On day fifteen, Pancake the Penguin and her sister Pep the Lungfish suddenly encounter Narlee the Snow Monster! Their location had been reported to him by Fuzz, his pet… whatever… who had seen the sisters the day before.
Scary!
The thing about Narlee the Snow Monster, who lives near Glacial Falls, is that he eats gold. What a weirdo. In the photograph above, he’s taken the golden key from Pancake’s backpack and is chowing down. “I want golden!” he shouts.
Pancake and Pep scream aloud, as one does when faced with a fierce monster. And Narlee, scared, screams back, as one does when faced with a fierce pair of sisters. (I have two, so I ought to know.)
Narlee is not a shoggoth, nor an Elder thing, nor one of the Great Race of Yith. Instead he sort of looks like a giant snowman with horns. Sort of. Maybe he’s the Thing from the John Carpenter movie and will suddenly mutate into something else even scarier. I don’t know. I can’t imagine. Only tomorrow will tell.
Today’s entry in the Episcopal Advent Calendar (Bless) reads, “Spend a significant amount of time today discerning if there is a special blessing or gift you can share with your church, a local ministry, or with your community. Ask God to inspire and equip you with the fortitude and tools to make this gift something truly memorable and heartfelt.”
Many years ago, when I was first learning all about how to do web development, I decided that the best way to break in and get experience was to do some volunteer gigs for organizations that I believed in. So I worked on a website for an organization that was doing ecological and appropriate technological education in Latin America, some designs for a Bay Area organization mapping organic materials in the San Francisco estuaries, and a site for a medieval studies professor at UC Davis. All these sites are gone now, like tears in the rain, because I did these sites twenty years ago, and nothing on the Web lasts that long, except for Amazon.
I have long suspected that one of my best gifts that I could share was my writing ability, but I write fiction and not copy. So web development and so on is what I can offer. I think I’m also good at working directly with people, so there’s that as well.
I think this entry is something all of us can benefit from pondering.
HEALTH UPDATE: Still wheezing. Now taking Prednisone. So grumpy and hungry too.
Did you name Fuzz? Because that name’s a little too on the nose. Someone needs to tell Fuzz that snitches get stitches…
I did not name Fuzz… that’s the name that came with the story. But yeah, it’s quite on the nose, but probably not intentionally.