Category: Family (Page 21 of 24)

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.

Carrying on the Tradition of Christmas Cookies

December 14, 2009 / Katie L. Carroll

Holiday traditions come in all shapes in sizes. As a kid, one of my favorite Christmas traditions was when Santa would leave our filled stockings for us at the end of our beds. It was so exciting to wake up on Christmas morning and not even have to get out of bed to find our first presents.

All five of us (my two older sisters, me, my younger sister, and my younger brother) used to gather together on one bed and open up all out stocking gifts. As my older sisters got older, us younger kids used to open up our stockings first, then we’d go wake up my older sisters and watch them open up their stockings. This was a nice tradition for my parents too because it meant they got to sleep in a little later.

Oh, and we always got oranges in our stockings, which seems like it would be lame, but I remember it as a nice treat. The orange-in-the-stocking tradition is one that carried over into my adult life (it seems Santa remembers about such things even as we get older). Many of the traditions I had as a kid have faded away, but many new ones have taken their places.

Making Christmas cookies with my niece and nephew is one of those new, but at the same time old, traditions. I used to make Christmas cookies with my Nana (my great grandmother). Then she stopped coming up north for the holidays because it was just too cold for her. She passed away at the ripe old age of 96, but I feel a little like I’m carrying on her tradition in a new way with my sister’s kids.

Unlike last year, we didn’t have any lady-licking incidences this year, but I paid homage to that by making a snowman and gingerbread lady the centerpiece of my cookies.

(These are the cookies I decorated…notice the snowman and his gingerbread wife.)

(My ten-year-old nephew decorated these cookies. He and his friend also made a really cool gingerbread house of Hagrid’s hut, but I forgot to take a picture of it.)

(My four-year-old niece decorated these. She was very meticulous and seemed to have a grand plan for each one.)

(These ones were decorated by my three-year-old nephew…he did most of the decorating by himself, but my sister did give him some help with the big gingerbread lady!)

(And because I didn’t want my sister to feel left out, here’s her cookies, including the big gingerbread lady.)

It was definitely a fun afternoon. What are your favorite holiday traditions?

Celebrating the Accomplishments Made Later in Life

November 22, 2009 / Katie L. Carroll

The hubby turned 30 today, and he’s kind of been freaking out about this milestone birthday for some time. The other day he said something along the lines of, “Well, I may as well just die now because I’ll be 30 soon and my life will be over then anyway.” (He was kidding, of course, but I’m pretty sure there was a kernel of truth to him feeling that a certain aspect of his life would be over once he turned 30.)

In honor of this momentous occasion, here are some major accomplishments people have made after the age of 30:

As chronicled in the movie “The Rookie,” 35-year-old Jim Morris makes his Major League Baseball debut pitching for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.
At the age of 37, Julia Child begins her culinary career by enrolling in the Le Cordon Bleu cooking school.
Also at the age of 37, Tom Hanks wins his first Oscar for his role as Andrew Beckett in the movie “Philadelphia.”
John F. Kennedy becomes the youngest man to be elected into the office of President of the United States of America at the age of 43 years and 236 days.
At the age of 52, Ray Kroc, with the support of Maurice and Richard McDonald, franchises the hamburger restaurant McDonald’s.
In an act of civil disobedience, 61-year-old Mahatma Gandhi leads the approximately 200-mile long Salt March.
At the age of 73, Charlie Chaplin becomes a first-time father when his son Christopher is born.
The first of edition of “Roget’s Thesaurus” is published when Peter Mark Roget is 73 years old.
Anna Mary Robertson (Grandma) Moses begins her career as a painter at the age of 76 years old.

As for my thoughts on age, I maintain the argument that you’re only as old as you feel and that each birthday is a time to celebrate that you’re still here, alive and kicking. I, for one, can only wish that my younger sister (who died when she was 16) got to see 30. Imagine all the things she would have gotten to do with an extra 14 years. That’s why, although I don’t relish the idea of getting older, I try to embrace it as an opportunity. Not everyone gets the opportunity to grow old, so I am honored each time I reach another birthday and try not to let it bother me as I continue to grow old(er).