Reconnecting

I was trying to think of a good title for this morning's post, but with my mind whirling, it's hard to think straight, so I opted for simple....and here's why it's "Reconnecting":

On Saturday, my hubby and I made a drive to Vermont, where his dad and step-mom live, to deliver Christmas presents in a surprise visit. It's normally a little over 4 hours for the trip without any stops along the way, and with the weather reports all saying "Sunny, but cold", we thought it would be a "no problem" trip.

Obviously, no one gave that weather report to the mountain passes that shorten the trip, however, so we found ourselves on a two lane highway that goes over the mountains in the middle of a white out, unable to see more than 5 feet ahead and on very slippery roads. (I'm glad the hubster insisted that the chair we were bringing as a present wouldn't fit in my car, as his truck has 4 wheel drive capability, and we needed that a couple of times.) Needless to say, we took the longer route home, staying in the valleys as much as possible for the return trip, relying less on the 4 wheel drive and relaxing a bit more, only hitting some snow flurries on the one section that didn't give us an option of a valley passage over the White Mountains.

The long drive and the hairy period when going through a total white out situation allowed us a long time to talk, and on arriving home, I set out to locate some of the people we spoke of during that trip whom we've lost touch with at one point or another. That's what my title refers to: that we were intending on reconnecting with some long lost friends and relatives. Of course, it helps that, in the years since a friend gave me my first internet-capable computer with the understanding that I would do research for him, I've become something of an expert at internet searches, coming up with fewer and fewer pages that I dubbed "pink bunny slippers" in my early days (because the results had as much to do with what I was searching for as a pair of pink bunny slippers) and actually finding what I'm looking for 99% of the time these days.

Sometimes, however, this isn't as good a thing as I'd like, as the search for one of our missing friends brought me to this:

http://www.derrynews.com/obituaries/george-dubois/article_bb102791-cc1e-521e-881a-1652d80f4c0b.html

George and my hubby used to work together at The North Conway Racketball Club back when playing racketball was a big thing. The club also had a gym, a sauna and a jacuzzi, and since I was related to one of the employees, I got to use the facilities for free. George (or, as we called him with heavy fake Mexican accents, "Hor-hey") was always a blast to hang around, and Buck the Wonder Dog, who wore a hat and sunglasses while riding in his master's canoe, was one of the sweetest animals you'd ever meet.

Of course, there's a bit of a Twilight Zone feel about this find, as my husband was diagnosed in August with Deep Vein Thrombosis and is currently on Xarelto to thin his blood and hopefully dissolve a clot in his thigh. It really brings a bit of fear to roost to know that someone who was always eating healthy, always on the go, has passed away from this very thing....and two years ago, at the same age my husband is right now....

Do I need to express why, in addition to trying to figure out what to get for our siblings, parents, and grandchildren, I have a little niggling voice that keeps telling me I need to worry about next year and what it may bring my way? (I try to shut that voice down, but it's like a rat in the sewers. I block up one exit and it just goes through the pipes to come back up somewhere else.)

In the meantime, one of the ones whom I was going to search must have been thinking of us a few days ago, as my hubby's only remaining sibling, whom we hadn't heard from in a couple of years, sent us a Christmas card that arrived yesterday. Even as we mourn George, we're very grateful that Dottie is still with us, as her ex-husband passed away in 2009 from Parkinson's and she had been seeming more and more depressed since then. With my hubby looking mortality in the eye, it's always good to hear from an older sibling who is still hanging on.

So my advice to all who read my blog is simply this: Use the holiday season for something more than just buying gifts and dreaming about what you'd really love to find under the tree. Reconnect with family and friends before they're gone from your sight forever. Tell everyone how much you love them in little ways, whether it be a simple hug and a kiss or by doing something extra special for them that tells them how much they mean to you.

You never know when that place at your table will be vacated, so don't waste another day.

I hope that all who read this have a truly magical holiday season and that you all know how much I appreciate you coming to visit me here.

Blessed be, in 2016 and beyond.

P.S. Having visited my mom last week and being given the chance to reconnect with a former neighbor who was as much of a mom to me as my own mother, I'm even more determined to locate my great-grandfather's family. Going over my findings with my mom while delivering some paperwork about her siblings who died in Canada as babies, I'm determined to leave the legacy of our family tree for others to use as a "jumping off point" in finding their branch of my family tree. At the rate I'm going, I may find that I'm just 6 degrees of separation from many of you....and we may well be related not too many generations back......

"Holy Hope Diamond, Batman!"

I've been getting rates for shipping three books, weighing in at a little less than 5 pounds, to places around the world for anyone who wishes to order the unofficially "boxed" set of the current trilogy - especially those who live in other countries. I don't know about my faithful readers, but I'm currently suffering from sticker shock, as I took the advice of my local Post Office Manager and used the furthest possible point on the globe (and therefore, the most expensive place) to use as the "international ship" destination.

To send three books, valued at apx. $60, to Sydney, Australia via Fedex at the "International Economy" rate would cost (big drum roll here): $163.00!

I'm not sure if it would make any kind of a difference to lower the "estimated replacement cost" should the package get lost along the way, but Holy Hannah! That price tag may well suggest why many of my friends outside the US will go for the $2.99 Kindle before they cough up the kind of cash they'd need to get the paperback sent to them!

In the meantime, I'm trying to re-do the buttons on the web page (which is also doing some shaking and shifting to a possibly shorter web address) to reflect that we at Northern Bard Publications are willing to mail you the books - but you need to be willing to absorb the shipping fee, as we aren't made of money (yet).......

So if you don't see any blog entries for a little bit, imagine me with little patches of hair gone as I further investigate shipping options and get the web page redone.....

It might be a bald New Year at this rate.....

“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

My rose is ready to show to the world....again. "Night of the Tiger" is as corrected as it's going to ever be, the proof arrived today and is as perfect as I was hoping it would look. The cover is as fine in print as it was in Dee Jae's files on the computer (and to be honest, I think it looks even more awesome in the print form, better than I ever expected it to look).

So, the proper approvals have been accomplished. Amazon has been properly notified and is finalizing the entry onto their site. The Kindle, I'm told, will be up for sale within the next 48 hours, and the book should appear, with the title "Night of the Tiger: The Author's Cut", within the next week. We're still trying to work out the details for the listing, but Northern Bard Publications wants to do a "Buy Two, Get One Free" sale through January 1st on the Northern Bard editions....

And, even as we complete this book, my mind is already turning back to the historical romance. All the advances I've made recently in the search for my ancestors has me looking back, and it seems time for this one to come next.....

It is, after all, already over 600 pages strong.....

*sighing as I settle in to begin editing first, as I suspect there is a lot more history than most will want to read in their historical romance......*

So, my "rose" becomes a fireblossom....

Maybe I'll explain what that means before the next book is published...

Maybe not....

*evil grin rising*

UPDATE: November 28 - After a couple of minor issues (I love - note the sarcastm - how advance emails don't always prevent minor issues from happening, no matter how many t's I cross and how many i's I dot), we have the newest edition on Amazon ( http://www.amazon.com/Night-Tiger-Authors-Cut-Book/dp/0578172690/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1448717933&sr=8-1&keywords=debi+emmons ), but we've hit a little snag on the "buy two, get one free" until January 1st deal...

Amazon tells me they don't offer that deal any more, so if you're interested in that one, and you don't mind a little "one on one" interaction between yourself and an author, I have a Pay Pal account attached to my web site that will allow you to purchase the books direct through me. If you live outside of the United States and don't mind paying the shipping charges, I'll even discuss that option with the printer, allowing you to get the delivery hot off the presses.....

Unless you would like me to sign the book(s) and send the package from the local post office, in which case, you can drop me a line at debi.emmons.author@gmail.com....

And since I'm in sales person mode, how about a nice piece of swamp land in Northern Maine, just off the snowmobile trails, with great hunting options......

Yeah....

As necessary as it is to play the salesperson from time to time in these blogs, I really hate to be "pushing the brand" that hard...

Thank you for reading my blogs, even when I have my salesperson hat on.

A December release for the third Northern Bard offering and finding Kunta Kinte

We're in the last stages of the publishing process for the Northern Bard Publications editions of all three of the books (so far) in The Tiger Series - and will be offering a special "if you buy all three you save [an undecided amount]". I'd like to see it be along the lines of "third one free", but the finance director would like to see more money come in toward expenses and our cover artist is working on the next projects....talking to me excitely about cover ideas when we haven't decided which book is up next.....

I'm still reeling from the fact that our first "Northern Bard Publication" was just last year - this month in fact - and we've already managed to re-edit, re-cover, and re-release two more books already.

I wonder if my compadres at Northern Bard will get upset if I start calling them both slave drivers....

