I'm Morgan LeFay, I beguiled Merlin, and all I got was this blond child

Chris brought Ingrid up to the farmer's market. My boothmate Crystal had her 3 year old daughter there, too. Fun was had by all. Asha and Ingrid are both cherubic blond little imps, and they get along very well. Crystal and I watched Asha and Ingrid do cute things, ate free food, and didn't sell much of anything. I sold one bottle of edible massage oil. Slow day, end of season. Anyway, so this woman came up to our booth to ask if we were interested in having a booth at a local charity event in December. After she gave us the details (I thought about it), she asked if Asha and Ingrid were sisters. "Nope," we said. We pointed out who was whose baby. Then the woman looked at me with total disbelief and said, "How on earth did you get a blond daughter?"

Let me just stop here and describe what's going through my head at this moment. I want to be rude. I want to point out to her how obnoxious her question is. I want to say equally obnoxious and flip things, like "I had sex with a blond elf or fairy or some freakishly blond unhuman creature. Doesn't matter what he was, he was so blond I was blinded by the light in his hair. Nine months later I felt ill, I leaned up against a tree and pushed and pushed and out came this little blond thing. I think she might be a changeling, or a halfling. It's amazing when you think about it. They've written songs about this sort of thing, and I never believed them until I gave birth to a blonde baby." Unfortunately I didn't say any of this, because I might want in on her little charity event. So I say, "Her father's blond."

And she just doesn't stop. "Well he must be really blond." Now what am I to say to this? "Why yes, you nosy and annoying wench, he's freakishly blond. The doctors thought he was an albino until they ran tests on him. He's so blond he was given automatic citizenship by Denmark and Norway, on top of his Swedish citizenship." I don't say any of this. I'm trying to be polite and I'm horribly insulted. Instead, I say, "yeah. He's pretty blond. But my older daughter looks just like me."

At this point I have no interest in participating in the charity event. I don't really like having to justify the genetic makeup of my children. I thought the "are you babysitting" comment I've received was insulting, but this one takes the cake. It wasn't so much what she said, as much as it was her attitude. How could I possibly create such a thing? I must be part of some kind of freak family to have such a freakishly blond child.

Why do people say stupid shit and get away with it? Why did I hold my tongue?

How do you like your tea?

Well, of course things got better. I stand on the sun sunny side of the street, and once again everything is right with the world, and what's not right will be so eventually, with a little work and love. My dad is still in intensive care. I'm going to visit him next week. Let's talk about something else.

This afternoon I walked to town with Meg. It is a gorgeous day and I had to ask myself what in tarnation possessed me to wear jeans. My legs yearned for a skirt. I've fixed that now.

After Meg and I parted ways I went to the Co-op and got some tea. Sometimes I'm a little self conscious about fixing tea in public, because I generally use two tea bags of the strongest black tea, a good deal of soy milk, and a big gob of honey. I'm not a tea purist in the sense I think some health food store frequenters are. I like it sweet and milky, organic or not, and never just plain, except for when I'm drinking really good Japanese green tea, which I only buy at the Asian food market. Green tea is for special occasions. Give me black tea, and lots of it every day, at any time of the day, as long as there's milk and honey. Today I used something called "Choice Black Tea", but Pu-erh, Irish Breakfast, Yorkshire Gold, and PG Tips are my favorites. I like Twinnings in a bind. It reminds me of the Ellingboe Norigarn (family cottage) in New Harbor, Maine.

So I like my tea strong, dark, sweet, and milky. As I said, I don't generally do with this high quality Japanese green tea, but I even put milk and honey in the Chinese green tea that comes in the cool tins from the Asian food market. While I like my tea sweet, I don't like to mask the natural bitterness. At home I'm very particular about how long I steep my tea. I steep pu-erh for at least 10 minutes (until it's murky and black), PG Tips, Yorkshire Gold, and other English black teas sit for no more than 5. If I'm at a restaurant, I'd rather drink something else if they have crappy tea. This doesn't mean I drink something else. I'm a little addicted to tea, and I'm too hooked to be a tea snob. I can make bad tea taste good to me. Okay, I'm really addicted to tea. There are worse things to be hooked on. I like my addictions to be life-sustaining.

