A useless day—or a day when I was useless

My brother and me, in happier days

Truth is, probably no day is totally worthless; each has some redeeming quality. But I am hard put to find much good about today. No, it was not a bad day. It was just a day, a plain day, one when I didn’t know what I wanted to do and did almost nothing. I checked emails in the morning and made chicken salad for our dinner, so it could cool and blend its flavors in the fridge all afternoon. And then I fiddled, manufacturing things to do, avoiding what I’d set as my goal for the week.

You see, I’m almost at the end of the first draft of Irene in a Ghost Kitchen. I have the end—the climactic scenes, if you will—in mind, and I think I know how they should go. But I am avoiding putting the words on paper. I think in part I’m afraid to ever call the silly, short book finished, and in another part I’m afraid the end won’t work out as I intend it to. With Irene, one never knows. The entire cast of characters could take off in their own direction and spoil what I think are my plans. So I piddled.

And I didn’t know what to blog about. It’s been a different day—my brother is in the hospital again, just down the street from us. I knew last night they had requested transport from Granbury to Fort Worth where his cardiologist is but there were no beds at the hospital. And then all day today, I knew nothing and was afraid to call, maybe because I didn’t want to intrude or interrupt and maybe because I feared bad news. Finally at six o’clock, I called, he answered, and we had a short but semi-reassuring conversation. When I asked if we should come visit him, he said his dance card was already pretty full. And then he said it was complicated to get there, and I thought he was thinking of me in my transport chair. I have found in the past that hospital has a lot of twists and turns, and you can get lost if you don’t know where you are going. So we will talk again tomorrow.

Also today, Jordan’s new cat went to be neutered, which didn’t affect me much but did throw a monkey wrench in scheduling. They took him eight and were to pick him up at three. Then I called Sophie’s vet because we discovered an abscess on the back of her neck. I had a faint hope he would prescribe antibiotics over the phone, but no—he wanted to see her. Diabetes complicates infection. Jordan took her at eleven and, to my dismay, they kept her. Then they called and said she could go home at three. Schedule conflict! No way the kids could have the dog and cat in the car at the same time. It all worked out: they got the cat, Jordan and the cat came home, and Christian got Sophie about four. She is home, has some antibiotics, and my wallet is a lot lighter. But I am grateful she didn’t spend the night.

Last night we had a farewell happy hour for my Canadian daughter and her husband—I fixed a spread instead of just a light snack, because I knew they would have packed their kitchen and couldn’t cook. Pigs in a blanket, devilled eggs, veggies with a dip, olives, pickles, cherry tomatoes, etc. We had a pleasant evening, and I worked to avoid topics on which we disagree, but somehow the subject of money ruling the world came up. Reluctantly I realize it’s true, but I hate it; she accepts it with a degree of cynicism that frustrates me. When Sue said she as always proven right, I didn’t remind her that she had absolutely guaranteed that trump would win in 2020 because money rules—and he didn’t. But I hated that a touchy subject came up when who knows when we will see them again.

So maybe all that baggage was on my mind tonight and kept me from writing or, until now when it is almost midnight, from blogging. Who knows how creativity works? Tonight, because I as so at loose ends, I took a nap about eight-thirty and that was when I really came to grips with how out of sorts I felt. So I got up, came to the computer, and deliberately wrote three sentences. And I felt the muse kick in, I knew where I was going. It was too late to keep at it, but now I’m fired about tomorrow. I had promised myself I’d write a blog post first thing in the morning, so I turned to the book I’m currently reading. And then it occurred to me that if I wrote the blog tonight, I could go right to the novel in the morning. And sort of what I wanted to say flitted around in my mind. So that’s why these cobbled together thoughts on creativity and indolence.

Sweet dreams all. I hope I dream of Irene wrapping up that story in her usual fine style.

Saving the children

 

Last week I wanted to refer to a comment that a friend had made on one of my blog posts. This meant scrolling through recent posts until I found the right one. It was an educational experience. Seeing my blogs as a whole, I realized my voice was—there’s no other word for it—shrill! Granted, most of what I post is shared material, not my own writing. But it’s still shrill and angry and not peace-making.

An old friend told me long ago that because she’s such an activist, she makes sure to post about her grands, her garden, her dogs and cats, so that people will know that there’s a warm, fuzzy side to her. Except for food-related posts, I have fallen down on that end of blogging.

