart as if dead already, with nothing much left of yourself but a hut of bones.

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, 1997. Page 16.

PS: I actually prefer Cold Mountain the movie. Exception proves the rule.

​

Imagination is like the common cold virus: it's always there, lurking, waiting for the chance to nip in and take the wheel. There's no sure cure, though you can treat the symptoms. Medical advice says let it run its course. 

Today's fiction prompt: a photo I took on a fishing trip to Wyoming.

Rudolph was no fiberglass elk, bugling soundlessly on the street of Thermopolis.
He was neither the victim of a fierce electrical taping nor did he lose an ear during a wrestling match with a drunk guy.
He did not lift his rack of fiberglass antlers into the wide Wyoming sky in an effort to voice his pain.
He did not wear a saddle-pad of twinkling holiday lights. 
He did not sport a compact fluorescent bulb painted red at the distal point of his noggin.

They might have let Rudolph join in any reindeer games, but little matter.
Was he like Bartleby before him, preferring not?
Or like Robert Cratchit, beetling away for the chance of a day's liberty?
Or Balthazar, with the insight to know what lay ahead?
Or maybe, inert as can be, he is like the Yule log, waiting for the dark to yield to light and then celebrate another year beginning.

​Hope your season is bright. 

Half asleep in our narrow berth inside Base Camp, we are roused by sound: a crunching, rattling, scratching assault on the recycling container, a lengthy effort to unsnap the cooler, a hissing dust-up over a piece of aluminum foil that once held roasted chicken.

Eventually, Mr. Linton or I will have had Just About Enough and shout at the intruders. Angry-Daddo-Voice invective, which sometimes works, but does require warning the other person. ("Hey, I'm going to yell."  "All right." "GERRROUT OF IT!") 

Scamper scamper scamper.

This autumn, they discovered both suet and the bird feeders.

As Jeff put it: they ate a whole LOAF of suet.

Naturally, they knocked a bird feeder over and emptied it also.

However, the raccoons did.

The first morning, I found the jar tipped over, the lid unscrewed and a small, tidy spill of seeds on the porch. 

In the morning, the birdseed was not on my mind. I was blithely drinking my coffee and being all China-to-Peru about the dew-laden field opposite the porch. 

I changed lids and put the jar inside. Thin the tin walls of Base Camp may be, and permeable as sponge, but there is a geographical limit to transgression.

You'd think, anyhow.

When the light slants just right, a distinct handprint can be seen on the window that looks into the sleeping nook at Base Camp. Maybe two inches across, the little handprint is smeared on the window that stands a good three feet off the ground.  

I try not to imagine why a raccoon climbed up and appears to have pushed –– pushed!–– on the window that looks into our sleeping quarters.

Nevertheless, I find myself weighing a few options:

1. an electric fence,
2. a wider perimeter of hair-trigger mouse-trips
3. –– rat-traps even! ––
4. the lend of a noisy dog,
5. buckets of water and Rube Goldbergian trip-lines,
6. noise-making contraptions,
7. firecrackers,
8. preemptive strikes,
9. firepower,
10. becoming the new sheriff with a fast draw ("Names Spackler, Carl Spackler, ma'm.")​​​

Which is where I hit pause.  The bandits were here first. They raid for a living.

​I'll start by making it prohibitively difficult for them to get satisfaction around Base Camp before taking lethal steps. Muah ha ha.

Roswell, we both kind of imagined, would be dusty little desert town far from anything since about 1948.

We figured on stopping at the quirky little diner that we'd find there. Maybe we'd have a slice of pie amidst a collection of ephemera of the 1947 UFO wreck. The waitress would look a little like an alien. It would be odd and we'd have a story to tell. 

Instead, we drove stop-and-go through a medium-sized American city, complete with a Super Wal-Mart and a Panda Express, all the hotel chains and Applebee's. An unremarkable place with a touristy downtown reminiscent of A-Bay, NY or Ocean Park, NJ or Venice Beach, CA.

​Ridiculously disappointed, we slunk into an Albertson's supermarket (they had little-green-men balloons, etc.) for groceries and then drove to Dexter, New Mexico, where we found a peaceful berth for the night under cottonwoods and a wide starry sky. 

