"True genius is knowing where to find the answer." - Einstein

I'm told I have an attitude problem at work - usually by the boss who takes me aside to "coach" me (frequently) by starting off with this sentence or one very similar:  "I don't know what your job is here, but you're doing it wrong." The conversation from there usually consists of him telling me how long he was a manager with another company for X many years and how easy it was for him to coach the people there because he fully understood the part they played in the scheme of daily life at that other company. Since I've been with my current employer for almost three years now and was given my current title, Inventory Specialist, about 18 months ago and he hasn't even completed his first year with this corporation, I can't help myself....

I tell him that, if he REALLY doesn't understand what that job title means, he needs to ask the corporation to include that position in his training so that he can fully understand what I do for the company....

So yes, I guess that gives me an attitude problem...

But in my defense, my attitude stems from years and years of being told "If you don't know what you're talking about, RESEARCH IT!!"

That, my friends, is why I have several reviews that speak of my ability to weave a tale that makes one feel you're there with my characters. I don't just write a story, edit it, and throw it out there for your consumption. For "Night of the Tiger", I conducted several interviews with my then brother-in-law, who was a long haul trucker for several years. Dana gave me intimate details about life on the road, such as how many hours a trucker can actually drive before he has to take an enforced "break". My sister-in-law, a former exotic dancer, gave me details about what that was like, as I've never been on a stage myself. For "The Tiger's Cub", there was research into empathy, tornadoes, the bayou, etc. For "A Wild Tiger's Heart", there were videos of the various places that Kelly Starbird wanted to visit, the tensile holding power of hotel windows and what could cause the sealant used to break, etc.

And, of course, there are hours and hours spent in the Maine Room at the Portland Public Library, searching for information on family members that continues to elude me even after almost 36 years of research....

So why am I considered to have an "attitude problem" when I'm simply suggesting what one of the most celebrated geniuses in history suggested for future geniuses?

Ah well. Such is my life until one of my books catches the kind of fan base that made Stephen King, J.K. Rowling and other such authors rich and famous. I guess I just have to learn to bite my tongue when it comes to the "coaching" and take the praise like he gave me last night, when I was continuing to straighten out the top stock in preparation for our "Black Friday" season: Back To School. (The warehouse has already started sending us items that we will need to be able to locate quickly for the summer to refill the "Power Aisle", so whenever I'm left to my own devices and I'm done with my regular duties, I've been reorganizing things that have been a royal mess for almost two years now.)

Last night, both my other team member and I got a compliment from the manager on how good the store looks, and how we're keeping more stock on the shelves than any other store in our district, and how happy the DM is with us....

But I still have an attitude problem. It's called "Obsessive Compulsive Disorder" and it makes me ignore whatever mess-making foolishness I'm asked to perform in order to make the store into the kind of place I like to go and shop...

I think I'm very happy with my "attitude problem".....*grin*

"You've washed your hands clean of this"

I've been having a discussion on my Facebook page about certain things that one of my friends is on the opposite side of the fence about, as he is a Republican and a fundamentalist Christian. I am a Democrat and as Pagan as they come, even though I was raised in the Catholic faith.

The discussion lately has been entirely about North Carolina's Republican governor, who recently signed a bill into law that doesn't allow a transgender person to enter a bathroom that is for the "opposite sex" from what their birth certificate identifies them as. His stance is that this is entirely to protect women and children, my stance is that, unless you have someone standing at the door insisting that they look down your trousers, this "public restroom police" measure protects no one (and there was a video posted recently in which a woman, with shorter hair and looking somewhat masculine, was "escorted" out of the bathroom because she refused to pull out an id to prove her sex even though several friends were shouting "She's a woman" at the male officers who came in to escort her out).

Of course, my stance comes from a relationship that Alanis Morrisette covers in her song "Hands Clean", from which I took my title for today's blog post, and the relationship I had directly after that in which my sexual partner WOULD have claimed to be transgender for the sake of following me into the woman's bathroom so he could keep his eye on me....

This stanza in the Alanis song (which plays over the speakers at my workplace at least twice each shift) reminds me of my first relationship:

"Ooh this could be messy
But you don't seem to mind
Ooh don't go telling everybody
And overlook this supposed crime"

The man this brings to my mind was 19 when we first met and I was 14. I had long greasy hair, acne, and wore glasses that I hated. He was very handsome (and knew it), had family money and, as I learned in later years, he liked virgins, but not to have a relationship with after he got the virginity he so coveted....

