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Birthday and New Year's Wishes

12/31/2018

First, I want to give a Happy Hatch Day wish to Zacchaeus (Zack), our sun conure. He's 19 years old today. Happy birthday, Zack! You truly are our sunshine, and adopting you (and your brothers and sisters) was the best thing we ever did. We love you, little buddy. Here's to many more. You really do light up our lives.

Most people are excited about the prospect of a new year, and I'm no different. While I've surpassed the urge to make resolutions, I do find myself taking stock of where I am and considering what I can do better in the new year. New things to try that I've been talking about but not doing. Taking stock and making appropriate adjustments in relationships and situations. Considering what I can stand to improve. This year, I'm feeling an urge to expand and reach more people, both personally and through my writing. There are many ways this can be done, and it's an exciting prospect. I'm hopeful that 2019 will see me break out of some ruts and make some significant progress in all areas of my life.

I believe that New Year's Eve and New Year's Day are some of my favorite days of the year. There's something about closing out the old and starting new, with a clean slate. I think a lot of us like that. One thing I like in particular is New Year's morning. The world is always so still and quiet, like it's peacefully open to all opportunity. I like to go in our upstairs sitting room for prayers, and to restart my daily Bible reading on Genesis 1:1. Then I move on to message my best friend on Twitter and work on a writing project, or reading. I know, that's no different from what I do every other morning when I don't have to be to work, but there's something special about it on January 1. It's like I'm embracing the silence to invest in two things that are my foundation: my faith, and my creativity. Thanksgiving and Christmas are about family and the contentment of the holiday season wrapping up gives me the joy and creative spark to enter the new year right.

I hope that you all have a safe and Happy New Year. Thanks for being great friends and for your support. I pray that 2019 will bring us all love, joy, peace, prosperity, favor, and blessing on our life path.

God Bless You and Happy New Year 2019!

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Taking the Magic Forward

12/26/2018

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Check out this neat banner that AllAuthor made for Progenitor for Christmas. I love it and have tweeted it out a couple of times already. It's simple and beautiful. A wonderful way to link a scifi tale to good books for, well, anytime.

But I know, Christmas is over. Still, I'll probably Tweet out this week's banner at least a couple of more times just because. As crazy as it is, Christmas is a special time of year, and it's a shock once it's over.

Admit it - you always feel a bit like a deflated balloon on December 26. Sure the holidays are fun, and hectic. There have probably been more than a few times when you wished for this day to finally arrive and for Christmas to (finally) be over. But when it actually does arrive, it's a bit of a shock. Suddenly, the Christmas songs and movies stop. Suddenly, the tree looks a bit bare with all of the gifts distributed. Suddenly, life is going back to normal, as you pick up your house after the holiday rush (because all of our houses look like an F5 tornado hit it the day after Christmas, whether you hosted holidays or not). Suddenly, those Christmas decorations look a bit strange.

And yes, there probably is a sense of relief in there that it's finally over. The "but it's Christmas!" logic keeps us all in a whirlwind for the past month that's sometimes fun and sometimes frustrating. But it's not Christmas anymore.

Maybe you're heading back to work. Maybe you're heading home from holiday travels. Maybe you're having leftovers from feasts the past 2 days for dinner. Maybe you rushed to get the decorations down today. Maybe you're leaving them up to brighten these long, dark nights just a bit longer. Maybe you're already on your way to whatever comes next. Maybe you're making resolutions to decide what comes next. Maybe you're getting back on track with the plan you already have. Maybe you're preparing for something new. Maybe you still have more holidays to celebrate. Whatever the case, I hope you had a very Merry Christmas, and that you hold that magic and wonder in your heart as you move into 2019.

As we move forward into closing out 2018 and making our resolve for 2019, I pray that you keep the love, peace, and joy of Christ that we just celebrated. Because it wasn't just to have a holiday marathon of gifts and food. It was about the Savior that changed the world, and taking that celebration into every area of life.

That's all today. Take care, and have a great rest of the week.

Bye!

