Tag: family

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pick a peck of pickled peppers

There are times when even an introvert agoraphobe needs some human connection, even if that comes in the form of socially distanced socializing. Yesterday I went up to my mother’s house for some of that human connection, and for an exchange of money for a monitor and home baked bread for some peppers harvested from their garden.

We spent some time not touching or hugging, while I crocheted and my mother and brother and I watched some news, talking about the happenings around us and just generally remembering what it is like to have people around.

I should have been in Austin this weekend for our annual shenanigans with Steve Carlson, but it has been pushed out to October due to the plague currently ravaging our country.

But, having gone out to see Mom and David and the nieces, I came home with a new tv/monitor to replace the one I have on my desk that is dying a slow death and I have a bag filled with poblano, dragon and jalapeno peppers that I need to decide what to do with. I’m actually contemplating an attempt at pickling some jalapenos. I know the dragons will kick up my chinese dumplings a fair amount, and I may try my hand at drying some of them because I have more than I can use before they’ll go soft.

Now that I have that new monitor, I’ll be spending time in this office today, clearing the desk, pulling the tower out to clean and make set up easier and getting everything set back up. But first, I’m spending some time writing (I’m currently working on a Sci-fi short story) and drinking some Death Wish Coffee.

I hope you and yours are safe, Readers, and I wish you a pleasant Sunday!

Cover Photo by Nick Artman on Unsplash

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to all the dads out there

A lot of people have complicated relationships with their fathers, and I think current political and health matters probably don’t really help in that arena.

I have LGBTQ+ friends whose fathers have thrown them away, disowned them, told them to never come back. I have friends who had abusive fathers, drug addict fathers, fathers who were too young and too afraid to stick around. I know people who never knew their fathers, and never had a male father figure step into their lives to fill the void.

But I also have friends who had amazing dads or stepdads or granddads who did what dads are supposed to do, who loved those kids and helped them grow up in a world designed to tear them down. Those who taught them how to ride a bike, bait a hook, stand up for themselves and for others. Those that knew the world outside of childhood could be could and cruel, and helped prepare them to thrive anyway.

I was fortunate, even if my relationship with my father has occasionally been rocky due to so many reasons that are rooted in who I was in my puberty years (think far-right, evangelical Christian) and who he was (as in, not that), that my dad was there for me. We don’t always agree, even now that I’ve gone the far right of him to the far left of him, but I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he loves me for who I am.

My Dad and Me

And I had a pretty cool stepfather too. Bob and I didn’t always see eye to eye either, but he was always there to lend a hand when I needed it and he loved us even if he never said those words.

I hope that all of you who fill those roles, whether you’re blood or not, take a little time today to give yourself a moment to know you are awesome. And if you are someone looking for how to help the next generation, whether you are cis-male, trans-male or nonbinary, consider finding that one on one relationship with a kid who needs it, and yeah, I don’t just mean the under 18 crowd. There are tons of folks in their 20s who could really use a father figure to help them find their way into what being an adult really means.

Even if you’re one of those guys who never really had an old man, maybe especially if you’re one of those guys, be the father-figure you wanted in your life.

So Happy Father’s Day to all the Dads and Dad-adjacent folks out there. Being that it is Sunday and my job #2 has no work for me to be doing today, I get to write for a while before I get on with the housework that needs doing. I’m off to do that…and drink more coffee.

Cover Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

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wine, women and song…or at least the wine

It’s another early Saturday morning, so of course that means I’m writing while I drink my Death Wish coffee, except when a certain kitty comes and demands cuddles.  Cuddles trump everything.  I spent a good chunk of yesterday doing neglected housework, and there’s a bunch more of it to do, but not today.

I have a wine club box to pick up out in Lodi today, so I’m planning to go kidnap my mother and take her out for food of some kind and probably a run to a store or two (possibly to get some yarn to work on a few projects).

