Tag: help

Pango

Glad you could join us for the next armored episode of Elliot’s Adventures. If you’re new here, you can catch up by returning to the beginning, and reading really fast…

Elliot 207
Photo credit: Nigel J. Dennis

Sirehta’s brothers had spread the word among The Arids’ disaffected residents of a meeting that might save their futures. Now the meeting place was crammed with silent creatures. Cahret rose from his coil to face those who had answered the call.

“You are here because you hate tyranny, yet you do not know how to stop a tyrant. Alone, you hide in your own defense, but you believe you are too weak and helpless to protect anyone else.”

Shifting beneath a hard skin of shining scalloped scales, a pointy-faced insectivore lumbered to her feet. “Each of us grows to become our own protector. We can’t be responsible for anyone else.”

Continue reading “Pango”

The Verdict and Breakfast, Too

Glad you could join us for the next liberating episode of Elliot’s Adventures. If you’re new here, you can catch up by returning to the beginning, and reading really fast…

Elliot 112
Photo credit: naturefit.cz

“Arturo, son of Miguel and Valeria, regarding the charges that you are responsible for the return of the rebels and the devastation they spread throughout our people’s homes in the Freelands, we find it is possible the rebels would not have come back if they had achieved their goal to begin with. Therefore, we find you are inextricably connected to the massacre.”

Arturo closed his eyes.

Continue reading “The Verdict and Breakfast, Too”

Father’s Day – it’s complicated

(If we’re friends on FB, you might remember seeing this about 3 years ago — not that I expect you to remember everything I’ve ever posted… 😉 )

Dad, Patty, Grandma Jenkins, and Grandma Ranscht
Dad holding Patty, beside Grandma Jenkins, and Grandma Ranscht. I believe my mom’s oldest sister, Sis, took the photo.

Outings to the Zoo, the museums, the merry-go-round and the train, the beach, the bank, the ferry. Listening to Dad read Alice in Wonderland waiting in the car outside the grocery store while Mom shopped. Semi-annual trips to Disneyland; car trips from California to Wisconsin, by-passing the Grand Canyon because it was out of the way. Family dinners every night. Speed math rounds. Kites. Edmund’s Scientific projects. Heathkit build-it-yourself electronics. Oscilloscopes. Photography — shooting, developing, printing. Working on the car. Watching while Dad fixed whatever we kids needed fixed. Making bullets, going to the range. Watching.

Loving Christmas.

Big Band music. Lectures on economics, politics, mistakes. Instruction. Help and advice only idiots would reject. Strong. Stubborn. Brilliant and independent, authoritarian and irreverent, determined and responsible. He was the most grownup man I’ve ever known and the biggest influence in and on my life, but I had to love him against his will.

I don’t have any pictures of Dad and me together. This one is from Christmas of 1950, before I was born. Dad holding Patty, beside Grandma Jenkins, and Grandma Ranscht.