Amazing Cakes

Karen McCullough Posted on by

My daughter, Liz, makes amazing cakes. Not only are they delicious, but her decorating skills astonish me. Her knack for it was on full display with two cakes she created for the birthdays we celebrated on our recent family beach trip to Edisto.

For my grandsons, my younger daughter always lets the birthday boy choose a theme for his party. This year her second son, who is turning 10, wanted an “Asterix” theme. For those who don’t know, Asterix (https://asterix.com/en/portfolio/asterix/)  is a series of comic books (and apparently a group of French movies) featuring the titular Asterix, a barbarian hero during the time of the Roman conquest. He adventures around Gaul, and beyond, with his somewhat thick-headed friend Obelix. Books at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Asterix-Omnibus-Gladiator-Banquet-Cleopatra/dp/1444004247/ . The birthday boy loves those comics.

They presented a bit of a challenge when it comes to theming a birthday party, however. The usual stores are short on related merchandise. Elizabeth (Aunt Lizzy to the boys) used her imagination. She made tee-shirts for each of the boys with an iron-on Asterix and Obelix, and then she came up with this brilliant idea for a cake mimicking Obelix’s peculiar garb.

The other birthday was my husband’s and his cakes often have a book theme, since he is a scholarly sort. This one may be the best yet. I believe the title was suggested by either my younger daughter or her husband, a professor of Theology at Notre Dame. It’s a gloriously wonderful pun, suited to the amazing two-book-stack cake she created.

Malice, Matrimony & Murder- Kickstarter Ending Soon!

Karen McCullough Posted on by


The Kickstarter Ends June 15th!

Just a couple more days left to back this project for an opportunity to get lots of juicy bonuses!

I’m excited to be part of this unique project. Twenty-six authors (myself included) have contributed mystery/crime stories centered around a wedding. Each story is complete in itself, but each also contains a clue to an overall mystery, which you’ll learn about at the beginning of the book. Solve the big mystery and win some interesting prizes. My story is The Other Wedding Crasher. Learn more and sign up to support the project here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/marlabradeen/malice-book?ref=4oje6u

The May Beach Retreat

Karen McCullough Posted on by

In our family May means Beach Time! (Yes, I know, it’s June. I’m a bit late posting about the most recent trip.) My husband and sister-in-law rent a large house on the beach on Edisto Island and we are generally joined by our two daughters and some of their families. My older daughter’s two children are grown. Her son has moved to Boston, and her daughter is the mother of a small child, so neither of them joined us this year.

But my younger daughter has four boys, ranging in age from 6 to 11 and they make a family trek down from Indiana for fun at Edisto and time with relatives.

We’ve been doing this for about ten years now and, of course, some traditions have developed. Our trip usually encompasses two birthdays – my husband’s, and the second of the four boys.

Grandson C’s birthday is actually a few days before the trip, but he enjoys the special cachet of having his celebration at the beach and is more than willing to wait a few extra days for it.

Mid-May generally means nice weather on the South Carolina coast. Temperatures are usually warm enough for swimming, but not blazingly hot. We had one gray, cloudy, windy day that ended in a humdinger of a storm, but pretty much the rest of the time was good for plenty of beach fun. Plus the beach is far less crowded than it will be later in the summer.

As recently as three years ago, only the oldest of the boys was even willing to go in the water. After a couple of summers of swimming lessons, the older three are all comfortable with the surf now. The youngest likes to play in the shallows and will venture in up to his knees as long as an adult will hold his hand.

A bonus feature of Edisto Beach is that while the house we rent faces the ocean, a quick drive of a mile or so takes one to publicly accessible beaches that are on the inlet rather than open sea. The result is much calmer water with practically no waves, which lets everyone get in some real swimming and a different sort of water play. The family made that trip a couple of times and all four of the boys were into it.

Between our times on the beach, we play games, read, talk, and try not to eat or drink too much.

I can’t say it’s totally restful, but it’s invigorating in its own way. It’s wonderful to have at least some of the family together for a while, to have time and opportunity for face-to-face conversations that are rare and treasured. The celebrations help remind us of how fortunate we all are.

