I’ve done it. I’ve upgraded my WordPress account. Now I just need to learn how to use all my new fancy features.
It will be a slooooooow process. I’ve gotten good tips and advice from other bloggers, but given my day job, my WIP, and my cats, I’ll be taking baby steps. [What about my husband, you ask? Oh, he’s low maintenance and he gives me time to work on my writing and blog . . . unlike my cats.]
For now, let’s celebrate that I no longer have those rather vulgar ads showing up in my posts. Although I may very well come up with ads of my own.
A girl’s got to making a living somehow.
I just hope I don’t break my blog in the process and disappear into the dark.
To honor my many family members who have served in the military …
To honor my dear surrogate grandfather, Ted Albers (RIP), who was drafted into the Army at the age of 34, captured at the Battle of the Bulge, and held as a POW under the end of WWII …
To honor my husband, a Vietnam-era Navy veteran who flew in P3s looking for Russian submarines …
To honor them, I’ve made a donation to The New York Bar Foundation’s fundraiser to assist veterans in need of legal services (https://nylawyerslovevets.swell.gives/).
Don’t just thank a veteran for his or her service. Hug them. Hold them close and tell them you love them. Support them. Make sure what they fought for is not denied to them.
We are fine. Irma was still a bitch but in lowercase letters. We prepared for the worst and it didn’t happen, at least not to us. We have power and some minor debris to clean up, but that’s it. So, now, please turn your attention back to those are still suffering from Harvey and Irma, from the wildfires in the West, from the earthquake in Mexico, from the monsoons and floods across the globe. There is still plenty of suffering going on.
I had hoped to be more active on my blog since our return from our road trip. Unfortunately, Irma (no friend of mine) has other ideas. As many of you already know, Hurricane Irma has torn up islands in the Caribbean, leaving devastation in its wake. Its path is set on Florida but still we’re not exactly sure where in South Florida it will make landfall. Just that it will sometime late Saturday. The latest report (as of 10 AM, 9/7/2017) is Irma is expected to go straight up the center of Florida and then veer out west.
At this point, we can only hope that those who should evacuate heed those orders and take shelter. Irma is a B-I-T-C-H. This one hurricane is likely to be more devastating than the combined impact of the hurricanes that criss-crossed Florida in 2004 and 2005.
My heart is heavy with worry for my fellow Floridians. I live in north Florida, near the border with Georgia. At worst, we’ll have tropical storm conditions and power outages.
That’s why I’m posting this now and why I’m turning off scheduled posts for the time being. Why post when I might not have the power (literally and figuratively) to respond to comments?
In meantime, please enjoy what a few of my friends are up to.
Finally, friend and fellow blogger/writer Phillip McCollum has been setting writing goals and keeping them, to the delight of his readers: https://phillipmccollum.com/let-us-write/
Okay, this should keep y’all busy for awhile. Cheers and stay safe wherever you are.
I feel that I owe you all an explanation. I’ve been … hmmm … relatively absent over the last few weeks. Some of you may have noticed. Some not. No matter.
A few weeks ago, I turned 60. And my husband retired from his state job. And I started looking into a second career. Yeah, pretty much all on the same day.
I am happy that my husband is retired for many, many reasons. The least of which is we have a big trip planned for later this summer and it’s a lot easier for him to work on the logistics from home. Another good reason is his health. His back got so bad for him last winter that he couldn’t stand up straight. He was hinged at his hip, his back flat like an ironing board. The guy is 6 feet tall. I’m 5 feet 4 inches. We are not supposed to literally see eye-to-eye. He has been proactive about seeing doctors (including physical therapists, chiropractors, and now an orthopedic surgeon) as well as developing an exercise routine that has greatly improved his posture and reduced his chronic pain. Reduced but not eliminated. More doctor appointments are in the future but at least he has the freedom to focus on his health and not be sedentary for 7 to 8 hours a day.
My favorite reason for his retirement is he is spoiling me. Most nights I come home from work to find dinner ready. I don’t have to go grocery shopping any more. I don’t even have to vacuum up the cat litter. I still do my own laundry but that is personal choice.
