Garden
All the tomatoes are out there. If it freezes…well, let’s not think about that. We’ve got some nights in the high 30s coming along, but it’s getting towards mid-Feb. A freeze could happen, but it gets less likely each day. The tomato plants look very small out there, nothing like a plant that can support a half pound tomato.

I put the zuchini, cantaloupe and cucumber seeds in pots indoors. Something kept eating the seeds I tried outside. No doubt some nasty worm that is now fat. Hopefully the plants will be up soon. I’ve had pretty low germination luck with a number of the seed packets that I purchased this year. That’s the first time it’s happened. The Siberian tomato seeds took about 12 seeds before I got two to come up.

Reading
I finished reading Clues, Haunts and Mystical Madness! For the most part, excellent stories. I enjoyed “Computer Virus” by Melissa Mead–it works well in an anthology like this. A light story thrown in there between some of the more intense works. But it is a ghost story so it’s not too light. I think my favorite finds were Martha Well’s works. Very tense, well-paced page-turners. The Chatterslee Circle by Jaine Fenn had some great characterization. I loved the geeks in this story and was reading with great glee. I’m not sure the story actually went anywhere though. It reminded me of when I send an email to people I know about people they know. Fenn writes so that I felt like I knew these guys–but I’m not sure anything really important happened. “And Justice for Doll” by Will Ludwigsen was kind of like that too–an email to family and friends. It’s the type of story you expect to find in Reader’s Digest–cute.

All in all, I was very pleased with my picks. One of the things that I liked about it was that I mixed shorter shorts with longer picks so it made for really easy reading–I could read a quick one or a longer one. All of them were good enough to keep me turning the pages. If I had to build this anthology over again, there would probably be three or four stories I wouldn’t include, but mostly that’s because they weren’t my style or they were perhaps just a little darker than I would have liked. I’ve been out to www.AnthologyBuilder.com since I built this little gem and I already know of at least 5 stories I could include instead.