Plus, my older daughter Liz has awesome cake decorating skills. More on that coming.

Writing Every Day

Karen McCullough Posted on by

Most people will tell you that if you’re serious about writing, you have to do it every day, or at least so many days a week.

I don’t. I tend to be more of a binge writer.

After more than thirty years of writing fiction seriously (with the intent to publish), I’ve found that I’m not a person who can write in half-hour increments. I need a solid block of time to let me sink into the world I’m inhabiting for the story before the movie starts running in my head.

When I’m in the groove, I can try to write 500 words a day if I’m in the first half of the book or story, or 1,000 words in the second half. Most days I will do more than that.

Family and events can intervene. I’ll go for a week, or two, or three doing almost no writing. But once I have the time and space again, I settle in and get back to business.

I also sometimes just have to take breaks to ‘refill the bucket.’ After emptying my brain onto the page so many times in a row, it gets tired and wants a break. Time to let the synapses rest and to refill the creative bucket.

I don’t see it as a right or wrong way to write. It’s my way to write. I’ve been doing it for some 30 years now and I’ve managed to crank out more than 20 novels, half a dozen novellas, and dozens of short stories. That’s my method and I’m sticking with it.

Baseball is Back

Karen McCullough Posted on by

Major league baseball has been back for a while and it’s fun to sit down and watch the occasional Atlanta Braves game on TV, but the real spirit and joy of the game is found at the ballpark for our local minor league team.

The Greensboro Grasshoppers are a High-A affiliate of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Players in High-A are still three big jumps from the major leagues, and sadly, most of them will never make it there.

Some do, though. In our many years of going to ‘Hoppers baseball games (and their predecessors, the Greensboro Hornets and the Greensboro Bats), we’ve seen eventual All-Stars like Derek Jeter, Giancarlo Stanton, Christian Yelich, and J.T. Realmuto at the starts of their careers. Two players currently on the Pirates roster played in Greensboro for a while (Rodolfo Castro and Ji Hwan Bae).

You can frequently pick out the ones who have the talent. Giancarlo Stanton still holds the record for the longest home run hit in our ballpark. And that was only one of the 30+ blasts he hit in his single year playing here. The only downside to seeing top-flight talent is that you know they won’t be around long. Often they don’t stay for the full season before being moved up to the next level.

The game play isn’t always the crispest, cleanest, or most elegant since the talent level is so uneven, but the games are exciting and (usually) competitive. Our fairly new downtown stadium, which holds about 9,000 people, is nice. There are almost no bad sight-lines. You can sit within a few feet of either dugout or right next to the field. Nets prevent most foul balls from leaving the field, though the occasional souvenir makes its way into the stands.

Team ownership tries hard to make the games fun for all the customers. A variety of foods, beverages, and snacks are available. (Aside: Why do the hot dogs always taste better at the ballpark?) Between-innings entertainment includes games, contests, dancing on the dugout roofs, and the antics of the mascot, Guilford the Grasshopper.

Another aside: The Grasshoppers aren’t actually named after the insect. Greensboro was the site of a Revolutionary war battle that helped turn the tide in the Colonies’ favor. One of the primary weapons was a small cannon known as a Grasshopper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasshopper_cannon

Other interesting features of attending a game include the appearance of the current “Bat Dog” Miss Willie Mays. She follows in the footsteps of the late Miss Babe Ruth, Master Yogi Berra, and Miss LouLou Gehrig, who have all sadly passed on. It’s always fun to see the black lab race onto the field to retrieve a bat left behind by one of the players and bring it back to the dugout. And weekend games are capped off with an awesome fireworks display.

For those who wonder: I really like the new rules. The games are quicker but there’s more action!

Garden Time – May 2023

Karen McCullough Posted on by

May is the perfect time for gardening in central North Carolina. The average temperature has warmed up enough to make the plants grow happily but hasn’t yet reached the sizzling levels that will make summer pretty miserable.

At this point the daffodils, tulips, and iris have come and gone. The Asiatic lilies are budding and the gladiolus are pushing up strongly. But May is the month of the roses, and mine are looking splendid this year.

