Category: Anecdote (Page 25 of 30)

Partying In St. Lucia With The Big Bamboo

March 14, 2010 / Katie L. Carroll

While in St. Lucia, the hubby and I did the Soufriere By Land and Sea adventure through Sunlink Tours. We traveled down the east side of St. Lucia by open jeep from Castries to Soufriere and back north by party catamaran. Al was our fearless driver and Thomas was our funny and knowledgeable guide (see below about bamboo for a taste of his trivia).

Here’s our jeep. Al is all the way to right (and yup, that’s the elusive hubby on the left). I’m very sad to note that I never did get a picture of Thomas. He was so busy making sure all of us tourists were taken care of that the only time he really sat down was when we were riding in the jeep.

The highlights included:

Getting pummeled by a waterfall, which was quite refreshing (yes, be kind…that’s me in a bathing suit!)

Driving into a volcano, complete with sulphur springs that smell like–you guessed it–rotten eggs

Being entertained by the Captain (that’s him jamming behind the wheel) as he sang along with Bob Marley and “Big Bamboo.”

Every time I hear the word bamboo, it just brings me right back to St. Lucia. Did you know that bamboo was the national tree of St. Lucia? That is until they found out bamboo isn’t a tree at all. Now bamboo is the national plant of the island and calabash is the national tree. All the Americans on the tour agreed that our country would have changed the status of the bamboo to a tree just to avoid having to admit being wrong!

A Winter Surprise on the Beach

February 15, 2010 / Katie L. Carroll

Today the hubby and I were sitting on a bench at the beach (the same beach at which I did my listening exercise). We had just stood up to continue our walk when a woman hopped out of her running vehicle and said, “Excuse me.” I had my hood on, so I didn’t even hear her, but the hubby did. We stopped and she said, “I’m looking for Anchor Beach.”

I gestured to the beach and around the corner and said, “I believe this whole stretch is Anchor Beach.” (Apparently she didn’t believe me because as soon as we turned the corner, we saw her asking someone else!)

It seemed weird that she was looking for a specific beach in the middle of winter, but we soon found out the real reason she was there. We rounded another corner and a news truck and a bunch of people were milling around. Cones and police tape had been set up and signs were posted.

At first I couldn’t figure out why all those people were there. I turned to my husband and quietly asked, “Do you see anything?” Just as I asked, I realized the rock I was looking at wasn’t just a rock. A baby seal was laying on it. He was so well camouflaged that he was hard to see. Can you see him lying there on the rock? (Scroll down to the bottom of the post for a hint.)

At first he looked dead, but as we watched and listened we found out that he was just basking in the sun and wasn’t hurt or anything. He was young but old enough to be out on his own. Our little visitor made the local news! Here he is.

I was so happy to have this little surprise spotting today that I did my own banana pose! (Okay, here he is one more time…this time I’ve circled him!)

My Haunted Wedding Location

February 8, 2010 / Katie L. Carroll

Let’s start with a bit of a digression: links to three contests. One is to win R.J. Anderson’s book Knife over at Cindy Pon’s blog. A second contest is a book giveaway at the Class of 2k10 blog. The last is for a MG/YA agent contest over at Guide to Literary Agents. And now back to our regularly scheduled post!

The other night the hubby yelled to me from the living room, “You’ve gotta come see this!” I had just gotten out of the shower and was still in my towel, but it sounded urgent, so I dutifully obeyed. He pointed at the TV and asked, “Do you recognize this place?”

Without hesitation I said, “It’s where we got married.” I was thinking that it was pretty cool that the Nutmeg Restaurant was on TV…that is until I realized that it was being featured on an A&E show called Psychic Kids: Children of the Paranormal. Then I started thinking Okay, that’s kind of freaky.

Check out this video to see the episode of Psychic Kids (you might notice the above chandelier in it). The restaurant doesn’t come in until the 9:28 mark, and the 11:22 mark is when things really start to get scary. The “loft” is where the girl says she feels a ghostly presence and that was where my bridesmaids and I got dressed before the wedding.

When I thought about it, I remembered we did have a bit of a ghostly experience in the loft. We tried to open the window and all of a sudden it fell out of the track. By all laws of physics, the window should’ve gone crashing to the ground, but it didn’t. Something caught it and it teetered there, jutting out a weird angle. Here’s one of the guys from the restaurant trying to put the window back in place.

Come to think of it, my whole wedding seemed kind of cursed. We had originally booked a boat on the Connecticut River, but six months before the date, I got a piece of certified mail with the deposit check (at least I got my money back) and note that said the docking site had been bought out and we’d have to find a new place to have our wedding. That was no easy task, considering we had already booked the D.J. and photographer and couldn’t really change the date. (In wedding time, six months is like two days!)