Just the one piece of pie with a side of story lacking for the whole trip.

I'm not actually complaining. ​

Speculative fiction (what some longtime readers might think of as "SciFi") can be described as the fiction of ideas.

​Even more than other fiction, SF often examines the consequences of one idea across a whole society.  For instance, what if robots became so beautifully built that they could pass for human? What if you could outsource your own memories? What if Hitler had won the war?*

So with SF on my mind, today's writing warm-up exercise:

Story 1
The eclipse was less dramatic than she'd expected. Not that she was in the cone of totality, but still, she'd never witnessed a solar eclipse before. Never mind a double.
Still, she'd taken the afternoon off, and though the cheap protective glasses had broken –– she'd forgotten them in the seat of her vehicle and then sat on the damn things when she'd slid into the seat in the cool darkness of the parking bay.
Still there it was: her first double-lunar eclipse. She watched two penumbral cones shaving the sun into a puny lozenge of light. An unseasonable breeze sprang up. She shivered and wished there was someone next to her. She hadn't considered herself in any way sentimental, but she longed now for something communal, a human companion.
The sight of the sun, even as small and cold as it was from this distance, turning just that much smaller and colder –– well, she felt for a moment that she understood primitive superstition.
And then, as quick as the remembered snap of a plastic tiddley-wink, the moons parted and the sun shone round and bright again. 

Story 2
He kept watch on the mirror-calm surface of the water, barely breathing.
He was comfortable –– or anyway about as as comfortable as anyone zipped into a breather suit and strapped bodily against the pot-bellied ventral surface of a drone hopper could expect to be. He refused to consider the blurring of the features of shore, blocked out thoughts of the hopper's speed (only a quarter-sonic, almost survivable without the suit), kept his attention on the glassy reflection of the sky.

The handful of beta-blockers he'd swallowed at the start of his shift was working to keep his blood-pressure low. He shrugged his shoulders against the petal-soft lining of the suit. He stretched the webbing between first his left and then his right hand.

Eyes open, he told himself. He was going to need to be very quick and very lucky or he was going to end up very dead. And he wouldn't be the only one. 

"Years ago," wheezed the oldster, arthritic knuckles whitening on the handle of the deluxe walker. "Years ago, artists had to use rubylith to separate each color for a color print."

Honking into a worn handkerchief, the dusty wheezer raised watery eyes and continued. "Hours I spent over a drafting table, X-Acto blade in hand, separating colors. The eye-hand coordination alone --!"

After a long pause, the lecture continued. "It took years to learn the tricks of the trade. Nowadays, all it takes is a ninety-nine cent app. Putting artists out of business. I don't know how they make a living any more."

Yeah, artists mostly don't make a living.

In honor of all of us antiquities who remember cutting ruby to separate colors, here's a timelapse video of the Rubylith process...

But those 99-cent apps are really fun:

In this highly digitized age, it's nigh on impossible to grasp the amount of work that went into, for instance, the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz. This link describes the Technicolor process.

Such an effort to give the viewing public ruby slippers!

When the favored daughter of Zeus offers to jostle you about at a high rate of speed, should you refuse? 

A river of words is usually in flood. And while I write about nearly everything, my blogging impulse is toward humor. This spot abounds with absurdities and piffle. 

This week has thwarted me.  

Not on a personal level, but at the world-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket level. I'm not ready to josh around with words today.

I have high hopes. The sun'll, as Annie would belt out, come out –– tomorrow. Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there'll be sun... Mashed up, inevitably, with the melancholic fall "Come What May" from Moulin Rouge. Be as kind as you can be out there.

​And as if their great-grandparents didn't say the same damn thing about the egg-head scientist working on penicillin, chemo-therapy, seat-belts, gel insoles. Jupiter!

References
www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-secret-life-of-bees-99559587/
www.goldengooseaward.org/awardees/honey-bee-algorithm
www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/24/136391522/natures-secret-why-honey-bees-are-better-politicians-than-humans
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/09/22/how-honeybee-research-improved-your-internet-experience/?utm_term=.01028bb510d3