Contests, Seeds, and Snow

I have gone through all the many, many, poems submitted to the National WOMR-FM contest and discarded all those without merit. I have gone through the hundred or so that remained, twice, but still have to get down to 3 prizes and 7 honorable mentions. I am taking today off to catch up on all the tasks I put aside and to have a fresh mind for what I hope will be the penultimate or even the last run through, but it is probably only the penultimate to get down some more. I still have about 45 poems to choose among.  It gets harder with each winnowing.

I enjoy it but it takes a lot of time and energy to judge both the national and regional contests. I don’t use a slush editor to pare down the submissions, but when I did, the judgement was too academic.  No thanks. 

I will always remember when I was one of the editors of our small publishing company, Leapfrog Press. I was letting my three-day-a-week assistant log in manuscripts.  I discovered she was rejecting a number. When I asked why, she said they were science fiction. Fortunately, I rescued what she had rejected before they went back. One of them was the bestselling of all our fiction and the most widely and favorably reviewed. 

It is amazingly cold. We have had a few snowy winters like this one while I’ve been here, but in my sixty years on the Outer Cape, we’ve never had such intense, long lasting cold. We’ve had it cold but only for 3 or 4 days at a time. This freeze just goes on and on and on and on.

We are nervous about the storm coming tonight or tomorrow morning. Weather people‘s predictions vary widely from a small amount of snow to half  a foot or so and the predictions on how windy it will get vary accordingly.  It makes Woody very nervous and me somewhat.

Since Dale is not working while he is in acute pian, I did all the seed orders. Woody and I split up calling them in or ordering on ine.  Either way, it took two days.  Now I wait to see what they actually have of what we ordered. I have a couple of extra catalogs I use when I need to order seeds that the place I initially ordered from is out of that particular seed.  We’ve done Fedco, Pinetree, Seeds ‘n Such, Burpee and Johnny’s.  I get the most form Fedco every year.  This year, the catalog didn’t come and didn’t come. When I called, the woman who answered said they were charging $3 for it. I ordered it but felt it wasn’t fair at all. I’ve ordered from them forever and a day, maybe 25 or 30 years or longer, and they could have sent out an email to everybody who regularly orders, telling them about the charge. As it was, we waited and waited so we did the seeds a full 3 weeks after we usually do.