111206 after NaNoWriMo Day 6,
Tuesday, December 6, 2011, 4:53 PM
I am out on my first walk of the day and it's already
getting dark. No only that, but I didn't
look up a topic to write about for NaNoWriMo
I have dinner in progress, K is due home momentarily, Graham just left,
with Kristina, I haven't walked, I haven't worked on Death Angel, I
haven't worked on my Christmas card, and my lower back hurts, probably from
standing at the stove. I was up last
night with insomnia. Until like 2:30 or
3 Am, and I'm tired. I'm remembering the
time when I was so sick with asthma that Bruce had to do Christmas because I
couldn't. I'm thinking of giving up
Christmas because I can't deal with it, but last night and today when I was up,
I worked on a long blog post about color instead the Christmas card. AK.
And never looked up what I need to do next on Death Angel.
Wednesday, December 7, 3:57 PM, Cold, sunny, but already
late, wish I'd gotten out earlier instead of baking cookies and eating half the
chocolate chips and half the dough raw.
Wahn, I'll probably be sick for a week or more. AK.
* * * *
Death Angel ***!!!
Rune had arranged to give a presentation on edible and
poisonous mushrooms to Dr. Otis’s Mycology 101 class. It was something Dr. ((Hanselman)) had
arranged last spring when Rune had contacted Hanselman about doing a MS in
Natural History Communications under him in the fall. She was to give a series of presentation to
various groups, and Dr. Otis was the first of these.
Rune had worked on the presentation all spring and
summer. She already had an extensive
collection of slides and photographs, and she asked Peter Schilya to make
drawings for her of the few things she did not have photographs of and wanted
to talk about. It turned out that Peter
had lovely drawings of most of those already and only had to do a few. He seemed pleased to be asked and Dr.
Hanselman)) had arranged for him to get a projects course one credit for
assisting Rune.
Rune scanned all the slides and made presentation slides
to go between and put them together in a digital presentation that could be
shown with one of Larry Thompson's digital projectors. She created a voice over for it and gave a
copy to ((Hanselman)). for her project grade.
She intended not to use the voice over but to actually speak aloud in
her own voice in real time so she could answer questions. Hanselman was the chairman of the Forest and Environmental Communications department and
Rune's major professor for her interdisciplinary master's degree.
Dr. Otis seemed willing to have her lecture to his class
and smiled at her when she arrived fifteen minutes before the class with
Larry's digital projector. Rune wanted
to everything set up and test it before the students arrived.
Dr. Otis disappeared as she was setting up and came back
with two cups of coffee and some cookies.
"Larry dropped these off for you.
You and me, he said, but they must be primarily for you, because he
doesn't usually give me cookies," Dr. Otis said.
Rune turned to look at him, because his voice has an
unidentifiable note of jealousy or anger or something. But he was smiling amiably and holding out a
paper plate of cookies to her. Rune set
them on the projection cart next to the projector. She didn't want to eat
anything until she was sure everything was copesthetic. She used one of Larry's tiny little notebook
computers on the lower shelf to run the program through the projector and
everything seemed to be in order.
She took a bite of one of Larry's cookies and a sip
coffee. It was cherry hazelnut with
vanilla cream. She peaked at Dr.
Otis. He wasn't grimacing, so Larry must
have sent up two carafes o coffee. She knew from her past experience with
Dr. Otis that he hated f flavored coffee.
He thought anyone who liked flavored coffee was a wimp. Talk about an opinionated asshole. Rune thought to herself. He thinks that what he likes is right and
what other people like is wrong. Black
and white. But she smiled sweetly and
sipped the coffee Larry had made, just for her.
"He was wearing an APRON when he came with the
cookies," Dr. Otis said, a note of disdain and disgust in his voice.
"I think he looks cute in an apron," Rune said,
cheerfully, smiling sweetly aging.
She was pleased that Larry trusted her enough to allow
her to take the A V equipment herself
instead of insisting on coming along and setting it up for her. It's true that she was a high school AV geek,
but a lot had changed in the intervening years.
Technology was changing in leaps and bounds.
The first students were filing into the classroom,
talking quietly among themselves. Rune
stuck the dish of cookies on the bottom shelf of the cart and set her coffee
where she could sip it when she got dry.
Dr. Otis moved a little closer to her. "You're not following Dr. McHaggerty's
outline," he said, very quietly. He
had apparently deduced something about the order of her slides from the first
few that she had projected to test the projector. (screened))
"No," Rune said, "I have my own story."
Again, she smiled sweetly. Dr. Otis was
rubbing her the wrong way, as he often did.
It wasn't his actual words, which seemed harmless enough, but his tone
of voice, expression, and body language.
He was handsome. Like
McHaggerty, he had a beard and longish hair, but his hair was curlier than
McHaggerty's, and very dark. His skin
was dark, too, well-tanned, and his eyes were such a dark brown to be almost
black. His eyebrows weren't as bushy as
McHaggerty's.
Like McHaggerty, he was a bear of a man, large and
strong, but his strength was not diminished as much by age as
McHaggerty's. Not that McHaggerty was weak;
he just seemed not quite as bearish as Dr. Otis. Dr. Otis ((diminished McHaggerty when
he stood beside him.))
As Rune was thinking of McHaggerty, he and
((Hanselman)) appeared at the door and sat quietly in the back. They, along with Dr. Otis, were on Rune's
graduate committee and wanted to sit in on her actual presentation.
Rune had a pang of nervousness and then relaxed.
She'd gone over the talk so many times she knew it by heart, and
McHaggerty and ((Hanselman) etc had already essentially approved it.
Rune smiles to herself as she forwarded the presentation
through the test slides. Those slides
were there so that she could test the equipment without anyone seeing actual
presentation ahead of time. This was for
the sake of any early-arriving students, but Dr. Otis hadn't seen it either.
"This is one of our graduate students, Rune
Carmichael," Dr. Otis said.
"She's going to give a slide presentation of edible and poisonous
mushrooms. As you know, Dr. McHaggerty,
who is in attendance today, teaches a whole course on that subject. This will serve as in introduction to the possibilities
in that course. Miss Carmichael has a BS
in Natural sciences and wildlife management from ESF, and I might add,
graduated magna cum laude and second in her class. Miss Carmichael."
Rune stood up. She
smiled at the kids. They looked so young.
When she was a freshman, she thought she knew everything. Hah! What a joke. What a rude surprise, actually.
((Hanselman}} was sitting next to the light switches, and
Rune turned to him and said, "May I have the lights?”