Shrill is what men criticize about women in public affairs or politics when what they really want to say is, “Shut up, sit down, and tend to your knitting. Let us men handle the affairs of the world.” I surely don’t agree with that attitude, but I don’t want to be known as a shrill female. Thoughtful, insightful, concerned—yes, all of those things. But shrill? No. I resolved to change my tone, perhaps post less often.

And then Nashville happened. How can any of us remain silent in the face of this recurring butchery of our children? I remembered back in the sixties, before Roe v. Wade, when we were encouraged to vote a one-issue ballot: if a candidate was for women’s rights to their bodies, we should vote for them; if not, nada. It didn’t matter what a candidate’s stance was on any other issue—the decision was made on the basis of the attitude toward abortion.

I am feeling that way again today. Two issues will determine my vote: gun control and abortion. I will not now or ever vote for anyone who opposes reform for those two issues. Yes, I know that saving the climate is crucial and immediate, and voter suppression is a problem, and yeah, I’d vote against any Republican who wants to withdraw support for Ukraine because that says to me they have no understanding of international relationships and do not deserve to hold public office. But those problems are not of immediate concern to me; the lives of children take precedence.

I was still mulling over my shrill voice when I attended church (via LiveStream) Sunday. Russ Peterman’s powerful sermon was about the school shootings. Pointing out that the leading cause of death in school children in this country is violence (and we are the only country for which that is true), he suggested that we are failing our children, failing our responsibility to keep them safe. Oh, some would have us keep them safe from drag queens and books that might enlighten them about our LGBTQ neighbors or the drag queen who reads stories to them, but not safe to live.

A meme on Facebook this week has a seven-year-old telling his mom he doesn’t want to go to school. “Why not?” she asks, and he responds, “I’d rather be dumb than dead.” Think of that. Let it soak in.

Admitting that the solution to gun control is complicated, Dr. Peterman pointed out that we have solved much more complicated problems. My thought was, “Yes, we are about to put men (and a woman) on the moon again, after fifty years.” But we cannot keep our children safe. I sent my kids off to elementary school in the late seventies and eighties—I cannot imagine how I would have felt if there was the slightest possibility of one of them being shot at school.

Dr. Peterman talked about compromise, with both sides trying to see the other side. For me, that’s so hard as to be impossible. When someone writes they will pry his AR-whatever out of his “died hands,” I know what kind of enemy I’m facing. When a Tennessee representative dismisses the whole things with, “We aren’t going to change it,” I know the enemy. I am beyond tired of people who don’t want to get involved or who withdraw for some peace—there is no peace, ever, for parents who lose their children in a shooting. And there is no reason we cannot ban military weapons in the hands of civilians. When Clinton did it, shooting deaths declined dramatically.

So watch for me to continue to be shrill, because I cannot in good conscience not speak out. If you want to tune me out, so be it. Dr. Peterman quoted someone who said, “Our faith does not  allow us to remain silent behind stained glass.” Either you  put your faith to work daily, or you are a Sunday believer.

Fittingly, our church service ended with the singing of “Tell Me the Stories of Jesus.” Jesus, be he prophet or teacher or divine god, loved the little children. How about you?

An apologia: this post is couched in the terms and traditions of Christianity, because that is the faith I know. I recognize that not all of my friends nor all of my readers are necessarily Christian but I am sure the beliefs herein can be adapted to your faith.

Texas is on fire—and so am I!

 

Here's the illustration for the post that nobody seemed to read.
Hope the picture isn't a jinx. I will not post a picture of my dying garden.

The wonderful herb garden I was so excited about has dried to dust, the pentas are shrinking instead of growing and nary a bloom on them (last year they were so gorgeous!), and the grass is brown. I’m sure it does not come as news to many of you that Texas is burning up. We’ve had days over a hundred degrees for a least two weeks now, and the forecast is over a hundred through the end of the month--no rain. The first three days this coming week are to be between 108-110. It’s brutal. And it’s taking its toll not only on our yards and gardens but on our dispositions and sense of well-being. It’s like being haunted all the time by a nameless, shapeless, invisible enemy.

I run two of those ceiling air conditioners—one in the living area and one in the bedroom—twenty-four hours a day, although in the early morning and late evening I can open the patio door for fresh air and freedom for Sophie.

