Former Member

Inspiration is not something you can turn off and on like a faucet. It can be fickle and stubborn. And some of us are unable to tap into it at all. I am happy to read what is produced as it becomes available. This despite the appearances when I tease a certain Danish author. Or complain about the difficulties of wading through the encyclopedic lengths of another author's postings. After all, none of them is charging me to read any of their stories here. ;–)

Alex is finally starting to put his life back in order. Talking to his parents about going back to school was very important even though they were never going to object to that unless he wanted to go away again. ;–) It’s also good to know he didn’t connect his credit card to his app store. Apple makes that impossible unless you know to use a Gift Card when you set up the account. At least Alex took the step to avoid temptation. ;–)

A respectable amount of time has certainly passed! ;–)

I’m going to guess that most tissue-stuffing young teenaged girls wouldn’t pull one from their ‘stash’ no matter how badly their nose was running – that would be an admission of guilt! ;–) I’m sure none of us ever resorted to any false advertising. I’m sure we were all very honest even as a teenager. (Because it’s too easy be caught in a lie, as Aidan found out.) ;–)

Now I’m hungry for a steak dinner first thing in the morning (first thing in the morning for me, that is, with my weird sleep schedule). And there’s absolutely no room in the budget for steak. ;–) I missed these guys! And Tracy came up with a great date for them. Such a romantic setting. With such a convenient spot to complete the evening. ;–)

I just figured they occasionally hopped into the ‘crick!’ ;–)

Sheldon Cooper’s Meemaw always has tissues up her sleeves! ;–)

Prompt 11111 “French-kissing my teammate was so much more arousing than I thought it would be!” ;–)

Spoilers! And now I’ll reveal that I only know about Christian Siriano because of articles on Advocate.com. Billy Porter’s Christian Siriano gown for the Oscars is a prime example. His outfits for Leslie Jones were additional examples.

Yay! Now I can use Reader View in Safari for this chapter! ;–)

I just hate onions. My mother loved them and put lots in the dishes she cooked. She hated it when I’d pick them all out and refuse to eat them. ;–) Now I just wish she were still around to cook for me again…

Oh, and ‘No cebollas, por favor!’ (No onions, please.) ;–)

No, just using one of the only phrases I know in French (because ‘Philippe’ seemed like a French name). ;–) ‘No comprende’ is my favorite Spanish phrase – it’s the one of the ones I use the most, along with ‘Lo siento.’ and ‘No se.’ ;–) My ignorance is multilingual…

Je ne comprende pas. ;–)

But my interpretation of the final chapter is funnier. ;–) It’s also not even remotely the arc that Ron has created. It doesn’t fit Ron’s style or thought process either. It’s a product of my twisted imagining of the most outlandish ending possible. ;–)

If you are using either Firefox or Safari, you can try Reader View. Other browsers might offer that feature too. Alternatively, a workaround would be to copy and paste the text into a text editor or text reader and change the font yourself. In MacOS, an old, free utility that’s very helpful in these sorts of situations is Tofu (but I’m not sure how easy it is to find these days).

Flat pack furniture (and Lego sets) usually come with a few extra pieces. I’m usually able to assemble them without a problem. But then again, I grew up building Lego sets with their (almost always) wordless instructions. And have usually been successful with the usually wordless* origami instruction illustrations. * Occasionally, instruction books from Japan have clarifications in Japanese which I cannot read. If they were written in Romajin (Japanese words written in the same alphabet as English and most European languages), I’d be able to type them into my computer for translation. I’m not sure if scanned or photographed Japanese characters can be translated because somewhere along the line they’d need to have OCR (Optical Character Recognition) involved and Japanese kana and Chinese characters include much more subtle variations that are significant than Latin Script letters.

Final chapter: Richard saw a fortuneteller who predicted the world would end if a product of Richard’s bloodline is Gay. Being the superstitious type, he’s conflicted between Richie being his son and wanting to save the world. It’s causing a schizophrenic split in Richard’s personality… ;–)

Spontaneous Human Combustion is supposed to be a myth! Maybe they just never realized what the source of the combustion was! But what was the cause before @Laura S. Fox wrote this chapter? ;–)

This chapter is posted in a typewriter-style font. Unlike the last chapter, and like the first three chapters, something in the way your software interacts with the GA site software prevents Safari from identifying the text correctly and it won’t let me use Reader View – Firefox has allowed me to use its Reader View in those cases. There are a couple other authors whose stories similarly have interaction issues that result in the same problem (and solution). I don’t have any other issues with the text. There are problems with missing words or incorrect near-homonyms which I attribute to your dictation software.

I don’t hate David, I just think he’s made a lot of bad decisions in the past. ;–) So, Charlie, David, and Eric? ;–) Or will Charlie introduce Eric to Jacob after the show ends? ;–)

I was thinking the very same thing! ;–) I don’t have cable (too expensive on Disability), so I’ve never seen the show. Bravo hadn’t even been created when I last had cable TV. Besides, the only reality show I’ve ever watched was MTV’s Real World and I only watched the very first season (with Eric Nies before he let his looks go) and the season in San Francisco with Pedro. I don’t care for the manufactured drama and exaggerated angst of the genre.