I don't drink coffee any more. I had my first cup at age six and gave it up for good when I was pregnant with Ingrid. I don't really miss it at this point. But I was the same way about preparing a cup in public. I liked my cream and honey in my coffee. You don't find this mentality with tea drinkers so much, but I had on more than one occasion, felt a scornful eye as I filled my cup with cream and counted to 5 or 10 while the honey flowed. I could almost hear people say, "Why didn't you just order a latte?" I ordered plenty of them. I ordered coffee and doctored it appropriately when I was short on cash.

But my coffee drinking days are long gone. Back to tea. I'll take it strong, dark, sweet, milky, a little bitter, always hot, nearly black, sometimes green, sometimes spicy, in a cup, from a pot, with a friend, caffeinated, often fermented, rarely herbal (but then mostly medicinally). And naturally I ask, what does this say about me? Draw your own conclusions, and I'll reveal later what I think.

But let's talk about you, gentle reader. Tell me how you like your tea. Don't like tea? Tell me how you like your coffee. Don't like coffee? Tell me how you like your favorite beverage which requires thoughtful preparation.

Off topic, I don't talk about Steal Away Jordan here anymore, but I had to share this great review with the lacquer box readers.

David Lanham Art

Smack Down the Optimist Day

It comes shortly after Talk Like a Pirate Day. Without going into too many details, I was the Optimist in question, and the smacking was severe, continuous, and came out of nowhere. Much of the morning (and the night before) I spent reeling from the smack down, listening to Alice in Chains and exclaiming "I don't understand!", and exhibiting other physical manifestations of acute trauma and stress. Yeah, it was that bad. No, I can't go into details, but I'll say to the two people I talked to about what was going on, thank you a million times over, my friends. And to the two people I talked to (not about it), thank you, too. It was helpful not to focus on the drama for a while.

This morning, while the worst transpired, my mom called. I called her back an hour later. My dad had a heart attack, and was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. He'll be in the hospital until Tuesday. Lots of tests, still trying to assess the damage, the heart attack may not have been "mild". Unfortunately, regular readers here can surmise it wasn't a huge surprise.

The afternoon improved. I managed to recover from the original smack down, and we're well on our way to working things out. Yeah, the optimist is back! The day is over and I can reflect and say "I just had one of the shittiest days of my life, and now it's over." One good thing was the person who shared the shitty day and I came to a new understanding of each other and can move forward more positively.

I had forgotten how much I like Alice in Chains.

Loving the Monster

We had a mini playtest of Malice the other day, and the mechanics that I tested did what I wanted them to do. This game will be GM-less. Players take turns telling the story from their character's point of view. You will always have a doll, a child who has a relationship with the doll, and the family, friends, and maybe the pets of the child. The first scene sets up a conflict between the child (and I use that term loosely. It's anyone under 21) and her family. The next scene establishes through a dice roll the relationship between the doll and the child. The child always loves the doll, but dice roll determines if the child trusts or fears the doll. And that's where I left it. That's where I got stuck.

Malice is supposed to be like those ghost and horror stories you tell while you sit around a camp fire. In the story, the ghost, the monster, the evil doll is, well, evil. You're not supposed to empathize with it. You're supposed to be afraid of it. You feel it staring at you, and you see it lurking in the brush, ready to do horrible things to you. By making the doll a PC, I think I changed that. The doll in Malice is the protagonist.

Where I thought I was doing campfire story, I'm actually doing Disneyfied fairy tales. It is the alleged villain who is the most dynamic character. And I say alleged, because I always believed that Maleficent had every right to be pissed at Sleeping Beauty's parents. And how can one possible feel like part of the family if she's always referred to as "The Wicked Queen"? Snow White was a brat, and she was not the fairest of them all. Her step-mother had brains, beauty, and power. She was the real hottie in the kingdom.

I'm not stuck anymore. Malice will explore pediophobia by making the object of fear the protagonist. I didn't say good guy, I said protagonist. Where Steal Away Jordan has gobs of dice, Malice is all about bluffing. You never know if the doll is acting with benevolence or malice.

