Julian was futzing with his laptop when he heard Dana get home. Something was wrong with her car, and he could hear her coming from a mile away. He got up and went to greet her. He\u2019d been blogging his ass off, and he needed a break.
\n\t\u201cHey, Babe. What\u2019s the news?\u201d
\nDana hung up her coat, and started shedding her suit in the bathroom.
\n\t\u201cYou\u2019re the news. A blog? You sent your class to look at a blog?\u201d
\n\t\u201cSure. What\u2019s wrong with that?\u201d
\n\t\u201cThey seem to think it an outrage over at school.\u201d
\n\t\u201cTough titties.\u201d
\n\t\u201cPerky titties, apparently.\u201d
\n\t\u201cGreat writing. I think.\u201d
\n\t\u201cShe\u2019s what? Twenty five or something?\u201d
\n\t \u201cWait a minute. This is too much info floating around. Who spilled the beans?\u201d
\nAt this she sat down on the crapper and peed her usual river.
\n\t\u201cOne of the students!\u201d
\n\t\u201cWhich one?\u201d
\n\t\u201cThat I don\u2019t know. Confidentiality.\u201d
\nThis word made him uneasy.
\n\t\u201cYou mean there was a complaint.\u201d
\n\t\u201cApparently.\u201d
\n\t\u201cDamn. I\u2019ve got to show you this blog. It\u2019s really well written and confessional.\u201d
\n\t\u201cAll right, show me the blog.\u201d
\nDana scooched into her slippers and beat it for the booze locker in the kitchen. Julian didn\u2019t always join her. This night was one of these occasions. He felt his cheeks reddening at the thought of some protracted battle over some ridiculous accusation at Blue Ridge. He needed to have a clear head to ponder. While she poured her drink and made her way to the living room and the couch, he hit the back porch and started bringing in some firewood. The fall chill had made this seem like a good idea. \u2018Do the evil thing and burn some trees while you ponder your fate,\u2019 he figured.
\n\t\u201cOooh. Good idea, Jules.\u201d
\n\t\u201cI occasionally have one, Dr. Fem.\u201d
\n\t\u201cLemme get my computer.\u201d
\nJulian set about making the fire. The room with the fireplace was also his study. The paneled walls, the high ceiling, the plasterwork, all of these elements made it a great room to write in. He sat on his ass, breaking twigs. He had a maul in the basement and when his frustrations ran high, he\u2019d head down there and turn logs into splinters. Ideally, you had to start with twigs and work up to sticks. From sticks, you graduated to bigger sticks, and then finally, logs. He\u2019d been using the sawdust and chemical logs for a while. They burned cleaner and thus kept the chimney freer of soot, but La Feminita had a meltdown about it at one point. She had a way of working at things that was all her own. Usually Julian loved her for it, but sometimes she could be a real pain in the ass. The fireplace logs disintegrated into a waxy mess if you poked at them to reposition a real log. Perhaps that\u2019s why the instructions on the wrapper of the log warned against augmenting them with the real thing. Julian had been in the habit of routinely doing this, but now, post fire log meltdown, here he was on his butt doing it the hard way. Eventually, the flames began to glow and writhe around in his mound of twigs and sticks. By the time Dana got her first serious shot down, Julian had a roaring fire going.<\/p>\n
She was perched in her chair, furiously typing away. He pondered. He acted.<\/p>\n
\u201cHere\u2019s the blog,\u201d he said, handing over the laptop.
\n\u201cOh. OK. Just a minute. Things are really heating up at master crafter\u2019s.\u201d
\n\u201cMonster crappers.\u201d
\n\t\u201cOK, let\u2019s see this stuff.\u201d
\nShe looked at \u201cAmy Tells All,\u201d which was open to the one about the evil sisters in the bar.
\n\t\u201cI agree. She\u2019s perky and funny. I don\u2019t see what\u2019s so bad about this.\u201d
\nHer attention span was short at the moment. Bacardi. She looked at Amy\u2019s bio.
\n\t\u201cShe\u2019s very pretty. If you spruced her up, she could model.\u201d
\n\t\u201cCould be.\u201d
\n\t\u201cOh, come on, Julian, admit that she\u2019s cute.\u201d
\n\t\u201cShe\u2019s cute. I admit it.\u201d
\nShe looked at her husband for a longer than ordinary moment. She was trying to pull a counselor Troi, and empath her way to knowledge of her husband\u2019s involvement with Amy Lissa. He looked blank.
\n\t\u201cThere was some talk in class about the possibility that she might not be even a woman. She spends a lot of virtual ink on the topic of airplanes.\u201d
\n\t\u201cWomen like airplanes. Sometimes they get obsessed with them.\u201d
\n\t\u201cYeah, I know that. I\u2019m the one that told you about Harriet Quimby.\u201d
\n\t\u201cRight. The one you wrote that story about almost before we met, the one that spent her last night on earth trying to get laid.\u201d
\n\t\u201cI forgot about that.\u201d
\n\t\u201cYou write too much.\u201d
\nHe hauled himself up and threw on another log. He took his laptop back and sat down. He went right back to blogging.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Julian was futzing with his laptop when he heard Dana get home. Something was wrong with her car, and he could hear her coming from a mile away. He got up and went to greet her. He\u2019d been blogging his ass off, and he needed a break. \u201cHey, Babe. What\u2019s the news?\u201d Dana hung up her coat, and started shedding her suit in the bathroom. \u201cYou\u2019re the news. A blog? You sent your class to look at a blog?\u201d \u201cSure. What\u2019s wrong with that?\u201d \u201cThey seem to think it an outrage over at school.\u201d \u201cTough titties.\u201d \u201cPerky titties, apparently.\u201d \u201cGreat writing. I think.\u201d \u201cShe\u2019s what? Twenty five or something?\u201d \u201cWait a minute. This is too much info floating around. Who spilled the beans?\u201d At this she sat down on the crapper and peed her usual river. \u201cOne of the students!\u201d \u201cWhich one?\u201d \u201cThat I don\u2019t know. Confidentiality.\u201d This word made him uneasy. \u201cYou mean there was a complaint.\u201d \u201cApparently.\u201d \u201cDamn. I\u2019ve got to show you this blog. It\u2019s really well written and confessional.\u201d \u201cAll right, show me the blog.\u201d Dana scooched into her slippers and beat it for the booze locker in the kitchen. Julian didn\u2019t always join her. This…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chapters","comments-off"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ken-beck.com\/bloggers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ken-beck.com\/bloggers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ken-beck.com\/bloggers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ken-beck.com\/bloggers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ken-beck.com\/bloggers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ken-beck.com\/bloggers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ken-beck.com\/bloggers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ken-beck.com\/bloggers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ken-beck.com\/bloggers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}