Happy New Year From KF's Dangerous Divas!

Yay! I get to be the first to wish you all 'HAPPY NEW YEAR!' Here we are on the last day of 2009--and it was a year for the record books. Record unemployment, record floods, record snowstorms. Personally, I won't be all that sorry to see '09 in my rear-view mirror. I always feel a sense of optimism and hope at the beginning of a new year. Like the brand new desk top calendar on my desk, I'm presented with a shiny, new year--a clean canvas to do whatever I chose to do with it--and a diverse palette to draw from and decorate each day. A new year simmers with endless possibilities.
Since weather forced us to delay one family get-together, we'll be celebrating tomorrow. Today and tonight I get to spend the last day of the year with the triplets. We have a big day planned. We're going thrift-shop browsing, catching a matinee of Avatar, and then we'll head back home before the revelers hit the highways and biways for an evening of football, (GO CYCLONES!) games, and finger food. How are you spending this New Year's Eve and New Year's Day?
Once again, from the Dangerous Divas here at Killer Fiction, have a safe, wonderful, upbeat, and fabulous New Year's Eve and New Year's Day!
Rock on!
~Bullet Hole~

The Tao of Ping Pong

So, I got the kids a ping pong table.

Okay. I got myself a ping pong table but made it look like it was from me. What?

Of course, putting the ping pong table together is another matter. Fortunately, I have male friends with tools in the form of Todd, with Bernie's drill. So, once Lisa and I made sure Todd had lots of help (does it matter that it's in the form of two 9-yr old boys?), we went back upstairs and opened up the chocolate peanut clusters, yelling down every now and then, "Hey, you okay? Do you need help?" (Does it matter that we didn't wait for an answer?)

This is what Todd overheard Jack and Logan say during the four hours of "fun" putting the table together:

Jack: Wouldn't it be great if we had a robot who builds ping pong tables?

Logan: Yeah. But what would suck is that we'd have to put the robot together first.

Todd did a great job. Of course, we had to try it out first...to make sure it was safe for the kids...ahem. Eventually, the kids tackled us and took away the paddles (did you know that 9 year old boys are very, very quick?) so we slouched upstairs and had to settle for beer.

We have warned them that on New Year's Eve, once the adults start doing vodka shots, the ping pong table is ours. I just hope we can fight em off.

Happy New Year,

The Assassin

Five Things You Don't Know about CC

Five Things You Don’t Know About Christie Craig
(Previously seen at BookLovers Blog Spot)

Howdy,

I have so much to tell you about Christmas, but it's not over at my house yet. Tomorrow is Christmas at my place with my daughter, son-in-law and grandbaby. So I'll catch up with you guys later and fill you in on all the gifts I got. You will love what I got from hubby! Okay, now here's a blog about a few things you might not know about me. Happy New Year guys!

1) The thing I mostly dreamed about being as a child was adopted.


Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t abused, or mistreated. I was just a misfit—the girl sandwiched between two brothers. I didn’t make farting sounds with my arm pits, I didn’t ask people to pull my finger, and I didn’t make weekly trips to the emergency room to get stitches. I’d catch Alabama toads and pretend they were princes; my brothers would catch them to blow them up with firecrackers. While I had my head in the clouds daydreaming, everyone else scratched their heads trying to figure out what was wrong with me.


2) The weirdest food I’ve ever eaten was toad soup in a dirt-floor restaurant.


Believe it or not, my brothers were not behind this. I was in China with my hubby and we were being treated to a fancy buffet. Hubby, a semi-germ freak, wouldn’t eat anything, so being polite I felt obligated to eat. They put just a spoonful of the unknown variety of soup in my bowl for me to taste, when I nodded my approval they dipped a huge serving into my dish and the drowned toad, cooked whole, head propped up on the lip of my bowl and its legs dangling over each side of my dish. I politely bypassed the soup to eat the fried snake. Hey…at least it didn’t look like a snake.

3) My favorite way to spend a Sunday afternoon is with a fishing pole in my hand.

Yup, I’m a closet fisherman. Very few people know that I love to fish. But I have to tell you there’s something about sitting beside a body of water with a pole clutched in my hand that brings on story plotting. I’ve gotten so many book and scene ideas while waiting for my bobber to bob. The whole dead guy in the Porta-Potty scene in Divorced, Desperate and Deceived, well, I was sitting on a boat reeling in a fish when that idea hit. How I got from catching an ugly fish, to a corpse reading a bird magazine in the Porta-Potty is even beyond me, but I’ll betcha I was dying to pee at the time. Now, this isn’t to say that I don’t take the sport of fishing seriously. Hubby says I fish hard, because I demand silence because it will scare the fish away. Also, I’m never one to set my pole down. I mean, what if I got a bite, I want to have that pole in my hands. This is battle and no way am I’m going to let the fish win. This said, I don’t like to touch the fish, so I need hubby to take it off my hook. And then I have him toss the fish back in the water, setting it free. Oh, I love to eat fish, but not the ones I catch. I have a rule, if I have to look anything in the eyes, I can’t eat it—which was the big problem with that frog in China. That thing was looking right at me.