He courted me until I was 16 and gave in to his desires, the whole time insisting that we not even tell friends who saw us together that we were "boyfriend and girlfriend". He encouraged me to cut my hair (which also helped clean up my skin) and stop wearing my glasses except to read (which my eye doctor eventually allowed), which made other men start to pay attention, then he dropped me like a hot potato the minute he got what he wanted, only talking to me twice after that: once when I missed my period and he thought he was going to have to come clean and "do right by the baby" (it was a false alarm and he disappeared as soon as that was confirmed) and once after he'd been in a severe accident in California, when he wanted to "apologize for all wrongs" just in case he was about to meet his maker. (He admitted to doing the same thing he did to me to no less than 20 other girls..jerk.)

Needless to say, my "first boyfriend" left me in a mental stew, blaming myself for "leading him on", thinking I was totally evil, and as such, I needed to be punished....

Enter boyfriend #2, who was actually a friend of one of my cousins (or so she said when she introduced us) who was into theater, as I was in those early days of college. He claimed that he wanted to help me to adjust to the college theater, as I entered during the spring semester of 1980 and he had been attending since the fall of 1979. We had one official date during which he got some liquor (we were both under the legal age at the time), we got drunk, and I allowed a sexual encounter...

Looking back even a week later, I was fully aware that I'd made a mistake, because in HIS mind, once we had sex, I belonged to him. He kept insisting that we were going to drop out of college, get married, and move to a place in Oklahoma that his uncle had given him in good ole uncle's will (even though Unk was still alive at the time, so we would be sharing the farm for a time). When I insisted that no, I was going to finish college, and no, I didn't want to move clear across the US and be that far from family and friends, and especially NO, I wasn't going to marry this guy just because we'd done the nasty, he started stalking me everywhere....

I was in an all girls dorm, so men weren't allowed on the upper two floors before 10 a.m., so I would head down to breakfast before my 8 a.m. history class and he would be sitting in the lobby, waiting on me. Despite my objections, he would "escort" me to breakfast, where he insisted that I needed to drink a glass of milk ("because women need calcium to prevent osteoarthritis later in life"), then he'd "escort" me to class, and he'd be waiting when I came out (at which point, I'd be feeling odd, as if I'd eaten something not quite right) to "escort" me back to my room. Often, I would settle down to have a nap until I felt better and awake - sometimes hours later - in HIS dorm room, wondering how I had come to be there, and whenever I tried to go to the ladies bathroom in the next section of dorm rooms, he would force me into the men's room in his section because "you're too drunk to go by yourself", at which time he raped me if I was unable to get the door shut and locked first....

A friend from my dorm started to pay better attention than I did to when I would start feeling ill each morning, and a few weeks later, when he insisted that I have a second glass of milk despite having got myself one (which he always went and got when I couldn't watch him), and when he brought the milk back to the table, she "accidentally" bumped him, causing him to dump the entire glass of milk down his front.  He went more ballistic than a simple drenching with milk should have caused, so when he got escorted out to go and change his clothes, my friend insisted that we bail - FAST - and then she proceeded to explain to me, as we went toward a friends room in another dorm than where we lived, why she thought he was putting something in my drinks.....

She started us off on an all night party that went from one dorm room to another, re-introduced me at one point in these "knock knock - the party is in YOUR room" proceedings to the man I would eventually marry, and, at some point, convinced me that I needed to get this fellow away from me before he made me overdose on whatever he was feeding me in my drinks.

This all happened the last night before we went away for spring break - at which time, I had a miscarriage of a baby that I never even knew I was carrying, because whatever was being put in my drink had resulted in several unprotected sexual encounters with this man who was so determined he was going to convince me to marry him. Needless to say, the miscarriage gave me the incentive to go to his room as soon as I returned to campus - at which point, there was a masculine voice and a feminine voice whispering in the dorm room, so I went to the local pub to grab a bite to eat and ran into my stalker's roomie - who listened to my tale, turned white as a sheet, and offered to go back with me to face down his roomie. When we got back to the room, it smelled like someone had recently had sex, but was empty, and the roomie opened a drawer in my stalker's desk to pull out several baggies that had the word "roofie" on it. (I had never heard of Rufenal until the roomie explained what this was, and with his help, we gathered up all the little baggies in the drawer and walked down the hall to flush them down the toilet in the men's bathroom - my thought being that we had never been interrupted while he was raping me here, why should anyone come in when the roomie and I were just flushing all the toilets over and over?)

Suffice to say, I was still waiting for him with all his little empty baggies in my pocket when he finally got back to his dorm, insisting that I was "mad about nothing" when I told him about hearing whispers when I first knocked on his door because "my roomie was entertaining someone". (I let him go for a while before informing him that the roomie was at the pub, and helped me come back to dump his stash of "date rape drugs". That was when he finally started to panic, going through several "secret hiding spots" that his roomie and I had already emptied.)

When it finally sunk in that he had no more drugs to feed me, he got an air of superiority, insisting that I was too late. He had already had unprotected sex with me, and had collected some urine from one of those nights when I was too drugged to notice, so he KNEW I was pregnant and would be forced to marry him....

