Guest Blogger Mark Saunders, Author of Nobody Knows the Spanish I Speak

Ay, chihuahua! Ay, caramba! Oy vey!

In early December 2005, Mark Saunders and his wife, along with their dog and cat, packed up their 21st century jalopy, a black Audi Quattro with a luggage carrier on top, and left Portland, Oregon, for San Miguel de Allende, three thousand miles away in the middle of Mexico, where they knew no one and could barely speak the language.

Things fell apart almost from the beginning. The house they rented was as cold as a restaurant’s freezer. Their furniture took longer than expected to arrive. They couldn’t even get copies of their house keys made. They unintentionally filled their house with smoke and just as unintentionally knocked out the power to their entire neighborhood. In other words, they were clueless. This is their story.

Here, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty by Mark Saunders

Making a road trip with pets is much like making the same trip with kids, except pets never complain about your choice of music or pinch each other when you’re not looking. Furthermore, you can’t leave your kids behind in the car with a window cracked while you go inside to get something to eat.

In my case, we were making a six-day drive with a dog who had a bladder the size of a caper, a Standard poodle named Cassie, as well as a cat named Sadie, who believed a cat’s reach should never exceed its claws. We were traveling from Portland, Oregon, to San Miguel de Allende, in the middle of Mexico. By the end of the trip, we were all tired of the road and of each other.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself.

In an amazing feat of both endurance and stubbornness, our poodle stood the entire way, in the backseat just behind the driver. Not only that, she had to have the window rolled down, at least halfway, so she could stick her head out. We suspect Cassie was prone to motion sickness and required deep breaths of whatever was passing for fresh air at the time. By the end of a typical 10-hour day of standing in the car, our black poodle had usually turned green.
Sadie was a different story. Once she was inside the car, you barely knew she was there.

The catch was getting her in the car, a cross between a Herculean task and a Three Stooges routine.

The morning after our first day on the road, Sadie hid under the bed, hanging tough on a carpet that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since Y2K. When my efforts to grab her failed, we tried Plan B and began sweet-talking her with soft chants of “Kitty, Kitty, Kitty.” When that inevitably failed, it was back to Plan A, only this time I used a long piece of wood, sweeping it under the bed like a broom, which worked.

The second morning gave Sadie new hope, since the night before we had upgraded to two beds. She scurried back and forth, from bed to bed, until I tipped one of the mattresses on end. She hit the mattress, scaled it like a rock climber on amphetamines and reached the top, just as I grabbed her.

The third morning, we checked everywhere, from under the bed to behind the armoire, as well as all points in between. I turned on the closet light to find Sadie crouching inside a trough of transparent plastic that served as a tacky storage unit above the closet rod. Cat nabbed, case closed.

Three weeks after we arrived in Mexico, Sadie disappeared. We searched every corner of our house, inside and out. We walked up and down the street, calling her name as if a cat would ever deign to respond.

We found her, of course. Sadie had burrowed her way inside our bed’s mattress batting. Even with six days of cat retrieval experience, it took me twenty minutes to extract her.
But now, with the mystery solved, we knew Sadie’s hiding spot and the next time she crawled in there, we let her stay.

Paperback
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 9780984141289
Pages: 298
Release: November 2011
Amazon buy link
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0984141286?tag=tributebooks-20

Fuze Publishing buy link
http://fuzepublishing.com/nobody-knows-the-spanish-i-speak

eBook
Price: $9.99

Kindle buy link
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0060OIO8A?tag=tributebooks-20

Nook buy link
http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=dcSBhG3Rj8w&offerid=239662.2940013250970&type=2&subid=0


The blog tour's official site is:
http://nobodyknowsthespanishispeak.blogspot.com/



An award-winning playwright, screenwriter, and cartoonist, Mark Saunders tried standup comedy to get over shyness and failed spectacularly at it — the standup part, not the shyness. He once owned a Yugo and still can’t remember why. Nearly 30 of his plays have been staged, from California to New York - with several stops in-between - and two plays have been published.

With three scripts optioned, his screenplays, all comedies, have attracted awards but seem to be allergic to money. Back in his drawing days, more than 500 of his cartoons appeared nationally in publications as diverse as Writer’s Digest, The Twilight Zone Magazine, and The Saturday Evening Post.

As a freelancer, he also wrote gags for the popular comic strip “Frank and Ernest,” as well as jokes for professional comedians, including Jay Leno. Nobody Knows the Spanish I Speak is his first book.

Visit Mark online at:

Mark Saunders' web site:
http://www.msaunderswriter.com/

Tribute Books Blog Tours Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Tribute-Books-Blog-Tours/242431245775186

Nobody Knows the Spanish I Speak blog tour site:
http://nobodyknowsthespanishispeak.blogspot.com/

Book Spotlight: My Life As Laura by Kelly Kathleen Ferguson

Kelly Kathleen Ferguson needed to know—was connecting with her lifelong heroine the key to knowing herself? She decided to find out. She donned a prairie dress and retraced the pioneer journey of Laura Ingalls Wilder. From Wisconsin to Minnesota, South Dakota to Missouri, Kelly explored Laura’s past and her own. Part travelogue, part memoir and part social commentary, Kelly discovered how an adult relationship with a little girl, who lived in little houses long ago, can give a sense of purpose for today.

Read an excerpt!

