A friend of mine messaged me on Facebook today and mentioned that she was sad that the new newsfeed settings didn’t allow her to see my posts. She had missed out on seeing all of Jet’s hilarious antics on Facebook because of it. I explained a workaround for that to her and hopefully she will start seeing my posts again soon. She mentioned a funny story about her Dad in her message that made me smile from ear to ear. Her dad passed away earlier this year and it was good to see her relate funny stories about him that I could tell were making her smile too. This is what Christmas is for. It’s about making memories with the people we love so that when the time comes that all we are is a memory, they have some wonderful stories to pass on.

This year has been tough for all of us in its own ways, but I’ve finally come to a place where I have made peace with all of the bad things that happened this year.… [Read More]

My Christmas Wish

I think about marriage and divorce a lot. In part, because I am married and have been with my husband now for 20 years. Ours is the longest running, happiest and most stable relationship I know besides that of some of our friends’ parents. I have plenty of friends who are in good, stable and happy relationships, but they are still in the process of raising their young families. Bill and I now really get the time to spend with each other, being who we are and we’re finding that we still like each other after all this time. Right now, we really are the happiest couple I know, but that’s only because we have a slight time advantage on the others what with our kids nearly being grown and the stress of whether our kids are going to turn out like normal adults is off the table. Our relationship has also outlasted more than a few that we have encountered over the years.… [Read More]

A Christmas Gift from the Geeky Gemini Girl

‘I gather my strength and I start off and it feels good, like I have no age at all, like I am timeless. I pick up speed. I run.” – Garth Stein The Art of Racing in the Rain

Many of you already know, that Miss Lucy is gone. I posted a longer version of the above quote on Facebook the day after she passed, but this is the part that stays with me when I think about the days after she died and when I think of what I know happened next for her. It doesn’t make it easier and I keep thinking that if I just believe hard enough that she is happy and she is free, it will get easier, but it doesn’t.

I have been reluctant to tell the story of how she died because I was saving it to publish in the novel I have been working on about Lucy.… [Read More]

Run Free Lucy.

I got into a discussion on Facebook yesterday about immigration and why I am not okay with illegal immigrants benefitting from government programs. The response to that comment really surprised me, because one of the commenters was a green card holder and he found no problem at all with the idea that people who were not paying into the system were taking advantage of it, because the system was broken.

That thought outraged me. Two wrongs do not make a right, but I wasn’t sure how to respond because this argument feeds into the core of my political beliefs. I am a centrist, not a conservative. I believe in saving our planet. I recycle. I drive a car that gets 30 MPG. I conserve energy and reduce and reuse items where I can. I believe in social programs that give those in need a hand up, not a hand out.

I do not feel that our current welfare system helps those that are truly in need, but rather, it props up a class of people who are unwilling to help themselves.… [Read More]

A Note on Humility

“A dog has no use for fancy cars or big homes or designer clothes. Status symbols mean nothing to him. A water-logged stick will do just fine. A dog judges others not by their color or creed or class but by who they are inside. A dog doesn’t care if you are rich or poor, educated or illiterate, clever or dull. Give him your heart and he will give you his.” – John Grogan

Someone I know posted this quote from the final pages of Marley and Me on Facebook this morning. It was written from the heart, out of love for a yellow Lab that was not entirely unlike my Lucy, who is pictured above, with my other best friend, Mugen. They look so serious, because they are begging for cheese. They’re Labs. They take their food very, very seriously.

Just in case the picture above isn’t enough of an indicator of how much I love my dogs, and Labrador Retrievers in particular, I’ll share with you the fact that Marley and Me is one of my favorite books.… [Read More]

Finer Things

I’ve hit a place with my script where I am in the doldrums. It’s just barely the beginning of week two of Script Frenzy and I’m bored with my script. My characters seem somehow less sparkly and beautiful. They seem flat and lackluster. Every time I sit down in front of my laptop to write, I have pondered the concept of becoming a Script Frenzy rebel and writing a novel instead because, while dialog seems to flow forth from my fingertips, this is my first script. That means only one thing and there is no doubt about this in my mind.

My script sucks.

Before my first NaNo, I had made a previous attempt at novelling and managed to get to 24,000 words on my own. It was a completed piece. It blew and I knew it, but the first one of anything that I write always sucks at least a little and I’m okay with that.… [Read More]

I Am A Scripting Warrior

Sometime over the weekend (Friday or Saturday, but I am not sure which day exactly because I forgot to log it), I bent down to hold Lucy’s face in my hands and kiss her nose. My fingers are usually on her neck when I do this, with my thumbs on her cheeks. This maneuver serves a dual purpose for me. It holds her head still so I can kiss her and it affords me a low stress opportunity to check her for lumps and bumps. I thought I felt something, but I wasn’t sure. So I compared notes with Mugen and found a lymph node in his cheek in, what I thought, was a similar location. So I let it go.

Sunday night, I was watching TV with hubby and I pulled the same trick on Lucy. I took her head in my hands and went to kiss her nose and the thing was big and felt hard as a rock.… [Read More]

That Beginning of the End Place.

This morning, I was sitting here working on re-drafting the outline for a novel that I began in 2009. That story has never really left my mind and it is crying out to be finished. We’ll see what happens with it when I get back into it, but it needs some work and the amount of material that I have left after culling the dreck that spewed out of my brain during word wars is, sadly, not much. Where the story sits right now, it’s not even a novella. It’s a short story.

Outlining, for me, is work. Writing is something I can slap down when I have twenty minutes and feel creative, but the work part of writing a story, is doing the outline. It requires that the entire length of my six foot long dining room table be available to me. I clear everything off of it and I actually grab pens and paper and I organize notes based on my “talking points”.… [Read More]

Good Morning Old Friend

When I was a little girl, my mom and dad bought this beautiful garland for our tree. Well, I was eight and I thought it was beautiful. It was red with a red and white gingham check pattern in the middle. It wasn’t like all the other garland that everyone else had and I loved it. On Christmas morning that year, I don’t remember the presents that were under the tree at all. I remember how beautiful it was, I remember that Santa had been there and turned on the lights and made everything look like magic. I remember the awe and the wonder and believing that miracles could happen.

I think I might have gotten a cabbage patch kid that year.

The presents are not important to my thirty something year old mind. I remember the magic the wonder and the love and how the tree was really all about that.… [Read More]

Christmas Garland

The morning routine in this house doesn’t get deviated from, even on weekends. This is why I was up at 6:30 am this morning. Mugen must be let out, must have breakfast and must have a play time while I read my forums and drink my coffee.

It will take me 20 or 30 minutes to write this post in between sips of coffee and finding where Mugen’s lost his wubba this time and tossing it for him, but it wears him down so he will take a short nap in his crate while I shower… and then the fun begins.

We come downstairs and make breakfast. Mugen is all over the counters, trying desperately to counter surf and he’s just about tall enough to get his paws up there now. Hubby gets very angry with this, but the trick I used with Reilly will not work here. Shake cans have no effect on Mugen because he’s not gunshy.… [Read More]

The Morning Routine