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WEB PLAY

Words are fun, and images are fun, so I’ve built a number of websites over the years. Before handy webdesign software existed, I coded html stroke by stroke (labor intensive) and had fun with Perl. Here is one of the relics as well as a more recent site.

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Boardgame Freak

What can I say? I’m a boardgame addict.

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Frog Fork Tales

Spencer Farthing, one of my characters, has a blog for his Frog Fork: A Series of Extremely Short Novels.

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WORD PLAY

Want to hear an unedited interview from long ago about my YA novel, Bead’s Pickle?  Okay.

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NOT PLAY

Sometimes, life is anything but fun.

Rat in the Walls: Caregiving

In a series of YouTube videos, I look at my blog posts about caregiving and grief during the final year in which my brother was dying of ALS. I blogged as Ratty on a blog called Rat in the Walls, and I haven’t read the posts since I wrote them.

♥

My brother died in 2008, and I stopped blogging. In 2014, I revisited the blog long enough to change my profile on Blogger to use my real name, explaining:

“When I first started on Blogger, my handle was Ratty, maintaining anonymity so that in my Rat in the Walls blog I could write about my brother’s fatal illness without giving away his identity. Under that pseudonym, I could voice things I couldn’t elsewhere. Rats thrive in the dark. ::: Now, five years after his death in 2008, I’m coming out of the walls and reclaiming my humanity.”

Now, in 2017, I’m ready to reclaim my words.

So, here’s the project:  as I open each post and look at it for the first time since my brother died, I’m going to make a video recording in which I read the post aloud and say something about it.

I don’t remember much about the posts, except the following:

• They are short.
• Some of them state a brief lesson about caregiving that I learned that day.
• Some of them respond implicitly to the post that my brother made in his blog that day or a preceding day.

Every few days, I’ll open another post, read it aloud, and respond to the rat.

The YouTube channel for the videos is at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6PPij7wsemCujfqossao3g.

Here’s a link to the first video, made late at night while looking at the first post.

The first blog post says:

Title: Knock Knock

Scurrying, nibbling, hiding. That’s the Rat in the Walls. Knocking about at night, avoiding the light, coveting the cheese.

You only see the leavings: the dry little kernels that trace Rat’s passage through your cupboards; the holes gnawed behind your stove. The fruits of your labor, tooth-marked, scattered.

The Rat lurks in your back brain.