I admit that the origin of the dress mandate was fuzzy at best. All I can say is the instant I decided to retrace the pioneer journey of Laura Ingalls Wilder, I knew I would wear a Laura dress. When I first envisioned this costume, my intention had been to browse online, haunt thrift stores, contact a seamstress, research historical garb, etc. What happened: I was leaving the next day and needed a dress.

That afternoon I scouted the local Goodwill, hoping for a miracle in the racks. Nope. I resigned myself to a vintage shop. As a general rule I dislike shopping in a place where a bored employee has nothing to do but stare me down. Help galls me, as I possess a toddlerlike insistence that I can do it myself. A poorling, I do not belong in the specialty spending bracket, and I hate telling people no, so I rank boutique shopping on the comfort par of wool sheets. Waiting until the final hour, I barreled into Mr. Higgins’Vintage Clothing & Costumes of Missoula, Montana, all bluster and little intention

Which explains why I was unprepared for this challenge posed by the owner.

“Do you want to dress like Laura the little girl,” she asked, scrunching up her face and tilting her head, “or Laura the adult?”

The proprietor folded antique bandannas on a display case while I processed. She looked somewhere between forty and eighty, youthful despite the crinkles. I had met her type a few times now, the western woman who could charge an alpine escarpment, dragging her giant dog while I clutched a scrubby tree and panted.

Her unexpected question, and inescapable inflection, made me realize that a thirty-eight-year-old woman dressing like a little pioneer girl was odd. And not odd in a quirky, adorable way, but odd in a Whatever Happened to Baby Jane way.

I inhaled the aroma of antique, steam-pressed sweat and rolled the dilemma around on my tongue, as though contemplating a flavor. This Laura dress issue was getting complicated. A basic getup began with the red calico worn by little girl Laura, but as Laura became a young woman, her wardrobe expanded. Passages detail her outfits—the brown poplin with her ostrich-feathered poke bonnet, her pink lawn, the black cashmere that became her wedding dress, but even if I chose an “adult” Laura dress, I would only be fifteen. At my age the real Laura was a farmer’s wife in Mansfield, and those clothes were not part of the Books.

To my relief, the owner had not asked why I needed a Laura dress, a question way too involved for me to answer right then. She didn’t even blink. As it turned out, my request was routine—in Missoula, Montana, people needed Laura dresses all the time. There were Frontier Days, reenactments of homestead life, and you never knew when Hellgate High might rally for another production of Oklahoma! The more we discussed options, I found myself grateful for professional help. A prairie newbie, I had not considered that I would need a bonnet and apron, or even known that the nineteenth-century style was Victorian. The owner said she was usually buried in calico and gingham, except she had just made a huge donation to the historical society.

Yesterday.

We leafed through her back stock of cowgirl outfits and flapper dresses with fringe. When I saw the rack of clown costumes, I began to panic a little. After an extensive search, we were able to roust out three dresses remotely suitable, not one of them a red calico or brown poplin with an ostrich-feathered poke bonnet. I took my options into the dressing room and drew the flowered curtain

Number One was a tiny yellow calico that had the girth of a sock. Number Two, brown with vanilla piping, looked doubtful (size and style-wise), but I tried anyway. It reached an impasse at my knees. I remembered yet another reason why I dislike vintage clothing stores: nothing ever fits. I confronted Number Three, my last chance—the floor-length, turquoise-blue-flowered dress with a scooped neck trimmed in ribbon and lace, cap sleeves, and a fluorescent-orange dust ruffle. Blue was Mary’s color, not Laura’s, but I rationalized that Laura had always wished she could wear blue. I chanted Laura’s mantra when facing the unavoidable—it couldn’t be helped.

In the end, the primary selling point of the blue dress was this: it zipped.

Read the reviews!

“Hilarious, perceptive and true, a homespun story as genuine as the ones that inspired it.”

—Judy Blunt, bestselling author of Breaking Clean

"You won’t detect any drawl in this Southerner’s voice. Ferguson is witty and edgy in a way that feels entirely fresh. This is stunningly, sharp, pitch-perfect writing."

—Neely Harris Lohmann, editor-in-chief of mental_floss magazine

"Grab your bonnet and plunk down in the sunny grass. Ferguson captures the high spirits and struggles of life on the prairie, then and now. A tribute to Wilder, a search for truer self, a twenty-first pioneer journey, My Life as Laura shows us how the books we love lead us to the life we need."

—Eric LeMay, author of Immortal Milk: Adventures in Cheese

PURCHASE MY LIFE AS LAURA AT:

AMAZON.COM

PRESS53.COM

BARNESANDNOBLE.COM

Kelly Kathleen Ferguson is the author of My Life as Laura: How I Searched for Laura Ingalls Wilder and Found Myself, a humorous memoir in which she retraces the pioneer journey of her lifelong heroine—in a prairie dress. Her work has appeared in mental_floss magazine, Poets & Writers, the Gettysburg Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Brevity, among other publications. She has an MFA from the University of Montana, and is working on a PhD in creative nonfiction at Ohio University. Kelly is a Libra, Cancer rising, Aquarian moon. She is Irish/French/German, lapsed Roman Catholic, and right-brained. Kelly once received a minority scholarship for a machinist certification program at Durham Technical Community College. When she was four, she ate a mothball and had to have her stomach pumped, or she would have died.

Visit her online at www.kellykathleenferguson.com.