In weather like this, all you can do is stay inside. So that’s what I did this weekend. Jordan and Christian visited friends at a lake house not far from here, and Jacob had a buddy spend the weekend. So, I was on my own. Had a welcome visit Friday from Sue and Teddy who are headed tomorrow for an intriguing far north Scotland resort hotel—so far north that it’s on an inlet from the North Sea. You may wonder about a resort in such rugged country, but it’s a place for hiking and maybe fishing, enjoying wonderful food, and lots of peace and quiet. I admit to a bit of jealousy—if I could go, I’d let everyone else hike, and I’d stay in the studio with a desk and write. Pictures of the interior of the hotel are captivating—imagine Scandinavian modern in a nineteenth-century stone manse. I admit I’m more than a wee bit jealous.

Saturday, Jaimie and Greg Smith came for happy hour—they live at the other end of the block, but the heat is so bad they drove from their house to my cottage! We had a good visit, caught up on each other’s doings—they had just been on an Alaskan cruise, another thing to make me jealous except they ate no salmon. Who goes to Alaska and doesn’t eat salmon? We ended, as we often do, talking politics, and it was a lively discussion but got us nowhere because we all agree, loudly and fervently. They are good neighbors and I treasure their friendship.

But most of all this weekend I wrote and researched like a mad fool—got the material I have for next month’s newsletter edited and ready to go, just waiting for final submissions; wrote my monthly column for the online newsletter Lone Star Literary Life (check it out every Saturday if you haven’t already) and wrote the first draft to a foreword of a forthcoming cookbook. Imagine that! Me, asked to write a foreword to a cookbook. I’m beyond flattered. And then I did a lot of research on Helen Corbitt. The next chapter is beginning to take shape in my mind, but the draft is still woefully short. And today, I wrote a thousand words on the next Irene novel, just because I miss being with my friends from that novel. For now, the next installment is titled Irene Goes to Texas but that's blah, and I hope to come up with something better. I am, however, ignoring the suggestion of Irene Does Texas. Bad connotation.

You may have noticed I didn’t blog. That’s because I’m a bit puzzled. Friday night I wrote what I hoped was an interesting post about the reprints of three of my historical novels about women of the nineteenth-century American West. Twenty copies of each suddenly landed on my coffee table—and that’s where they still are tonight. I gave a synopsis of each book, hoping it would attract readers. Nada. Not a single like nor comment. Now I don’t mean to whine, but there are some who comment on almost every post, which makes me wonder if this one somehow didn’t make it. It shows up on my Facebook page, but maybe not yours. Here’s a link if you missed it: View from the Cottage: Where is my librarian? (judys-stew.blogspot.com)

Tonight, the Burtons are back home, and I fixed us a sheet-pan supper of King salmon, potatoes and onions. I slow cooked the salmon—twenty-two minutes at 285^o. Salmon was delicious; potatoes and onion not so much. Undercooked. Close to raw. And those sweet onions I ordered? They weren’t. A substitution. Still the salmon with Jordan’s great salad was enough to make us all satisfied. And there’s cold salmon for lunch tomorrow. Who cares about potato and onion?

Stay cool, my friends.

 

Cleaning the junk drawer

 

My junk drawer

Cleaning the junk drawer for the sake of my soul

A friend recently wrote about how important journaling is to centering her in her world—overcoming the writer’s block (which she says doesn’t exist and is really fear), getting her in touch with her inner self. Okay, I get that, sort of. I’m not much one for getting in touch with my inner self—I sort of think it’s all one package, and what you see is what you get. I frequently say that blogging is my form of journaling, and yes, someday I may do the cheater’s method of a memoir, by assembling a selection of blogs. Then again, I may be fooling myself about what blogging does for me.

But I do recognize every once in a while, the soul needs a boost. Last night, I sent off to the editor my final version of Irene in Danger. Of course, it won’t be the final version when I get it back with comments, but still, getting there was a big accomplishment. This is the manuscript I started, stopped, started, put aside again, and then all of a sudden was on fire about finishing it, with ideas and scenes coming quickly (I hope not too easily). In addition, ten days ago it was really short, somewhere in that no man’s land between a novella and a novel. By last night, with my last read-through and plugging up some holes, adding recipes, it had picked up a whopping ten thousand words. Almost a respectable length. And as I read it through for the last time, I thought, “I really like this.” I hope others will too.

