From a House to a Home

By Devin Barrett

It was October 11th, 2007, the day we moved into our (new) lake house. I was very skeptic about the house, the neighbors, and everything in between. I knew I would miss my old neighbors, tremendously. I sucked it up and tagged along for the move. The movers arrived at a chilling 6:30 in the morning; the brisk fall wind off the lake wasn’t helping. Luckily, our new house was only five minutes away.
When we arrived, I quickly walked through the new empty house, wishing it would be as good as my old one. The movers arrived and “dropped” of all of our stuff, we arranged it the way we’d like and sat down to take it all in. I remember this day quite vividly because this was also the date of our annual light house festival. We traveled to the lighthouse and looked through all of the local merchant’s stands; we than bought a few items to make our new house feel like a home. When we returned to the house, we put the new items in their “right” place. I soon realized, maybe this house will be even better than our old one.

What is Reality Anyway?

As Lucy and I wondered down the old Tree Top railroad, I heard a loud screeching sound,
“Lucy, watch out!”
“Ahhhhhh!”
It had been Pterodactyl Man, the town’s great superhero; he saved my sister just as the tree-top express wondered down the fully covered train tracks, caused by the overgrown vegetated surroundings. I can’t stand this train, the operator, Old Man Iowa, he is certainly crazy. I swear that man gets absolutely no sleep! He always falls asleep on the train, while he is supposed to be operating it, our terrified civilian’s only hope is Pterodactyl Man. He sweeps down from the rocky Pointe Pleasant everyday in hope of saving one of our town’s people. My sister and I don’t want to rely on him anymore, we are fleeing this town for good.
We traveled down the tracks for a few days now, both of us looking quite pitiful, we hadn’t seen civilized plumbing for a day now, Lucy’s hair was beginning to become very stringy. On the bright side, we hadn’t had anymore encounters with Old Man Iowa and his train. We did however run into the evil little leprechaun in the Butterfly Meadows, he was asleep though.
“Today is a new day!” I proclaimed to Lucy.
“How so?”
“The elevator to reality was only a few miles away!”
“I can’t believe it; I just can’t believe that we will see the real life behind all of this mayhem!”
We traveled down the track for a few hours; we were moving very slow, Lucy had injured her ankle during the train track rescue. We stopped and had a little picnic, I picked up a loaf of bread and some jam at the last General Store back some way.
“I am going to miss this place”, confessed Lucy.
“I will too, but I think we’ll be much better off with out all of these distractions”, I tried to put it in the kindest way possible; after all, some of the “distractions” were Lucy’s friends.
We packed up the picnic and started down the tracks yet again, I quickly saw the great elevator of reality, the one that we’d all heard about. Lucy and I raced as quickly as we could to the elevator; we barely managed to keep our feet on the ground. We pressed the reality button and the elevator went soaring up into the sky. The door opened, and we cautiously walked out and looked around. We both noticed all of the violence and destruction. We then asked ourselves,
“What is reality anyway?”

thisweek...

...I continued reading the Ivy Chronicles, which I really like. Ivy Ames,the main-character, told the parents, or her clients, to create a few paragraphs about their child, which she would edit into profiles. The first she received, was, well, horrible, she had to have her professional-writer-friend to make it sound the slightest appealing. Ivy also attended to her personal life, she got to know her neighbors, one , a cook named Michael, who owned a very famous deli downstairs (from her apartment), who's regulars included Oprah and Hilary Clinton. Another, a writer, named Philip, got used to the noise from her children playing in the very rare backyard, I remind you this in the middle of New York City, he even moved his desk/office from the back of his apartment to the front.
I also worked on my "writers notebook", I continued writing a few writing prompts throughout the week, one being an invention which i wanted "destroyed", a chose cars, I just feel like our generation as become accustomed to very lazy behavior. Also, I read a short comic, with no words, I created a short story-line on how all of the characters (in the comic) got into this "messy" situation. I based the situation on sibling rivalry, which I fortunately don't have to partake in, where they all blamed the "slacker" of the family, for the food fight caused at their "mother's" birthday party. I also added in that this "sly" looking character in the background caused the mayhem in the dining room by stealing all of his grandmothers birthday presents. He was unfortunately surprised at the presents, being one a shower cap. He decided the only thing he could do in a situation like this was to join in with a piece of cake and laugh.
Also, we were to write an affect-effect story based on Grammar Girl's entry, on how to differentiate between them. Affect is what affected the "aardvark", and Effect is how the reaction was. I chose a strange story about me and a friend, and how an elderly woman came up to us whispering in our ears, "vote for Obama", anyways it was very strange, which is exactly why I chose it for the writing prompt. Being creative and differant is exactly what writing is about, uniqueness.

Celebrate at Cinequest

Celebrate the new artists at San Jose's Cinequest Film Festival, starting February 25th to March 8th. To purchase tickets, event passes, and more visit the festivals official website.
A lot of the films sound very interesting,
-All About Dad
-First Person Singular
-Audie and The Wolf
-Garrison Keillor: The Man on the Radio in the Red Shoes
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Check it out, you may get inspired.

The Novel

I am currently reading, "The Ivy Chronicles", about a homeless upper-east side mom who decides to become an adviser for private kindergarten, she meets many quirky people and has fun along the way, climbing herself back to the top of the social network and back onto Park ave.

Barnes and Noble, $14.00
Source//nypost.com