I was Storytelling Tip Master for the Silicon Valley Storytellers meeting on October 11th. The meeting theme was “A Wrinkle in Time”, and I wanted the tip of the day to have something to do with the book. I’d read the book in elementary school, but by the time the second book in the series was published, I was in college and not interested in YA books.

Luckily, we had a copy of the book that we’d bought for Jeff when he was in elementary school. I used the opening line of the book (“It was a dark and stormy night”) as my inspiration and called on our members to start their stories in a way that drew the reader in.

It took a while, but that first line finally drew me back to the book, and I finished it today. I remembered much of what happened, but I’m pretty sure I got more out of it on this reading than I did the first time through.

We have the next three books in the series; I’m looking forward to catching up with the Murry family!

As I write this entry, it’s been 24 full hours since our last power outage. I never found out what caused the one last night (the weather was not an issue), but at least it was brief enough that the UPSes carried through with only a small hitch – the Mac mini that runs the home automation put itself in sleep mode, even though it’s on a UPS. I fixed it this morning when I saw the power light pulsing on and off (the lights in the garden were on, too, which was another clue that things had gone awry).

Speaking of the garden, we harvested our first persimmon today. Not just the first persimmon of the year, but the first persimmon since we planted the tree in early 2014! We should get a few more persimmons this year unless the squirrels beat us to them – we don’t want to harvest too soon because it’s hard to keep the persimmons from getting soft.