In the meantime, while waiting for my daughter to see a lawyer about a divorce, I had an "aha" moment in the special room for Maine genealogical research in the city. There was a statement written out by a lawyer from Somerville, Maine that another researcher had spoken of that mentioned my great-grandfather's name. (I've been trying to find my great-grandfather's parents for 35 years, but a lot of records were destroyed by fires before there was a central place for them to be kept....) I had read it once, but didn't fully recall the entire piece, so I looked it up again, as the first time, I was answering a question from the other researcher as to whether I might have information about this woman, as she and her husband had spent six weeks with the James and Susan I was seeking information on....

The second reading proved I had overlooked a few important things that coincided with what I was seeing in census reports.

As Kurt Vonnegut says  "Listen"

The only time I see James and Susan together in census reports is in 1870 in Albion, Maine. Per that record (as well as in the family bible recording such things), they were wed in April of that year, and he is listed as 19/her as 17. (Census reports used to be done when someone showed up at your house and started asking questions. A lot of times, in my experience, incorrect ages were given, but when my own father had to carry our birthdays in his wallet and do the math when asked ages.......)

Earlier this week, deciding to try to find more about the mysterious Mary Dow Evans who spent time with James and Susan in Albion for the six weeks prior to the birth of their second child (one of those things that I keep thinking would be more of a "family" type thing to do rather than a :"kind neighbor to Susan's parents" type thing), I started looking at the census reports for Palermo. Elisha and Mary are right next to Susan's parents in 1870. Mary, whose husband is listed by the other researcher as having died in October 1880, is listed as alone in the June census of Palermo - right next door to the now widowed Susan Dow and her three children. Susan's parents, James and Fannie, live on the other side of her.

An earlier foray into the census reports on a hunch, as several family members insist that James Parker Dow was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts and was adopted had been done. There is a city in Maine, incorporated in 1851 as Chelsea, as well - and there is a small family in the 1860 census that has a father, William, mother, Mary, a married daughter, Eliza, her husba -nd, and two children under the age of 5. Going back to the 1850 census, there are William, Mary, Eliza - and an older son named Llewellyn (my father's middle name, which we never figured out where it came from, since his mother named all her children after related people). In 1860, William was listed as 70 and Mary as 54. In the 1870 census, Mary is listed as 65. In 1880, she is listed as 75.

I suspect that I have my great-great-grandmother in my sights at the moment, so I decided to re-read the paper that the other researcher recommended....

And I heard the theme from The Twilight Zone as I read through the entire paper the second time.....

Written April 10, 1878, (and from the sound of the piece, to explain that Elisha and Mary hadn't abandoned their farm in Palermo, but had spent some time elsewhere), A. B. Bowler notes that, after marrying in 1864, Mary and Elisha moved to Palermo in 1867 - and into a farm right next door to James and Fannie Belden, per the 1870 census, which, in my mind, gives James, who would have been about 16 at the time of the move, three years to fall in love with his neighbor, Susan, and properly court her. They note that they moved some of their things to Albion for "temporary purposes" in the spring of 1873, returning to Palermo on June 10 (my grandfather's brother was born on June 14) after "five weeks and six days" in the home of Susan and James Dow (whom it is noted in this piece was "now deceased", as family records show James passed away in February of 1876). They moved back into their house in Palermo and had been there for almost two years at the time of the disposition by the lawyer, which was listed as having been marked by an "x" from both Mary and Elisha, neither of whom, it seems, could read or write.

Going back into Ancestry.com when I arrive home, I look back at Llewellyn Dow, whom a couple of relatives are trying to claim couldn't possibly be related because he was in northern Maine and the rest of the family I'm investigating live close to Augusta in the southern part of the state. Once again, the theme from The Twilight Zone again begins to play when I find Llewellyn's death certificate, listing his father as William Dow, no mother listed at all (perhaps one of the "family feuds" that make it impossible for me to share such information without hiding everyone's emails, as there are certain family members who don't speak to other certain family members?) - and his "place of birth is" (drum roll please): Somerville, Maine.

My little inner Sherlock Holmes is jumping for joy, as all of these little "connections" are making me feel that, after all this time, I've found the right leads to try to locate my great-grandfather's line.

Now I just have to have a couple of days to travel to places like Enfield, Maine, whose records on this era appear not to have been shared with Ancestry.com and also don't appear in the Portland Room (where the Maine records for the area), so I have to go to the source - the town office, local library, or perhaps even the cemetery - to get the confirmations on William, Eliza and the two children who seem to have died there.

Hopefully, Enfield didn't have a fire that destroyed their records.

And thus, the cobbler's children have no shoes.....

My mother used to say what I used as the title A LOT when we were growing up in reference to the fact that, even though my dad worked as an oil delivery person for the store next door, he would often forget to deliver to his own house until the tank was so dry that he had to clear sludge out of the lines before the furnace would run. She still says it in reference to my own husband, especially when I share with her what I'm about to share with you....

You see, my husband is what they call an HVAC Tech. HVAC stands for "Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning". He's been doing this for 30 years, so he's highly respected at his work site as the "go to" man for any answers to difficult problems that they may be having.

Unfortunately, in our own home, we have a furnace that has seen better days. When we moved in 17 years ago, it was soon discovered that the automatic water feed for the steam heat boiler no longer worked, so when the heat doesn't kick on when expected, it means that there isn't enough water in the boiler for it to work, so it shuts itself off rather than burn out any parts.

The current rate of having to fill the boiler should be about once a day, but it's usually accomplished by yours truly when I, the first one out of bed every day because I was raised in a farm-like situation in which my eyes open between 4 and 5 a.m. and I just can't stay in bed once I'm fully awake, will discover that the house is much colder than it should be. I then have to go out to the bulkhead in the garage - totally unheated and generally cold enough to see one's breath, even sometimes during the summer - or risk life and limb to go down the interior staircase, which has been slowly rotting since well before we bought the house and may well just collapse one of these mornings. Once in the basement, dodging the hanging spiders and spider webs, I make my way to the furnace and slowly add cold water until the level reaches a certain spot in the "sight glass" that indicates how full the water is, usually getting deafened in the process when the furnace hits the point that it has enough water to run and starts itself up...

Many discussions have gone on about this boiler, starting with my husband stating shortly after we first moved in that he would fix the auto-fill before he decided that, even with the proper auto-fill, the furnace (which at that time also provided the hot water for the house) wouldn't be able to keep up. Instead of the auto-fill, we bought a water heater to allow us to shut the furnace off during the summer months, saving heating oil. There has been talk of replacing the old furnace with something newer and more efficient, but we can't just replace the old piece of junk in the basement, because steam heat isn't as efficient as forced hot water heat, which would involve somewhere around 130 hours of work to re-pipe the whole house. There is also an argument about the cost.

In short, the work that he gladly does for other people on weekends to put money into his private savings account for the fishing trips he likes to do all summer can't possibly happen in his own house because it would take away his "free time"....even though the end result would be more money in the family budget at the end of it all because of the savings on the oil we have to use each winter to heat this poorly insulated farmhouse.

And thus, the cobbler's children have no shoes, because the thing that he does every day (and therefore is well paid for) can't possibly happen for free for his own family.....

Which is why, even though all my Christian friends keep telling me that "money is the root of all evil", I keep playing the lottery, praying to win the kind of money that would allow me to either hire someone else to come in to replace the furnace or, if I got REALLY lucky, would allow me to have this house torn down and a better, more efficient building put up with brand new electric wires (as this place has the old fabric-wrapped electric wires from the early days of electricity and may well cause a fire at any time) and the furnace my husband thinks of as the best possible solution for heating the house equally.

If course, if we were still young chickens with healthy bodies, I could take a page from my first novel and go work at a local strip club to earn extra cash for such a venture, but who wants to pay to see an almost 55-year-old woman with belly fat and saggy boobs dance around naked?

*le sigh*

Ah well, at least we have the new cover for the Northern Bard Publications version of "Night of the Tiger" (to be marketed as "Night of the Tiger: The Author's Cut" because we made some corrections to the tale). Hopefully I'll have the PDF of the interior ready for the printer tonight and we can release this one - with the option of doing all three books of The Tiger Series as a special priced set for Christmas 2015.

For those interested in seeing the new cover, here it is, with many thanks to Dee Jae Dow for all her hard work:

Thank you for letting me rant.

Now, for my next trick, I need to find the source of the "rodentia carcass" smell that is permeating my office space because my daughter's cat obviously mauled something enough to kill it, but didn't manage to keep his teeth on it long enough to produce it for us to praise him over it. Considering that the 9 bodies he's managed to show us over the past two months included mice, moles, and even a chipmunk (he's an indoor cat, so how that happens is beyond me), I'm almost scared to find the final resting place for whatever is stinking up the joint, but it has to happen before my nose hairs catch fire....

Laterz.....

Addendum 11/12/15: I think I might be in shock!

After the "freak out" I did on Monday (mostly because the rickety stairwell has started shuffling around when I go down it, which scared me half to death) and letting him see me go back down on Tuesday to refill (at which point he tried to pass off that I hadn't added much water, so I told him he was in charge of Wednesday, while he had a day off and I had to work), he came back from fixing a friend's heat with an automatic water feeder for our furnace!! He put it in this morning before going to work! Apart from going down now and then to check on the amount of oil in the tank, I don't have to go visit the spiders in the cellar any more!!!