That's when I broke the news about the miscarriage and he made the mistake of slapping me across the face for "ruining everything by having an abortion". I still don't know whether I hit him with just my hand or something I grabbed from nearby, as I was seeing red at the time, but suffice to say that, when I came back to being in charge of my temper, he was sitting on the floor with a broken nose, staring at me like I'd grown another head while I told him that he could STOP bringing me drugged milk at every meal or go to jail, as I was going to turn any further drinks or food he tried to force on me in to the campus police and turned on my heel to walk out.....

Suffice to say, it's been 36 years since that encounter, and I've heard from college friends that he insisted he'd been in a fist fight with a man to end up with his broken nose. I think back and wish I'd had the common sense to bring his baggies of drugs to the police instead of letting his roomie convince me to flush them. And I think about the lack of confidence that made me go out on a date and "give up the goods" that first night, stemming from Mr. Secret Relationship and the way he made me feel totally useless because of how he treated me.

It's taken a lot of time for me to become self-confident in myself and my own worth, and as my friends on Facebook insist that "not having trans-sexuals allowed in public restrooms" is going to "protect our women and children", OBVIOUSLY you didn't have someone rape you in a public bathroom in the 80's. OBVIOUSLY the ones who are going to take advantage of the ability to claim they're trans to get into a ladies room AREN'T going to be hindered by a law, as they already have been breaking the law for decades, as there will ALWAYS be men who think that women are only here for one thing, and that one thing is to make men happy no matter WHAT the man decides is going to make him happy.

Frankly, people, I expect that the same type of men who let me be in a men's bathroom in a college dorm without turning me in to the campus police still exist, and as long as we all bury our heads in the sand and pretend that some words on paper, drafted in some hallowed hall where the truth never comes to light, is going to "protect our women and children", we will NEVER take the steps to make ALL humans equal with equal rights.

*stepping down off my soap box so that others can come and make comments, whether they agree with what I've written or want to tell me that I'm nothing more than a sex toy for all the men of the world*

"I banish all negativity from this space. Only good and light may enter here."

Last night, my husband and I did our "normal" ritual for a Monday night. He was watching the NCAA College Basketball finals on his laptop while I was (sort of) watching the news and catching up with the day's news on Facebook. At 11:30, when both programs ended (and congrats, Villanova, on that "beat the buzzer" shot that won you the championship), we turned off the televison and, since I was actually the one in less pain last night, I took the dog down for his last trip outside while my husband went up and get settled upstairs. When I returned to the second floor, where the living room, a small room that has become Bill's fly tying space, and a weight room all are situated, I realized I was still wearing the reading glasses I wear when using the laptop were still in place, so I went back into the living room to drop them onto my laptop for morning. A quick glance around proved that all was in order. There were no candles left burning. The television was dark and silent. All lights had been extinguished.

I went up to bed.

At about the time that I was finally warm enough to start to drift off into the arms of Morpheus, with the bulk of my husband snoring as he pressed against my back and the small, furry weight of the dog pressed up against my stomach (also snoring), I started hearing soft voices. I lifted my head to listen for a minute, trying to tell if it was real or my crazy imagination, but there were no lights or sounds other than that soft murmur that I convinced myself had to be coming from outside the house. Maybe one of the neighbors was out by a car saying goodbye to a late night guest?

I dismissed the sounds and slipped off to sleep.

As always, I was awakened by the clock radio and the songs and chatter of the country radio station that my husband prefers. Since I'm currently on the late shift (12-8 four days a week and a morning shift on Friday, just to throw off my inner clock), I did my normal thing about getting up, dozing lightly until the radio shut itself off after an hour, hearing the weather report and groaning about it, same old same old.

Then I noticed something that WASN'T "same old": that soft sound of murmuring voices in the distance that I had written off the night before as late night guests leaving the home of one of our neighbors.

"Are you hearing voices?" I asked the hubster, who normally will cock his head to one side, listen for a moment, and then tell me I'm imagining things...

This time, he responded, with a confused look, "Yes, I am."

"Did you get up at some point and turn on the tv?" I ask, and again, that confused look.

"No. Did you?"

I start hearing the theme to the Twilight Zone as I respond in the negative, but then his face clears as he comes up with an explanation: "Maybe the dog went down and was trying to see if I had anything on the other side of my laptop and hit the button."

"The dog", whether he actually does it or not, gets blamed for a lot of things that happen around here, from closing doors that you could swear you left propped open, to knocking things off tables, and obviously, even to turning on the television by walking on a remote that, considering how small the dog is, should have been outside of his reach on the tv stand where my husband stores his laptop. But then I remember hearing the voices as I was drifting off to sleep at a point when I can solidly connect the dots to prove that both Pookah and Bill were snoring next to me, having remained within physical contact with me from the moment I settled beneath the covers until I was warm enough to not wish to go see if somehow the television had turned back on or if, perhaps, I was hearing someone talking outside in the middle of the night.....