I would probably be more spoiled if I hadn’t decided to enroll in an online program for TESL/TEFL certification.
TESL: Teaching English as a Second Language
TEFL: Teaching English as a Foreign Language
The acronyms are used interchangeably but usually TEFL refers to teaching in other countries like China and TESL refers to teaching immigrants. I don’t have plans to teach in another country, but I’m interested in moving out West where there may be some immigrants wanting to learn English.
Why, oh, why, am I pursuing a course of study when I already have two graduate degrees?
Shortly before I turned 60 (an age, by the way, I had been looking forward to), I realized that I really, really, really didn’t want to continue with my current job past 62. But if I retire then, I’ll still have three years before I’m qualified for Medicare. I’ve estimated that my health insurance premiums would take at least 3/4 of my pension. I need another source of income, at least for those years and possibly beyond.
So my dream is to work part-time as an ESL tutor.
Actually, this isn’t a new interest of mine. I had looked into certification many years ago at my local university. The one class I took was underwhelming in content and inconvenient for my work schedule. I also worked at my local library as a literacy volunteer for a while. But it wasn’t until I started working on my current course of study that I realized that maybe, just maybe, this was what I should have been doing all along. I just hadn’t had the imagination to pursue it when I was younger.
Well, there’s no time like the present. Actually, all we really have is the present.
And I have a limited amount of time in which to complete my certification. It’s self-paced, but there’s an “expiration date.” The course work is very interesting. I’m learning a lot about my own language (us native speakers take so much for granted), and I like the challenge of coming up with my own lesson plans. I have to use my imagination.
Now some of you (well, maybe one person) might wonder why I’m not thinking about self-publishing as a way to earn some extra $$$.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Okay, in all seriousness, I still have a novel in the works, but it’s on the back burner until I finish my studies. I do want to self-publish, but I’ve set my expectations for market success pretty low. I can’t be in it for the money.
So I’ll continue to be fairly absent from social media and blogging for the next couple of months. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t think of each of you often.
I’ll leave you with a few photos I took at the bay side of St. George Island recently. My husband was working on a time-lapse of the clouds, while I sat and sweated.
Usually I don’t review a book I haven’t yet finished. I definitely don’t review books that I don’t plan to finish (for whatever reason). I’m making an exception here.
This weekend I started reading Kevin Brennan’s memoir-in-vignettes, In No Particular Order. Readers of this blog already know I’m a Brennan groupie fan and I’ve pretty much snatched up everything he has written. Most of the vignettes are actually from his blog, previously published so-to-speak, so I’ve already read most of them; however, reading them as part of a collection is a different experience. Even though I remember the few I’ve read so far, having these writings in context adds a depth that one usually doesn’t get from the untethered blog post.
Before I go on to explain why I’m writing a review now, when I’ve only read a quarter of the vignettes, I do want to note that while this collection could be read in a weekend, you could also take your time with it. Which is what I plan on doing. Each vignette is only a couple of pages long. So, for example, if you have a few minutes to kill before your next meeting (and you really, really don’t want to check your email again), you have time to read one of Kevin’s vignettes in its entirety. You can read one of these vignettes in less time than it takes to smoke a cigarette (if you’re so inclined) or boil an egg or preheat the oven. So you can read In No Particular Order as fast or as slow as you like.
Now, why am I writing about this book when I haven’t even finished it?
First,
“Everybody has at least one book in them. The book that is their own life.”
As Brennan notes in his preface, “most people’s lives don’t add up to a narrative that would interest many readers […]”; and yet, he’s managed to reflect on various experiences in his own life that, while not necessarily out of the ordinary of many others’ experiences, are still unique experiences because they happened to him, not them. In reflection he adds layers to the experience that assist the reader in understanding how even the experiences of a teen-ager shape the mature man or woman we later become. He ends his preface with the quote above and my first thought was, “Yes!”
Second,
“When you indulge in a personal nostalgia trip you have to be ready for some revelations that might shock or disturb … Understandings that you might be remembering people inaccurately, or that you weren’t as meaningful to them as they were to you.”