4) The three things I suck at mostly are wrapping gifts, sewing, and spelling/spotting typos.

Not only do I suck at wrapping gifts, I hate wrapping gifts. Don’t get me wrong, I love giving, I just hate wrapping. I swear, no matter how hard I try to make them look “department-store” pretty, when I’m done with them you’d assume a man wrapped the dang thing. Seriously, I’m wrapping impaired. I think whoever came up with gift bags should win a Nobel Prize. Now sewing? Oh gosh, I’d rather clean someone’s toenails than have to use a sewing machine. Even a needle and thread has a negative effect on me. I pay the dry cleaners to hem and sew on buttons. Spelling? Yup, I know I’m a writer and people assume that writers should be able to spell. But not this dyslexic writer. Spell check and I are best friends. Of course it often lets me down. My two biggest typo/spelling errors were: (pre-published) in a scene where my hero in DD&Delicious had been beat up, thrown over a bridge and shot in the shoulder and was hiding out behind a shed and I had him “look down at his bloody shirt.” But in an unpubbed contest, I accidentally left out the letter “r” in the word “shirt.” The contest judge made the comment: “So he has internal issues, too?” The second typing faux pas was in a blog where I wrote that I was going “public” with a confession. Well, I mistyped and left out the “L” in the word public and honestly, it was not a “pubic” type of confession.

5) The worse thing I ever did to my husband (according to him) was get an emergency hysterectomy six weeks after I demanded he get a vasectomy.

I swear, he was furious. You’d have thought I personally went after his Mr. Johnson and the boys with a pair of wire cutters. He acted as if I’d decided to have this procedure just for fun and to somehow lessen the significance of his little snip-snip. I mean, if I could have gone back in and unsnipped him I would have. Amazingly, it took him longer to recover from his quick out-patient procedure than it did for my “full-blown, gut her open and yank out body parts” surgery.

So there you have it, five things you didn’t know about yours truly. What I’d like to hear you guys is either, what you dreamed about being as a child, what’s the weirdest food you’ve ever eaten, what’s your favorite Sunday afternoon pastime, what you suck at, or what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done to your hubby or boyfriend. Come on, let’s share and laugh a little.


~CC

Random Stuff

Thought I'd just do a random stuff post today, as my mind is sorta all over the place. First off, I want to get some complaints off my chest so I can start the new year fresh and sunny:

1. Vista sucks and so does Bill Gates for not providing an upgrade to Windows '07 for that crappy, ill-tempered piece of junk they forced onto the computer buying public.

2. Sony sucks for saying they have no driver available that works for the Sony Reader with Vista and have no intention of creating one.

3. BTW - Thank you to the guy living in his parent's garage who was smarter than Sony about their own hardware and software. I can now use my reader again.

4. HP sucks for bragging that their laser printers can last 10 years or more, but telling me that I need to replace my 8-year old printer that works perfectly b/c they don't "feel" like creating a printer driver for Vista or '07. (Side note: c'mon guy in your parent's garage - I have a really big doorstop right now)

So now that the complaining is out of the way, I feel much better. Did anyone watch The Sing Off last week? It was really interesting - all acapella groups and I swear sometimes you could not tell there wasn't a band. Here's my favorite (although they took second) - The Beezlebubs, a college group from the Boston area. They were great singers and fabulous entertainers.



Have a great week!

Deadly DeLeon

Fun with pets, holiday hats and scrapbook software. Hope everyone had a fabulous Christmas!

Deadly DeLeon (and Bogey)

Merry Christmas!

Happy Christmas from the whole Killer gang!

And since I didn't get a chance to send out cards this year, here are some of the ones that I wish I'd sent. ;) Ho, ho, ho and Merry Christmas!








~Trigger Happy Halliday

Christmas Wish...

This has been a tough year for so many families. My household hasn't remained insulated from the reality of a stressed economy, unemployment concerns, and the on-going challenges of having to do more with less. It's the signature of the times.

So this Christmas season I find particular comfort in the fact that the reason for this season is one constant that never changes. It's not diminished by dismal economic outlooks or depressing weather forecasts. Its message is not diluted by political correctness, congressional high-jinks, or pop culture. Its meaning is not marred by dissenting opinions or opposing perceptions.

Christmas is...what it is.

It's the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ.

It's faith, family, and friends.

It's a time to relax, reflect, rejoice, and just BE!

At least that's what my Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

My wish for all of you at this holy, reverent, and joyous time of year is that your holiday is filled with all the blessings and wonder Christmas represents.

Be safe. Be happy. Be healthy. Be thankful.

Merry Christmas!

~Kathy~