Now, my children and I, and even my husband at one point before we ever moved in, have mentioned seeing something a bit off in this house. When we were painting the outside of the building in an effort to hurry the paperwork along when we were buying the place, my husband insisted that his Uncle Ken, who died in 1976, if I remember the stories correctly, had been sitting above him at one point when he was painting close to the peak over the garage and smilled at him, as if approving of our choice to purchase this property. If I were to bring that up now, he would deny ever telling me that, as he and I have different believes in the spirit world, and he is currently at an all-time Mr. Spock logic mode on most of the weird happenings in this house, so unless it's a thoroughly logical explanation that DOESN'T involve some prankster in another plane of existence, all is well in Bill's World.

I, however, being raised to believe that God, an entity that cannot be touched, but can be felt in one's heart, believe that there are things in the world you just can't explain with logic. Take, for example, my very mobile coffee cups when we first moved in.....

I am often left alone in this house, and at times, I have done things such as pouring a cup of coffee and leaving it next to the coffee maker while I do something on the first floor, which houses a bathroom, a long, narrow combination kitchen/dining room (or, at one point, our living room), a den/laundry room and a space we call "the rock room", as it has a rock floor that appears to have been a back deck space at some point in it's past. About four years or so ago, my husband walled off a part of the "rock room" that features a crushed rock floor (where the former owner built a "greenhouse" that was on the south side of the building and was too hot to grow the plants), but when we first moved in, this was a space one could easily reach from inside the house, and it often had spider webs trailing down one corner, as we didn't use that space much and the spiders love a good drafty spot....

It was the spider-infested corner where I would find my freshly poured coffee whenever it went missing, behind an unblemished wall of web, still steaming from the point about 15 minutes earlier that I had poured it and left it next to the coffee maker. (The first couple of times this happened, I searched for an hour or more before finding it, but after a point, I would roll my eyes and head for that one corner, where the seemingly playful poltergeist seemed to enjoy putting it because I would always curse under my breath about having to break my coffee free without having any web or spiders fall into it.)

There is, and always has been, a spot at the foot of the stairs on the first floor where I catch a chill every time I go downstairs for anything. Sometimes the chill I catch there is fierce enough to make me shiver to the point I can barely walk as I make my way back up to the living room for a blanket. My husband used to make fun of me for "being wimpy" until I started touching him with a foot or a hand that has suddenly become an ice cube just from walking through that one spot. He's now decided that I have something seriously wrong with my circulatory system, even though this house is the only place where I get those fierce, "you-can't-move-until-you're-warm-again" chills.

And, of course, there are the odd electrical things that happen here far more often than they should, like a television that turns itself on or a stereo system that turns itself down when the phone rings and back up again when I've hung up and, sometimes just for my own amusement, call out "Ok, I'm done. We can have the music back up."  (The stereo doesn't have any such thing as a remote, doesn't turn the sound up or down on a regular basis, and has been checked by Mr. Logical more than once for any weirdness, yet it still happens from time to time.....)

While researching and talking to various people over the almost 20 years we've been living with this, I've started using such oddities as last night's "voices" as an indication that it's time to relight a smudge stick and walk through the house, trying to get every possible space touched by the smoke from the ancient form of cleansing and repeating my title "prayer" over and over as I work by way from the third floor, where we have a master bedroom, a bath and my office, through the second and first floors (including the basement and garage) and ending at the front door, where I briefly open the door in a symbolic offer for any evil to leave before I "seal" the door against it's return. This is a temporary fix for the problem, but one that buys me from a couple of weeks up to a year without the return of any of the oddities (although that cold spot always remains there on the first floor, defying me to make whatever is causing it to leave). As I've been typing this entry and the sage smoke that I spread around circulates, it's an almost notable sensation of peace that's been growing around me, as if telling me that, even should it be only a temporary fix, I've managed to banish the spirits for another little while.

Of course, this also means that the house smells of burnt sage, so if I don't do anything more before I leave the house for my shift, my husband will be texting me about the "dump smell" in the house, asking which insence that is he's smelling so he can throw it out.  (He and I grew up in an era when dumps burned the garbage once a week, and a smell very similar to my sage would permeate the air for miles around the dump - right up until the EPA realized that, if you could smell the smoke, you were close enough to get ill should someone burn something toxic......)

So, if you have little issues in your house like mine, I recommend doing a search for "Smudging Protection" against spirits and emotional baggage left in your home. As I have to do, you may need to repeat it several times a year, and it always helps to start the session by drawing the smoke to yourself to banish all negativity in the practitioner before the real work begins.