I’m in a pretty good place regarding work.  I have two jobs that have been offered to me, though both are contract positions and I would rather have a permanent one, and I have two permanent jobs that I have passed the first hurdle in the gauntlet of interviews. I have a good feeling that I will be starting a new job pretty soon.

In fact, I feel pretty good right now about the entire direction this year has started to take.  I have a new job on the horizon.  I have a planned excursion to Batuu West at the end of March, a trip to Austin and another Batuu adventure in August, and come October I will be back in Denver for Sirens.

Not a bad year so far.  All it needs is for that new permanent job to materialize.  I hope your 2020 is shaping up to be awesome too, Readers!  Happy Saturday…also known as half-price chocolate day.  Go get you some sweet!

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yule logs and pumpkins and the fear of 13

It’s Friday the 13th, which honestly is a day I love, and not only because I was born on one.  I’ll be honest, most superstitions strike me as odd, but they tell us a lot about who we are, or who we came from.  The roots of such superstitions can be illuminating, and they illustrate the times and lives of our ancestors.

I’ll be honest here, I often take a perverse sort of pleasure in purposely defying superstition.  I dress in black on Friday the 13ths, today replete with skulls.  I adore black cats, the only fear I have of ladders is of falling off of them.

This juxtaposition of Friday the 13th against the landslide down to Christmas is amusing, not the least because it invokes the whole Nightmare Before Christmas scenario.  I’m that person who has Halloween decorations up (for some value of decoration, I don’t do much) year round.  Right now the area in front of my TV is filled with pumpkins and witches and candles and some pine boughs…

I don’t do a lot of decorating, mostly because I hate taking it down and putting it away!  One year I had Christmas lights up until nearly July.  I save that urge for my mother’s house, where I will be going tomorrow to help her get the tree up and all that fun stuff.

I may go so far as to decorate a Yule log and burn it in my fire pit one night, we’ll see how I’m feeling about it, and if the rain lets up long enough to make it happen.  Yule is pretty low key for me generally, as a Pagan, but I do want to recognize the rebirth of the sun and the return of the daylight as we pass the solstice and the days grow longer once more.

Christmas is a secular celebration for me, a time to spend with those that love me and to give gifts that remind them of my love for them.

But for today, I’ll just wrap my arms around the day and celebrate the overcoming of fear.  I should probably also re-heat my breakfast, which has gone cold and drink some more coffee, because coffee is life!

Happy Friday, Readers!  May the 13th shower you with good things!

 

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As a writer, I look at every experience as an opportunity to learn human behavior, to observe from the sidelines as the world goes on around me.  I mean, sure I get frustrated and even angry with things, but even then a part of my brain is taking in the color and cataloging characters in the never-ending expanse that is my “things to write” filing system.

This weekend, as my mother and I engaged in a little retail therapy at the local mall, I had ample eye candy to keep my brain chugging…from the flamboyant and awesome folks at Hot Topic, to the mother who would not keep her kids from screaming at deafening decibels while we were trying to have lunch, to the bored elves with a Santa with no one coming to see him (I tried to convince my mother she should go have turn, but she refused).

We shopped stores I haven’t been into in years.  To be fair, I do most of my shopping online these days, so going to a store is rare.  And going to a mall is rarer still.  We hit up Barnes & Noble, the afore mentioned Hot Topic, Bed Bath & Beyond and Dillards.

I haven’t been into a Dillards since I lived in El Paso, and they had closed all of them before we left there.

For being a Sunday in December, it was not very busy, and it gave us both a chance to forget the holiday frustrations for a while and just shop.  I spent far too much money for someone who said she was done Christmas shopping before Thanksgiving!  Especially in BB&B…I LOVE their candles, and they were having their sale…got a few favorite scents and a couple of new ones…because CANDLES.  Have I mentioned my love of tiny flames?  Especially this time of year.  I have candles burning pretty much every night in December, reminding the sun that we need him here, and enticing him to return.