Maybe it's just going to be a good day, as I also went into my email to find the message that the new version of "Night of the Tiger" meets the printing tests, so I've ordered the proof copy to make sure it prints to my specs...(and the digital file for the Kindle looks awesome, I must say!)

Thank you if you prayed for a fast resolution to this issue! I'm seriously in shock, and it may take a few days before it sinks in that I won this little battle!  *BIG grin as I go off to see what other mischief I can get into with the dog and cat today*

Addendum # 2 - 1/14/16:  Thinking of how much my legs love the auto-feeder....

My husband asked me last night if I had noticed anything about the automatic water feeder he put onto the furnace. I've only been downstairs since the original post to check the oil in the oil tank, so I had to admit that I barely looked at the nifty box with the glowing red light...

He told me that the box recorded how many times it's added water since he attached it, and in curiosity, I finally went downstairs just a few moments ago to look....

281

That's how many "add ins" the auto feeder has recorded in just two days over two full months.

281

And he didn't understand why I didn't want to be going down over those rickety stairs, possibly waking the raptor who lives in a dark corner under said stairs and making it opt to collapse the stairs with me on them, in order to enjoy the warmth from the furnace so far this winter.

281....

In 63 days...

Shall I make my hubby something special for dinner on my next day off for saving my legs all those trips?

I suspect I might.....

And now, a word from our sponsor....

I always loved that line in the old cartoons....

I've been re-editing "Night of the Tiger" and plan on calling it "Night of the Tiger: the Author's Cut". I finished a couple of days ago. Of course, we're also working on the covers at Northern Bard Publications, and the cover isn't quite ready yet due to a little miscommunication between myself and the photoshop artist...

Or so I thought, until she grudgingly showed me what she has so far (although the paint part isn't working quite as she wants), and we're doing well on it. Looking very nice so far, with the barn house against one of my photos of a mountain pass in autumn....

I think the Northern Bard Publications edition is going to be very nice indeed, and will be finished as soon as Dee Jae gets a run down street at dusk and gets the sign for BoxCars photoshopped in....

I really love working with creative types...

Loading my weapons.....mostly to see if my government is watching....*grin*

I should be old enough to know better, but I always make the mistake of going into my Facebook account right after seeing something on the news about yet ANOTHER shooting in America....and have to wade through all the posts by those who want to have our Constitution totally torn out of the laws and by-laws of our country as well as by those who insist that our forefathers put in the fact that we have the right to bear arms and that, by all that is holy, we will not give up that right.....

As the third child of four in my family, I have always been in the middle of arguments. I have learned that little trick of seeing both sides of an argument - and if it's a good sized crowd and I think I can get away with it, I'll argue BOTH sides...loudly...then leave when it starts getting into the time someone is going to throw a punch....

*missing my cousin, who was so like me that he joined in the fun...*

But to the current argument...

When our country was founded, one needed a gun to survive, and at one point, the governing country tried to remove the guns from this country and there was a rebellion. TAH DAH! New country under our own rules. The rules were written according to what out forefathers were coming here to get away from...

One of those rules was the 2nd Amendment, which states "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." (from https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/second_amendment) 

Simple enough, until we start letting the leaders we've put in charge keep changing things...

\Like closing mental institutions and turning the crazies out into the streets....

Then telling the law abiding citizens, some of whom hunt for meat for the family table, that they're going to (possibly) ban all guns, no matter what you might use it for, because the crazies are out there and, well, they can get guns! Guns kill people, not the crazies that are out there, unmedicated and with little voices inside their brains because the government closed the hospitals with the rubber rooms where we used to put the crazies...and if Johnny was in a rubber room on medication instead of skipping a medication that the doctor's told Johnny's mom he should take, but he doesn't want to take, and it's considered child abuse if she tries to make him.....

Of course, I could argue that, since we can't get unmedicated, crazy boy Johnny off the street, maybe we should ban guns....but.....

Let's just leave my little rant right there, shall we?

In the meantime, I won't be adding to the furor by naming any of the beasts who have chosen to pull a gun - or a knife, as recently happened in a town not far from here, where a woman got knifed to death by a total stranger over a look given in a parking lot of a grocery store - to end someone's life on a whim. I won't be adding to their insanity by making them more famous.

I joke that insanity doesn't run through my family, it walks through and gets to know each of us personally, but my family always taught me that human life is valuable. I've lost too many loved ones to want to give anyone else that pain for the sake of having my name put into some record somewhere as the person who blew a gasket and took some ungodly number of people along for the ride. I refuse to give the crazy ones who opt to do such a horrible thing more press.

In the meantime, the re-edit of "Night of the Tiger" is going very well, as I'm catching a few other things that were missed, whether by yours truly or the other editors, and keep finding myself spending more and more time there than reading the madness that my Facebook has currently become....

And the other characters from other unfinished tales that have been started are still waiting for me to finish this project and work on theirs....

And another of the Bentons is starting to whisper about her story....

"Yes, It's A Mess, But It's MY Mess!"

Like most of the creative people I grew up around, I'm a bit of a slob. I cheerfully admit this on my Facebook page with memes like "My house looks like I'm losing a game of Jumanji!" and "My housework style can best be described as 'There appears to have been a struggle...' "....

But ask me where something is, and I will often be able to go to a specific place in the mess and pull out whatever you asked me for. The system appears to be total chaos, but somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind, I remember exactly where I last saw something.....

Unless someone else in the house has moved it in an effort to "clean up" for me.....

And since we're all different people, they put the item where they feel it logically belongs, such as a packet of clothesline that I purchased in the spring, while I was out of work after a surgery. The intent was that I would bring in the metal clothes line support from outside my kitchen window, take off all the blackened clothesline that it came with many, many, MANY moons ago, and then re-string it with the new line.

In April, however, the metal pole was solidly frozen into the cement block that supports it, so I set the clothesline on the table until the ground thawed - and have never made it back to that project, as it's been so cold and wet, I haven't wanted to hang clothes on that line. The clothesline packet has been sitting silently on a corner of the kitchen work table, reminding me that it must happen, but other, more pressing duties have been getting done first.

Then, this past week, when I discovered that a slightly musty smell in the corner of the front room was an Australian Outback coat that was put there dry, but has gotten moldy because of all the humidity, I discovered that my other clothesline, on the front porch, had dry rotted. I've decided that the line I've been mostly using because it's at least under a roof needs to be replaced. The clothesline on the table will no longer mock me because it will be in use, holding things like a heavy oilskin coat (which is cleaned by a vinegar and water solution and a stiff brush followed by hosing it down, making the one article of clothing weigh almost as much as yours truly) so they can dry without shrinking in the dryer.

I started looking for the clothesline almost two hours ago, as it was no longer on the corner of the table. Either someone else has decided to "clean", or I, in a story-induced daze, have moved it to another "logical" location. I naturally start with looking around the various things in the kitchen, through piles of important mail, stacked according to which family member they belong to, then look in all the places I would have moved it to if I was thinking about the current works in progress (as there is always more than one).

No luck.

Next, I try to think about the other members and where they may have moved a roll of clothesline. None of the more logical spots yield the clothesline, and I'm soon back at the table, looking at the spot it was all summer, recently scrubbed clean by a helpful hand....

My eyes travel around the kitchen, and as I text the only family member currently awake, I'm opening drawers and cabinets, just systematically looking EVERYWHERE. The hubby has seen the clothesline on the table and heard my jokes about "finding the time", but didn't move it. By now, I've moved on into other rooms, and on a whim, open a tub with our camping gear still in it that has been left in the front room until camping season is done for the summer. Someone must have thought the clothesline was for taking camping, even though we have enough camping rope to hog tie a whole football team, as there it is!

I check to find that my whole "grab the clothesline and re-string the front porch" scheme has used up an hour and 45 minutes of my day. The laundty that I started, wanting to hang it on the clothesline, is sitting in the washer, done its cleaning cycle some time ago, mocking me.....

And, as I walk back into the kitchen and survey the mess I made searching for the clothesline, I pray that I don't die before I get this straightened out, because I'm hearing a familiar line from a lot of crime dramas on television....

"They ransacked the place!"

Feeling like time is slipping away......

As September 11th hit this year, I was feeling very upset, as it feels like it was just yesterday that I was coming home from a hernia surgery in April. I still am having twinges as I try to work the stomach muscles, still finding weak spots that I need to work a little slower, but tomorrow makes 5 full months since that surgery....

And then, while watching the news and trying not to get drawn back into the fear and anger that the media still keeps trying to make us feel 14 years after the attack on the U.S. and the fall of the Twin Towers in New York, there's a weather report that states that some parts of New England, including the southern Maine section where I live, is in drought condition...