Although I no longer believe in organized religion, I do still believe that there are invisible entities out there, some good and some evil. I sincerely hope that I have helped you to find the way to your own inner good and that you can benefit from a good "spiritual cleansing" to begin the spring cleaning (or fall cleaning, if you live in the Southern Hemisphere and are just entering your "prepare for winter" ritual). May only good and light enter your heart and soul, and may only good things come your way in this coming season.

Blessed be!

"Instant Karma's gonna get you"

I've been watching a very disturbing trend on Facebook lately in the form of videos posted by bullies of their "victims" being beaten.  Often, realizing that the beating is being filmed, the victim is  rising up against them while one of the bully's friends is busily filming - and oftentimes, laughing at the beat down rather then coming to the defense of their bullying pal. It has spawned a bunch of anti-bullying videos lately, but I have a couple of questions about these videos whenever they appear in my News Feed:

1) Who in their right mind would "get ready" for a video that, if the proper authorities get their hands on it (i.e. it becomes "public domain" because you're dumb enough to post it to You Tube or Facebook), NOT ONLY will the bully get caught and punished (because the biggest "excuse" for these people is "I didn't do anything and don't know WHAT this so-called victim is talking about"), but YOU, whose voice comes in several times over this video, will also be punished as an accomplice? ("Accomplice", for those of you skipping classes with your bully friend, is defined by Merriam Webster as "a person who knowingly helps another in a crime or wrongdoing, often as a subordinate".) You DO realize that, when your bullying buddy convinced you to film them beating down some poor sucker you've been beating on all year, that you are "knowingly helping", right, and that, if this goes to a news station, as one did last year in my local area, that you will also be suspended and taken to court along with that bully you've been hanging out with?

2) When these videos hit "big time" on Facebook and such, do the parents ever look at these and say "Good job on bullying that kid who's smaller than you are, son. How did his foot taste when he broke your nose with that roundhouse kick?"

3) Do the parents of other kids that the bully hangs out with see the video and punish their own child for bringing this nasty person home with them, either by taking better stock of the people their child is hanging out with or by flat-out grounding their child for not having the common sense God gave a gnat?

4) There are parents out there (like me) who, on seeing these videos and realizing that school hasn't changed since WE were in school, are getting their bullied child self-defense lessons, so that the next time you perform a sucker punch on your favorite victim, you may be picking your head up in the next county when your victim takes what they've learned in self defense to put your bullying heinie into the hospital so you can think about how Instant Karma did just what John Lennon predicted and "Gonna knock you right in the head"?

For all the parents out there who are too busy trying to make ends meet to pay attention to what is going on in your child's life, I sincerely hope these videos are waking you up to the fact that BULLYING HAPPENS EVERY DAY! If you aren't paying attention to your child enough to know if they are the bully or the victim, you're adding fuel to the fire for the next child who decides that the only way to feel safe is to bring a gun to school and blow a bunch of people into the next life. By ignoring your children and letting the day care and the schools raise them with NO value when it comes to human life, you AREN'T part of any form of a solution.

This, when it comes right down to it, is why I'm hoping that Bernie Sanders beats out the others vying for President and also accomplishes a major shake-up in the people that we send to represent us in Washington - especially those who aren't seeing that, by keeping minimum wage at less than $8 per hour, parents BOTH have to work, leaving their children to be raised by surrogates who encourage this bully behavior because they can't instill the family values we need so bad. We need to stop the "business as usual" atmosphere in the US and start having parents at home who see their child instigating these bullying videos and start taking action to change the way our children see the world.

We need the moms to be at home, as mine was, to see the bully in action in their own home and put a stop to it before pain and fear are all we know, as that is what John Lennon was saying in his music:

"Why in the world are we here
Surely not to live in pain and fear
Why on earth are you there
When you're everywhere
Come and get your share"

May your share of the instant karma be peace and goodness all the rest of your days.

Blessed be.

Do you think God sometimes stirs the pot?

My deceased father had a lot of sayings that sometimes still come back to me at the oddest moments. One of these was "Stir the pot and see what floats to the top". Some days, this was a disturbing thought, as he would include the word "shit" before the word "pot" if things were really not happening in a nice way....

But I now wonder if that's what the past couple of years have been about. Perhaps God is stirring the "shit pot" to see what part of my personality floats to the top when I'm under intense pressure.

Not that I haven't been under pressure for most of my life, mind, but the past 10 years have been particularly trying, and with all the medical ailments that come with getting old suddenly coming due within just the past 3-4 years, I'm starting to wonder if the God of my ancestors isn't just a little bit nasty to those who try to be good and obey His words....