Throughout my life I’ve kept a journal of one sort or another. Some of the very earliest ones I either destroyed on purpose (watching it burn in the trash barrel at the far edge of our backyard) or simply lost (oh, to have that record of my first few months in California!). Reading (or trying to remember) old journals allow me to engage in nostalgia. They bring to mind people I haven’t had contact with in 40 or more years; experiences that make me pinch myself in wonder that I’m still alive. For the most part, that “personal nostalgia trip” is a precursor to an episode or two of depression. Nostalgia turns to self-berating for all the stupid decisions I’ve ever made, all the bad behavior I engaged in.
Third,
I’m taking this collection slow because of my own propensity to wallow in the past. Brennan’s writing, his reflections and remembrances, are short enough to be a jumping off point for me, if that makes sense. With a novel, I’ll get sucked into the plot and characters and their world and maybe even forget about my own world for a while. With a memoir, especially one of vignettes, I tend to reflect on my own experiences in-between. I don’t just read the vignettes; I consider them for lessons on how to look back, how to integrate (or let go of) experiences that are not fond memories. I have a tendency to dwell on the negative in my life, although …
“[w]hatever the case, here I sit now, happy as a panda in the bamboo grove, having made a series of decisions that led to a personal kind of heaven.”
Kevin could have written that for me. Despite all the negative experiences I’ve had, I’ve wound up (through no calculated intelligence of my own) in an enviable situation: happily married, a home to call my own, and a new horizon awaiting my husband and me.
So if you’re still on the fence about whether you should plunk down 99 cents for Kevin Brennan’s memoir-in-vignettes, well, all I can say is, I’ve certainly gotten a lot more out of In No Particular Order than the 99 cents I put down, and I’m not even finished.
What’s not to love about a collection of vignettes by Kevin Brennan for only 99 cents? I can’t think of anything either so go and get yourself a copy of In No Particular Order!
I totally get why people would want to tune all out politics. What’s going on in our country right now is an effing fiasco; a train wreck of epic proportions; a depressing, dismaying, infuriating, shocking clusterf**k of authoritarianism, fascism and isolationism. Who wouldn’t want to bury their head in the sand, or in a book, or behind a mountain of yarn and two flying knitting needles?
It’s not in my DNA to look the other way. At times it’s a blessing. Often times it’s a curse.
Granted, much of what is happening has little to no direct or immediate effect on me. I am white. I am way beyond reproductive age. I have a job that pays well by Florida state government standards. I have a good HMO. I own my house. My husband and I tend to be fiscally conservative so if I happened to lose my job, we would still be fine financially. Except that my husband has a serious back problem, one that will likely require surgery, and so health care coverage is not something we can take for granted. At least, not in the way that #45 can or Paul Ryan can or Rand Paul can. Any one of them can have a catastrophic illness and not worry about how they’ll pay for treatment and recovery. And, yet, they would accuse me of feeling entitled.
You know, I wasn’t born into a wealthy family. Hell, I wasn’t born into a middle-class or lower middle-class family. My mom was one of 12 born to a so-so farmer (her words: “he wasn’t progressive”). My dad’s family was even poorer. Both my dad and his sister had mental health problems that plagued their lives. My dad couldn’t keep a job so eventually my mom had to take on minimum wage work to support her four kids. And we got Social Security because of his disability. Yes, the very Social Security program that the GOP Congress seems hellbent on destroying was the difference between my family living in a house (that my mom finally paid off when I was 16) and living god-knows-where. The very Social Security program that enabled me to go to college, to aspire to a more secure life than what my mother had known. And let’s not forget the PELL Grant and the other grants that enabled so many of my generation to get our educations without having to go into a sinkhole of debt. Compare my current income with what I would likely be making without my college degrees and I think you could say that the country has benefited from its investment in me.
The GOP Congress wants to totally destroy Planned Parenthood. When I came of age, I started going to Planned Parenthood for my yearly checkups. And, yes, for birth control because, no, I didn’t want to have children. When I was a young adult going to a Planned Parenthood in Oakland, California, the nurses tried to counsel me to use something other than birth control pills. They made a point of providing me with the lowest estrogen pills possible because they knew that we women were simply guinea pigs for Big Pharma. I didn’t have a boyfriend then but the pills were convenient and they regulated my menstrual cycle. I had my priorities.