So there I was this morning: what should I do? Too soon to jump quickly into one of the other projects waiting on my desk. I don’t know if it was what a counselor calls my executive mind or what I call my soul, but I needed a bit of space. So I cleaned and sorted and straightened. I began with computer files—managed the payees on my bank account and deleted a whole lot that I will never use again; then I went through the pictures for my blog—a lot were stock pictures; others were ones that were clearly dated or had no long-term significance. I kept all the family pictures, and I’ll have to go back another time to delete all those food pictures I’m not sure about.

From the computer I moved on to the bookcase. A good friend dropped off a copy of Rodham, a novel based on the fantasy that Hilary did not marry Bill. My friend  recommended it, but right now I am deep into other books. Rodham is a thick book, and I literally did not have a space for it on my bookshelves. (And no, my cottage has no room for additional bookshelves.) So I sorted a stack of books and found enough to donate that I could fit the new one in. Now I burn to sort more books.

Finally—and this was a big chore—I turned to the two top drawers in my office file cabinet. They are not file drawers but flat, for papers and the like. If nothing else, I am the queen of that American institution, the junk drawer. The one I tackled today held thick stacks of really old manuscripts—I always thought I’d be environmentally conscious and use the blank sides, but since the computer has taken over my life I don’t do that anymore. And my notetaking is on legal pads So I discarded at least two reams of paper, destined for recylcing. The drawer also held batteries, and a couple of things I couldn’t identify but looked like computer accessories.

And an appalling mismatched, disorganized collection of assorted greeting cards. My big problem was I took them out and piled them on the worktable in the kitchen, but they kept falling on the floor. It is a royal pain to pick flat papers up off the floor when you cannot stoop or bed down to get them. I was breathless by the time I got them to my desk for sorting.

But sort I did, and discard heartlessly. If a card didn’t have an envelope or an envelope didn’t have a card, it went in with those reams of paper. For the time being, the drawer is neat, sparsely filled. I can’t wait to show it to Jordan. But the real work lies ahead tomorrow—the top junk drawer is an awful mess.

I feel sort of righteous tonight, having done all this. But as I took a picture of my junk drawer, I realized I should also sort and delete the photos on my phone. It’s like unravelling a knot on a ball of yarn—there is no end.

What about you? Do you have one or more junk drawers?

The days run one into the other

S

Sophie protecting her food

For her, eating is a competitive sport, and one of the 

Cavaliers always tries to share her dinner

Sophie is having none of that

Jordan lost her driver’s license and a credit card today, and in the process of searching for it we all tried to reconstruct what had happened yesterday. She knew she had them when she ran errands in the early afternoon, but after that the day was a blur. In the process of trying to remember yesterday, we realized how much the days now run not each other with a sameness. What did we do yesterday that made it stand out from the day before—or from today? We couldn’t solve it. A great commentary on the way we are living our lives in this pandemic.

Today stood out because it was Palm Sunday, and we went to church online, whereas we would normally be dressed in our fines, sitting in the pews to watch the church children and youth parade into the sanctuary waving palms. The church had called for pictures of us waving our palms, and that was among the many things on my to-do list that didn’t get done. But it was fun to see pictures both contemporary and from previous Palm Sundays—we spotted Jacob in one, apparently from the year he was baptized.

The rest of the day was, as I said before, like any other day. I wrote the blog I should have written last night—I really think keeping to my ideal schedule of a blog every night helps keep me alert and in some kind of discipline. I hope it doesn’t bore you.

I finished the mystery I was reading and began to explore what to read next. But I also went back to the last notes I had made for my Kelly O’Connell Mysteries and found an idea I thought might work. At first, I thought of checking in on Kelly and Mike to see how they were handling the pandemic, but all advice on the writerly lists I read is against pandemic novels now. No one wants to read about them when that is our reality. I may have found myself a new project, after floundering for over three weeks with a possible non-fiction project and a compilation of blogs. A new mystery might give me just the thing I need, though I’m hesitant to say that out loud.

We had sausages, northern-style beans, and a lemon potato salad for supper. Making the potato salad took a bit of my time. It calls for making the dressing and boiling the potatoes and peeling immediately so you can pour the dressing over warm potatoes—always hurts my thumb that takes the peel off, but I know that warm potatoes absorb dressing much better. When I was young the hospital where my dad worked had an older Italian cook. She taught my mom to peel and dress warm potatoes with a bit of vinaigrette, even  if you were making mayonnaise/mustard potato salad. Said it gave them more flavor and over the years I have always followed her advice. But I dislike peeling hot potatoes.

