Spring advances

And spring is rolling right over me. Time just keeps passing and I cannot keep up with it.

So, yeah, I vanished right after that last post, because my dad didn't recover from his skull fracture. He went back into the hospital a second time and we had to call in hospice after that stay. He passed on Feb. 20, a few months before he and Mama would have had their 60th anniversary. She came and stayed with me while he was in hospice care, and it was good to have her here. I'm a little sad, but happy at the same time, because I know he's in a better place--somewhere he can remember who he was and do the things he could do before the Alzheimer's hit and see his family again.

Let's see--that kept me busy through the first of March. April and the grandbaby came for the funeral, as did both the boys and the Dallas grandboys and lots and lots of other relations. And when April and Rocket Girl went back to Georgia, the little toot left me with her flu/earache. Only it attacked my inner ear and vestibular nerve, so I spent a month or so being seasick on dry land. Did you know there's physical therapy you can do for dizziness? Makes you sick as anything when they do it, but it sure cured my dizziness. The positional kind, anyway. I had to wait for the nerve to get well on its own.

Which brings us up to my 37th anniversary. The fella sent flowers. Aren't they pretty? The flash washed the purple of the roses out a little, but they matched the shirt I just happened to wear that day. Oh--and the flowers in the picture above? They're from an orchid that Rob gave me for Mother's Day one year. An orchid which has now bloomed for the second year! It has six blooms open now, so it looks even more impressive. Only--I turned the pot several times as the flower stem was growing, so the stem grew in a big, loose spiral...you can kind of see how it curves around. I didn't know it would do that. It's kind of cool looking, actually--and I would have had to pin the flower stem to a stick for support anyway, so...

We went out to dinner on our actual anniversary, which was on a Wednesday, at a restaurant we've been to before--Saltwater Grill-- which is usually really good. This time, the shrimp and fish were not so fresh. It was kind of disappointing--but I guess when you order the special on a Wednesday... Oh well. Early in April, we had a really busy Saturday, with work and church stuff in the morning, then the Galveston Food & Wine Festival in the afternoon, and Art Walk in the evening. We went to eat at Bistro LeCroy, which has been one of our favorites in the past, but closed down for a move from The Strand to a new location on 21st St. around the corner from The Grand 1894 Opera House. It's been open a little while, and it was really good. We ate crab cakes and shrimp and grits--very yummy. Their shrimp & grits sauce had bacon in it. I love trying different recipes of that stuff. They all do it different. (My recipe--which came from a junior college in South Carolina--has andouille sausage in the sauce.)

I've been cooking a lot. Trying new things--mostly gluten-free, of course. Reading a lot. (Check out my GoodReads page-- I'm already to 207 books for 2013! Good grief.) I edited a book for a friend. I need to do some writing of my own, but haven't. (I know, shame on me. But I'm dealing with a lot of crap--and mostly, it's the being sick stuff that's kept me from doing much.) I have been thinking about it. Thinking is good. I probably need to think about different stuff --like the book I need to revise, or the one I need to post on the self-pub stuff--but I am thinking about new stuff. Maybe that will kickstart me out of the "I Don't Wanna" stage.

So. Well, I guess that's all for now. I really will try to get back here next week. Unless something new blows up. Or whatever.

New year, new post

Yeah, I know. I need to be better about making posts on my blog. I suck. Sorry. I think I had a pretty good reason, though.

See, I had a work-related injury. Sometime last fall--late October, maybe--I felt something pop in my upper back while I was working on my computer. By early November I had a full-blown pinched nerve with agonizing shooting pain down my right arm. I couldn't type, I couldn't sleep, I pretty much couldn't do anything, but especially anything relating to work.So the fella made me go to the doctor, who prescribed lovely drugs--er, meds. He also sent me to physical therapy, but I couldn't get in there for several weeks, so I called my friend with the chiropractor husband and they got me in a couple of days later. Between the drugs, the chiropractor, and the PT, I am just now getting back to where I can do very much on the computer. (I still need to go shop for a new desk chair, and find where my track ball got put...) I am happy. Still in some mild pain, but much, much, much better.

So, I was getting ready to go back to work, and even work on my taxes (I didn't enter a blessed thing on expenses OR income last year) this week... and the nursing home called because they were sending my dad to the hospital. He fell--into the wall or something, not down on the ground--and fractured his skull around his temple. We were really worried for a few days, but he seems to be recovering, almost back to his normal.