The nurses at Planned Parenthood tried to warn me. Eventually I did go off the pills, opting to have a tubal ligation in 1988. Too little, too late. Fast forward to 2001 and I’m diagnosed with endometrial cancer, developed no doubt because I had so much estrogen in my body. Menstruation at nine. Birth control pills for roughly ten years. No pregnancies to deplete some of the estrogen. So when people demonize Planned Parenthood, I can only think of how much foresight they had compared to my HMO doctors of later years. Planned Parenthood was looking out for me, so I feel compelled to look out for them.
I’m white, but I wasn’t born into privilege. I wasn’t born onto a level playing field. I can’t imagine what it must be like to not be white, to have to work even harder just because of skin color. Oh, please, there is racism in this country. #45 is evidence of that. Sadly, our country has been built in part on the distinctions we make between ourselves and others on the basis of what we see. And the first thing we see is skin color. I saw it in my small town growing up, where there were only three black kids in my high school. I can’t say for sure that any of them were treated badly, but I believe the one male teenager was pretty damn lonely. You see, they were all cousins so at 15, 16 years old, when everyone else was dating, he wasn’t because no parents wanted their white daughter going out with a black boy. Nothing personal, they would say.
I can’t forget my own history. I can’t ignore my sense of “there but for the grace of God …” because, frankly, much of what I was given, I took for granted. I never thought that Planned Parenthood might someday have to close its doors to me because there was no longer funding for it. I never thought that the grants and Social Security I received might someday not be there because Congress wouldn’t think I was worthy enough. But that is what is happening to young people now. They already have fewer advantages than I had. And what few they do have, the GOP Congress and #45 want to take away. Add to that, the racism and sexism and xenophobia in this country. The “shining city on the hill” is tarnished.
I know people (some I’m even related to) who would say, “I don’t care” when issues like immigration or racism are raised. They would argue that they had had it tough too so why should they give an inch to anyone. I don’t argue with them. It’s a waste of time. I just know that I have to live with myself. And I don’t fight to protect the rights of others in order to ensure that they might in turn protect my rights. I do it because it’s the right thing to do.
Excuse me now as I step off my soapbox and attend to the bright spots in my life:
Finishing Line Press has revealed the new cover of my chapbook Kin Types. They put it on their website with my headshot, taken by my friend Renee Rivers.
A little background on the cover image: this is a tintype from my family collection. It was handpainted, and the jewelry was painted in gold leaf. We don’t know exactly who the photograph is of, but believe it is of the Remine (Remijinse) branch of the family. My great-great-great-grandmother was Johanna Remijinse De Korne, born in Kapelle, Netherlands. I love how the Dutch spelling conjures up the word “reminisce.”
The cover is new and the book edited once again to enhance the experience. What is really nice is the price has been cut for the introduction. You can buy the kindle version for a special introduction price of
$0.99
John J. Cannon, a successful San Francisco lawyer, takes a well-deserved leave of absence from the firm and buys a boat he names My GRL. He is unaware that his newly purchased boat had already been targeted by a terrorist group. John’s first inkling of a problem is when he wakes up in the hospital where he learns he was found unconscious next to the dead body of the young woman who sold him the boat in the first place. John now stands between the terrorists and the success of their mission.
Check them out and read the first few pages on Amazon.
Also, you can check out John Cannon’s other two adventures as well as the new My GRL at John W. Howell’s Author Page
Author Bio
John began his writing as a full-time occupation after an extensive business career. His specialty is thriller fiction novels, but John also writes poetry and short stories. His first book, My GRL, introduces the exciting adventures of the book’s central character, John J. Cannon. The second Cannon novel, His Revenge, continues the adventure, while the final book in the trilogy, Our Justice, launched in September 2016. All books are available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle editions.
John lives in Port Aransas, Texas with his wife and their spoiled rescue pets.
Marie at 1 Write Way 