I might run Acts of Evil at JiffyCon in November. I played a little of it at GenCon, and I'm very curious. If I understand it correctly, the PC's are the antagonists. I didn't realize that until we wrapped up our scene and talked a little about it. How cool is that? I can't wait to see how it works.


The Project Gutenberg Ebook of Household Stories, by Grimm

The Villain
And oh crap, I just discovered someone is working on a game called Malice. It has nothing to do with dolls, but still. I need a new title. Crap.

Alice

Based on a true story, and only slightly embellished. The names have not been changed.

The moment she saw the baby doll, Ingrid fell in love with her. She loved her musty old house smell, the crazing and cracking on her composition finish, her frayed red cotton dress, and even the voice box that sounded more like a death rattle. The doll was older than her grandmother. Mama wouldn't tell her where she got it. It didn't matter. Ingrid named her Alice and she loved her dearly. She swaddled Alice in a fabric scrap that mama gave her and supported her neck so her head wouldn't fall off.

Her big sister, Bea, on the other hand, would not go near Alice. She smelled like the creepy basement, she looked dead, possibly evil. Where Ingrid saw a loving gaze in Alice's hand painted eyes, Bea saw malice--towards her. "Keep that thing away from me!" cried Bea when Ingrid held Alice up to her to adore. "She's scary!"

At last, Ingrid had something that Bea didn't want. She had something that kept Bea away from her. Ingrid loved Alice, and Alice loved Ingrid. She didn't even notice that the cats hissed at the baby doll. Alice was special. By the end of the day, Ingrid and Alice were inseparable. Mama tucked both Ingrid and Alice into Ingrid's toddler bed. Ingrid snuggled up to her old new friend, and whispered secrets in her ear.

That night, something startled Bea awake. Something lurked in her room, and it wasn't a cat. Something crept up on to her bed. Something hard and cold touched her foot. She turned on the light. There sat Alice at the foot of her bed staring at Bea with those dead painted eyes.

I Scared My Daughter!

This is a picture of one of my scary doll project dolls. I got another one today, and four more are on their way. That will be all for now. I asked my mom to send me the doll I was originally afraid of, but she couldn't find it. It wasn't where I last left it when I visited them!

So when Bea came home today from school--Proud mama moment: Bea rode her bike to and from school. I just happened to be getting the mail when she cruised up with her little black corduroy messenger bag, in her black yoga pants, on her black Electra bike with the pink flames details. Bea is just so much cooler than I ever was in school. I mean, at eight years old she's got more cool in her dirty little finger nails than I did in my size 9 1/2 army surplus combat boots that I wore with my cheerleading uniform my senior year of high school. Even better, she's so cool, she's not embarrassed that she's wicked smart. And not only that, she's cool, smart, and disturbingly beautiful. Chris and I have our work cut out for us in 5 or so years. And it won't let up, because Ingrid follows in her sister's skateboard tracks.

Anyway, so I just happened to be getting the mail when she cruised up on her bike, and there was a package on the porch. "Oooh It's another scary doll!" I said.
"You mean, like a Living Dead Doll?" Bea asked. She was fishing to see if it was for her.
"No, it's an old creepy looking doll I'm using for a project."
"Can I see it?"
So I spent the next 10 minutes trying to open the damn package. (I'm not really cool in action.) All the while, I explained to Bea why I wanted scary dolls, where the other scary dolls were, and did she want to see them?
"NO!" She yelled. "I'm scared!"
"I can show you pictures..."
She settled on pictures on the computer. She would not let me bring the dolls upstairs, or even pick up the bag. After she saw the pictures (and was sufficiently freaked out), she asked me over and over again where I left the dolls, because she wanted to go downstairs and get a snack. HA! I scared my "I collect Living Dead Dolls, I love to wear black, scary movies don't bother me, so why can't I stay up late and watch them with you and papa" daughter. A small but significant victory.

I'll post more photos of my new acquisitions very soon.

Birthday Girl

That there is a picture of yours truly, because today is my birthday. I love birthdays, especially my kids' birthdays, but mine's been pretty fun so far.

