Blowing in the Wind

The Santa Ana winds are blowing through Southern California with a vengeance. The newscaster said these are the worst winds we’ve had in a decade. But then the news people always try to make things sound as bad as possible.

Some people call them the devil winds. They come from inland and the air they blow is so dry it makes your skin itch. Not only that, but they stir up the bad kind of ions. It’s easy to feel edgy and in a bad mood.

I had them blowing in the beginning of an old manuscript to set a creep tone. My character walked out into a parking lot at night as the dry wind whipped around scraping the palm fronds scrap together so they made an eerie sound. She walked right into a mugging and despite her heels and celery green suit with a pencil skirt, plowed into the middle of it. Of course, she saved the day – and ruined her clothes. BTW, this character, Casey Feldstein, ditched that manuscript and jumped over to my new series.

There is a real reason to feel edgy when these winds blow. A careless spark can lead to an unstoppable wildfire in the mountains.

As I’m writing this, a wind gust whined through my window. The lime tree is bending and shaking for dear life and dropping it’s old fruit.

The sky looks different. There is only a hint of clouds, but the blue is watered down and it’s as though all the dust in the air has put a filter over the sun.

Outside the streets are littered with fallen trees. Palm fronds have bombarded our roof all afternoon. I have cabin fever from being inside all day.

A memory connected with these winds surfaces. My son was small and carryable. We were going through a shopping center parking lot, when all of a sudden the giant sign above the grocery store in front of us began to break apart and huge pieces flew off into the air. Where were they going to land? Where was the safe place to walk to get away from them? I remember bending forward to shield my son and trying to get to a covered area, as the pieces of sign landed around us. Miraculously they all missed hitting us.

Maybe the memory of that is why I don’t feel like going outside today.

Have you ever had weather related scares?

December 6, I am going to be interviewed by Zontee Hou on the Lions Brand podcast. http://yarncraft.lionsbrand.com/

Me and My CAL

This weekend marks the end of summer. Maybe it’s not the official end of summer, but the mental end. Though to me September always feels like a beginning. After the languid days of July and August, everything seems to start up again.

Some people think spring is full of promise. For me it’s the fall. I think of crisp days and changing leaves. That’s really a throwback to growing up in Chicago. In L.A., September is actually the hottest month and instead of looking for changing leaves, I’m still planting flowers.

I’m having a hard time getting a flow going on this blog entry. One of my cats, a huge black and white one named Rocky, keeps pestering me and knocking things around. Any second I expect him to come over the back of my chair and start hugging me. Yes, he does really hug me. He puts his front paws around my neck and purrs in my ear. He prefers it when my hair is loose. He likes to stick his paws in my hair and flip it around. He’s an unusual cat, at least compared to the other cats we’ve had. We adopted him along with his “sister” last March. He’s seven, she’s ten, so their already pretty set in their ways.

This isn’t supposed to be about my cats or my dog who was sick last week, but is now recovered. Or the blind dog that showed up in my driveway. Luckily, she had a collar with a phone number on it. The point I was on my way to was that I did start something. I joined a CAL. What’s a CAL, you ask? I didn’t know either the first time I saw the letters. Eventually I figured out it means Crochet Along. It seems like it should really be CA then, but I guess CAL looks better. Even knowing what the letters stood for, I still wasn’t sure what it was.

I noticed a group that meets in a library back east had done a Crochet Along with HOOKED ON MURDER. In that case, it appears the members all used the instructions for a granny square wash cloth I included in the book. Then they posted some of the final projects. I was pretty cool to see what they had made and know it came from my head.

The Crochet Along I joined is online through the Lions Brand yarn site. They showed a photo of the Crochet Along project which is a lovely afghan made up of squares. The whole thing is done in one color, but the stitches in the squares vary. I liked the idea of squares. They are portable and when you finish one you have a sense of accomplishment. Since I’m going to Chicago on Wednesday and like to crochet on the plane, the afghan squares seemed perfect.

They asked that you introduced yourself by leaving a posting. I left a posting the other day and the number next to it was something like 167. Now there are over a thousand postings of potential CALers. I read a lot of them. It turns out that many of them were already altering the kind of yarn and don’t plan to use the Fisherman’s Wool that I spent the afternoon looking for. Since it’s my first CAL, I didn’t know that you didn’t have to follow the rules or apparently the pattern either as some of the posters were going to change that, too.

Actually, there don’t seem to be any rules for the Lions Brand CAL. We all more or less make the same thing and then at the end there’s a chance to post a photo. During the CAL, there’s a chance to aks questions. I’m not sure with over a thousand people how that’s going to work. But it should be interesting. Many of the people who joined seemed to think it would give them the incentive to finish something. I guess I’m not the only one with a room full of unfinished projects. Uh oh, the cat is sitting behind me and looks like he’s getting ready to jump.

As a last thought - I will post a photo of whatever I have done of the afghan at the end of the CAL. I just hope it is more than one square.