Take, for example, the health issues I've chronicled just on myself here in this blog. In less than one year, I've been treated for both a hernia and menopause issues that, until I mentioned to my mom what my elder sister had told me, I was unaware that both were genetic via my maternal grandmother. They've been a pain in my nether regions, but since Memere lived to be 89 despite her problems, I'm hopeful that I can side-step her diabetes, excess weight issues and strokes by the exercise that I've been doing to get myself down to my ideal weight for my height and age....

My hubby, on the other hand, has refused to allow me to hunt down information on his paternal side (he was the product of a nasty divorce and refuses to admit that the man who raised him from the time he was 11 isn't a biological father and therefore isn't the health profile we need) and doesn't admit that the history on his mother's side simply isn't any better than the mess on my mother's side...

Take, for example, the blood clots he had back in the fall that he's just managed to battle off with the help of Xarelto. His maternal grandmother, when I met the woman, was in a nursing home after having a couple of strokes - which are caused by blood clots breaking loose from another part of the body and blocking off important arteries. I've been worried about strokes and heart attacks, but he's been worried about how this will prevent him from going on another paddle down the Allagash....

and just when he got taken off the Xarelto so that he could think again about his big paddling trip, he got the sad news this morning that he's going to have to have surgery on his ankles (which have been bad since before I knew him and getting progressively worse from damage he did back in high school and college, but that were never that important to him until he started having them go weak on ladders he has to climb for his job). From the first part of July until early September, he's not going to be allowed to put weight on his legs except for trips from the bed to the bathroom.

For him, this puts the kibosh on not only his Allagash trip, but also on our Anniversary Week Vacation that we always take at the end of July. If he's not allowed to bear weight on his legs, he won't be allowed to take that trip - and he's more concerned with getting out for our vacation before he has to be stuck at home for two to three months. Having had to practically sit on him to get him to stay down long enough to heal from a black ice car accident in 1989 in which he broke 37 bones, I'm more concerned with finding enough things that he can do from a sitting down position so that he has the chance to heal properly and not end up in a wheelchair for the rest of his life....

and I've been joking with some of my friends that, if things don't go well, I may need to have a good place to hide a body before the end of August, as I'm apt to kill him if I come home (as I did several times during the recovery from the accident) to find him pacing the driveway because he was bored, but didn't have a car available.

So, while I go into my job to tell them the bad news, see if perhaps the vacation I already got approved for at the end of July can be moved up a month, and try to come up with things to keep a man with the personality of a giant toddler amused for two to three months, may I ask that you all pray for me? Please ask whatever deity you believe in to grant me patience, because if He or She grants me strength, I'm also going to need that place to hide the body, or maybe bail money if I just resort to beating him into submission.....*grin*

And for all of you who haven't reached the age of 50 yet, please make this your mantra: Getting old sucks, so live it up while you're young!

Blessed be, my lovelies, and thank you for your visits.

Saying Goodbye Is Often The Hardest Thing To Do

This weekend proved to be harder than I thought it could be, because even though I was warned, I wasn't quite prepared for someone posting photos on Facebook - and they hurt in a way I can't really describe, despite the fact that I have a dictionary and thesaurus easily available. There are just some times that the pain is so intense, so deep, that even the darkest of words can't really hit the nail on the head...

This is what I'm talking about:

This photo, taken shortly after the current owner of the property took possession, is the place where I grew up in a small town called Exeter, Maine. Not to be confused with the big city of Exeter, New Hampshire, the town I grew up in was mostly farms, the largest of which belongs currently to Crane Brothers Potatoes.

As you can see, it's nothing special, just a house with an always shabby looking garage where my dad used to spend a lot of time working on things like old television sets and things. My sister's room (and briefly at times over the years, my room) would be the two upstairs windows that face the road. My bedroom, for most of my life, was around the back side of the building with a window that looked out at the back yard. To the right edge of this photo, that building and roof are part of the former general store, where everyone in town came to shop unless there was something special they had to buy in Dexter or Bangor.

The red metal roof was brand new at the time I took this photo, which was after visiting with my mom at her new home and hearing her tell me "I didn't raise you in Howard Johnsons!" (A famous restaurant/hotel that featured a red roof when I was growing up.) I've driven past several times since I left home in 1981 to move to Fryeburg with my then-boyfriend (now husband), as my dad's grave is just a half a mile from here. I've witnessed the way the town is slowly changing from a center of commerce, as there used to be auctions at a big barn that stood on the property to the left of this shot and a rooming house across the street - both torn down now - and saw the general store become a sandwich shop, because EVERYBODY drives to the larger towns to grocery shop these days....

So I got to see the work in progress when the new owner painted the house a dark grey (which my mom hated), then the other work he did, such as removing sheds where we used to pile wood for the wood stoves in order to build a deck overlooking the back yard. As others noted over the years, it seemed to be smaller all the time, especially the "back forty", as we called the acre or so that we had to mow every summer...