Jordan in my TCU mask

Before supper tonight Jordan came out and made me a mask out of a TCU bandana—then she promptly modeled it. Good thing we are related and are not practicing social distancing within the family. A good neighbor also gave us four masks, and I am indebted. We are all set—if I ever get to leave the cottage again.

Be safe, my friends. This too shall passl

Cultivating Cheerfulness

A good friend told me today that my blogs of late have all been downers, complaints of one sort or another. Jordan chimed in with “I’ve tried to talk her out of her depression.” I have mixed feelings about this. Quite honestly, I admit I have whined a bit—my back hurt, my house is in chaos, I got a rejection—and I shared those things. I think each of us have periods of depression and discouragement, and if I’m going to do a personal blog—which mine is, particularly for this year that I’m hoping to compile them—then I think I should be honest about my feelings. Pollyanna isn’t always at home. 

On the other hand, a friend and I were going into a restaurant for lunch the other day, and I saw a woman with multiple physical handicaps pushing a small grocery cart (no matter she was pushing it away from the drive-in window of a liquor store). I looked at my friend and said, “I’m never going to complain again.” Guess I haven’t been good about keeping that resolution, though I know some of my posts have been thoughtful—i.e., the pope’s visit—and some joyful, like last night’s reunion with old friends.

Still, maybe being sure I post positively will help me improve my disposition as I go, and truthfully I’m a happier camper tonight. I think mainly it’s due to the ministrations of my brother, who did a lot of spasm relaxation techniques (lay person’s description) on my low back today—for an hour and a half or so. When he’s working to release your back, his hands may well be on your head, but it’s magic, to me, that he can say, “Yeah, it all goes to that one spot” and point to the place in my low back I knew hurt. I won’t fool—even his low impact techniques sometimes hurt like fury, but by the time I got off the treatment table my back was ever so much improved—pain free. John and Cindy, my sister-in-law, do a two-man technique that involves pushing legs straight in the air and gradually back toward my head. John said I tolerated it well, and Cindy said she couldn’t believe how flexible I was. Music to my ears.

We went to Carshon’s for lunch—best Reuben ever—and as we left, John observed that I was walking pretty well and that the fact I didn’t hurt so soon after treatment was a good sign. Tonight I do feel better than I have in a long time. A bonus; both during treatment and at lunch, I had a great visit with both of them. John asked about my tremor and I said I’d had it for a long time—it’s the reason I don’t take the juice in communion, because I can see grape juice all down the front of whatever I’m wearing. He laughed and laughed, but it’s true. I’ve always had shaky hands. It was that kind of a visit—we caught up on kids and other things.

It was a hectic day at my house with all kinds of workmen, loud saws, and noxious fumes. I can’t tell any progress in the bathroom, except they were under the house and there’s a big hole where the shower will be. But my kitchen counter went in, and I am thrilled with it—it’s going to make my kitchen looks so much lighter and brighter—and speckled as it is, it won’t show every spilled drop of everything like the old counter Formica, a dead, dull gray, did. I stop every time I go in there and admire it. No pictures—I don’t think pictures of vast empty counters tell you much. Lesson learned as I cleared the counters for this work—I have way too much junk in my kitchen. I will be judicious about what I put back.

So here I am, back to being a happy camper. Bear with me, please.

 

Judy's Stew--Writing, Grandmothering, and a Dash of Texas

As I begin this year of dedicated blogging, I thought it appropriate to reprint the first post I ever wrote. A lot has changed: I've been retired since July 2010; I have seven grandchildren; I have published nine mysteries, with plans for many more.  My world keeps moving on. But this is where I was nine years ago...and how Judy's Stew came about.