I did manage not to buy ALL of Barnes & Noble, which, considering I was shopping with my number one enabler, is a small miracle.  But, now it’s back to the daily grind and my cup of coffee.

Hope your week is fabulous, Readers!!

 

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nano, holidays and other manic things

So, November was an interesting month.  I chose to focus on The Blood Witch for NaNoWrMo, dedicated my morning makeup routine time to writing, and spent at least four hours every Saturday and Sunday writing.

On November 29th, I hit 50K and breathed a sigh of relief.  I’m really fond of a lot of what I wrote in November, and yeah, some of it sucks and will end up heavily edited or cut, but that’s not what matters.  With a deadline, even self imposed, I set myself to powering through even the plot spots that were stymying me and making me back off the story.

It isn’t all fixed, and I still have a lot of ground to cover, but I know how the story works from here to the end, and I even know how we transition to the next book and a vague idea of what happens in it.

If you can’t tell, I am not a big outline and plotter kind of person.  I kind of pants it mostly.  I find that if I sit down and plan it all out, my brain decides we’ve already told that story, time to move on.

I got to spend a good day with family on Thanksgiving, even if the oven at their place decided to decorate my hand TWICE.  Ouchie!  And, with that the run up to the holiday season is upon us.

Tomorrow is my brother’s birthday.  On Sunday I’ll be heading up to help my mother decorate for Christmas (and recruiting help from the younger generation).  My presents are all bought and I’m just awaiting delivery for some of them.  I have some baking and such to do, and I’m crocheting in the evenings, handing out scarves and hats to the homeless as I walk to/from work.

And yes, still writing.  My goal is to finish this zero draft before the end of the year and find a critique partner/beta reader who can help me with plot holes and inconsistencies and such.  December is such a crazy month!

I hope that you find some time in it to do something you love and spread a little kindness.  Happy Tuesday, Readers!

 

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the road ahead

Yesterday was a momentous day in the land of The Blood Witch as I got across the 40K words mark.  I had hoped to be further along, but well…life.

Being a writer who has to hold down a day job and who lives alone, thus is responsible for all of the housework and grocery shopping and laundry, etc…sometimes mean that writing goes very slowly.

However, I can see my way to the end of this book.  I’m probably just over half way there, so the 50k for nano isn’t going to be the end of the book, not by a long shot.  But, I’m further along than I was and know how to get from here to there, where there is the end of the first quest.

And it leaves plenty of story line for the second quest.

I’m hoping to knock out a few thousand words today before I need to get out to get a few things at the store, do some food prep for the week and other fun things, like making some pumpkin pie bread to take to work this week.

I’ve also decided to take some time off between Christmas and New Years this year to go visit my father in Tucson.  I haven’t been down that way in a while.  I’m thinking that it would be a good time of year to do so.

Now then, I need more coffee and should probably eat before I sit down to make the words.  I hope your Sunday is wonderful, Readers, and filled with kindness.

 

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the road through 15 years

I have a confession to make, I love the television show Supernatural.  Sure, it has its faults.  Yes, it’s had some less than stellar story lines.  Or course, some of it is over the top outlandish.  Yep, the characters are all deeply flawed.  I think maybe that’s part of why I love it.  For all that it’s about the supernatural, it’s about the very human family at the center of it. And not just blood family.  It’s about that, but it’s also got a very strong understand of made family, the family you chose.

I’ve just finished a rewatch of the show from the beginning through the end of season 13.  When I started my rewatch, I didn’t know that they would soon be announcing that season 15 would be the end of it, but it made me glad I had decided to go back to the very beginning.

I can remember when we waited, heads bowed and praying for them to announce that we’d get another season…back before it became the juggernaut of fan-conventions, before the fandom rose up to perform some truly amazing acts of charity (despite all of ITS flaws and backbiting and judgement).

Marathoning through 13 seasons in the last few months gave me some insights I probably wouldn’t have gotten any other way.  It made me appreciate those flawed characters and the amazing actors that bring them to life even more.