"What?" I say aloud - and realize that I sound like the minion that my 3-year-old granddaughter is becoming adept at imitating. (For those who don't know what I'm talking about, here's the clip: https://youtu.be/MfylJy_nMbM )

Most of the summer, I haven't gone out for my normal "sunrise paddles" because it's been cold and rainy. We normally have our air conditioners in the windows by mid-June, but with very few exceptions, we were quite comfortable with just running fans at night and shutting them off shortly after sunrise, keeping the inside of the house at a quite comfortable 65-69 degrees Fahrenheit, which is about where we try to keep it when the air conditioners are in and running. Most days when I've come home from work, my daughter has been wrapped in a blanket complaining of the cold, when she would normally be asking if I could take her down to a friend's camp down the road for a swim after work because, even with the a/c, it's still too hot inside to be comfortable.

The one and only day that I actually got into my bathing suit this year to take my daughter and the dog for a swim, which was actually just a couple of days ago, the water was still very cold in the little cove that is normally as warm as bath water on a hot day, making it necessary to swim out to our friend's float to dive into the deeper water in order to cool off. Needless to say, with back damage that makes my left leg go numb and stop working if the water is too cold, I didn't even fully immerse myself even on that one very warm afternoon.

So how in the devil did we get "abnormally dry" in what I've been calling "the summer that never was"? We've had more flood wanings than we've ever had this summer, and more severe thunderstorms than normal, making several tornadoes appear - something that I never heard of happening much in Maine when I was growing up. (This web site http://www.tornadoproject.com/alltorns/metorn.htm notes the tornadoes that DID happen in Maine, but it was a very rare occurance from the 1960's, when I was born, and has been happening with more and more frequency in recent years......)

"So, what did you do with your summer?" I was asked yesterday by a friend who happened to be shopping at the Staples where I work.

I poppped off with "I worked all summer", but after she left, I started seriously thinking about it. Where did all the time go that I would have normally spent in taking my family swimming, camping and on picnics? Looking out the window at my very overgrown garden, which I'll have to seriously hustle to get cleaned up for winter due to all the rain, it's readily obvious where I DIDN'T spend any time, but what did I honestly do?

I've spent a few days doing what I call "bugging out" with Dee Jae, finding barns and silos with her that can be used to make up part of the cover for the Northern Bard Publications edition of "Night of the Tiger", since Selene has informed us many times that the book sales haven't been great enough for us to think about hiring another model. (Dee Jae has had the idea that she can photoshop a front cover showing a run down city street with a Kawasaki Ninja motorcycle on the sidewalk and a sign over it reading "BoxCars" to represent the place where Kyle meets the Lady Tigre and, for the back cover, she can photoshop the photos we've taken this summer to "build" the barn house where the tiger woman finds safety for a while.)

I've spent a little time organizing things inside the house and editing "Night of the Tiger" to take out the glaring errors - including a paragraph in Chapter Eighteen that was changed by the editors at Write Words Inc. that changes what I consider to be the pivotal part of the whole story into something I keep getting emailed by fans who are making that same minion "What" noise about because it makes absolutely no sense that my hero, who has discovered a secret that the woman he loves has been carefully hiding for seven years, answers his own question.

And what else have I done?

Just as I told my friend, I've been at work. In one way, all the extra hours have been nice, because my husband drops to a "regular" work week of 40 hours over the summer, so many years, we would be struggling to make ends meet, but this year, we've actually had a little extra money for such things as the wonderful "Anniversary Week" that I wrote about in an earlier blog post.

But I still feel like I didn't get a summer to enjoy.

Oh well, I guess I shouldn't be grumpy about it, because this means my favorite holiday, Halloween, is right around the corner. I just hope Mother Nature has had enough fun drowning my flower garden, most of which grew mold instead of flowers, so that I can take the next couple of weeks of days off to pull all the weeds and plant a few more bulbs before the ground starts to freeze. It's looking very hopeful for this Tuesday and Thursday so far....as long as the weather report I saw about "drought" is otherwise accurate.

Goodbye Summer of 2015! May the summer of 2016 see me putting air conditioners into my windows again and having the dry days to work in the flower garden so that, at this time next year, I'll see the last summer blooms instead of the weeds of neglect when I go down the path to my driveway.

Strangest Question Ever From A Smart 7-Year-Old

I spent my day off yesterday on an adventure with the two youngest grandkids. The eldest of the duo is 7 ('turning 8 in October" he reminds you) and the little one just hit 3.

We talk while Yama drives. (Don't ask me why it's Yama short of there were too many Nanas and Grammys and such in their lives, as they both are with my son, but two of the three grandkids don't actually share our blood.....just the littlest injun. Love them all the same, however....) They tell me about their favorite things right now, and stories from the days we weren't together over the summer, then I ask the eldest a question, as he knows all about zombies, and video games, and other such little boy things....

"Hey, did your parents ever take you to see Stephen King's gargoyle fence?"

(It was one of my boy's favorite things, as his Nana lived just around the corner, in an apartment on Hammond Street, and one had to walk past to go to the nearest playground. This young man's parents, currently including my son, have gone to Bangor to visit my mom many times, and even though she now lives across the river in Brewer, I would have thought it a place they would have seen by now....)

My grandson responds with a question.

"What's a gargoyle?"

A lirrle voice deep inside says "Sacrilege! They know about zombies, but not gargoyles?"

That part of my brain that stores all I've learned starts pushing images forward, and folklore, and all the facts I could fill that little mind with about gargoyles...but we are talking Short Attention Span Theater version if I'm to keep his interest, as he's already sounding like he's losing interest...

"They're ugly figures meant to scare away evil spirits, and they used to be put on the edges of roofs."

"What are spirits?"

The inner voice is back, indignant.

"Good heavens! My kids were telling ME about gargoyles by 7 and how they chased bad spirits away!"

"Kind of like a ghost, but bad, like a zombie."

(He has friendly ghosts that help him in one game, he's just told me.)

 "Oh. Okay."

Then he's off on another round of talking about the latest video game that he and a friend have
been playing.

And his Yama is left a little perplexed.....until I mention the gargoyles again when he asks what our plans are along with the age old question: "Are we there yet?".....and he has already forgotten about the fence with the gargoyles on it. He isn't concerned with such things. He's too busy being a little boy who likes video games and playgrounds who wasn't exposed to the children's cartoon about gargoyles protecting New York.....

Yup! Definitely the day to add a little walk around the block to the playground visit I promised him and his little sister!

Hints from The Universe that NBP is Slacking Off

I love to shop on Amazon for various things, even though I don't always buy the items I've seen. For me, the part of the process that my dad always called "kicking the tires" has always been as much - if not more - fun than the actual purchase.

This is especially true as the bills from the spring hernia surgery have come rolling in, telling me in no uncertain terms that my financial guru, Selene, was absolutely right to put the brakes on my spending for Northern Bard Publications (otherwise referred to here as NBP for the sake of typing speed). While Dee Jae and I would LOVE to hire a model - or two - for the new cover for "Night of the Tiger" for its official second print edition, Selene has been keeping track of our sales and says we really can't.

So Dee Jae is looking for one final photo of a Maine barn to complete her composite photo of the barn house in Greenville, I'm working with friends in New York to try to get a photo for her of a rough looking area of the city - preferably after dark - where she can make a sign that says "BoxCars" to represent the place where Kyle Benton meets a young woman who introduces herself as Tanya LaMonte....

But in the meantime, I occasionally pop onto Amazon and see if anything new is happening with the books, especially the ones I've had the pleasute of putting together with my dear friends, who were my sounding board and my advisors when I was getting frustrated by the things I was dealing with when trying to get the Write Words Inc. version of "The Tiger's Cub" released. It was Selene who, while reading over the contracts I was considering, talked me into the idea of allowing other companies to offer our first official publication, "A Wild Tiger's Heart" with the arguement that, no matter who actually offered the book or fulfilled the order, NBP would still get our "cut"...

I'm SO glad I listened to Selene!

While looking at who was offering what, I found that the NBP books have been picked up by companies who are offering to mail paperbacks to readers in the UK and other "out of the US" locations. Having sent a couple of books to friends I've made in Australia, South Africa and Romania, I have to give those companies MAJOR kudos, as it's not an easy task to get anything, even something as simple as a book, to someone in another country. Simply getting the correct paperwork for Customs alone turned into a major hassle, resulting in the loss of one book that I was sending to Australia for Christmas somewhere in New York because I made the mistake of listening to the person behind the Post Office counter rather than accepting that the online form I had filled out was actually the correct form....

Since I see a lot of people in other countries who have come to read my blog, it's thrilling to know that there are companies you can turn to who can get you a paperback edition of NBP's hard work. It makes me work a little harder to spot the kind of barn that Dee Jae tells me she's looking for so that we can improve and re-release my first published book so that we'll be that much closer to a boxed set for The Tiger Series Romances. It makes me always say "Yes" when my boss asks me to work overtime on the off chance that I'll be able to put some of that overtime money back into the company I formed with two good friends and possibly afford either the models or the programs that Dee Jae needs to make us even better covers for future releases.

