Gamma in the doorway of her igloo. Note the snowgoyles to either side of the door, and the hedgehog hotel in the lower left part of the picture.

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First he was tired, so tired he was afraid he would drive his car off the mountainside, then the electrical system went… no, that’s too realistic… then all four tires simultaneously…

How do we get him here? Getting off the bus, the pool cleaner unloaded his gear and thought to himself with satisfaction that from the looks of this “resort” he had a few weeks work at least. Everything was covered in a foot of leaves, at least. The whole place smelled like when you drop your cell phone in the woods and have to rake around in the mulch with your hands until you find it again.

That’ll do.

He went inside but no one was at the desk so he went into the dining room where a dozen zombies with blue rinses sat around listening to a stand-up comic. The comic stood on a small, round make-shift stage, with a drink in one hand and the microphone and a cigarette in the other.

He was telling an Irish joke that he had remanufactured from an old Jewish joke.

“So Mig Mick can’t stand it anymore and he goes up to the local priest, see, and he says, Father, I can’t stand it anymore, ye see.”

The pool cleaner notices the dining room is so quiet that when someone drops a piece of silverware in the kitchen, you can tell from the sound it makes that it’s a fork, and that the floor is tiled.

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Winners of the 2005 Valentine’s Limerick Contest (extra points were awarded for mentions of skin conditions, medical pioneers and microscopic animals; see all entries in comments to this post) are as follows:

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As every morning, I was thinking this morning about how things are accomplished. Thanks to the book “Bird by Bird” Anne generously loaned me, which life experience corroborates, I even have an answer now: thing by thing. One builds, as I have said before, an igloo shovelful by shovelful. You write a novel word by word, everything is bit by bit. The title of the book comes from an anecdote about the author’s brother getting advice from his writer father to write a late report on birds “bird by bird”.

So, sitting at my table this morning, the phrase “mouse by mouse” came into my mind. It sounded good for a second, it seemed to make sense. Either it was god winding me up, or the cats.

My cats do send me messages, you know, of the extra-sensory sort. Sitting in the kitchen, I know when a cat wants out of or into the house. I get up, go to the front door, and there it is waiting with that feline “it’s about time” expression on its face.