I bet you thought I wouldn't change my homepage in time for 2003, didn't you? I bet you thought I would let that oldy oldster index stay up after the year it refers to was gone! Well, what you got to say now? Huh? That's right, read my website--my up-to-date website--read it and laugh. 'Cause that's what I'm doing: I'm laughing at YOU for doubting me. I'm laughing at your bad attitude for checking at the beginning of the new year just to see if maybe old Vande-so-and-so didn't get rid of that out of date "2002" index in time. Well, I hope you like it, punk. I really do. I sincerely hope you really enjoy it.
The time is 1 AM Tuesday morning. The place, southwest Lakeland. A young fantasy/SF illustrator, Ian Vandewalker, is quietly reading in bed. A familiar "sweeping" sound is heard. Vandewalker's neighbor--who mows her lawn diagonally, regularly blows the leaves off her roof, and sweeps and washes down her walk and picks up leaves by hand from her lawn every morning at 5--is sweeping the road in front of her house, muttering to herself about sweeping leaves in the middle of the night.
An otherwise unremarkable trip to the Vandewalker attic turned grisly Tuesday morning. Pet supply wholesaler Ian Vandewalker was rooting around for luggage for his upcoming trip to New York City (NYC) when he noticed a gruesome smell. In the shadows, he glimpsed a rat trap on a ledge with an ominous shape hanging from it. Not to keep the reader in suspense, I'll now explain that the shape was the body of a dead rat, its head crushed by the trap's cruel clamping motion. The rat was a disturbingly large one to find in one's home, but it was quite dead. It was transferred to a plastic bag and disposed of. After some brief deliberation it was decided to not try to salvage the trap.
...and onto house. A wooshing and crashing sound much like those which are heard in logging films accompanied the sudden death of one of the old oaks in the Vandewalkers' neighborhood Tuesday afternoon. The tree simply leaned over and fell onto a house, pulling its roots right out of the soggy soil. The tree's branches punctured the roof of the house and the falling trunk narrowly missed a newly-installed hammock in the back yard. "I've never seen anything like it," said redneck eyewitness Ian Vandewalker, who was two houses down at the time. "The tree just up and fell over--it was no more than a light breeze." The scene afterward looked much like the result of the fiendish work of the Orcs of Isengard in the popular film, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Giant lemons discovered next door
Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a grapefruit. The famous trapeze-artist family, the Vandewalkers, have some next-door neighbors with a green thumb--or perhaps I should say, an enormous, yellow thumb? The tree from which this monster came is no more than eight feet tall with no branches more than an inch in diameter. Yet it is covered with freakishly large lemons. Will wonders never cease? I guess, probably not.