Aunt Family Mini-Call Summary!

The Aunt Family Mini-Giraffe Call is closed! (LJ)

Over two days, I wrote 9 stories for 9 prompters and earned $20. This week, I will write a second prompt for each donor, and then their continuations.

Prompters who earned a free 500-word continuation are:
Friendly Anon
Rix-Scaedu
(chosen by random.org)

Fated (LJ)
Visiting Aunt Eva (LJ)
In The Attic (LJ)
Engraved Invitation (LJ), Ruan & Johias
Cleaning House (LJ) After What to do about Auntie X (LJ)
Accepting the Welcome (LJ) after Welcome to the Family (LJ)
Kitten Switchen (LJ), After Cleaning House
Visiting an Uncle (LJ) Rosaria, Evangaline
Glass and Steel (LJ) Zenobia!

Mrs. Gent's Lemonade, a continuation of Fairy Town for the Giraffe Call (@inventrix)

For @inventrix's commissioned continuation of Burning Summer Quest (LJ) and In Mr. Ting's (LJ); Part 2 of ?


"Lemonade sounds nice, thanks," Jordan said, and stepped out of my way, finally letting me see the shop. Shop? This place was a space-time warp. This place was unbelievable. This place was...

Okay. Imagine the estate sale of the most obsessive hoarder you can picture. Then imagine this being curated by the most OCD guy you know. There was everything on those shelves, shelves filling up all but the center of the store, and every single thing was labeled. Everything.
( Read more... )

Thinking about Weather

I've been talking, recently, with people in different climate zones- specifically @dahob and anke most recently - about "winter" and its varying meanings.

I grew up in Rochester, on the northern coast of one of the Great Lakes - http://www.divinglore.com/Genesis/USA/great%20lakes%20map.jpg - Ontario, the easternmost. For comparison, my husband grew up in Buffalo, between Ontario and Erie.

The weather there is snowy, wet, with a long winter normally stretching from late October to early April (it was not uncommon to have snow on Hallowe'en, although it was normally gone by mid-April). According to this chart, Rochester gets less than one inch a year less than Buffalo, although, in my memories, it came more steadily, and with less majors dumps of the stuff.

Still, I remember playing as a child in drifts as tall as I was, and having similar drifts to shovel in blizzards when I lived there - '98, I think, and sometime around '04 or '05. They call it lake affect - the cold weather from Canada grabs all the water off the lake and dumps it on us.

Down in Ithaca, this site confirms that we get less snow. It's colder down here - no giant lake-heat-and-cold-sink going on - but the worst of the weather seems to bypass us; last year, when the entire Northeast US was being dumped on, we had one small storm.

What does winter look like where you are?

Spreading da love: a loving meme

Meme stolen from an awesome-sauce person:

Reply to this post, and I will list three things I love, like, and/or appreciate about you. Maybe more than three. Then repost to your own journal and spread the love.