And for all future NBP releases, we'll keep the contract that allows other companies to allow any readers from other countries to get paperbacks instead of just the Kindle versions, should you be like me. While I enjoy the portability of the Kindle for such things as doctor appointments, I truly love to take along print books for my vacation trips - for obvious reasons if you read the post about recharging this author's batteries.....

Thank you all, always, for reading my blogs, and if you happen to have an account at either Amazon or Barnes & Noble and have read my books, I would dearly love to see your comments there. Even if there was something you didn't like, every comment helps me to learn and to be a better writer.

Blessed be.

How To Recharge The Batteries On A Writer

My husband and I started a tradition a few years back, especially once we could leave the children on their own: we go camping for two weekends and the five days between for a total of nine days away from civilization. We time this to coincide with out anniversary, and when it became clear that, if we didn't go far enough, the bosses would be caling our cell phones with all kinds of stupid questions....

Yeah, the only standing rule about the place we choose to go is that we drive north until we lose cell service, then drive  a minimum of ten more miles just to make sure we can't be reached. We've found some very interesting places, many of which allow free camping, if you can find them and are daring enough to leave the cilivized world behind for a bit.

This year, the place we chose to spend our vacation time was a little Maine gem called Nugent's Camps (http://www.nugentscamps.com/) on Chamberlain Lake, not too far from Baxter State Park and Maine's tallest mountain, Mount Katahdin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Katahdin). We usually have either taken our camper or our tent for these excursions, but this was something new, a cabin on a lake with a gas stove, gas refrigerator, gas lights, a wood stove and a privy out back. For entertainment purposes, I brought along a notebook, and when we arrived, I started a daily journal with brief entries about our adventures.

As they used to say on such shows as Dragnet, "The story you are about to see is real. The names were changed to protect the innocent."  (Who am I kidding. I lost my innocence almost 40 years ago.....)

So, without further ado:

Day One: Mother Nature is reminding us of the honeymoon

Nugent's Camps. Fifty miles or so from Kokadjo, Maine (population: Not Many per their sign) where we lost cell service. A check in (and payment of a fee, as it's part of the Maine North Woods system) at the Telos Gate, then a sign-in at the Chamberlain Ranger Station, where we leave our vehicle and take to the boat to get to our destination. It's going to take two trips of somewhere between 4 and 6 miles from the boat launch to the dock at Nugent's. The dog and I ride over on the first run with the idea that I can get us settled in somewhat while Bill goes for load two.

I've zipped our sleeping bags together, taken some photos of our really nice digs, and am trying to decide what else to do to amuse myself when it starts to thunder - and I hope Bill is still at the truck when a fierce storm comes barreling in. I'm hugging the scared dog when there's a brilliant flash, a loud crack, and the thunder coming immediately - hinting that the worst of Nature's fireworks are happening directly over our heads...

It's precisely at that time that Bill, partway back to the cabin with our second load, has his motor conk out. He's in a metal boat....in water...with lightning flashing overhead....and his motor is dead. Hoping the lightning strke didn't totally fry his motor, he waits a moment and tries again....

Success!

He's still getting drenched to the skin despite a gortex raincoat, but at least he's moving toward shelter.

The second load contained my duffle bag, which is supposed to be waterproof. Liars! Within minutes of Bill arriving at the cabin, safe and sound, half of my clothing is hung around the cabin on conveniently placed nails. Seems I'm not the only one since this place opened in 1936 to have to hang my clothing to dry...

I suppose, considering that our honeymoon, on top of a mountain, involved being INSIDE the storm cloud, we should have expected such a greeting. We're soon laughing about it over a tasty meal.

I can't wait for Day Two!

P.S. Kudos to Rob, the camp host/manager, because he went out in that storm to meet Bill at the dock to haul the rest of our gear to the cabin, deluge or no deluge. That is one dedicated host!

Day Two is for the letter F: Flexoril and Fly Fishing

After our ceremonious entry to Nugents, with the evidence still drying all around us, drying, Day Two is for relaxing.

I did one of the two things in the title for this day's entry, Bill did the other. Match them up.

Stretching out the aches from the long (almost 6 hour) drive with the last 50 or so miles on dirt roads becomes a walk up the snowmobile trail that brings in campers for ice fishing during the winter. (ATV's are forbidden because of past damages in the North Woods, so the only summer access is by boat or float plane.) There are no sounds of civilization short of the generator that runs from 8 am to 8 pm to provide energy for such things as the water pump, as your "running water" is you running up the hill and get it from the pump.

The radio, also dampened by Nature's enthusiasm, finally dries out enough for us to try to see what we can listen to for the week. One station is yammering on and on about the Red Sox, who are as abyssmal as always. The other station is from Canada, all in French.

We're listening to one of those stations right now. Guess which one and you win this cute little kewpie doll.

(I read this aloud to Bill, who teased that it wasn't fair to give Pookah as a prize to somebody. I disagree, because if I was speaking of Pookah, the little hairy grandchild who moved up from New York about 5 years ago and somehow became a permanent fixture in our house, even though we didn't want any more pets, I would have to be offering you the cute little grumble monkey, because Grampa doesn't like little dogs, so Pookah must be a monkey....)

Day Three - 3 a.m.

WTF??

Third morning in a row of waking up at 3 a.m.!

I expected it Saturday morning, as Bill is like a little kid at Christmas when it's time for vacation. He's awake early every year, but the Sunday and now Monday wake-ups...

....and this morning, we're also greeted by another loud storm, so I'm sitting up to make an entry...

It's still better to be in a cabin instead of on a mountain, feeling the building lightning as a crawling sensation on your skin...

My Maliseet foster uncle claims that living through a storm on the top of the mountain means that we got through Glooscap's anger and were blessed.

We're being blessed again...

8 a.m.

Second wake-up brings good news. With only a couple of exceptions, all the clothes are now dry. As the clothes disappear from the nails, we look less like an old fashioned laundry and more like a comfortable camp. The station that was talking about Red Sox reveals itself as WTOS, the Mountain of Rock - one of the stations we like to listen to.

Their weatherman, Russ Murley, gives us hope that the clouds will break up and then we'll have a couple of fairly nice days. Huzzah! Maybe we can go have some fun without being drenched again! While waiting for the sky to break up, we spend another day just relaxing, me reading the latest from Katorah Kenway on my Kindle for as long as the power lasts and Bill reading his North Woods Journals.

And we slowly realize that we haven't seen anyone in any of the other cabins. Apart from the camp hosts/managers, Rob and Stella, we have the whole campground to ourselves!

Day Four - The Train, Boss, The Train

Another 3 a.m. eye popping, but I stayed in bed until 4:30, when Nature's Call got too loud to ignore. The clouds that rolled in around sunset have left us with another grey morning, but Russ Murley says it's going to burn off, so we keep the plan we made while enjoying the brief glimpse of sun from our porch.

Today's adventure: a boat ride to a hiking trail that brings us to some adandoned locomotives that Bill took pictures of when he did the Allagash paddle a few years ago.

2 p.m.

Having left on our little excursion around 9-9:30 with advice from Rob as to how to find the opening for the hiking trail (Bill visited from the other side, Eagle Lake, so he knew there was access from Chamberlain, but not where.)  Per Rob "Go into the cove to the right after McKeon Point and go as far back as possible." Bill and I are expecting a break in the trees. There isn't one, as the tramway that used to cut through the woods between Chamberlain and Eagle Lake to transport wood out of the north country before roads were cut is slowly being reclaimed. We eventually find a small dock and a footpath, so we pull the boat up, get our gear, and make the hike. Bill carries drinks and snacks, I carry my camera for the album that's going to be put up onto my Facebook page. (https://www.facebook.com/Tiggette)

There is something of a display up there maintained by a conservation group with three plaques explaining the whole logging operation that build the tracks and worked the tramway. There are two massive steam engines sitting and rusting in a clearing as well as a lot of man made items left where they were last used. In one way, it's rather sad that it wasn't kept as more of a natural history museum instead of being left to rot away. In another way, it's a truly awe inspiring tribute to the resiliency of nature. If man was to die off, the primeval forest would return, hiding the blemishes that we foolish ones have scarred the earth with.

Even white caps blowing up on the lake when we come out of the cove can't dampen our spirits, and a nice hot shower (one of the amenities that one pays for and which must happen while the generator is running - and which Bill is enjoying while I write this) is as welcome as the beautiful sunny day.

Of course, as each day passes in this spot, the kind of cabin setting that Bill and I have been wishing to come across for years now, we are arguing about just one thing: Who is going to be the adult who is going to force us to return to the civilized world on Saturday?

At this point, we've come to the agreement that Pookah, even though he's only 5, will have to be that adult....