Growing roses in this area is a challenge. They are glorious right now in the warmth and wet of May, but they really don’t like our very hot and humid summers. To ensure they stay reasonably healthy, I feed them rose food once a month, water a couple of times of week in hot weather, spray regularly for insects and brown spot during the summer, and deadhead constantly. I hate having to spray, but the combination of aphids and Japanese beetles means I’ll have no plants left if I don’t. (The experiment has been made. I’ve tried several ‘natural’ means of getting rid of the bugs. They don’t work.) But when the weather cools again in the fall, they’ll have another explosion of blooms to reward my efforts.

Other things are going on in the garden right now as well. Many of the perennials are beginning to bloom; the zinnia and cosmos seeds are germinating; and the weeds are proliferating despite my constant effort to remove them.

The area in front of the house needs a refresher and some new plants, but we’ll be having our front porch rebuilt in a couple of weeks, so there’s no point in working around there until the workers are finished tramping over it.

I have in mind a couple more areas to turn into flower beds.

That’s the thing about working in the garden. It’s never done. But the rewards for the effort are really quite wonderful.

That Wonderful Moment When It All Comes Together

Karen McCullough Posted on by

It’s probably my favorite thing about writing – that glorious moment when the threads I’ve been writing weave themselves together and I see the pattern and what is going to happen next. There’s a kind of high about it. I suppose it’s when my subconscious mind releases to the conscious mind the full picture of what it’s been working on for the last few days, weeks, or months.

As a writer, I fall into the “pantser” category. I start with an idea or an opening scene, and sometimes a vague notion of where it’s going, but I frequently have no idea what’s in between or how to get it where I want it.

So I write the story to find out what happens, just as a reader reads it for the same reason. I sit at the computer and let it come out. I watch the characters, set up the problem, and wait to see what they do next.

It’s a bit scary to write that way, not knowing how I’m going to get from point A to point B all the way to Point Z. I’ve had a few false starts. But for the most part, the magic does happen, and I write the story all the way to the end.

But there always is a Moment. It’s like a flash of lightning in the brain that illuminates how everything comes together and shows me the answer I’m looking for and how I’m going to get there. In a novel, there may well be several of them as I go along with each one showing further development of the plot. In a short story, it’s usually just a single light bulb suddenly switching on.

That happened recently when I was working on the story I’ve just finished for the Malice, Matrimony & Mystery anthology. I started out with a character, a title, and an event. Then I just wrote, going along with what I saw happening. At the 2500-word mark (of a 4500-word story), it finally came to me who the baddie was, what would happen, and how it would be resolved. I even saw a couple of rather neat twists in the resolution.

I love it when that happens!

So Hard to Say Goodbye

Karen McCullough Posted on by

Freya got to see cousin Melanie and meet her newest cousin, Vinnie.

The family visiting from England has returned home now. They went back hauling more stuff than they came with, at least in part because grandma doesn’t get enough opportunities to spoil the children, so I had to take advantage.

We had a great time together. The debacle on the trip to Beaufort has provided plenty of conversation and is already becoming part of the family lore.

But so many other wonderful things happened during the visit. Many good conversations. Trips to museums, visits with relatives, going to the park with the children, and playing in our backyard.

Freya bonded with Bean, Liz and Alan’s dog.

James spent a large part of his time here kicking a soccer ball around our yard. At six, he appears to be surprisingly athletic. (Surprising mostly because no one else on our side of the family is. We’re a bunch of hopeless klutzes.) Freya, who is eight, loved the tree swing and put in a lot of time on it.  There were many walks around the neighborhood and visits to the playground down the street.

A couple of days before their visit ended, we went to Target so the children could spend the money their English grandmother had given them for the trip (supplemented, as needed, by yours truly) and so I could fulfill my itch to buy a few clothing items for them. I get so few chances to do things like that.

Nice stance, right? He looks like he’s ready for the pros.

Freya picked out a new Barbie doll with interesting accessories. James wanted a baseball bat and ball. Since he’s only six, we found a tee-ball bat and balls for him. We also got a set of plastic balls too, for practice in the yard.