Luckily the Nutmeg Restaurant was available, so we booked it right up. Then a few days before the date we found out the wedding planner there was “let go.” That meant the main person we had been working with to plan our entire wedding was not going to be working there on the wedding day. It also poured for 13 (gotta love lucky 13) straight days leading up to the wedding. It poured so hard that the hotel we stayed at the night before had massive leaking. And that was just the big things, never mind the million little snafus that happened.

Oh, and I just remembered that my sister accidentally left her dress in the loft after the wedding. The hubby and I went back the next day to try and find dress and to pick up a few other things that had been forgotten. The dress was no where to be seen! (There was a wedding after ours, and it’s possible someone from that wedding took it, but now that I know about the ghost, I’m blaming it on him.)

Turns out the actual wedding was awesome. The ceremony was personal (and brief), the food was delicious, and the dance floor was packed most of the day. The sun even came out in the afternoon. I guess it wasn’t so bad having a haunted wedding site.

The Signed Book Collection of a Bibliophile

January 17, 2010 / Katie L. Carroll

I’ve made it onto the web again! You may remember (or probably not) that I’ve blogged about appearing the web before (check out this post and this one). Unlike those other posts, though, this new one is ALL ABOUT ME! Check out a great–if I do say so myself–interview of yours truly on Kimberly Sabatini’s blog.

I mentioned in the interview that one of the reasons I like to go to writing conferences is to meet authors and have them sign books for me. Here’s my shelf of signed books:

I love all my signed books (call me a bibliophile if you must), but here’s a few that hold a special place in my heart:

Lisa Yee is a great writer and a really fun person. I’ve only had the pleasure of meeting her in person once, but we occasionally chat via her blog. It’s cut off in the picture, but she crossed out Stanford Wong and put in Katie!

I remember reading Bruce Coville’s My Teacher is an Alien back in grade school and loving it, so it was a real honor to meet him in person. I saw him speak at the SCBWI LA Conference a few years ago, and it was great.

Sid Fleischman is one of the cutest men I’ve ever met. He was in a humor panel at the LA conference. He was one of the quieter contributors on the panel, but when he did speak, it was definitely worth listening to. I later told him that I enjoyed his subtlety, and he said to me, “I’m sure you have a great deal of subtlety as well.”

As I was looking at my signed books, I realized that I have given away all my signed picture books, but there was some good ones. My favorite is How Do Dinosaurs Eat Their Food? by Jane Yolen and illustrated by Mark Teague (it’s signed by Mark Teague), which I gave to my little nephew. When you read it with him, he turns to the title page and says, “It’s signed by Mark (my nephew has a funny little accent like he’s from Boston or something, so Mark sounds like Mak) Teague and he drew a picture of a dinosaur.” Then he recites the whole book for you.And because there can never be enough links in one post, here’s one more for you. Agent Mary Kole is running another contest on her Kidlit blog, so check it out here.

Magnetic Poetry: Poink

January 6, 2010 / Katie L. Carroll

Girls’ Christmas (my “sisters” and I get together every year for a girls-and-kids-only Christmas party) was relocated to my house at the last minute, so I requested that my guests create a sentence with the magnetic poetry kit on my refrigerator. Here’s what we came up with (as usual, I put a space in between each magnet to show the creative combinations):

love people like they a r e obedient prostitute s (I would think any obedient prostitute is easy to love, so this could be a new logo for world peace or something!)
experience perfect pleasure through bald chicken rhythm dance ing (I’d like to see bald chicken rhythm dancing…or on second thought, maybe I wouldn’t.)
spark random inspiration speak every thought investigate precious emotion (lather, rinse, repeat)
electric transgress ion s will burn holy fire (That’s what she said!)
the devil s skeleton is suck ing seed y sweet & sour soup (Nice alliteration…who knew the devil’s skeleton liked Chinese food?)

In other word news, my sister, niece, and nephews are trying to get the word “poink” into mainstream vocabulary. This started when my three-year-0ld nephew told my sister he didn’t want to sit in one of the dining-room chairs because it had a “pionk.” My sister asked, “What’s a poink?” So he showed her a broken chair rung that was sticking into his back. They now use the word regularly.

Poink has actually turned out to be very versatile. It can be a noun, as in the original sense: That needle has a sharp poink. It can be a verb, literally: Ouch! That needle just poinked me. It can be a verb, figuratively: Oh, you just got poinked. It can be an adjective: That needle is very poinky.

I checked out the urban dictionary and found some interesting definitions for poink and poinky. I recommend everyone tries to use poink in a sentence today.