R. Harrison's Blog, page 43

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It looks like you’re at the edge of the world when you’re at the top of Mt. Snowdon. Even when the weather is good.

FrankenKitty 5 #wewriwar #amwriting #weareparis

Frankenkitty

Welcome to Weekend Writing Warriors.  This is a sample from my work in progress, “Frankenkitty”, and I hope you enjoy it.  It started out as a young-adult superhero book, and well, you’ll see. Last week they decided to give Dr. Frankenstein’s ideas a try. Both Mary and Jenny are on their way to visit Amber’s “lab” after school. The bus has just dropped them off, and they meet someone important on the way.

The big yellow school bus squeaked to a stop just off the main road, near the old folk’s home known as the towers.

“My official stop is closer on the street,” she said, “but it’s faster to walk from here; we’ll cut through the garden and down Elm Street; be home in no time.”

Several elderly inmates of the Towers were sitting in the garden as the girls walked through it. Jennifer suddenly stopped and stared at one of them.

Mary asked, “What is it, Jenny?”

Jenny slowly approached an ancient woman, a woman with a fierce looking face that belied her friendliness.

“Mrs. Jones?”

“Jennifer, what a surprise; I thought you were going to visit me sooner.”

“I thought you were dead.”

“Oh, that explains it; there vas another Mrs. Jones; they mixed up the names.”

This is a work in progress. In other news, I’ve become a booktrope author, but more on that latter. It has meant a change in pen-name. Last Weeks is here and you can read the whole last chapter if you’d rather.

I’m also looking for reviewers for my nearly ready book “The Curious Profession of Dr. Craven”

I thought hard about giving this week’s entry a miss. In the end, if we quit even in little trivial things like this, then they win.

#weareparis

There’s not much more that can be said.

Frankenkitty Chapter 2. #amwriting #WIP

High School Biology.

A few days later, in the morning, on a school day, and at breakfast, Jennifer surprised her parents. “I think I’d like to try medicine, help people.”

Her mother perked up, “A nurse?”

“No, a doctor.”

“Why the sudden change, Sweetie-pie?”

“I don’t know. It just came to me last night.”

“You know, you’ll have to take a lot more science, and math.”

“And do well at them.” Her father groused, while her annoying little brother snickered at the thought.

Jennifer said, “You’ll see.”

“I hope so,” her father, suddenly serious, continued, “if you’re willing to work hard at it, I’ll talk to the guidance counselors. Get your schedule for next year changed.”

So far, Jennifer had been put in the “nice girl” track. Enough courses to get into a junior college, and some sort of business job after that. It would let her tread water until she met the right man. Or at least a man willing to marry her. She would have been firmly cemented into the pink collar ghetto.

“You will?”

“I’ve never thought much of pre-algebra as a final course in mathematics, and just learning to use a word processor is not a good class in computers.” His unhappiness at his daughter studying that limited curriculum was evident in the tone of his voice. “I’ve always thought you could do better if you wanted to.”

“I do.”

Jennifer’s resolve survived into biology class. They were dissecting frogs today. Like most of the ‘nice girls,’ she had opted for a computer simulation instead of the real thing. It was only the boys, who sniggered and joked their way through it, and the few nerdy girls who braved the smell to see what the real insides of an animal looked like, who dissected actual animals. She started to join her friends, then stopped and walked to the teacher.

“Mr. Jefferson?”

“Yes, Jennifer”

“Can I join one of the teams that is dissecting real animals?”

Mr. Jefferson did a double-take. He didn’t, as a matter of principle, approve of simulated dissections. Nonetheless, he followed the school district policy, and that was laid down by the town politicians. “You want to dissect a real frog?”

“Yes, please.”

There was one team of the nerdy girls that was missing a student. There were only two students on that frog instead of the three or four that were mandated. Mr. Jefferson asked, “Mary and Amber, would you be willing to have Jennifer join you?”

“Do we have to?” Mary and Amber enjoyed working together.

“Yes, unless you have some very good reason why not.”

That Jennifer had been a ‘C’ student and they ‘A+’ students wasn’t quite a good enough reason.

Their reserve lasted all of ten minutes. Up until Jennifer had a turn with the scalpel and delicately laid open the frog. She quickly identified the liver and heart, then with Mary’s help pulled the intestines to the side to see the blood vessels behind them. Mr. Jefferson remarked that it was one of the best presentations he’d ever seen a student team do.