I have been at the hospital four days this week, but two of those days, I remembered to take my laptop with me and have done some work. I probably ought to lighten up a little--my arm is sore--and go do some exercises, but I'm so thrilled just to be able to use the computer!

So, once more, I set my goals. I am going to do my very best to get here and post some blogs on a more regular basis. So there.

October in Review

Yes, October was very busy. See? It's November now.

Boston was fabulous. As was New England. We pretty much ate our way through Boston and New England. Loved it. :) It rained on us several days, but we went out in the rain and saw the city anyway. (For those of you who aren't familiar with Boston, that's the clock tower on the left.) (Please do not ask me what clock tower... It's downtown.)

We ate lobster. Lobster is good, but it's rather labor-intensive, if you just have a boiled/steamed lobster. Personally, I want somebody else to crack the thing open and pick all the meat out for me. I feel the same way about crabs and crawfish. I will consent to peel shrimp, but only if they're boiled without heads. Those heads have to come off before I sit down to eat.

(I will de-head shrimp to freeze, or to prepare them for cooking, but I do not like it. Shrimp heads are pokey--meaning they will poke you with their sharp pokey things. They are also hairy. Not like a bear, but they have those long feeler things that are like coarse hairs. Ick. It's a good thing shrimps are so tasty.)

Anyway, I ate lobster bisque, lobster mac & cheese, lobster roll, and something else lobstery. The fella did the boiled lobster eating. It was a lovely division of labor. Or whatever.

I also went to Valley Mills for the annual Heart of Texas RWA chapter fall retreat and wrote for several days. And now I have posted a new/old book--I wrote it a while back, but I still like it... It's the sequel to one of my old Silhouette Desire books, Her Convenient Millionaire, which was published back in '03. Poor Little Rich Girl was never published until now. It's another marriage of convenience story set in Palm Beach, about the sister of the heroine in the first book. It should be up at Amazon and Barnes & Noble tomorrow or the next day, so take a look.

What else? Daddy wound up not having any surgery--we decided it would just upset him for very little result. And besides, we had to move him out of the nursing home where he's been for the past year & three-quarters. They couldn't handle him any more. So we moved him down here near me to a place that specializes in assisted living for Alzheimer's patients and other folks with dementia. It's a really nice place, and he seems to be responding really well.

We kind of hate having him where Mama can't visit when she wants, but he can't really carry on a conversation any more and it upsets her to see him so bad. And then she can't remember going. Or thinks she did when she didn't. But it's been good for him, so we're okay with it. I took some pictures of him with my tablet, but haven't figured out how to do the upload thing from it, yet.

The daughter wants her dad to come see their new house in Georgia, so we're going there sometime this month. And since he occasionally has meetings in Georgia, we'll get to go visit more often. That's happy-making.

Well, it's election day (I voted early), so I guess I'll go see what Jon Stewart has to say about it all...

Making it fun again

I've got a very busy month coming up. Between having to drive up to take my dad to his cataract surgery appointments and other stuff going on, I'm not sure I'll have time to get my clothes washed. And the month will be capped off with a lovely colonoscopy on the 30th. Joy.

So, I've been thinking about things like coping with being tired, and trying to get the writing done along with all the regular stuff, and about having fun too, because some of the things I have on my schedule are fun. And then I'm thinking about writing and thinking "That should be fun, too."

It's really hard for me to write when I'm not having fun. And the stuff I write is no better than pedestrian. It's not good writing, it's just kinda going-through-the-motions writing.You may motivate yourself through a fear of failure, or a drive for success, and that's great. For you. Me? Not so much.

So it's important for me to figure out how to grab hold of the joy that writing was for me back when I first started writing. I'm one of those people who wrote her first story when I was still in elementary school. I was reading a lot of animal stories back then and the one I wrote was about a cat, I think. It was about playing make-believe, but a more intense kind of make-believe. One with more detail. And it was all about the story.

I was having fun when I wrote those stories. Once, when I was telling my fella (who is in the community college business) about a novel-writing class I was teaching, and about the writing exercises I had the students do, he said, "And they do them? They write? Voluntarily?"

Well, yes. Because it's fun.

Apparently, there are a lot of community college students who don't see writing as fun. It's more of a chore, to them. But to me, it's fun. Really. It is.

I just have to remember that. And maybe rest up when I get tired. It's hard to have fun when you're falling asleep over the keyboard/paper.

And just so you know-- I plan to collapse once November gets here...

