Sontarans Are Pigs!

WORD COUNT: 35,636

Strictly speaking, no.

Sontarans, a race of cloned alien warriors from Doctor Who known for their maleficent persistence (I love that phrase, though that might be more true of Daleks) and malevolent evangelism (ok, that's more true of Cybermen) that sees everything in terms of gaining military advantage (now THAT'S true of many Humans), are not pigs. But in the collection of Time Lord Fairy Tales (ISBN 9781405920025) written by Justin Richards and illustrated by David Wardle, what I at first thought would be totally original stories were mostly retreads of classic fairy tales from our world with either the Doctor himself and or many of his regular adversaries integrated into the role of main characters.


But not always.


From "The Three Little Sontarans" (my favorite of this collection, a Whovian retread of "The Three Little Pigs") to ... let's see now, "The Scruffy Piper" recounting the Second Doctor's saving a human expedition from Cybermen infestation and other tales of derring-do both from "long before [and after] vortex drives and time capsules were even thought of", it was great to not come to a book or even an alternate history and expect to make comparisons based on what I've heard again and again -- that is, the original fairy tales -- and these twists. Seriously, I get too thoughtful of these things and I know it can turn people off. It's as though the writing I do for NaNoWriMo and continue to do outside of it (oh, it's a lot) is a release for me, to say and do through my characters what I would not

in real life.


I was going to not start on or go back to anything else I had read this month, and I knew I was lying. Today Sarah went back to school after her "day off" for feeling sick with crap that's been going around school precipitated by the change in weather. Winter's not quite here yet -- it gets cold out, but it's not near as chilly or white as it could be, and when I was taking to kids to school I don't know what happened but when Jeffrey tried to close the back car door for me to take the kids to school it wouldn't shut. It was a fight opening it due to some light frost in our driveway, but it stuck on something and I had to be careful not to let the door fly open when making a sharp left turn.


Took it to Robert. He got it shut.


The door had apparently slipped off track and we (by we, I mean myself and Martha whom I took it to at work and her co-worker Steve who gave it a look-see and handles "the mechanical stuff" at her office) were thinking we would have to tie the door down or tie it in as the case may be. But Martha's parents live not far away from where Martha works and she called her dad Robert to look at it with me. And I was very grateful that he got it shut, even though we don't know how the door had issues in the place. One of those testy things that I was very thankful to get fixed before work, and that at that time of the morning was probably meant to test the patience I am not known for.


Seriously. Patience is not my best quality.


Two hours of jumping at HighAir Ground -- hey, the title was supposed to be about the trampoline park which opened here in Minot this past Friday! -- did not exhaust Jeffrey, or he says it didn't. But the combination of that AND dinner AND taking cough and cold medicine caused him to throw it back up Saturday night. It's almost as though Sarah and Jeffrey's illnesses passed each other this weekend and in hindsight I should have made other arrangements for them while I was at Marketplace Saturday helping with Horn of Plenty benefits. I feel though you have to work off sickness unless it's really debilitating, and I had been home overnight with them -- and it's been my experience here that death is required to back out of any volunteer commitment.

For me at least.


David