Then, via Facebook and my mom, I was informed that the new owner had rented the place to people who really didn't care for it. They let the furnace blow out one winter, and instead of doing anything to repair it, they broke holes in walls and removed all the copper piping in the place to turn in for scrap. By the time the owner realized what had been done to the place by his tenants and got them removed, it was going to cost him more to fix the place than he'd paid for it in the first place...

So this past weekend, it was burned down by the local fire department as a training exercise - and some days, it doesn't pay to have relatives who are firemen, policemen, etc. who have never left the local area...

I had purposefully avoided going to see the "festivities", as the house held so many memories, including being the place where my father breathed his last when cancer got the upper hand in July 1980. Jim included photos and a couple of videos of the "training exercise" - and even trying to share these here, I have tears flowing down my face three days later...

The little boarded up window above the space we always called the "porch" was my brother's bedroom for a number of years, and it was the window Dad always insisted we should crawl out of if there was a fire, as the drop from the edge of the porch roof was less likely to injure us if we had to jump. Even if we couldn't get to that window, however, he always emphasized that it would be better to have a broken leg than to burn to death. The boarded over windows on the lower floor looked in on the cot where he lay the night he passed away...

This picture hit particularly hard, as there was one blizzard when I was a child in which the snow was piled up to the edge of this roof - and we all (meaning my sibs, myself, and a half-dozen of the neighborhood kids we played with) got into MAJOR trouble climbing up with our sleds and sliding down the back into the drifted snow in the back yard...

The last shot Jim posted before going to video to tape the "final burn" - and for some reason I can't seem to fathom, this seems to be the worst of them all. As when Dad last painted the house, the back side never got finished, and from that little vent on the wall, this strikes me as the window in the former shed that Dad and Pepere and remodeled into a laundry room/the place where Mom had her stove. The little vent cover would have been from the hood that took the steam (and occasionally smoke) that came off the stove.

What has been eating at me is this: it's the fourth place I've lived that is no longer there. The home in Fryeburg where my husband spent most of his life from the age of 11 until we moved into an apartment at the far side of his folks place burned flat after someone left a candle burning. 7 Oxford Street/6 Smith Street in Fryeburg was never rebuilt after it burned in the early 90's and is a parking lot. 

The place we were living when his mother died and where we had our second baby was taken down a few years ago when the guy who owned it after us sold it to Poland Springs for their new, wide driveway to their bottling plant in Fryeburg. Poland Springs had jumped the gun a little, buying the property and taking down the house before they had permission to put in the road, so it also is nothing but a cleared space of lawn. Although Google Earth still shows a photo that includes the house and garage at 46 Portland Street, it's been gone almost 2 years now.

The place in Gorham that we only lived for one year, which had multiple code violations for a rental, got torn down and turned into a parking lot as well. I had less of an emotional tie to that one, but it IS where we "adopted" a white cat we named "Zippy" and where our elderly black cat, Avatar, suddenly started coming to the door and calling "Hello" when he wanted to come in....

Maybe I should look up our old addresses and, after confirming that THEY are still there, I should notify current owners/residents to be careful. I seem to have cursed the places I've lived to total destruction......

In the meantime, I'm going to give the earth some time to heal once they've pushed the remainder of the house into the old cellar hole, dumped dirt over, and put in grass seed before I go visit for another photo. After watching the homes of both grandparents fall into neglect and slowly fall down piece by piece, I'm much happier that we won't watch that happen in the home where I grew up...but I'll never be able to go back like this song from Miranda Lambert speaks of...

There's no place for me to "touch this place and feel it"...not any more, anyway.....(Miranda Lambert's "The House That Built Me" is at the other end of the link)

https://youtu.be/DQYNM6SjD_o

ADDENDUM April 4, 2016:  Going to visit my mom for her birthday with the grandkids, I took a ride through Exeter on a mission. I wanted to get pictures of "the places I used to live" for a tongue-in-cheek post later this year showing all the parking lots and grassy knolls that have taken the place of some of the places I used to live in. I was hoping that the current owners of the "old homestead" would have the dirt pushed over the remains....but I was wrong and it became a very hard task to take the photos below....

Taken from roughly the same angle as the pic at the top of this post, the lack of the house is a little disturbing, but livable. I noted a very burnt tree that I didn't recall being that close to the house, so I walked several feet over, to where there used to be a garage that housed the oil delivery trucks that my dad drove when I was young, and took a "straight back" shot (below). As I was looking at it from this angle, I realized that the giant pine tree was one my sister planted when we were kids, and was once short enough that we were playing "Leap Frog" over the top of it. It's been 35 years since I moved out, so it's entirely possible that the unfamiliar tree was planted by an owner after Mom sold the place......