Rainy Days and Wednesdays

It did rain today. I thought I'd miss my walk this morning, but the rain was over in a couple of minutes--on my end of the island, anyway--so I got out and walked. It rained after lunch too--really hard, for longer. Maybe half an hour. And then it moved on, and I went to the grocery store without getting wet. I was out of cereal. ;)

This is a great time of year here on the Gulf coast. It's still hot--though it was down below 80F/26.7C early this week, which can feel darn cold when you've been at 90F (32C) or hotter since May! The magnolias in the front and back of the house are getting lots of ripe cones on them. Our yard magnolias bloomed like crazy this year, so lots and lots of cones. The picture I found had a squirrel in it--squirrels and birds love the seeds on the cones. They also like the --I guess they're dates on a neighbor's palm tree, but they're not the kind of dates people eat. They look like little fibrous dates, though, and they grow on a palm, so they must be related. It's high living for the birds this time of year.

All the seabird babies are getting big enough to go out and find their own food. I saw an actual Vee of pelicans this morning when I was walking. Usually pelicans don't fly in vees. They seem to be always in straight lines--unless there are lots and lots of them flying together, and this group had 30 birds. Usually, they're in lines of a dozen or less, but 30!! Might have been more--I was counting really fast. I saw a baby laughing gull this morning too. The babies are as big as their parents this time of year, but their feathers are still brown, rather than gray and black. The white's coming in, but not the gray.

I went to see the parents at the end of last week. Daddy's cataracts are apparently pretty bad--he's very uncertain in his walking, especially going up and down steps, because he just can't see where he's going. He sticks close to the wall and holds onto the handrail for guidance--which is better than just blithely strolling down the middle of the hallway. If the doctor thinks he'll leave his eye alone after the surgery, we'll probably have at least one eye operated on. He just can't be picking at it afterward, and since he won't be able to remember he had surgery, it's an issue. Still, he hasn't been picking at his face lately, so maybe he won't. Mother's about the same...she's starting to read her books over again because she can't remember what was in them. But I read books over too, so-- I do it because I can't remember if I've read them before or not, and then I read them and realize--yes, I've read this. Oh well.

I've been writing a little bit. I'm kind of in a "what do I want to work on now" situation. I'm not sure what I'm in the mood to write--and unfortunately, right now, I seem to have to be in the mood, or nothing gets done. So I'll think a little and get out files and re-read a little and see what strikes me. Maybe I'll clean up my desk too.

The Scary Tumble

Okay, so I spent the first week and a half of August helping the daughter and son-in-law move from Pennsylvania to Georgia. I was the grandkid wrangler and the relief driver.

The wild child--aka Mowgli--is 9 years old now, and doing pretty well with his autism, as long as you keep him busy. His parents prepared him really well for the move--by the time we were packing things up, he was mostly worried that we might not get the basement television in a box. We found him trying to pull it up the stairs by its electric cord...

Rocket Girl is 18 months old, and very busy too. When the movers came and we were desperately throwing things in boxes as fast as we could go, she got her own little shoe-box-sized cardboard box and carefully put Bob the Tomato, a book and a stroller toy in it. She was packing too.

So, we drove to Georgia--a day late because one of the cars broke down and had to spend a day in the shop. Then the same car wouldn't start after our overnight stop in Virginia--but after we jumped it off, it started every time after that. (Turned out, the connectors were bad, not the battery.) The daughter didn't make orientation for her new job, because of all the car issues, but we got there before school started.

The bridge--with boy

The new house is down a slope from the street--a fairly shallow slope with a straight driveway, and a parking area at the bottom. Then the lot drops steeply down to a really cool creek behind the house, with a curb at the edge of the parking area to keep cars in place. There's a bridge over the creek, and wild child spotted it immediately. He loves that creek, and that bridge. When she was house shopping, the daughter described this house to me as "The Calvin & Hobbes house" because it's the kind of house C&H would have loved--the back yard slope is one of those Calvin would go sledding down, complete with "terraces of death."

When the movers arrived, Mowgli was anxious to get "his" television out immediately, and so climbed up in the cab of the truck. Three times in 30 minutes. His mom took him bicycle riding around the neighborhood to distract him. When they got back, she watched him pedal around the moving van, watching the car coming down the street, to make sure he was careful. Then when she got around to the end of the van, she saw him riding his bicycle down the driveway. And apparently he forgot about brakes.