A little background on that:

Joe is a huge baseball fan and it’s one of the biggest things he’s missed since he relocated to England. Thanks to the Internet and MLB.com, he can still watch his beloved Braves, though he has to make adjustments for the time differences there. The children do sometimes watch with him.

Sadly, all the local minor league teams were playing out of town during his visit, but he did get to watch a number of Braves games on television while he was here. The children begged to be allowed to watch with him (possibly to avoid going to bed, but they did actually seem interested in the games).

For a good bit of the rest of their stay, James wanted to practice batting. His dad pitched many balls to him. He showed very good hand-eye co-ordination and was able to hit the ball pretty regularly. The kid might have an athletic future. Freya also took a turn with the bat. They took the bat home, along with a couple of balls, and an old youth baseball glove that had been hanging around here since it was abandoned years ago by another grandson who grew out of it. They may be the start of a wave of interest in baseball in England!

But now they’re gone. I’m always a little melancholy after family guests leave. The yard seems to echo with the squeals and laughter of the children. The house is too silent. I miss them all and my heart is a little empty.

But then I start to put the house back in order and get back to my normal activities – a bit of website work for my few remaining clients, gardening, watching baseball, myself, and most of all writing. And I begin to plan for the next family visit, and maybe another after that.

As a wise friend once told me, “There’s no ‘hello’ without a ‘goodbye’ first.”

The Beaufort, N.C. Visit

Karen McCullough Posted on by

Once we arrived in Beaufort, after the rather harrowing journey (see previous post), we had a wonderful time. I feel very blessed that all three of my children remain friends and enjoy spending time with each other. Since they’re widely dispersed geographically, the opportunities to gather aren’t as frequent as any of us would like, but perhaps they’re all the more special for that.

On our first full day there, it was still raining, windy, and chilly, but we decided to go ahead with some of the things we wanted to do that were mostly (or at least partly) indoors. That meant two museums which were high on the interest list: Fort Macon State Park and the Beaufort Maritime Museum.

Fort Macon is a restored pre-Civil war fort built on the tip of a coastal island overlooking the inlet from the Atlantic. The main part of the fort is below ground-level and built roughly in the shape of a diamond surrounding an open field. The cells of the building, once used as barracks, kitchens, and storage areas now all feature museum-type displays that show in (sometimes dismaying) detail what life was like for the men who served there. Each area displays a different time, starting from the pre-Civil war era when it was built, up to World War II, which was the last time it was used for military purposes.

Mess area in the fort.

The fort is surrounded by raised cannon emplacements. The State Park also include a very nice visitor’s center and displays. Weather prevented us taking advantage of some of the features like hiking trails and beach access, but we did spend most of the morning inside the fort and visitor’s center.

James with cannon at Fort Macon Visitor Center

After lunch at a local Beaufort restaurant, we walked over to the N.C. Maritime Museum in downtown Beaufort. The museum actually has two parts, a shipbuilding museum and the broader one. We skipped the shipbuilding, though we’ll probably go back for a closer look at a later date. The main museum has a number of exhibits that interested us particularly.

Raising a cannon from the seabed. Picture: Internet Archive Book Images, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons

Perhaps most spectacularly, the museum is the storage and display space for most of the artifacts retrieved in the undersea archaeological effort on the presumed site of Blackbeard’s main ship, the Queeen Anne’s Revenge.

I can highly recommend both places. They’re well-kept and well-run. Both had impressive displays that highlight unique moments in history. Fort Macon obviously leans heavily on military history, though it also highlights interesting facets of life at the time, including some of the gritty realities. (Bedbugs, anyone? Nineteenth century soldiers had to take apart their beds at least once a week and clean everything thoroughly to control pests. They also slept two to a cot in a frame the size of a regular single bed.)

The Maritime Museum also includes some fascinating information about and displays of marine flora and fauna. The display of a whale’s heart intrigued the children.

I can also report, from personal experience, that both have nice gift shops, well stocked with things that will tempt to children to nag their parents. And grandparents will find plenty of items that can be supplied with the justification that they’re educational.