Day Five - The Witching Hour and Nesowadnehunk

For this 3 a.m. wake up, which I jokingly called "the witching hour" (referring to "the power of three") and got Bill calling it that, we're sitting out on the porch, listening to waves crashing on the shore from the strong wind coming down the 13 mile length of Chamberlain and looking at the stars in a briefly clear sky. When we get cold, we go back to cuddle in the sleeping bag and discuss the plan we had for the day. Our drink cooler needs ice, and we have traditionally used that "ice day" to go into a town where we can get cell service and take care of any minor emergencies that have come up.

The wind kicks up a little more as the sun comes up, and because I have some back damage that makes being bounced around hurt for days - and sometimes weeks, if the nerves are pinched just right - Bill decides to do a test run to see how rough it's going to be. (Of course, there's also the still healing stomach muscles from my hernia surgery that he's concerned about at well.) As I write this, I'm watching him bob across in our small boat, and I'm going to trust his judgement on how rough it is.

Part of what he wanted to do was show me the camps that were for sale one of the times that he was up in this area in the past. The camp is Nesowadnehunk Lake Wilderness Campground (http://www.nesowadnehunk.com/) - and has long been an inside joke as the place we'd want to buy if we ever won the lottery. (It's no longer for sale, but it's the kind of place we'd love.)

In the meantime, while we were checking out the trains yesterday, the cabin next to ours was inhabited by three men from Kittery who bought "the American Plan", which includes meals. (We brought our supplies along and are cooking for ourselves.)  We're guessing that part of last night's supper was strawberry rhubarb pie, because there was a plate on one of the porch chairs when Bill went out that wasn't there at 3 a.m.

I really love strawberry rhubarb pie, but I've put it in the refrigerator for supper. I sounded like Dean Winchester from "Supernatural" when I found it, though.

"Mmmm! Pie!"

Day Six - When were we transported to the ocean?

Our little adventure to the "mainland" turned into a bit more than we bargained for, starting with Bill trying to show me the location of another of the wilderness camps we were thinking of renting from this year. We didn't find Ross Camps, but we did see a bear race across the road. Unfortunately, I had no time to grab my camera...

Then he showed me where he stayed a couple of times, in a little free spot called Sourdahunk, with only three timy spots and an unmaintained (except by you) outhouse. It was kinda scary going down the almost overgrown road going to it, but very pretty. We skipped the trip into Nesowadnahunk to get to Millinocket for ice and a refill of gas. Clouds started to get thicker and greyer as we did our errands. On the way back, we opted to skip seeing Nesowadnehunk for fear of being caught in a storm.

We were right to worry.

When we left, the lake was as "stirred up" as we ever see Little Sebago, just down the road from our house. There is always a "safe passage" space near one shore or another. When we came out of the river where the boat launch is, however, we discovered the dark side of Chamberlain. The wind was coming down the lake from the north, kicking up waves like we hadn't seen since we lived in Florida and used to take a Boston Whaler out to little islands in the Gulf for beach camping.

The Whaler had a pretty powerful motor, capable of taking on the large waves of the Gulf. The small boat we were in has only an 8 horse. The normal half hour trip from the river entrance to the cabin took us an hour and forty minutes. Way off it the distance, as if it were Moby Dick urging Captain Ahab to battle, the big white rock island kept appearing and disappearing as we rose to the top of a wave, then went down into the trough.

Needless to say, between the almost two decades old back damage and the newer stomach surgery, I'm writing this is some pain, debating whether it will be worth the fog tomorrow that the Flexoril always brings. Bill is making us corned beef hash and eggs for breakfast and joking that he's going out to troll for sharks, as the sound of the waves hitting the shore this morning remind us of beach camping on the ocean.

No matter whether I take Flexoril and sleep or just spend a quiet day finishing a thick Stephen King that I started a while ago (as I finished the Katorah Kenway on Tuesday), I'll be having another quiet day at the cabin.

Day Seven - Winding Down The Clock

The current plan is, since we're hearing that rain is moving in on Sunday, that we're going to try to get everything we don't absolutely need for Saturday night and Sunday morning out to the truck tomorrow. Poolah, who suffers from a little puppy stomach problem called pancreatitis, is starting to act a little off, so without really getting ill enough to need to visit the vet, he's silently telling us that we really DO have to return home soon.

Even with as damp and grey as the day appears at 7 a.m., Bill is talking about going out again to do some fishing, and I figure it's time to fire up the laptop, which I brought along, but haven't turned on, so that I can take a good look at the photos I've been taking all week and decide if anything needs to be reshot before we leave for home. There are also several shots around the camps that I want to take, as well as taking a quick look at the other cabins to see which one we should request should we decide to bring our son, his lady, and the three grandkids up here to enjoy some quiet time away from technology. (I personally think they'd benefit from such an excursion, should we be able to afford it.)

If we were independently wealthy, with the funds to be able to just stay here for a second week, I would be in hog heaven, but the decision to go back to civilization would be that much harder without the need to work for a living. It's hard enough to think about returning to the "real world" as it is, as this place has touched the part of my soul that has longed for the ability to buy ourselves a little piece of land that is off the grid and put up the kind of camp like the one we've been enjoying.

For any of my readers who would like to go to a place where the kind of hunting and fishing camp that our forefathers enjoyed is still there for YOUR enjoyment, I strongly recommend Nugent's Camps on Chamberlain Lake. True, the lake can go from smooth as a baby's behind to rougher than the ocean during a fierce storm, but the peace and serenity is well worth anything Mother Nature choses to throw at you....

Day Seven - Part Deux

It's been sprinkling all day, with grey skies with very few breaks, but Bill, decked out in his Gortex rain gear, brought us home a nice, fresh whitefish for supper (very tasty when filleted, dipped in flour, and fried up in a pan, I might add).

As I've been saying all week, this would be my dream place to live, with the daily things to do in order to survive (such as cutting wood for the fires, running out to the mainland for 100 gallon propane tank refills, etc.) as the only "necessary" things to do. (No getting up and having to deal with traffic and such to go to work and kill oneself for the meager dollars that we get rewarded with now.) Bill thinks that the daily survival mode stuff would get old after a while, but I honestly have to question myself....

Would it be worth it to live like this forever???

Day Eight - Taking Stock and Making Choices

Today is what we're officially considering "packing to go back" day, as we're planning on only having coffee here in the morning and stopping at Auntie M's in Greenville for a brunch on the way back through town. As a photo on Facebook will show, it's technically a shorter distance to Millinocket to pick up the Interstate for the trip home, but the Interstate is just lots and lots of fast speeds and not a whole lot to look at for about 192 miles....

And Bill, during his trips to this area, has made the last day brunch at Auntie M's into a tradition....

Once the packing is done and Bill has gone to take the loaded boat to the Ranger Station and transfer everything to the truck, I'll have more reading time, which I've thoroughly enjoyed. I've read Katorah Kenway's "His To Have", her third release in a series, from cover to cover. I've finished Stephen King's "11/22/63", which I actually started two vacations ago, but never managed to finish (and which I forgot at home last year - silly me). I'm about half-way through Stephen King's "Doctor Sleep".  Something tells me that one of the first things I'd have to do if I actually WAS able to spend more time here would involve going to a book store and stocking up or getting several notebooks to continue work on several stories that I'm in the process of writing or editing.....

Bill has also been enjoying some quiet time to read, as he's gone through several issues of his sportsman's magazines that he'd allowed to pile up due to a lack of reading time at home...

Before I left for this trip, someone had posted one of those little games in which Facebook tries to pretend they are fortune tellers. According to this game, I'm supposed to have three things happen to me in 2015: 1) World Tour, 2) Dream Vacation and 3) a Ferrari. (I jokingly posted the result to Facebook with the comment "Can I trade the Ferrari for a classic Corvette?")

Now I'm sincerely hoping for the World Tour and Ferrari part to come true, as I've already had the Dream Vacation....

Day Nine - Home Again, Home Again....Dammit......

Our last day in this marvelous place dawns and we, regretfully, have to return to our real lives. I help to roll up sleeping bags while the coffee perks, then I make sure to clean the cabin while Bill loads the things we have left into the boat. We leave the plate that our unexpected pieces of pie in the middle of the table along with one of the few remaining "limited edition" copies of "Night of the Tiger", my business card for Northern Bard Publications, a note thanking Rob and Stella for everything - and a rather generous "tip" for them as well to help maintain this beautiful place for future genereations to enjoy.

The wind is blowing again from the north, but since it's behind us for the final trip out to the Ranger Station, it almost feels like Mother Nature is sending us home with her blessing. The rain that was forecast holds off until all of our belongings are stored under the truck's cap and we're on our way out toward the Golden Road. Two moose - one of whom is standing on a lawn between Kokadjo and Greenville, causing a stir among the tourists who pull off to get a photo - make an appearance, but my camera has been stowed away, so I don't get any photos. The brunch at Auntie M's, however, is extremely tasty and I've resigned myself to the return by the time we pull into our side yard to unhook the boat and start the unloading process.

We're back in civilization for another year, but somewhere deep within my soul lies the peace and serenity of Nugent's Camps. I will keep that feeling with me, and when I find myself getting stressed out, I can go to that special place through meditation, bringing myself to this sweet peace that I feel at this time....