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Sick Days and Holidays

12/20/2018

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I had a nasty, unexpected surprise this week: I relapsed with that sinus stuff, and it went into a sinus infection. My doctor has had me homebound for 3 days while I recover. At first I bristled, but I soon saw the wisdom of it, as I've felt miserable and spent most of the time sleeping. I'll probably go back to work tomorrow looking like the ghost of Christmas past from the plague years. I am recovering, but slowly. Such is life. Rick has been taking care of me, the birds have been super sweet and concerned, and my parents have been calling multiple times a day to check on me.

These extra days off really haven't been productive, as I've been sitting in the recliner like a lump. It's a good thing that I got the Christmas shopping done. I've been in this place before, and learned not to wait until the last minute to do shopping or mail out the cards.

The good news is that healing is happening. It's slower than I like, but I'll be good for Christmas festivities starting this weekend and running through early next week. Maybe a bit slower than usual, but functional. Which is better than I've been since Monday. And I'm glad I got to the doctor and pharmacy early in the week, especially since the pharmacy was a bit lax about filling the prescription and wanted me to wait another day to get it. If you're on social media, you know what happened: I threatened to move the prescription to another pharmacy, and they suddenly 'found' it. They didn't want to miss out on that chunk of change from my insurance company. But I am changing pharmacies, as I later learned that they're frequently out of stock, and they do it on purpose. Mom gave me a tip on one that doesn't pull such shenanagins, and that will be my 'go to' place when I'm home sick from now on. So they won the battle, but lost the war on keeping me as a customer.

Anyway, the holidays are coming, and it looks like I'll be functional again tomorrow. I do hope you all have a safe and Merry Christmas. As a special gift to you, I have a couple of free ebook offers over the next 2 weeks on Amazon. Joy on the Journey is free December 24-28, The Tanger Falls Mystery Box Set is free December 3 - January 4, and Resonance is free January 7-11. This KDP special is my gift to you as a thank you for supporting me (and a great opportunity to get new ebooks). I have reminder posts scheduled through Hootsuite, but most of them will be through Twitter, since Facebook is good at ignoring me. But that's another blog entry, if I haven't done it already.

So that's that. Not the week before Christmas that I expected, but it's what I've got and life's like that sometimes.

I hope you have a safe, joyful, blessed, and very Merry Christmas. Be safe out there and have a wonderful holiday. May the love, joy, and peace of Christ be with you always.

Bye!

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Nostalgia

12/15/2018

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I think it's natural to be nostalgic this time of year. Certainly, the holidays spark memories of years past, and it's normal to indulge in it from time to time. But the nostalgia has taken a different turn for me this year. In fact, this whole week has been filled with "blasts from the past," and ironically very few of them have to do with the holidays.

It started last weekend, when I decided that it's time to get serious about working on short stories again. Yes, I'm on a writing sabbatical from novels this month, but it just didn't seem right to me to be a writer who isn't writing. Then I had the realization that once upon a time, I worked on short stories between work sessions on my novels, and quit back in 2011-2012 when Blurry and Anywhere But Here were published, and I was working on Splinter. I got sidetracked having to learn about book publishing and promotion, and it seems I let short stories fall to the wayside. It's something I always said I'd get back to, but never really did. So last weekend, I decided that now is the time, and that I need to do something to keep myself accountable to this goal so I don't fall off track again. My solution: join Writing.com again. I was a member there a decade ago, before Twitter and Facebook and Goodreads and the plethora of other social media sites came along in my life, and I really enjoyed it. So I rejoined, and have done a couple of writing exercises this week. It's been mixed reviews. Obviously, I've slipped since it's been so long, and it's going to take some work to get my skill level back up. But I want to do this - and boy have the memories of my early writing days been flooding me as I did it!

That's not all, though. I also ran across a Christopher Pike book that I loved as a teen, and my boss sent me to pick up some stuff from a place that was right next to the apartment where Rick and I lived while we built our home in 2007. And that Smallville theme song in Part 1 of Everworlds was a real blast from the same time as when I was so active on Writing.com. Smallville was the first superhero show that the CW had, and Rick and I loved it.

The funny thing about all of this is that none of my nostalgic moments from the past week have anything specific to do with Christmas. It's been memories of seasons of my past. I usually think about holidays past this time of year and I have had a few memory triggers, but not nearly as many as I usually do. I even had a dream about the house I grew up in, but unlike past years when I've had it, it wasn't about the Christmas tree in the living room. I think it was actually summer, or at least warm. But that might be wishful thinking, because it's been cold and raining lately and these short days are really grinding on me. I hate driving home in the dark.

