My wife called me the other morning on her way to work to say that she’d heard there was a tornado warning (not a watch, which is less urgent) for our county. About 10 minutes later, I got an automated phone call from the Emergency Weather System, a red alert warning about possible tornadoes. So I moved anything that wasn’t bolted down in the back yard to prevent flying debris.
Then, a couple of hours later, another call from the EWS with a flash flood warning. It all sounded quite dramatic. Yes, we did get a lot of rain, perhaps as much as 3-5″. And, yes, there were some tornadoes in this part of Texas, perhaps as many as five or six. I guess some people had high water, too. But I could have left the stuff in the back yard where it was. Well, maybe not the patio umbrella, which was open at the time.
I haven’t been talking much about my writing projects lately, but I’m working hard at the main one these days. I have a little over two months until my deadline, so I’m not wasting any time.
A nice exit for Catherine Willows on CSI this week. I didn’t expect the reveal that the bodies in the burned out car weren’t who they were supposed to be (although it’s almost a cardinal rule in mystery fiction that if you can’t identify a body, it probably isn’t who you think it is), nor further the fact that it was actually the jerk’s wife who was responsible for most of what was happening, along with the FBI agent. I liked the scene with the hooker in the motel room, though I thought Catherine recovered a little too quickly from essentially being impaled (a through-and-through that it standard TV fare, missed everything vital). Her speech at the end sounded like the same one Helgenberger might have given at the wrap party.
The dynamics between Raylan and Boyd Crowder is one of the best features of Justified. Raylan was a bit off his game, so he didn’t understand why Boyd tackled him in his office until he talked to Winona, who made an off-hand comment about how lawyers and realtors lie. When Raylan went to the prison to tell Boyd that he had sussed out his plan, without exactly saying what he meant, their exchange was hilarious. Raylan asks, “What do you think of a man who divorces a woman THEN gets her pregnant THEN wonders if maybe they should move in together?” To which Boyd replies, “You’re talkin’ to a man who is sleeping with his dead brother’s widow and murderess, so if you’re lookin’ for someone to cast stones at you on this matter, I think you’ve picked the wrong sinner.” Boyd is always scheming. What a character.
It was good seeing Art in action this week, too. Once he found out that one of their federal witnesses was trying to make money to get back into the mob by turning in another witness and, worse, that he had killed another Marshal, Art didn’t hold back. Liked seeing Karen Sisco, although they couldn’t call her that because they don’t hold the rights to that character. The chemistry between her and Raylan is interesting, especially the way they worked together when they raided the hotel room. Tossing guns like jugglers.
We finished the first season of The Sopranos last night. Tony got some of this retribution for the people who were either trying to turn him in to the Feds or kill him, but the issuing of the federal warrants kept Uncle Junior alive. And his mother—what a piece of work. Such histrionics, and finding ways to drop sensitive information into willing ears so they would do her dirty work. Did she really want Tony dead just because he put her in a home? I figured Tony would come out of his funk (and, boy, did Gandolfini ever do a good job of what might have been a ludicrous depiction of a zonked out character) when he fended off his would-be assassins, but I didn’t anticipate that everything involving Isabella was also a product of his mind, including the fight with his wife over her. We have the entire series on DVD now, so we’re looking forward to hitting Season 2 this weekend.
We supposedly have an impressive rainstorm heading our way, one that could produce 1-5″ of precipitation in the next 24 hours. We call that showers. We call that welcome, in fact. Despite the rain that we’ve had in the past month, we’re still in a drought, so the more the merrier.
I received my contributor copies of Cemetery Dance #65 in the mail last night. It’s been a while.
Got a little behind schedule this month, so my Storytellers Unplugged essay is a revised rerun: 
Until last night, I’d never seen a single episode of The Sopranos. Last fall I bought the Season 1 DVD set and we just got around to sampling it now. We watched the first two episodes. Interesting. Tony’s mother is a real piece of work. “He was a saint,” she says about his deceased father, though the reality was that he was something less than that. The notion of having him suffer from anxiety attacks requiring counseling is an interesting one. Has Lorraine Bracco always been such a terrible actor? I’ve been peripherally aware of her for years. She plays Jane’s mother on Rizzoli and Isles and she’s dreadful. Fortunately, her part on The Sopranos doesn’t require a lot of range from her, so she manages to stumble through, but there was one point in the first episode where it almost seemed like she’d forgotten the end of her line. The delivery was wretched. I have no doubt that we’ll go through the first season, but whether we decide to go on from there remains to be seen.
Making good headway on the work in progress. I see I have roughly 80 days before my deadline. That’s ok. I wrote all of The Stephen King Illustrated Companion in half that time so I should be in good shape.
That’s my Christmas gift over there, a recliner. The fact that it reclines is the least important aspect. See the way the back is recessed? The lower ridge supports my lower back, which has been causing me problems for a couple of years. When we watched movies, I spent a lot of time wriggling around to find a new comfortable position because the sofa didn’t have good back support. I tested this one out at the show room and it was perfect. We watched a movie on Saturday night and I didn’t budge the entire time. Simple pleasures.
Devoted my attention to a single writing project this morning and got a substantial amount of work done. I’m pleased.
The decorations came down and were packed away a lot faster than they went up. Less than two hours from beginning to end.
This’ll probably be my last blog entry of 2011. The time when people might traditionally be expected to write about resolutions. Not me. I don’t make them. Never have. I’m not exactly an introspective person. Sure, I meet deadlines and I schedule and plan things and stuff like that, but I don’t do resolutions. One day at a time, for the most part. I have to turn in a manuscript on April 1 and I will meet that goal, but I don’t resolve to do it. I’ll simply do it! I also have a 25,000-word novella to write in the first quarter of the year and I plan to do that, too. Again, not resolutions—simply plans.