Amber asked, barely keeping the astonishment from her voice, “Where’d you learn that?”

Dr. Frankenstein’s lab notes would be the truth; he had worked with frogs before trying bigger things. That was so clearly unacceptable that Jennifer skirted the truth and said, “I looked it up in study hall. I wanted to be prepared for class.”

Jennifer had another advantage. She had taken art, and while her drawings were in the normal blocky badly scaled high school style, they were far better than either Mary’s or Amber’s. Some training was better than none. Thus, between the three of them, Amber and Mary turned in their normal and Jennifer her first, one hundred percent on a lab report.

Jennifer’s father proudly taped it to the refrigerator, and called the guidance counselor the next day.

Biology class was moving on to the highlight of the term, dissection of fetal pigs. This time Mary and Amber insisted that Jennifer join them. She was glad to. What had started out as an accidental seat assignment was developing into a solid friendship. The study habits Jennifer was learning from her nerdy friends were helping her grades no end.

Not that the benefits only went one way. While Jennifer wasn’t of the ‘cheerleader class’ who could make or break a girl’s social status on a whim, she was reasonably popular, and some of her popularity rubbed off on Mary and Amber. They were even invited to a party, and, for once, not invited out of pity. Not only that, but they no longer had to eat lunch alone, at the nerd’s table.

Dissecting the pigs was a two-week long dive into the smelly gross insides of a preserved animal. The smelly preservative didn’t easily wash off, and Jennifer’s little brother took to wrinkling his nose and teasing her about it at dinner time. She replied by wiping her hands in his hair. This was, if anything, even grosser, but at least the smell of little brothers washed off.

It wasn’t until halfway through the pig that Mary and Amber noticed something very unusual about Jennifer. She really knew her anatomy. There were details that even Mr. Jefferson missed when he walked around the groups brave enough to dissect, that she would point out.

“Jenny,” Mary asked, “where did you learn this, and don’t tell me study hall. We were all doing math last time.”

Amber concurred. “I was helping you with consecutive number problems.”

“I have this book, these books, at home. They’re all about anatomy, and um,” she paused, “a few other things as well.”

“Can we see them?”

Jennifer couldn’t say no to her friends. So that evening, after dinner, the doorbell rang twice. First for Mary and then a few minutes later for Amber. After a quick and perfunctory chat with Jennifer’s mother and father, they went to her room.

Jennifer pulled the shipping crate from under her bed and opened it. “These are the books. They’re very old, but”

Amber took the first one and tried to read it. “It’s in German. You don’t read German, do you?” The high school used to teach German, before budget cuts forced them to pare the foreign language program down to Spanish. They would have removed that as well, but there were enough Hispanic students in the district that they couldn’t.

“I know a little, now, but they’re mostly written in English.”

Mary carefully sounded out “Experimente in der Reanimation von abgestorbenem Gewebe,” and then said, “That doesn’t mean experiments in reanimation, does it?”

Jennifer nodded, “Yes. It does. Experiments in the reanimation of dead tissue.”

“And the name inside,” Mary continued, “That’s not really Frankenstein, I mean the Frankenstein?”

“It is. My neighbor Mrs. Jones gave them to me. She was his great-granddaughter. These are his lab-notes.”

Amber laughed, “Do you think they’d work?”

“I’d like to try. Bring back my cat Mr. Snuffles.”

“That’s not possible. Dr. Frankenstein must have been insane.”

Jennifer then sat between her friends on her bed and showed them what she’d found. An hour later, when her mother knocked on the bedroom door and said that her friend’s parents had arrived for them, they were still engrossed in the notebooks. Whatever was there, no matter how ill-conceived or incorrect, wasn’t insane. Jennifer closed the book and put it back in the crate.

Amber sat there, slightly stunned, “You know, Jenny. It might just work. We’d have to be careful with that much electricity, but it might work. Why don’t you see if you can visit my house tomorrow and we can discuss it?”

“In the lab?” Mary asked.

“Where else?” Amber’s parents were chemistry professors. As long as she promised not to blow the house up or set it on fire, they let her use the basement for her ‘laboratory’ and even found or bought her supplies. Her experiments had been pretty tame so far, but that was about to change.

