The Elephant in the Room

I'm writing short stories for NaNoWriMo again this year. Here is story 1, from a prompt by my friend Pauline.

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David's dreams had been strange, stranger than liver wurst and buttermilk could ever explain. Someone hd been trumpeting during an earthquake, and the smell that had resulted from the ground opening up beneath him was too horrible to describe. 

That scene in Holiday Inn had totally lied about the foods that created dreams of beautiful women.

Rolling over, David whacked his nose soundly against something large, warm, and putrid.

He was pretty sure he'd been alone last night. Bringing a girl home after eating liver paste wasn't easy, and he was pretty sure that he still wouldn't have brought one home that smelled this bad.

Slowly, he brought a hand up and patted the bed beside him.

He met with the same large, solid object as his nose had.

Refusing to take a deep breath because of the smell, David slowly and deliberately opened his right eye. All he could see was a wall of grey. 

Struggling to remember if the buttermilk had tasted like someone had slipped a mickey into it, David opened his left eye. 

A large brown eye stared back.

David blinked.

The large brown eye winked back.

The next thing David knew, he was on his feet, tangled in bedding, back to the wall of his small room.

Staring at an elephant.

David fainted.

When he awoke, he was laying tangled in a duvet on the floor, alone.

His bed was a pile of splinters.

A strong odour permeated the room as David ran, quietly, out the door.

Hills and bumps and a roadtrip to Orangeville

We did a lot of riding this Civic holiday weekend. We went to Stratford, to Guelph, to Listowel. We drove through the most Mennonite of Mennonite areas, where entire country blocks don't have utility poles. We got too much sun, too much food, and a great deal of our errands accomplished.

Fort Oak

We have an old chair in the living room.¹

A challenge: How to save money by looking at your utility meter

Some backstory, for those who don't know what I do for a living: I work for Noesis Energy, a company that has a website dedicated to tracking energy usage for large buildings, and assisting businesses and industry to find energy savings, as well as the funds to  implement those savings. I'm a software tester, and my job is to help make sure that the site is working correctly, and iron out the bugs before new features are put out in public.

May and health

Clearpath Chiropractic in Guelph has an annual health event in May called, appropriately enough, May Health. You choose a challenge, you do it for 31 days, and hopefully you have a habit built afterwards that you can keep up - or not - as you will.

Revelations

Life is full of questions.

Some are simple. Like why if you decide to put a lid on a pot of beans to make it boil faster, it will inevitably boil over at the exact moment you've stepped away from the stove and can't hear the pot boiling over and by the time you think to question the strange smell you have a good half hour of scrubbing ahead of you? (Answer: Murphy's Law.)

Updates and other things

I've been bad at the blogging recently, but things here have been a bit hectic.