It's interesting that the nostalgia is more diverse this year, and not just from childhood through my college days. I'm having those blasts from the pasts from early adulthood now too. But I guess that's normal as you get older. The memories build, and you have more to draw from. Or maybe it's my mind trying to tell me to get out of the dark places I've been, and to connect the wisdom I've learned from the past few years to the person I was and the person I'm becoming. Life is settling after some hard knocks, and maybe this is a way for the Spirit to tell me to reconcile my identity for the present and the future.

Maybe that's what holiday nostalgia is about for us all. Because where you've been makes you what you are, and you have to decide what to take forward with you. I think my mind is trying to tell me to take the best forward.

That's all today. Take care, and have a great weekend.

Bye!

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Why I'm Over The "Perfect" Christmas

12/5/2018

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I feel inspired to follow up with last week's entry by answering the question of what's next? What do you do after that one year anniversary of a death or loss has rocked your world? How do you move on and establish a "new normal" after the old norm has been shattered?

It's a situation we all face eventually, even if the loss doesn't happen during the holidays. And of course, the struggle is real that first Christmas after a loss. But what do you do that next year? This is a question Rick and I are facing now, a year after Chloe passed. And my solution is that you take it in moderation.

It actually started when I was unpacking the Christmas decorations last weekend. I shouldn't have been surprised to find that I wasn't as careful or diligent in packing them away last year as usual - obviously, I was upset and just wanted all of the stuff down, out of the house, and to get back to some version of normal. Unfortunately, this muddled mindset resulted in several decorations being broken. The good news is that nothing that broke was of great sentimental value. The bad news is that one of the items that broke was a nativity snow dome, and it made quite a mess of that particular box, ruining several other wooden ornaments and out tabletop nativity scene. It was a mess to deal with, but in the end we decided not to replace any of those things this year. They weren't major, so we decided to move forward with what we've got. Perhaps we'll go out after Christmas to see about replacing a few of those things after the holidays. But for now, we're both getting over colds, we just finished Christmas shopping, and we just want to take it easy and take the holidays as they come without the added pressure of perfecting the decorating. It's just not worth it.

I think there's a bigger lesson here. We're obsessed with making the "perfect holiday," and in the end we usually stress ourselves out so much that we can't enjoy it like we're supposed to. Maybe we even miss the meaning of the season in our rush to conquer "to do" list, present buying, cookie-baking, lavish parties, and all the other "must do's" of the holidays. What's wrong with keeping it simple and choosing to focus on enjoying each day of the season? Nothing, except that it's socially unacceptable to have such a "chill" attitude toward the holidays. But after last year, I don't care about those trappings anymore. The meaning of the season is more important than the societal expectations, commercial pressures, and FOMO (fear of missing out) that conquers so many people. It took death rocking Christmas again last year to open my eyes to this again this year. The goal shouldn't be perfection but APPRECIATION of the season and what it brings to our life. If we're wrecking or missing that meaning in unrealistic expectations while we rush about with overfilled schedules and arguments with family and friends over what "perfect" means for Christmas, then what's the point? There isn't one.

Maybe it's my experience last year, maybe it's this cold, or maybe it's middle age, but my patience with the hustle and bustle of the season is pretty thin. The "perfect" Christmas doesn't exist, because life is change and reality will always throw wrenches at you to remind you that life and the world aren't perfect. Something will always be out of whack, which is why we need the season in the first place - to remind us that there's always hope.

I don't want to find myself sitting at the window on December 26 just having the time to ponder the meaning of the season. I want it to be timely this year. I want to live it in the moment, not constantly deferred by the demands of a schedule or "to do" list. Maybe that's why so many people love those old-time Christmas movies and songs. It was simpler back then. It didn't take so much to make people happy, and they weren't offended by everything under the sun. Maybe we need to get back to some of those classic values. it's something to ponder

That's all today. Take care, and have a great rest of the week.

Bye!

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Birthday and New Year's Wishes

Taking the Magic Forward

Sick Days and Holidays

Nostalgia

Why I'm Over The "Perfect" Christmas

Escape Reality

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