1. I took this photo from the deck on my office this morning. On June 1, there was a terrible fire up here and we were forced to evacuate. We really had no choice in the matter, and when we left we were convinced our house would burn down. Well, the house did not burn down, although Satan's House (this was actually a real place) and a couple others did.
In fact, just about the only spot for miles in any direction up here that DID NOT burn is this land directly behind our house, which is what I look at every morning, and day, and night when I am the galley slave to the keyboard.
The consequence is that every last bit of surviving wildlife has now crowded into this area, which means we are sharing our space with families of deer and lots of big, hungry coyotes. One of the coyotes is completely unafraid of us, and will often sit just outside our horse corral, just waiting and watching. He has eaten two of our cats in the past couple weeks, and is probably trying to figure out a way to get to our chickens, or maybe the puppy.
It was a very noisy night last night with swarming coyotes and stuff. It was very much like the Sam Shepard play, True West, which I recently read.
2. Apparently, Grasshopper Jungle is up on Edelweiss, an e-ARC delivery system for bloggers and reviewers. I think Edelweiss may be overheating, judging from the comments I am getting from people queuing up to read it.
This morning, the lovely Carolina Valdez Miller posted this beautiful comment about Grasshopper Jungle:
Unexpected, to be sure. And big. But hard to explain. Like when you look into a tiny snow globe, which is really just a tiny thing, but inside there's a whole village, or world, or universe, everything all connected by the fake snow and the walls of the snow globe and your hands holding it and your arms attached to the hands, etc. One little shake and the whole thing goes. So yeah, big like that. One Hundred Years of Solitude big.
Nice.