July 1, 2006

When Melanie, long known as my fifth child though she’s married to my third child, suggested I needed a blog, I scoffed. I knew little about blogs and, as I told her, had nothing to contribute. “Jude,” she exploded, “you have lots to write about.” So I began to explore, the idea intriguing me more and more. There are things I want to talk about, things on which I’d like feedback, things I wish I could talk over with someone who shares the same outlook and frustrations as a writer. And then she came with that wonderful title that reflects all the things that fill my life--writing, my grandchildren, cooking, and Texas history. So this is for Melanie . . . and for me.
I am just shy of sixty-eight, the grandmother of five and a half children, the mother of four. Those are my most important roles, but I’m also the author of about sixty published books, though I always demur and add the qualifier that the majority were slim books written for third- or fourth-graders on assignment. Still they took research and work. And I've written fiction for adults and young adults, articles, essays, book reviews. Right now I do a monthly column on Texas Writers for the Dallas Morning New. In 2005, Western Writers of America honored me with their Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement, so the writing life has been good for me.
But writing doesn't support nor did it provide for raising four children as a single parent. For almost twenty years I've been the director of TCU (Texas Christian University) Press, a small academic press in Fort Worth, Texas--it's work that I love and so far, I refuse to really retire, though I've cut back. I also like to entertain and cook for guests (usually an experiment), and I'm a homeowner with a garden, a cat, and a dog, a churchgoer and a volunteer, and fortunate enough to have many many good friends.
So what are my concerns? How to be a good grandparent, how to be a good in-law, what to do about my writing career (which I'm always sure has stalled), what to do about global warming, how to improve the United States’ image abroad—a wide variety of things. And I love trading cooking tips and recipes. Sometimes I may show you pictures of my grandchildren (when I figure that out) and sometimes I may try out a prospective writing project. Who knows? Sometimes I may rant, but this is not an in-your-face blog.

A Year's Worth of Judy's Stew

Today I am seventy-seven years old or, as my father would have said, entering my seventy-eighth year. I am blessed with good health, a wonderful and close family, a comfortable life and home, complete with a faithful dog. I still have a career—writing—and an avocation—cooking. Still, I feel about thirty-five, and it amazes me to think of my age. And, yes, scares me a bit too.

I’ve been blogging almost daily for nine years, and I have a fairly good following. From time to time, someone suggests a book of my blogs—a publisher gave me free rein on organization (writing, my life, cooking, etc.) and my brother wants me to pull out family-related blogs. Both would be great projects, but I didn’t keep Word files—just wrote on the blog—and it’s a mess to retrieve.

So I decided to keep Word files of my posts for a year, and my birthday seems a good place to start. I don’t want to creep into my new year; I want to stride confidently. Maybe with that thought in mind, I’ll come up with enough meaningful posts.

Yes, there’ll be some blatant self-promotion, some cooking, some posts about family. Jacob starts fourth grade this year, and I’m hoping it will go more smoothly than third, which has had its rough spots. There may be some book reviews, if I read books that not everyone else has read. I may even recycle some posts I’ve written about my own work for other blogs. I won’t avoid politics. If you read my blog at all regularly, you know that I’m a liberal or progressive. This should be an interesting year, with a crowd of candidates on the Republican side and some interesting debates shaping up on the Democratic. If I feel moved to comment, I won’t mince words. Sometimes I’ll simply post my observations on life around me. If it’s a truly dull day, and all I could post was “I did this, and then I did that,” I’ll simply skip—but I hope there won’t be many of those.

I’ll try to include pictures as often as I can. Need to get in the habit of taking a photo of most meals.

Anyway there it is. At the end of a year, I’ll publish, probably though Create Space. If nobody wants a book, so be it. Maybe my children will each buy one.