Then I moved in for some close-up shots.....

This was the one that hurt my heart, as that crumbled bit of metal was the hot air furnace that Mom and Dad had put in shortly after they bought the house. As you can see, the cellar didn't go all the way across the length of the house, so there was just cellar under the living room and dining room areas, and crawl space under the kitchen, porch and sheds. The small blue building near the trees marks where we used to slip down into the "woods"  between our house and the neighbors cow field and have "adventures" - mostly living out stories we were making up as we went along....

As I was taking this last shot, I almost started laughing at myself, remembering when I was given the duty of going down into the basement to get potatoes from the large wooden bins where we dumped them each fall after collecting them from local potato fields (the "leavings" after the harvester had worked the field were free for the taking, so we took a lot.....). I always hurried, because I was certain a velociraptor lived somewhere in the basement. The fact that there were no velociraptor bones in the cellar hole should have made me feel better, but I'm wondering where it moved to before they burned the place.....

So, I'm going to call it an end to this particular post and try to make another trip out in a year or so to take the photo I was hoping to have this time, with all the "remains" properly buried and the grass starting to grow. In the meantime, I'm making a list of all the places I've lived so I can do a complete "warning system" for those who happen to be living in places I used to live. Considering that this makes the FIFTH place to be taken down, I feel it's only fair to let those who might be caught in my House Karma Backlash to be aware that they should be VERY careful.....

*grin*

All That Glitters Must Be Fool's Gold

I just opened an email that I probably shouldn't have opened before coffee. It was titled "Get your book noticed by libraries and bookstores", and since that's what I've been trying to find a marketer to find out how one does such things, I opened it....

Surprise, surprise, surprise, as the old character, Gomer Pyle, used to say on the Andy Griffith Show.

The email says that a review needs to be placed in a certain magazine in order for the bookstores and libraries to see my books and note that they are worth buying. The review needs to be done by one of the magazines staff members. The staff member needs to be paid $350 for each month one wants the review to appear for this magazine.

Obviously, the company that hit up my email address for this kind of cash infusion into their business so that I can get mine off the ground doesn't realize that, although I doubled my income between the re-issues of two books and the publication of the third over the past 18 months, I still only made $50 on the year in royalties for the books and Kindles sold on Amazon. No one at all bought my books from Barnes & Noble over the year.

Considering that I'm spending more per month than I made on the year for the business credit card that I used to hire the models for the front covers, and that I took a HUGE gamble to try to boost sales (which didn't happen as I'd hoped, so I gambled and lost), this "marketing scheme" doesn't appeal to me at all, even on the off chance that someone would actually put my books into a library should this magazine ACTUALLY be a legit thing that gets into the hands of those in charge of buying for the libraries. I'm thinking I'd be better off to do as I did before, and just get a couple of copies of the books to put into the libraries in the towns where I lived and grew up here in the state. At least if people in Gray, Bangor, and Dexter can pick up a book at the local library and pass the reviews on by word of mouth, should they like them, I might manage to get a few more people to go and pick up copies at Amazon or Barnes & Noble for next year - and it certainly WOULDN'T cost me $350 per month to do so.....

So, for those who follow this blog in the hope that I'm going to spill the beans on some major secret of how to get your books into bookstores and libraries, therefore giving your indie book a chance at becoming a New York Times Bestseller (which is ENTIRELY based on book sales through book stores, mind), I'm going to leave you with a word of caution, as I've obviously skipped something along the way that would encourage people to buy, buy, buy......

Be very careful where you spend your money when you start gambling on ideas of how to boost sales. In my own experience, the beautiful covers I have from hiring models and the sweet people who've modeled for me (and brought TONS of engagement to my Facebook fan pages when I post their photos as the characters I asked them to portray) didn't pan out as sales, but I've made some very marvelous friends. The advertising schemes also didn't pan out as well as simply keeping this blog and writing about such things as I've shared this morning. In short, for the indie authors and publishers out there, the best thing that can happen to you is to gain free advertising from those who have purchased the books and put their reviews in places like Goodreads or Amazon.

Now I'm off to file my tax paperwork, produce the proof that I had a major loss in my business (with proper documentation for the US government so I get a little tax break because of the gamble that didn't pay off), and pray that somehow, some day, I'll be able to get my books into at least the LOCAL bookstores and libraries so that my fellow Mainers can at least wander through and find one on the rack. Otherwise, that cover gambit won't EVER pay off......

Blessed be, and thank you for the almost 3000 views that I've gathered on this blog since I started it in 2013. Even if the books aren't selling, it's still a major thrill to see how many people in other countries come and visit this place where I can share my thoughts with y'all.....