Now comes the research toward next year, when we hope to find another place like Nugent's to be able to recharge and refresh the way we did this year.

To Rob and Stella and the Thornton Family: Thank you SO much for all you do! May your lives be truly blessed!

Just a quick post about the next post...*grin*

My husband and I just got back from a nine day vacation in Northern Maine, and since there was no cell service and no wifi for that time frame, I had a notebook that I was making daily entries in to share our experience to those who've never done the "primitive camp" thing.

Now, as soon as I have time around my "day job" to transfer the writings to this blog......

Blessed be, everyone, and hopefully I'll have time on Thursday (my next day off) to share the fun we had.  (When I woke up this morning with my sinuses so clogged up that it's taken 7 hours and LOTS of pain meds to make it possible for me to go to work, I was wishing we were back there, where I could just opt to climb back into the sleeping bag and sleep until I felt better....but alas and alack, I have to work a closing shift......)

Living the LIfe of Stephen King?

Every once in a while, I question myself and my decisions in life, especially when it comes to my writing. The fiercest questions come to haunt me, and many have no real immediate answers 

For instance: Am I really seeing a brand new book when the characters start coming to visit me in my dreams, or am I reliving something I've read in the past, since I devoured whole libraries (if allowed to select off any shelf I wished) throughout my youth and young adulthood? 

Are these characters so much like people I've known that the people I based the character on will come forward to sue me at some point?

And this week: Am I perhaps writing in the wrong genre when I can so accurately describe the smell of a rotting corpse?

Well, okay. So the rotting corpse isn't human, but wouldn't a rotting human body smell the same as a rotting mouse body, but just that much more intense??

In my last post to this blog, I spoke of my daughter's cat, Meeko, who briefly earned himself the nickname "Houdini" from yours truly by manifesting himself in the garage often enough to make us wonder if we shouldn't have chosen a name for him from a J. K. Rowling novel. When we managed to find all of his secret passages from the interior part of the house to the garage, he stopped being able to perform his magic, so his attention turned to other ways to amuse himself.

Sunday evening, just after the girl offspring left the building to go to Connecticut for a few days, we heard a very loud squeeking noise from the next room. Confirming that some foolish mouse had managed to be waylaid by the cat, we closed the door and let nature take it's course, assuming that one of two things would happen: 

1) The cat would kill the mouse, and we would come out of the living room to find a body in the middle of the floor with a very proud kitty standing over it, waiting for us to praise him for being a good mouser, OR

2) The mouse would manage to sneak away, cheating death for another day - or, if what I found while working in a veterinary office to be right, the mouse would crawl away, covered in cat spit (which is fatal even when the cat misses, according to myth) and die somewhere else.

Therefore, when we stepped out into the weight room to find that the cat was prone on the carpet, looking exhausted and somewhat disgusted, we assumed that choice 2 was where things landed.

Until the next morning, when the floor containing the weight room and the living room had an odd smell to it, almost as if someone had worn a pair of socks for several days before balling them up and tucking them into a corner instead of taking them down to the clothes hamper. The odor was vaguely annoying, but nothing was obvious as the source.

Since it's summer in the northern hemisphere, we have our windows open and fans blowing through to move the air, so the smell didn't seem as obvious that evening. The next morning, however, when the house was sufficiently cold and the fans were shut off to avoid dragging afternoon heat through (the house stays nice and cool this way), the odor was still there, and vaguely stronger. By that afternoon, when I returned home, a body had been brought out for me to view, almost as if the cat and dog were holding a funeral for the dead mouse and had opted to have it lay in state in the middle of the kitchen floor....

And when I wrapped it in paper towel, then put it into a garbage bag and hauled it out to the trash cans outside, I thought the smell would move outside with the body.

Obviously, I was living in a fool's paradise, for the smell was even worse the next morning, enough so that I sprayed some stuff onto the carpet that was meant to take out the odors caused by an "animal accident" - though something tells me that the creator of this miracle odor destroyer wasn't thinking "dead mouse" as the "animal accident". The spray helped for that particular moment in time, but by the time I arrived home THAT evening, I kept finding myself surprised that the police weren't pounding on my door, insisting that, since the girl child wasn't back yet, that the smell HAD to be her rotting corpse....

And there was a second mouse body displayed, this one next to the weight bench, and again, it was wrapped in a paper towel shroud, put into a garbage bag, and brought out to the outside trash cans, where an odor as strong as I was smelling inside told me that this one I was currently adding wasn't the same one from the day before, magically brought back in for my distinct displeasure.

We put some more of the smelly stuff into the carpet, rubbing it in with a stiff brush to remove all remaining odor, then vaccumed it up, throwing the powder and any dirt from the carpet into the garbage bin with the bodies. We burmed incense. We put all the fans up to full bore and slept with extra blankets when the night turned a little colder than is normal for this time of year, and that next morning, Wednesday, the house smelled much better, so we followed our normal procedure and turned off the fans for the day, keeping the cold of the night before inside the house and keeping the heat of the day outside.

When my husband got home shortly after me that evening, he showed me a large gash on one hand that he'd done on his last job. Unknown to him, he had bled on the side of his white work van, and because he works around a lot of strong chemicals, he didn't smell the outside garbage bins nor the slight smell clinging to the inside of the house. Having lived in the house for the past three days, I had gone nose dead to the slight remaining odor inside. 

So when the girl child came home from her time away to see blood on the van, smelling the rotting mouse corpses in the outside bin and still smelling that smell inside the house, and finding her dad gone (he was playing 8-ball with his buddies in the pool league), she had to question what had happened. Had I perhaps decided that 32 years of marriage was more than enough and done something horrid over the three days she was gone?

The moment I started telling the story about the mice and the odor, both inside and out, the cat started rubbing for attention, making sure we knew that he was tall enough to rub his head on our thighs....

(My daughter and I are both tall women. It's scary to have a cat be able to rub his head almost at one's hip and, when he extends his paws, he can tap our waists.)

and luckily, the first thing my husband showed her was the hand he'd cut.

I was a little surprised that the police hadn't been by, just to check on the smell, until I was going over to visit the grandkids. On the side of the road, there was a porcupine, road kill from several days prior, from the look. As my car drew closer, that now familiar smell started to surround me. By the time I passed it, the odor was strong enough to make me want to gag - much stronger than the two little mice in my own covered garbage bin. In comparison, my little stench is nothing...

But I still have to wonder if this knowledge of the exact qualities of the odor of a rotting corpse will ever come to my aid in the writing of a romance novel....

Or am I writing in the wrong genre?

His mama named him Meeko, but I call him Houdini

My daughter, who is in her early 20's but is currently back in the family home, has a cat who is Bengal and Maine Coon. He has stripes, almost like a raccoon, so she named him Meeko after the Disney character of the raccoon in Pocahontas.

He lives up to his name, as he is full of mischief.

The past few days, he seemingly developed magical powers, appearing from places he's not supposed to have access to.....

But let me start back in 1998, when we saw a "for sale by owner" sign on a house about a mile from a friend's camp. It wasn't the cleanest walk-through, but the house had a wide-open floor plan that promised lots of solar gain in winter, when we'd need extra warmth. There were nifty little nooks and crannies from the seller adding on a section. There were a couple of minor things noted by the inspector that had to be fixed before we got the loan to go through, but it was an old farmhouse with it's own special character.

We're still finding interesting things from the "adding on a section" bit that are kinda scary, in a way, but sometimes just fun, as Meeko has demonstrated with his magic act.....

Meeko is, and always has been, an indoor cat. This doesn't mean that he wouldn't LIKE to try outside, but he gets afraid when something strange happens and panics, so outside is something we try to avoid.

The garage, where there are rakes, shovels, picks, and other implements of destruction to do damage to an unwary cat. There are also spots where chiipmunks and squirrels have been coming in since day one, and considering the size of some of those squirrels...

So Meeko is NOT allowed in the garage, even long enough to allow me to get something out of the large chest freezer that's in constant use. Imagine my surprise when, just a couple of days ago, I was going out to get something from the freezer - and Meeko breezed past me, rubbing my leg on his way in from the garage.

I asked my husband if he'd been in the garage since arriving home, as I hadn't been in the garage all day. He didn't recall going out there, but admitted to being tired, so we wrote it off.

And then it happened again last night.end

He came and greeted me as I came home, and both his "mama" and "Grampa" were right there, finishing fixing a light fixture that had fallen apart. The next project was repairing a storm door handle, so I sat down on the one set of stairs that leads to that door to watch for the animals, not wishing to chase dog or cat down the road....

That was when Meeko turned up missing.

I went through the house while my daughter went outside and started circling the house, looking for signs he'd managed to sneak past. When I opened the garage door, a very smug looking cat was sitting on the third step down. He wasn't outside, but he was back in a place where no door had been opened to allow him access. This time, we went looking for the secret way he was getting out there, and found a spot where we had thought there was a wooden wall. It was just cardboard and a thin layer of fiberglass insulation...