A walk on Atlantic Beach

We concluded the day with a trip to Downeast Marine, the boat repair and sales place my daughter and her husband own. That was quite educational, too, though the children mostly wanted to see the 20-foot-tall statue of Blackbeard Liz and Alan acquired along with the shop.

Sunday morning was Easter, which meant baskets and Easter Egg Hunts in the morning. In the afternoon, we headed for Atlantic Beach, for a stroll on the sand. It was still chillly, but the rain had stopped and the sun actually appeared in the course of the afternoon. Joe and family live in Hythe, Kent, on a hill overlooking the English Channel. They found the cool, breezy weather pretty normal, though I found it chilly. They reported the water was warmer than the Channel water and the children took their shoes off to go paddling in the shallow surf.

 

 

An Unfortunate Incident on the Road

Karen McCullough Posted on by

Picture yourself barreling down the highway at seventy miles an hour in a rented minivan with your spouse in the passenger seat, son and daughter-in-law in the next row, two children in the third row and a pile of luggage in the back. It’s pouring rain, cold, and windy. You’re on the outskirts of nowhere.

Without warning, a message flashes up in bright orange on your dashboard. “ENGINE SHUTDOWN IMMANENT.” Below that, it suggests you have three seconds to find a safe place to pull over. When you press the gas pedal, there’s no response.

Good News: The highway isn’t too crowded here, and there is a shoulder so I can drift over to the side and stop off the road.

Bad News: Everything else.

Mixed News: We all have cell phones, but service shows only one bar. Fortunately, one bar is enough.

First Step: Call Avis Roadside Assistance. They’re only sort-of helpful. Suggest calling 911 to help us get safely off the highway, then they’ll provide a tow service for the current vehicle. Replacing it is trickier. A lot trickier. She’s looking into it.

Our gear stacked under the umbrella at a table outside the Circle K

A sheriff’s deputy showed up within a few minutes of my call. Fortunately we were within sight of an exit off the highway. The car did turn on again, although the ‘check engine’ light was now lit. Still, it moved when I pressed the gas pedal. With the sheriff’s deputy following us in case the car stopped again, we made it off the highway to a Circle K convenience store near the exit. The deputy wished us good luck and departed.

More conversation with Avis: They proposed getting us all an Uber to take us to the nearest Avis office, some 40 miles away (and back in the direction we’d already come). Of course, we’re several miles outside the nearest town, so it might take a while to get an Uber large enough to hold six people and luggage. And there was no guarantee the nearest Avis office would have a six-seater vehicle available, so we might have to wait for them to find another one for us or go to yet another office. I chewed all that over and had another thought.

We were heading to Beaufort to visit my daughter and were about 80 miles from there. I called her and she generously agreed to come get us. But it would take her and her husband coming since neither car would hold six people. He had to leave the boat shop he owned to come along, but he agreed, and they set out. We could work out how to get another vehicle later, in more comfort.

Meanwhile, the tow truck showed up take the minivan. We had to unload all our luggage, bottles, and other things from the van. The Circle K has a few tables outside topped by metal umbrellas. None of them are in use since it’s cold, windy, and raining. We stow everything on, around, and under one of the tables.

The gang poses under the giant pirate statue that marks Downeast Marine, the boat business my daughter and son-in-law own.

The Circle K was actually quite nice as roadside gas station/convenience stores go. They had an expansive selection of beverages, including coffee and hot chocolate available. They also had clean restrooms. There were plenty of snack food options and we sampled many of those as we waited an hour and a half for daughter to arrive. We rotated people standing watch over the luggage and going in to use facilities, warm up, and grab drinks or food.

Daughter and son-in-law arrived and brought us to their home in Beaufort. We had a great visit and did several interesting things while we were there, despite the poor weather. More on those in another post.

We’ll still need another minivan to get us all back home in a couple of days. It took five calls (three to customer service numbers; two to Avis offices) and an escalation to a supervisor to resolve the issue and find that there was a minivan available at the Avis office in the New Bern airport, about a 30-minute drive from my daughter’s home. We picked it up and it took us home and took the family to the airport with no trouble at all.