Frankenkitty (c) 2015 R. Harrison

My Light with Yours

My Light with Yours

Edgar Lee Masters, 1868 – 1950

I

When the sea has devoured the ships,

And the spires and the towers

Have gone back to the hills.

And all the cities

Are one with the plains again.

And the beauty of bronze,

And the strength of steel

Are blown over silent continents,

As the desert sand is blown—

My dust with yours forever.


II

When folly and wisdom are no more,

And fire is no more,

Because man is no more;

When the dead world slowly spinning

Drifts and falls through the void—

My light with yours

In the Light of Lights forever!

Ships at dawn, anchored near Cumberland Island.

A Riddle, an Enigma

Old English riddle

Anonymous

My dress is silent when I tread the ground

Or stay at home or stir upon the waters.

Sometimes my trappings and the lofty air

Raise me above the dwelling-place of men,

And then the power of clouds carries me far

Above the people; and my ornaments

Loudly resound, send forth a melody

And clearly sing, when I am not in touch

With earth or water, but a flying spirit.

Backcountry Mists.

Henry Coe State Park,

California

Photograph (c) 2010 R. Harrison

October

October

Helen Hunt Jackson

Bending above the spicy woods which blaze,
Arch skies so blue they flash, and hold the sun
Immeasurably far; the waters run
Too slow, so freighted are the river-ways
With gold of elms and birches from the maze
Of forests. Chestnuts, clicking one by one,
Escape from satin burs; her fringes done,
The gentian spreads them out in sunny days,
And, like late revelers at dawn, the chance
Of one sweet, mad, last hour, all things assail,
And conquering, flush and spin; while, to enhance
The spell, by sunset door, wrapped in a veil
Of red and purple mists, the summer, pale,
Steals back alone for one more song and dance.



Photograph (c) 2014 R Harrison

Nondescript, but vitally important 70 years ago.

A few pictures, no words

Why was it so important?

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There’s a literary connection as well a the computer science one.

From the Tooth.

Altitude

Lola Ridge, 1873

I wonder

how it would be here with you,

where the wind

that has shaken off its dust in low valleys

touches one cleanly,

as with a new-washed hand,

and pain

is as the remote hunger of droning things,

and anger

but a little silence

sinking into the great silence.

Sunset from the Tooth of Time
(c) 2009 R. Harrison

A Quick Chicken Pie.

This is a surprisingly simple recipe that works both on the stove top, and even more amazingly, with period cooking gear, and completely unbelievably with tenderfoot/webelos scouts (did I ever mention I’m a scout leader and adult trainer?).

I’m going to give two variations, the “fail safe” one that you can eat uncooked, and the somewhat nicer one that you can cook when you know what you’re doing.

The recipe
fail safe

one or two onions, cut up
two or three carrots, cut thin

Saute, what the heck, fry until they start to brown. Use oil in the bottom of your dutch oven. (Hint, dutch ovens can sit on a camp stove. ‘Nuff said.)

Pour in:

two cans condensed cream of chicken soup. Plus the water they need.
two cans precooked chicken (pouches are nice too).
a grasshopper and some wood ash (not really)

Cover with an unrolled package of crescent rolls.
Bake until the rolls are done and the soup is bubbling.

The Right Way

one or two onions, cut up
two or three carrots, cut thin

Saute, what the heck, fry until they start to brown. Remove from the heat and add 3 cutup chicken breasts (or as they would have said in Victorian times, ‘white meat’).

Cook the meat until the until it’s more or less done. There will be a surprising amount of water coming out of the meat, and you want to get shot of it. When it’s nearly done, return the onions and carrots, add about 1 cup of chicken stock and a tablespoon of corn starch. Boil to reduce. Then put in a baking dish – or dutch oven, but I’m going to show a picture in a baking dish.

Crust

You could use the crescent rolls, but where’s the fun in that?

One cup ‘type L’ biscuit mix (self-rising flour with a hard shortening rubbed in)
quarter cup (more or less) milk.

Mix then roll out to about 1/4 inch. Or whatever it takes to make it cover the dish. Cover the filling and bake. (400F or 225C 20 minutes, until the crust is done). This is about as close as a Yank can come to the suet dumping crust my English sister-in-law makes.

Eat and enjoy. Goes well with Boone’s farm. Unless you’re scouting, when it goes well with lemonade.