thirteen degrees

It’s only 13 degrees here in Portland! THIRTEEN!!! All the evergreen rhododendron leaves have curled in on themselves, like they’ve been mummified or preserved in a bog or something leathery like that - Local Garden Beset by Bog Mummy Rhodies! I guess it’s more of a flash freeze, but it looks similar and the other sounds more like a campy horror movie. Now I’m going to get paranoid that they’re creeping ever closer to the house with their reaching, twiggy hands. (Please don’t kill me, Bog Mummy Rhodies.) At least the knifepoint east wind isn’t blowing; it’s just sunny and still, clear and &^%$# COLD.

This boozy Christmas train photo doesn’t really have anything to do with my new (beginning and ending with this blog post) horror movie project, but maybe it should! Unsuspecting teenagers could ride the christmas train to a grove of frozen evergreen shrubs - they would THINK they were going to the haunted amusement park for teenaged shenanigans, but the evil, sentient train whistle (in league with the frost-bitten denizens of TERROR GROVE) has other plans. (It turns out that these other plans are all part of a rhododendron/train whistle communication problem - the Evil Shrubs, who are actually merely frozen, require the chlorophyl of the young to survive, the Train Whistle is a little foggy on biology and thinks teenaged humans would fit the bill.) Blah blah, screaming, scary shadows, don’t pick up that hatchet, nooooooo, it was all a dream… or was it? Wiggly camera! Wiggly camera! Blah blah, everyone’s fine apart from that one chopped off arm, but it doesn’t look so good for that train car full of hothouse poinsettias chugging around the bend. THE END.

Now I’ve got to finish my Christmas cards.