And here's a quick run down of what I did:

Bea and Chris woke me up singing "Happy Birthday" and bear carrot cake and gifts. The gift was a game called Dread Pirate: Buccaneer's Revenge. He said given my interest in pirates lately (even though they aren' funny), he thought I would like it. He was right. I still think highwaymen are cooler, unless you're talking about the pirates we played at GenCon. Anyway, I hope to play Dread Pirate tonight.

Chris took Bea to school.

I went to the TV studio and taped another interview for Local Bias, the talk show I host.

Ingrid and I hung out for a while. I surfed the internet, she napped. I ate more cake.

I picked Bea up from school, and it all went downhill from there. I took the girls to the grocery store and they about tried to kill each other, and take me down in the fray. I grounded Bea from the County Fair parade today. I know, I'm a mean mom. You should've been there. I wish someone was. It was hard to keep my cool, but I managed just minimum amounts of annoyed mother snarkiness.

And here I am, talking about my birthday. Tonight I'm going to play with Emily, Meg, Joshua, and Vincent, maybe Chris will hang out a little, too. We're in the middle of In a Wicked Age. I hope we continue with that.

I almost forgot! Two very old, and very scary composition baby dolls came in the mail today. They are of the Scary Doll RPG and Doll Embellishment Project. They're scarier than they were in the photos. I have five more dolls coming soon, and hope to have a skeleton draft of rules worked up by the end of September. I'll take pictures soon and share. The working title of the game is Malice: Stories of Doll Love and Fear.

...Entertain Us

Dear Friends,
Please update your blogs, help me stay awake, and save me from bad television.

I have one more night before my 10 work day marathon ends, and I'm off until Sunday. In other words I will have worked 7 out of 10 days, 7 pm to 7 am. That's lots of overtime, lots of late nights, and occasional periods of sleep deprivation. I really love my job, and I'm clocking in 20 hours overtime, plus holiday pay tomorrow, plus my usual weekend shift differential, so the crazy schedule is easier to do. On the other hand I miss my kids, my husband, my bed. One more night.

Tonight I'm doing sleep studies in a hotel. I love the hotel shifts. I have internet and cable and my own hotel room. When I work at the main clinic I don't have cable tv, but high speed intenet, and as luck generally has it, my favorite co-worker. I got to watch a little of Big Love before I did a patient set up. My second patient got a little freaked out and left early (like 7 hours early), so take down will be easy in the morning. Idlewild came around the time he left, so I got to watch great dancing and Andre 3000. Then there was the CSI marathon on Spike TV, and now Purple Rain is on VH1. I haven't seen Purple Rain since I was in high school. I started watching House of Wax, but even though it's a bad horror movie, I scare easily, and hotels already give me the creeps. I don't watch scary movies at work.

And then there's the surfing. I check my regular fora, my blog stats, my email, and then my friends' blogs. Not much in the way of new stuff there. And I do all these things to stay awake. I can only drink so much Coke Zero and Red Bull without getting ill. I need brain stimulation.

I could work on game notes, but it's hard to look at paper while I'm monitoring sleep studies, and that's why I'm here. Yes, I do work at work. I don't mean to make it sound like I just surf and watch tv all night. I monitor my patients' brain waves, EKG, muscle movements, respiration, pulse, what position they're sleeping in. If they have a certain number of "events" (apnea and hypopnea) after at least 2 hours of sleep, I hook them up to a CPAP machine. In some studies patients actually begin the study with CPAP. And some people wake up frequently and require assistance to the bathroom. Sometimes electrodes fall off, and I have to replace them if the patient is awake. There's lots to do. Some nights, like tonight, are a little slow. My remaining patient hasn't stirred since I left her room at 9:20, and she didn't meet the split night with CPAP criteria.

I have 40 minutes before I wake my patient, take off the electrodes, do my paperwork and go home. This is where I get to the worst part of my job: my patients' morning breath. If you ever have a sleep study done, do the tech a favor and don't say anything in the morning. Don't share your funky yuck mouth.

So friends, please update your blogs, send me some email, post on a forum. Think of me, staying up all night with bad tv, scary movies, and no updates on your lives.

Nighty night,
Parthenia