Chain Reaction

I do a small part in the most recent story to show its face on Marshal Latham's Journey Into... Podcast. I play the part of AJ in "Chain Reaction," the story which won third place in his Journey Into Journey contest.

Check it out, and enjoy.

Collection Cover

I was messing around on Photoshop trying to put together a cover for a collection of my stories that I'm thinking about publishing, and I made this image.

It's a creepy image, but when you put the titles on, it's even better.

That was my first attempt. I thought the red outline would make it stand out enough, but I don't think it works. I like this second one more.

It might still need some work. I was listening to a podcast the other day, and the guy on there said that if all the words on your book cover are written in the same font, then you have no idea what your doing when it comes to graphic design.

I guess I need to switch the font up in one or two places.

More importantly, I need to get to work on the audio versions of the stories in the book, so I can publish the thing. Stand by, folks, stand by.

Piece Of Cake

It was my daughter's birthday and I had to share her cake with you. It was a pretty special cake:

Doesn't it look great?

My wife and my older daughter give my younger daughter a hard time. They always joke with her about loving unicorns. They say it's her spirit animal, and anytime they see something with a unicorn on it, they ask her if she wants it.

Thing is, she doesn't like unicorns at all. They're fine and all, but if she had to choose a spirit animal, she'd probably go with a fox. She really likes foxes a lot.

Doesn't matter. They keep doing it, and she always gives them enough of a reaction that they do it again next time.

So, when my wife saw these birthday candles that looked like unicorn ears and a horn, she had to buy them.

Inside, the cake was rainbow-colored:

I bet you didn't know that unicorns were actually made of rainbows.

More importantly, though, were those pink layers. That was strawberry ice cream. My daughter asked for an ice cream cake this year. She's always preferred ice cream to cake, so this time, we went ahead and combined them for her.

Let me give you a couple more shots of it to finish off the post so that you can see how nice the mane looks. My wife and older daughter did that icing. I don't know about you, but I was really impressed. It looks so pretty. I feel like My Little Pony just jumped out of the TV and...onto my plate. Am I eating horse?

We talked a lot about where this cake ranks among the best cakes we've made over the years. The unicorn could be top five, but let me see if I can show you the ones that probably come in before it. We decided that the number one cake was the dragon that we made for her birthday party in 2012.

Then number two, I insisted was the Barbie Cinderella cake my wife made in 2006.

The robot cake from 2016 is pretty definitely in third.

But after that, I think it gets pretty nebulous. It could be several different cakes. The football from 2002?

The snake from 2013?

The Captain America cake I did in 2017?

The race track in the shape of the number 2 from 2014?

Or maybe Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi battling in front of a volcano from 2006?

Or maybe that very unicorn you saw on this post today? It's pretty hard to say. What's your vote?

We've done a lot of good cakes over the years, and the cute little unicorn is taking its place alongside them.

Cockroach Cluster II

The other day, my wife came home from work, walked in the back door to the kitchen, and freaked out. Not for the usual reason...the kitchen wasn't a mess. Instead, she saw four cockroaches on the counter! FOUR!

I lived my whole youth in California, and I never had to deal with cockroaches. Now I'm getting used to them, and let me assure you that they are the grossest, most awful, disgusting insects out there. They fill me, and everyone else in the family, with revulsion.

So, seeing four of them all bunched together on the counter was a horrifying sight for my wife. The weird thing was that they didn't scatter when she came in. They just sat there, unmoving. She felt a little safer upon noticing this. They must already be dead. Still gross, but at least they were neutralized already.

She moved closer to check them out, and even snapped a photo. Here's what she saw:

Those cockroaches looked a little odd...not so much like cockroaches at all, actually. They look more like...hmm...oh, whoops. She'd been screaming and grossed out over a bunch of pecan halves.

The other day, my daughter had made brownies for our Super Bowl party, and my wife put nuts on half a pan's worth of them. Most of the kids are not fans of pecans. When the plain brownie supply ran out, they had to move on to the pecan-topped brownies. They weren't about to eat those pecans, however. They just picked them off, and ate the rest of the brownie, leaving a surprisingly large gathering of cockroaches behind to frighten my wife.

She shouted up the stairs, and made the kids come down to clean up the mess they'd made. Giving them an earful for scaring her with these counterfeit cockroaches. Hopefully, a lesson has been learned through all of this...you shouldn't put pecans in brownies. Everybody knows that.

Mando And Grogu

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Tied Up In A Bow

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Birthday Or Father's Day?

My son just had his ninth birthday. He got this Baby Yoda...doll, I guess you can't call it anything other than a doll...or maybe a stuffed animal, I guess...as one of his presents.

He was really excited about this one. My wife couldn't understand why, though. It wasn't the version that moved, or talked, or did anything. You couldn't pose it like an action figure either. It was just basically a stuffed animal, but with a hard plastic head.

Truthfully, I didn't know what you might do with it either, other that carry it around with you as you pretended to be Din Djaron, the Mandalorian, protecting it from the Empire.

Turns out, he mostly played with it like it was a baby doll. He immediately asked what the proper way to carry a baby was, and I had to show him how you needed to make sure to support its head, and keep it in the crook of your arm. He took it everywhere like that from then on.

I guess it was his baby now. Later, when we went out, he made his sister promise to babysit for him. The next day, when he went back to school, he put Baby Yoda in his pod (the box that he came in) in front of his sister's door with a note asking her to keep watch over him. He's a very attentive father to his alien offspring.