I’ve never been to a Supernatural convention due to my agoraphobia and the cost it would involve to get me what I need to cope, but there’s a part of me that wishes I could.  I’ve come to love, not just the boys Jared and Jensen, but the entire family of actors who inhabit the Supernatural universe.

I’m glad they get to go into the final season knowing that it’s the final season, and I hope that it provides them to give us a fitting end to 15 years of hunting trips.  And if they wanted to give us another episode with Jeffery Dean Morgan popping by, I wouldn’t complain.

I’ve been mulling over what I might like that ending to be, and I have a few ideas, but I think I’ll keep them to myself for now.  Feel free to drop your ideas in the comments.  I’d love to know!

Now, the coffee is getting cold, so I best get to the drinking of it, and start putting some words to the page.

Photo lovingly borrowed from Entertainment Weekly.

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the elusive nature of unconditional love

Back in the day when I was an evangelical Christian (yes, really), I  spoke a lot about unconditional love.  I believed that I acted inside that love.  I believed that I understood what unconditional love really was.

The truth is, I was clueless.

It took a lot of changes in my life to realize that.  It took leaving behind everything I thought I knew, everything I believed.  It took discovering myself under all of the layers of learned behavior and belief/fear conditioning.  I often liken those days to days spent in a cult.

Unconditional love is something that springs from inside you and because of that, nothing external to you can change it.  Nothing someone does, nothing someone says can change that kind of love.

That’s a really powerful thing.  It’s the kind of thing that changes lives.  It changed mine.  I’m not saying I practice it perfectly, I am, after all, still human.  And I’m not aiming for sainthood here.  I still make snap judgments about people.  I still criticize things I know I shouldn’t.  But I try to embody unconditional love to all.

It’s what drives me to act with kindness.  To meet people where they are, as they are and try to be helpful without inserting my own prejudice and needs into their life.  It’s why I can be friends with people so very different to me. How I can give of myself where others won’t.

Sure, sometimes I miss the mark, but the longer I practice this idea, the longer I choose to put love and kindness ahead of judgement and fear, the better I get at it.   I just keep hoping to one day get it right.

I hope your Saturday is filled with the light of Love, Readers, and that you radiate that love back out into the world around you.  Let’s light this place up!

 

 

 

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wedded bliss

All around me people are planning weddings.  I must know at least twelve couples getting married this year.  I’m happy for them, if that is what they truly want in their lives.  Love is, after all, a wondrous thing. For myself, however, I can love freely without needing to be defined as a half of a couple.

I’ve known since I was in my early teens that marriage was not something I aspired to.  I have nothing against marriage, I just never saw myself as a married woman.  As I aged and discovered that there were options outside of straight, monogamous marriage and I started to understand myself better, I realized that the reason I had no designs on finding that one true love is that, for me at least, love is so much bigger than that.

I was introduced to polyamory as a concept nearly twenty years ago.  It made so much sense to me, for me.  Not that I am seeing anyone right now, but when I am dating, it will be a relationship built on mutual love and trust, and the understanding that he or she is not my one and only.

I haven’t tipped my toe into the dating pool in a while, and I don’t plan to any time soon, though as wedding season rolls around, it would be nice to have someone to take with me, even if just to forestall the conversation about why I’m not dating/coupled/engage/married.  Somehow complete strangers seem to think they have the right to ask me about these things when I show up to events alone.

If I had a dime for every time I’ve been told I just haven’t found the “right person” I could retire on my own private island.  At fifty years old, I’m having the time of my life, just like I am.  I don’t need a husband or a wife to complete my life.  Love infuses my life, and when I feel the pull toward a person, I explore it, without hitching my ride to another’s existence.

Either way, love wins.  Love should always win, marriage or not.

Happy Saturday, Readers!  I hope love infuses your day, and happiness fills your pockets.

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