Forty Years Ago Today I Began My Legal Career
Forty years ago today, September 4, 1979, I started working for Hallmark Cards. It was the day after Labor Day, summer was over, and it was time to get to work. My husband and I had spent the summer studying for the bar exam, taking the three-day test at the end of July. Then we […]
My Hope Secured: Cover Reveal
It seems appropriate that on this Labor Day I am updating you on my most recent labor of love. I am pleased to show you a near-final version of the front cover of my soon to be published novel, My Hope Secured: Love and Loss on the Oregon Frontier. I might revise this cover slightly, […]
Where Did 1850s Oregon Farmers Get Their Water?
As I am finishing my current novel, it dawned on me that I have not focused on how the settlers in Oregon obtained their water. I’ve just assumed they had plenty, mostly from creeks or springs near their cabins. This is probably a reasonable assumption, but I decided I should do a little research into […]
Random Photo: Summer Visit in Virginia
Now that we know where most of our boxes are after our recent move, I decided to open a box of photographs and post about a random photo. My selection wasn’t entirely random. Summer is drawing to an end, and I told myself I would use the first snapshot I found of summer. What surfaced […]
MY HOPE SECURED: An Update on My Work in Progress
Because of our move, July was a lost cause on editing my current work in progress. But I am pleased to report that as August began, I got back into the swing of things. I’m into the polishing phase on the novel, which will be titled My Hope Secured. I’ve discovered a good way to […]
The U.S. Postal Service Gift That Keeps on Giving
I posted a couple of weeks ago about the error the U.S. Postal Service made in recording the zip code of our new home. In that post, I described the finger-pointing between the Zip Code A branch and the Zip Code B branch personnel. In a second post, I described how we received mail one […]
Lost and Found
A few days ago, a friend said to me, “You look thin. Have you lost weight?” “I have no idea,” I responded. “I can’t find my scale.” The bathroom scale is one of the things my husband and I have lost in the move. I remember packing it. I think I shoved it in a […]
The Hazards of Living Off the Grid
My husband and I have now been in our new home a little more than two weeks. Most of the problems during the move have stemmed from people’s reliance on computer systems. Automation can be a boon to efficiency or a bane to our sanity. When we rely on computers to organize our lives, we […]
Fifteen Nuggets from Cherry Adair at the Woodneath Romance GenreCom Master Writers Program
On August 1 and 2, I took a break from the hassles of moving to attend the Master Writing Class with Cherry Adair offered by the Woodneath Branch of the Mid-Continent Public Library as part of their Romance Genre Conference. Author Cherry Adair taught a two-day program that covered how to plot a novel, with […]
I Should Have Buried St. Gabriel
There is a tradition that says that when one wants to sell a house, one should bury a statue of St. Joseph in the yard of the house to be sold to help it sell quickly. I have had Catholic and non-Catholic friends tell me they followed this practice, and they all swear their houses […]