Category: Jared

Happy Trails

Walking along the trail, motion catches my eye. I look up, but only in time to see the flash of a little ball of white fur at the end of a brown-gray blur darting into some underbrush. Constant companion to my footsteps is the sound of rustling leaf litter indicating unseen animals rushing away from my disruptive presence. There’s no counting the number of lizards that have interrupted their basking to dart under a rock or log for safety. I’m no threat to any of them, but there’s no surviving in the wild if you don’t consider everything a threat.

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In case you’re curious:

– Turn off fans.
– Download sound file.
– Listen to it.
– Plug in microphone.
– Start Audacity.
– Record introduction.
– Drag over TEMPLATE.
– Edit template.
– Drag over sound file.
– Export to MP3
– Name the file.
– Add ID3 information.
– Drag finished file to P drive (server’s repository).
– Close Audacity.
– Unplug microphone.

– Log in to WordPress.
– Add new post
– Give it a title.
– Copy and paste story.
– Set category to author.
– Enter media URL.
– Verify it.
– Click Publish.

That looks like a lot of steps. But it isn’t.
Only takes me a few minutes.
So, it’s okay to send them in after I’ve posted the collection for the week.

Beans in Quarantine?

At the start of last year’s quarantine-that-wasn’t-a-quarantine stay-at-home orders, stores ran out of lots of products related to keeping ourselves safe from the virus: gloves, hand sanitizer, bleach, paper products, masks. Plenty of grocery items became scarce, too: pasta and sauce, canned vegetables, soups. I never knew how many people knew how to bake from scratch. Flour, sugar, and yeast seemed to disappear from the stores, as well. One grocery category that disappeared that amused me was beans. Both canned beans and dry beans. I don’t think people thought about a bean-heavy diet when they were home all the time.

My story for last week is entitled Never Cross River Song
€€€€€
He stopped running. He was so tired of running. He had lost track of how long he’d been running long ago. But he couldn’t stop now. Running was the only thing keeping him out of the hands of his would-be killer. And she had a personal temporal displacement system. So, he had to run, but also jump – system to system, timestream to timestream.

He almost escaped for good. He did a multi-step jump through a planet moments before its destruction. But he triggered a traceable signature on the other side, allowing her to avoid his trap and regain his trail.