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 took Jet to a fundraiser for Canine Cancer research today which also provided our local NaNoWriMo group with an opportunity to hold a book and bake sale. Jet is a 9 month old black Labrador Retriever we adopted from the humane society last week. He has almost zero obedience training and is one hundred percent Lab puppy. He zooms, he swoops and he bounces.

I’m pretty sure that Jet thinks he can fly.

I had originally planned to take Mugen to this event, because I would have loved to have taken Lucy and walked around with her in her “I’m a Cancer Survivor” scarf from WSU. Unfortunately, she is no longer a cancer survivor. She is at rainbow bridge now, waiting for the day when we can see each other again. So, it seemed fitting somehow that Mugen, the puppy she raised for me, be the one to go. This was not to be.… [Read More]

Lucy Smiles

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

I cannot change the ignorance of younger generations. It is not my fault, nor my responsibility that the rest of society has failed these children. I cannot change the fact that members of the younger generation feel that they are right, even when it is glaringly obvious that they are wrong and not only that they are wrong, but that they are completely and utterly stupid, because they defend their factually incorrect positions with phrases like “Whatever.” and then proceed with the argument.

If you claim you are not going to argue, then don’t. That means you have to shut up first. That does not mean you get to say, “I’m not going to argue” and then go on about how you are absolutely right. That’s not how it works. Either you are arguing, or you are not. Commit to one course of action or the other.

If you claim that you are right, maybe you could do something simple like… check wikipedia and post a link to back up your point of view, and then if you should happen to prove yourself wrong, which you will find will happen a LOT more than you think it will right now because you are young and think you know it all, and I know that you do because, believe it or not, I was once young too, then admit it and apologize for being a jerk.… [Read More]

A letter to the entitlement generation.