DOG DAY AFTERNOON BEER

Talk about your WARPED WEDNESDAY!
This was on someone's Bucket List. If it was a watermelon martini instead, it would be on mine!

LOST in Kauai

Chickens and roosters run rampant on the island of Kauai, and they're pretty, too. Those are two facts I'm surprised to learn on my visit to the colorful island.

What Sarge and I don't see on the island is the iron hatch with the DHARMA Initiative logo on it, the Black Rock pirate ship, or any of the "Others" from the TV series Lost. Nor do we hear the steel-grating sound of the Smoke Monster, even though episodes were filmed on these very shores.

Okay, that's enough reminiscences for us Lost buffs and our bent towards unsolved mysteries. (Why DID the Smoke Monster make mechanical sounds?)

Flashsideways. What we do see in Kauai is very lush greenery, the most vivid horizon, and the bluest ocean I've ever seen; more vibrant even than the Caribbean, in my humble opinion. Maybe it just seems that way because we got our trip at half-price; the catch being -- and this is a plot twist -- we have to listen to a 90-minute timeshare pitch. Spoiler Alert! We end up buying the timeshare. Who knew, she said, throwing up her hands in wonderment.

Anyway, Kauai is a great place for lovers, so you'd better love the one you're with if you decide to come here because there's not much else to do. More than half the island remains uninhabited so visitors mostly lay on the beach and go to restaurants. We are not bowled over by the island's cuisine, though, except for Gaylord's Plantation restaurant. Worth every penny.

Also worth the price of admission is the Movie Island Tour where we see the film sites of Jurassic Park, South Pacific and some of the Elvis movies.

We didn't do any filming ourselves, but we did take photos. Check out the slide show in the sidebar. Sarge got some well-deserved rest, and I was able to cross off number "4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 32..." er I mean Number 78 off of my Bucket List.
(That's one last parting gift for you Losties)

What's on your bucket list?

The Buried Life

I struggle to keep you -- my precious flowers . . . I mean followers -- entertained, but I'm not going to get naked and chain myself in a coffin just so you can have a good laugh. Instead, I came across something I found interesting and I hope you do, too, for I know you like to live a varied life.

Trick or treeeeeeaatt!!!!

The Buried Life of MTV

One Krazy Kat

This is WARPED WEDNESDAY . . . where you supply the caption using the words "bucket" and "list." Kudos if you use both!



(photo courtesy of stewickie)

Bleeding at the Typewriter . . .

. . . is my day gig.

It is otherwise known as the art of writing. For the first time in my life, I wrote for a week straight, Number 113 on my Bucket List -- me and my writer pal Pamela Samuels Young.

If you're a writer trying to focus, sometimes you need to get out of your own way. Los Angeles is a great place to be if you're a mogul with your own movie studio or the governator of your own state, but if you're a writer trying to hone in on her story, you need to get away from distractions of Kardashian proportions.

So Pamela and I drove to Palm Springs, writing from the moment we arrived at the house, breaking only for meals, which we never took together. Pamela worked on her fifth legal thriller, while I pecked away at my debut novel, Sput Louie, Cherokee Freedwoman.

It's historical fiction about a freed black woman, Sput Louie, who is chasing the American dream of owning her own land when she suddenly finds herself back at the mercy of her former owner, a Cherokee Indian, himself in the throes of fighting for his own dream. But love, lies and a vicious murder stand in both their ways. When a third party arrives, it becomes a nightmare of a struggle between the land-rich, the land-poor and the land-greedy.

I said we wrote from the moment we hit the door, but that's not entirely true. Ah, the unreliable narrator rears her ugly head, and she didn't even comb it first. While Pamela was writing in the living room, I did my usual writing routine: first, I spread all of my research out on the dining room table, put it in alphabetical order chronologically, from smallest to largest according to color, height and weight. Only after that bit of procrastination did I begin to write. I wrote and wrote and wrote some more, and the story began to bleed out of me.

It was such an invigorating experience, I'm determined not to let the momentum subside. I know that my work is less than a fourth of the way done, so I've added a word-meter widget at the bottom of my blog to showcase the pace of my WIP. I just hope it whips me in line when I'm slacking.

Strike through Number 113 on my Bucket List. I wrote for a week straight and lived to blog about it. Next time, maybe a month?

Grapes of Laughs

A winery would be a perfect place to carry out a Bucket List Maneuver AND have an I Love Lucy moment with your BFF, your daughter, your mother or your sister just like this fun-loving bunch did.

What's on your Bucket List?

How Clever Are You?

WARPED WEDNESDAY
...WHERE YOU WRITE THE CAPTION USING THE WORDS "BUCKET" OR "LIST," KUDOS IF YOU USE BOTH!