A clean slate...almost

It was a hectic weekend, even if I eventually didn't go to the rodeo or the stock show grounds. I still had a houseful with four extra adults and five extra children--which meant Jacob slept in my bed three nights out of four. By the last night I kind of got used to it and slept well, until he turned into a small-size octupus about five in the morning. Kids are by nature noisy, especially when you put five together, so there was never a dull moment. And then there were three dogs. Sophie got in their faces, wanting to play; Gracie, the big dog, growled and carried on though, out walking, she played with other dogs. Eddie, at ten lbs., sometimes was okay with Sophie and sometimes attacked--which was kind of funny since she weighs two and a half times what he does. She seemed unfazed by the rebuffs to her playful advances, but I was constantly shuffling dogs and locking doors so neither children nor dogs would go out unsupervised.
We had a good family breakfast Sunday--a sausage and cheese casserole (see Potluck with Judy, http://potluckwithjudy.blogspot.com), plus a potato casserole Christian had left from a breakfast meeting, and fresh biscuits. It was a chance to all sit around and visit, which we couldnt do the night before in a noisy restauraant. Soon after everyone began to pack up and by noon the house was peaceful and quiet.
Not sure what it is about suddenly having time, but it made me industrious. I did laundry and dishes, and then I dug into my tax organizer, wrote my thousand words, posted on Potluck with Judy,and found time to read. Did the same thing today, with time out for a pleasant lunch with a friend. We exchange a flowers of the month program for Christmas and then have a monthly lunch before getting our flowers. So I enjoyed tuna fish in an old church building and tonight I have lovely cut flowers on my dining table. I am on the home stretch of getting my taxes together, have 34,500 words on my novel, sent corrections off on my newsletter, and am about to go over once more my notes for the program I'm to do tomorrow at a local retirement community.
This afternoon, it was back to first-grade homework with a reluctant scholar who claimed he was too tired because of "the allergies." We whizzed through math but muddled through his reading--I made him read it three times, because he still stumbled over words. Then we did the spelling, and he had a hard time recognizing the words, which led me to say if you can't pronounce them, you won't recognize them when the teacher reads them and  you won't spell them correctly. Somehow at the end of the week, he aces the spelling test, but I always despair on the first day of a new list. We didn't even touch what he had to write about the book he read. After he left, I did a nice, relaxing yoga routine--don't know if it's tree or dancer or what, but I sure can't do the one where you stand on one foot and put the other foot on your opposite knee. Good thing I keep a chair there to hang on to.
The other day my neighbor said to me, "You don't have anything you have to do." I countered with the fact that I have a desk piled high with work to be done, and he said, "Those are things you choose to do." He's right, but I am so glad I choose to write, to blog, to read, to give the occasional program though it makes me nervous, to lunch and dine with friends. I even choose to do yoga, because I feel some sense of accomplishment at some of the poses I can do and I'm afraid of the consequences of inactivity. (I don't think tax organizers are a choice.) And I also choose to get Jacob every afternoon and do homework with him. I have chosen to build myself an entirely new life and career after retirement, and I couldn't be happier.
Do I miss the zoo and confusion of the weekend? Of course, but I'll see them all again soon.
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Blogging--a personal history

Some months ago a friend who runs an academic press casually mentioned the possibility of publishing a collection of my blogs. Flattered, I thanked him but said I was in the midst of a novel. The idea however stayed in the back of my mind. Today, having finished the first draft of that novel, with many revisions along the way, I put it aside to send to a beta reader and probably won't go back to it until after the holidays. So it's a good time to start reviewing blogs.
I've been blogging since June 2006--over six years, which means I have a lot of blogs to review. Today there's controversy over whether or not blogs are good marketing tools and I admit I blog in hope that peole will like me enough to want to buy my books. But six years ago blogging was still new, and I only got into it because daughter-in-law Melanie said she thought I had a lot to say. When I protested I wouldn't know what to write about, she said, "Writing, cooking, grandmothering." And she's the one who come up with the name Judy's Stew. I didn't have books to promote, so I began because it turned out to be fun, not because it was a marketing tool. It will be interesting to trace the change over the years, but the early blogs I read tonight are highly personal.
My brother wants me to pull out the family blogs and compile them separately as long as I'm going through, and one of my surprises was how many of my posts have to do with grandchildren and family. I had thought they were mostly either random thoughts or a chronicle of a writer's journey toward mystery. So I'm trying to separate them into those categories. It's kind of daunting to keep the files straight in your mind--and on your computer, and I didn't get anywhere near through 2006 tonight but I'm ready to give up for today. I'm also trying to edit a bit as I go--excerpting relevant bits and pieces but not including an entire blog. It's work, I tell you.
But it's fun to think how much things have changed, how much my family has changed, in six years. My oldest grandchildren was still a child--now she's a sophisticated teen. My youngest wasn't even born. A family picture shows many fewer of us than when we last gathered for a reunion.
Of course my writing has changed dramatically too--I was working and struggling with my first mystery and now I have three in print, one more at the publisher, and one in draft form.  Six years ago I was still working and my daily life was very different--today it's all about writing and cooking and keeping Jacob and going to lunch with friends.
This is going to be an interesting--if long--project, and one I'll do in bits and pieces between other things. But if nothing else I should get a good family chronicle out of it. And I'm enjoying the nostalgia. It's like reading anything else you yourself have written--sometimes I think, "Damn, I'm good" and other times I shudder that I signed my name to something an idiot wrote.