Geron Kees

I much prefer to approve of my friends, than to disprove their theories.

Huh? Hey...who left the door open again!

Insta-ghost! Coming soon to a creepy old building near you!

May you also live long and prosper!

Sorry your morning was rough. And you're not the first guy to call me 'distracting'!

The only guns people in the UK have are in military arsenals and on the hips of their bobbies. And if the bobby in question is cute, it's scarcely even threatening!🙂

Kitties can be the most frightening ones on that list!

It worked for me, and I thought for many years that 'UK' was just an acronym for 'unorganized knickknacks'!

Uh oh. Admit it...you're a Vulcan, right? I have found that people are mostly not analytical to that degree while going about their daily business. I know I don't keep a running count on how much bread is in the kitchen, and have more than once gone looking for an English muffin only to find there aren't any left in the breadbox and I need to get a new package from the freezer. I do not remember the location of every small item in my house, and while I have discovered things in places I did not remember leaving them, I do not immediately consider a supernatural or otherwise unusual reason for it being there. I figure I simply put it down there and forgot it. There are levels of that, though. I have things in my house I take more note of, and it they were moved, I would notice, and would know I had not moved them. On the other hand, I don't live alone, either. I also have a regular procession of family and friends through here (well, in non social-distancing times, anyway), and my first thought would be that one of them had moved it. I also have a secure home out in the boondocks, and my first thought would never be that a stranger had managed to get in and move something. We tend to weigh daily elements like this on a subconscious scale, and not place much stock in them unless they tip too far into the red. Granddad would consider that he has a secure condo in a secure building, that there was no way into his home, and that if no one else had been there, than it had to be that he simply used more bread and then forgot. Being a chef doesn't necessarily gift anyone with a better inventory of the food in their own home. My mom is not a chef, but she cooks and bakes incessantly, and is always calling to borrow something she didn't know she was out of. I guess my answer to what you've pointed out is that most people are too wrapped up in daily living to pay that close attention to the smaller things around them. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it! 😇

I love stories like that! Those are the sorts of little tales that make everyone smile, but are common in one form or another to life for us all. Thanks for sharing!

I lived for six years in New York City, in an older building in Manhattan. It had lots of this sort of charm, and we loved it even though we did not particullarly love city life (we is country folks!). The building had its weird noises, and the old elevators often sounded like they were getting ready to drop us ten floors to our deaths. But we never considered that the place might be haunted. Sounds to me like you live somewhere just oozing with great story ideas! Consider that a hint!

Is it a black cat? Cats are like that. My brother's cat comes out to greet him whenever he drives up (he's in the boondocks like me), and has a weird penchant for getting into the car when no one is looking. When my brother and his wife bring groceries in, the cat will sometimes get into the car and lay in the back seat, and they don't notice. After an hour or so, they'll think, "Where the heck is the cat?", and my brother will realize what happened, and go out to the car, and there is the cat looking out the window at him, as if to say, "You locked me in!" Cats live in a no-fault world - for them. They see everything that happens as YOUR fault!

Maybe. It would ruin it for me to say more!

It actually wasn't supposed to be really creepy. But if it creeped you out at all, that's a nice bonus! I'll take what I can get!

How would I know? I just wrote the darn thing! I haven't read it yet, myself!

Shh! It's a secret!

I'd tell you, but i won't know myself until I read the end!

Thank you!

There is a good joke there, but I am too timid to state it in mixed company!

Yes. And Arnold was not particularly pleased, either!

It's the middle of summer, so school is out. You make some good points about the reason for David staying with his grandfather, that they were not clearly enough stated. The mother is obviously no longer at home, and I thought I gave enough clues to indicate that the father was wrapped up in business and would be away for a few days. He did state that he wouldn't be back before the weekend. I also mentioned that the mother was after David to come live with her, something he did NOT wish to do. David is old enough to stay home on his own, certainly. As a parent myself, I trusted my own son at 17, but I doubt I would have wanted to go out of town and leave him alone at home for any length of time if there was a reason not to do that. Not that he couldn't be trusted, but that the world around him cannot be trusted. It was the suddenness of the move that had David initially upset, not that he had to stay with his granddad, who you can see he is quite fond of. The mother has been stated to be trying to get David to come live with her, and I felt the dad wanted him somewhere safer than left home by himself. That was my initial reasoning for the move, but maybe I did not so plainly state it. Sorry!

Buildings incorporate much of the personality of their designers, the manufacturers of their various systems, and even the people that live in them. The buildings designed in each age vary hugely by aesthetics, because what constitutes beauty also changes. I find buildings designed at the peak of the art deco period in the 1920s and 1930s to be especially appealing. They incorporated a lot of visually interesting features, and also tended to experiment by utilizing modified features from earlier architectural periods like German Renaissance, Gothic, and Victorian. I very much eyeballed The Dakota as a semi-model for The Boltfort, though updating it a little for the art deco era. The elevators in those old buildings were very much works of art, ornate, massively-made, and showing off much of what they were about by not hiding the works like modern elevators do. They were fun. Pleased you like the setting, and the story!

I'd forgotten that granddad was off the next day, so he was in no hurry to get up the next morning. By the time he came into the living room I was showered, fed, and two hours into the next book in the fantasy series. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and the sunlight streamed in through the dining room windows and spilled across the carpet to land at my feet. Granddad was in his blue bathrobe and fluffy slippers, and I had to smile. He smiled back. "What? It's that funny?" I shook my head. "

Thank you!

I learned English from my dad, who is American. My mother is Dutch. We lived near Amsterdam until I was nine. But my parents wanted all of us kids to learn English well, as they expected the family to come to the US at some point and stay a while. We did that, and It turned out to be a stay of over 40 years! My greatest problem upon arriving was the way the locals spoke their English. My dad was college educated, military trained, and spoke English fluently and clearly. That's the way we kids learned to speak it. But the locals did neither! The slang was overwhelming, the pronunciations difficult to grasp, and the tendency to elide - omit entire syllables - preponderant. And, the other kids gave me a hard time for the way I talked! Fortunately, I was nine years old, and not thirty. After a year, I spoke English just as badly as a native. 🙂 J'aime ton nom. C'est l'orthographe inverse de la forme française d'Aristote. At-il un autre sens?