Mom's hollering "Brakes! Brakes!" He's going faster and faster. The movers are yelling. And Mowgli speeds across the parking pad, hits the curb and goes airborne. He landed about five or six yards down the hill.

Do you see the tire tracks???

He got a bad bruise in his crotch, and tire tracks across his forehead. The bicycle fork got bent. Other than that, he was fine. And the next day, as we went out the garage to the scene of all the excitement, he informed us that we needed to be careful of "the scary tumble." That may now be the name of the hill...

I stayed in Georgia a few more days, long enough to get Mowgli registered for school and go out to meet his teacher. And now life goes on.

I'm going to be doing some traveling this next month, getting Daddy's cataracts seen to. He apparently doesn't remember how he's supposed to see, so he doesn't realize that he can't see now. But I do have time for writing, between trips to Austin. I've been very good and written every day this week. Even when we had our fire adventure.

I took a half day (after writing) and went shopping yesterday. I am now outfitted from the skin out, head to toe. I bought a new hat, shoes, draws, jeans and shirts. I bought a present for my niece's wedding shower--but the shower is on my birthday, so while I'm going up there sometime next week, I may not stay through Saturday, because the shower is so late in the day. If I come home, the fella will take me out. We went out to Benno's on the Beach for his birthday today. For the next week, the fella will be older than me. ;)

Which reminds me. I need to go get my driver's license renewed. At least they've reopened the DPS office on the island, after our last hurricane.

Surf's up this weekend because of Isaac, but fortunately, that's all we've gotten from it. Y'all take care.

Where there's smoke...

I'm a little embarrassed, it's been so long since I posted a blog, but we had some excitement at the house this a.m., and I can't settle down until I talk to somebody about it, and I can't get to my office where the e-mail is, and I've already talked to everybody around here about it...

We had smoke, but we didn't actually have a fire.

We've been fighting with an air conditioner that doesn't want to stay fixed for almost two months now (of course, in the hottest part of the summer--and it hasn't been that hot of a summer...). The fella turned it off last night, because it had apparently frozen up, and when I turned it back on this a.m. (When are the dang hot flashes supposed to stop??), I smelled a little burnt smell, like dirt burning off maybe. Went on to eat breakfast, and about an hour after I turned it on, I smelled a serious, big burnt smell. And it looked kind of hazy, like maybe there was smoke. So I texted the fella that I was turning the a/c back off, and that it smelled bad. He called me back and asked about smoke, but I just wasn't sure. Sometimes my glasses get hazy... So I walked around and looked, asked him to come home...and when I went to see if it was any worse at the attic access (where the a/c is), there was smoke all in that back hall. That's when I called 911.

They sent two rescue units, four police cars, three or four fire engines (don't know if the picture is actually one of "our" trucks, but it is GPD), and the battalion chief. They could smell the smoke. They could see the smoke. They couldn't find the fire.

The first two policemen to arrive went in the house--I assume to make sure I was the only one home. (I was already out on the front lawn.) Then 6 or 7 fully turned-out firemen went in. I think they did finally decided it was something in the a/c that burned up. They opened up both units (we have one for the bedrooms and one for the front of the house), turned them off, turned off the breaker, turned off the gas lines running by--pretty much turned off everything a/c related that they could turn off. Three of the four trucks stayed until they'd checked everything and decided it was the a/c.

The firemen were so nice. They appreciated that I called them to come check it out, rather than trying to do it myself. They'd rather come out on a nice cool-ish, breezy day--and then not have to fight a fire... (Cool is a relative term in Texas, in August. It doesn't start cooling off until October, here. But it might be 88F (31C) instead of 98...)

The repairman, Phil, came by and said it was the blower motor that burned up, plus the insulation inside the unit. They're going to replace the whole thing.

In other news, the summer has pretty much been a bust, writing-wise. I figured out that from the third week in July through the third week in August, I either had company or was out of town (mostly wrangling grandkids) except for about four days. In which I pretty much lay around and ate bonbons. Or Cheetos. Whichever.

I discovered the e-book lending at the local public library. I've also been doing some freelance editing, and between the two of them, I've been inspired to get back to work, however. I've written one whole day in a row. I'm going to try to keep it going. Wish me luck. I've got a lot of work to do. And now that I've vented to the world--I shall remind myself to write a blog about the grandboy Mowgli's "scary tumble," and then get to that work. The windows are open and there's a fan going, and I've kind of gotten used to working in 80F temperatures. It should be good.