Smoke and mirrors, as many other portions of this place seems to have been built.

So we lock the cat up and look at ways to either fix the spot or keep him out of the basement. There are no support beams. Door lock it is, so that gets accomplished. Meeko is let out of lock up. In short order, he's disappeared again. Open the garage door. There he is.

Another hole is found and plugged. Another disappearance. Another cat in the garage find. This continues all evening, until finally, we've found all the little spots he's found to gain access from the upstairs to the basement. The disappearances finally end, and he's spent the entire day looking for new access - and glaring at all the humans in the house.

We seem to have temporarily blocked his magic, but like Harry Potter, I expect he's plotting on how to get back his wand and disappear again.....

“All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust.” ― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

I was feeling really down recently. Here in Maine, it's been raining a lot and, although the normal temperature at this time of year is low 80's, we're barely making low 60's most days. (That's Fahreinheit for those of you who need to calculate to Celsius.)

In short, after a long, cold winter, we're having a wet, cold summer, too, it seems...

So I've been cruising Facebook a lot...and I found this lovely photograph that I resposted to my wall:

Now, I personally like this because I have a nephew who spent a LOT of time in the hospital as a baby, and he would have LOVED this....

I'm amazed at the number of people who have liked this on my timeline. I posted it on June 22, and as of today (June 26), it has 450 likes and climbing....and the lovely comments from people who liked it as much as I did has restored my faith in humanity. They mirror my thoughts on this type of person:

These Every Day Heroes deserve SO much more attention than the Reality TV types.....

Of course, now I'm trying to think how I can do some little act like this every day. It suddenly came to me that each time you help that elderly person in the grocery store, or smile at a baby who is being a little fussy and make it smile back, or any little, simple kindness that you do for your fellow man, YOU can be an Every Day Hero!

Here's to the Every Day Hero in all of us! 

May we all find that faith, trust and pixie dust is all we need to make a better world..

One foot in the past and one foot in the present

My current work in progress is one of those "long term" pieces.

It started out in 1989 in a series of notebooks - 5 little 5x7 notebooks, to be exact - written during my breaks and lunches while working at a little place called Yield House in North Conway, New Hampshire. It was the first time a story flowed solidly from end to end instead of popping in as bits and pieces, and my sister-in-law was reading each day's progress while I cooked supper, as she was staying with us for a brief time.

Then I set it aside, wanting to research the time frame to make sure I made no obvious gaffs...

And now all of that research is going into the rewrite....Heaven help us all.....

The story is, in the same format as the prior books published by Northern Bard Publications, already 686 pages....and a LONG way from being finished. The native American side of the story explains so much about the world that the young lass lives in, and presents a real problem for the knight who has been granted land in the New World. As I continue to edit, getting myself caught up to where the story went before the characters started arguing about what happens next about a year ago (when I was typing it onto the computer and adding in the research about the natives), the characters are impatiently waiting for me to get back to where I left them.

For those of my era, there was an old Carol Burnett bit about a playwright (view here, for those who need it: https://youtu.be/KOVOv5WrZWs), and strangely, that's what I think of when I think of Max and Amy, waiting for me to finish the edit and continue with their story. Sir Maxwell, dark haired and dark eyed, in his native American clothing, keeps glaring from me to Amy, with red hair and pale green eyes...and she glares right back....

Some days, I seriously wonder if that skit was true.....

Hating Selfies As Much As All Pics of ME......

For someone who wanted to be an actress when I graduated from high school, I've been told I have a bad attitude about pictures of myself. I'm supposed to be like the people whom I met in the college Theater classes, self-absorbed and so determined to succeed that they were stabbing the others onstage with them in the back, just to get a better part to show them off to better advantage...

It went against every reason I had for wanting to be an actress in the first place.

The crew I was with in high school understood that a production is a group effort. Each member of the "team" has a different role that is very important to the show. No role is more important than the others, because the so-called "star" needs the other people to play off of. How can Scarlett O'Hara win the eye of the man of her dreams without Mammy to tighten her corset to the proper degree?

Of course, there's also the fact that, from a very young age, I seemed to be the one of my siblings to "ham it up" for the camera, doing what my parents called "ruining" every family portrait they ever took. Take, for example, this shot of my siblings and I on our swing set in the early days of colored photographs. The Brownie camera that Dad owned needed the sun behind the photographer's back in order to get a properly lit outside shot. My siblings all managed to look into the sun with just the slightest squint to go along with their smile. Me? Not so much...

Yes, that would be me making that funny face in the little plaid dress - and I started this nonsense of goofing for the camera before I could even walk, as this photo of me and my cousin at the age of 6 months (he was just three weeks younger than me) at Christmas time.

As I've grown older, I've tried to NOT make faces, but even a selfie that I did yesterday (because one of my sisters insists that I post WAY too many photos of other things and not enough photos of me enjoying whatever the thing is I want to share) makes me cringe, because even when I just try on a small smile, I think I look exceptionally stupid. What do you think of me "channeling my inner gypsy" in the skirt I got for my birthday last week?

Suffice to say that I need to get together with someone who will direct me properly in order to get a new author photo like one of my current favorite authors, Sherrilyn Kenyon. She looks like the kind of person who understands romance, doesn't she?

Of course, for all I know, she has the same attitude as my other favorite SK - Stephen King. He also has stated that he doesn't like photos of himself, but puts them on the books just because that's how it's done. Maybe his attitude is the one I should take: People don't care how goofy I look in my author photo as long as the story is good...

At least, I hope people think the stories are good. It's been so long since I got a review from anyone who wasn't there before I published the first novel that I'm not sure what any new readers think. Most of my reviewers are close friends who give me good reviews out of kindness.

Would a better picture, maybe put on the back of the book, make a difference? What are your thoughts on this?

"The hurrier I go, the behinder I get" - Lewis Carroll (and my dad.....)

I heard the quote I've used for today's title my whole life. Dad used it whenever he had a lot of things going on and not enough time in a day to get it all done.

I'm having that same issue myself, complicated by the need to move slowly due to my surgery in April. Six months after the hernia repair, I've been cleared to start putting yoga and weight lifting back into my routine - but with the caveat that I have to listen to the muscles and NOT push to the point they hurt, or at least, not yet. In short, "Feel the burn" CAN'T be part of my vocabulary yet.....

And, for a person like me, who is used to going 'hurrier" than most people around me, thiis is SO thoroughly frustrating!

Among the things I'm getting "behinder" on:

1) My flower gardens, which need weeding, mulching, and fertilizing (though not in that order) so that they look nice for the summer. (The fertilizer and mulch bags are still at the store, since I'm still not allowed to lift 40 pounds yet, and my husband is too busy with the spring fishing trips with his buddies to help me out by at least getting them home for me to be able to just take what I need out of the bag and out it where I need it.)

2) The vegetable garden, which is still waiting for my hubby to borrow the rototiller from the neighbor - and which also needs a few bags of fertilizer to get worked into the soil before I can start putting the veggies in for us to eat later this summer.

3) Getting the kayaks down to our friends camp so that, on those mornings when I'm about to climb the wall because I can't think of more than a couple of things that I'm ALLOWED to do, I can at least go and push my sorry butt around the lake, listen to the loons call, and pretend that I'm all the way healthy again for at least a little while. (Yes, the kayaks are heavier than I'm supposed to lift, but if they made it to the camp, I could viably roll the Tiggershark over and drag it to the edge of the lake.....)

And the list of things that I need to get done but am still not allowed to do goes on.......

On the good side, the editing of "Fireblossom and the Dream Weaver" is going well, at least, even if I'm keeping myself awake until after midnight and getting back up again at 5 a.m. in order to get that work done around my "day job" and the other little chores I'm allowed to do.

For those who aren't aware, "Fireblossom" has been sitting in a desk drawer since before I had my youngest child. She celebrated her 24th year on the planet in December, so the fact thst I STILL haven't completed work on this book is somewhat disturbing. In my defense, I got 687 pages, if the Microsoft program that I've been using to try to set this in the 6 x 9 format of the other books put out by Northern Bard Publications is actually correct, that I'm about halfway done editing before I continue on with the tale. I had made it that far in the transposing the story from the 5 small notebooks I initially used to write it during my lunchtimes at work and adding in the research about native Americans before the characters started to argue about the scene that came next. It seems Sir Maxwell Colburn had one idea of whree the story should go and Amy McCullum had a different idea, so......

This may well be my first 1000 page book by the time all is said and done.......

So, if anyone wants to come by for a visit to help me do some of the things my doctor says I shouldn't, drop me a line. In the meantime, a little prayer or two that I don't tear anything apart while I start work on redoing my strength training would be very appreciated.

And if anyone wants to explain to me what I was thinking when I decided a redheaded woman was going to be the main character for this particular book, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter. That fiery wench can cause more trouble in ten minures than anyone I know can cause in ten days......

Off to try to get less "behinder".......