Sunday Update 6/30/24

Yay, I remembered to do this on a Sunday for a change!  :muppetflail: You have to celebrate the little successes, doncha know.

Not much to talk about in the writing sphere.  I wrote two days out of seven for 1866 words.  Tomorrow, Ju-Lo-Wri-Mo starts, so I better get over that shit in a hurry and set my ass down here to work every day.  Again, Ju-Lo-Wri-Mo is about 'no expectations' other than to write every day.  I had said something about no editing, but as Silver (who's also participating) pointed out, she's editing, too.  Like I said, no expectations.  This month is to do whatever you want to do as long as you're writing every day.  My problem is I sometimes use editing to avoid writing, so no editing for me.  Basically, Silver and I are using this month to get back into writing since we've both been on our own hiatuses for long enough that it's hard to find the groove again.  If you need this, too, join in.  It doesn't matter what you write.  It doesn't matter how many words you put down.  It doesn't matter if you get to the end of anything in the next 31 days.  Personally, I'm planning on working on the next Duke Noble for those days.  If I get stuck, though, I'll happily jump over to any of the other unfinished books I have.  Or I'll hit something totally new.  

In reading, I finished an ebook and I'm almost finished with the 866 page omnibus of Hercule Poirot stories.  I also picked up 12 new hardcopy books yesterday and a book I ordered from Amazon arrived in the mail.  So yay.  

Not much baking this week, other than I made a pan of chicken enchiladas.  We ate them for dinner one night and I have enough leftovers for two more hearty meals and one lunch.  Today, I'm planning on making apple crisp.  

On the weight/activity front, I did 4 days out of 7.  Weight: 170.4.  Yeah, I'm gaining since I stopped work.  I expected this to happen, so I'm not berating myself for it.  I need to get back to eating smaller portions and increasing my activity.  To that end, I'm going to try to start walking in the mornings.  (It's too damn hot to walk any other time of day.)  I also still have a lot of garden work to do which can also only be done in the mornings.  We'll see.  

The fawns are here.  They're all so tiny and cute.  We've seen like 3 single fawns, but yesterday, I actually saw a verified set of twins, so yay.

I'm still not fishing.  It's too damn hot to fish.  And, like I said, I'm busy with other stuff first thing in the morning which is the most likely time for fish to be biting this time of year.  Oh, well.  There'll be plenty of time to fish this Fall.

My gardens are pathetic right now.  Aside from the neglect they've suffered, we had a hard rain the other morning that knocked my new tomato plants over.  I need to cage those suckers, but that's a task for another day.  The coneflowers I bought look tragic.  They may be at the end of their growing season, which is part of it.  The other part is the deer have discovered them and have gotten over their fear of NEW THING, and they're munching on the plants now.  Derp.

Well, I think that's it for me today.  If I missed anything that you have a burning desire to get on update on, let me know.  Have a great day!  And feel free to leave a comment letting me know how your week went.  

Saturday Reading Wrap-Up 6/29/24

Saturday Reading Wrap-up?  Well, if it wasn't broken before, why fix it now?  So here we go...

Not a lot of action on picking up new books this week, but I did get a new ebook - the first one this year :gasp: - so that's something.  I also discovered that one of the ebooks I bought last year never made it to my Kindle.  I'm working on fixing that because I still want to read it and I did pay money for it, dammit.

Books Read:

7) Perfect Pending by Lucia Ashta (6/25/24) - paranormal romance* - 4 stars - new to me but not underappreciated.  Picked up for free last year from a freebie list on Amazon.
Review: "Good story. A little too explicit here and there for me to be able to give it 5 stars, but your mileage may vary."

DNFs:

6/24/24 - free - paranormal romance - it just didn't blow my skirt up and that was obviously in the first few paragraphs.  Blerg. (This was sitting on my Kindle from July of last year, which makes me sad.)

6/24/24 - free - cozy mystery - it was the second book in a series when I never read the first, so I'm not sure if it really was this book's fault, but the allusion to all the different things that happened in the first - not a recap but hinting at it all - definitely turned me off.  Needless to say, I am not inclined to go looking for the first book so I can read this one.  (This was sitting on my Kindle from July of last year, too.)

Currently Reading...  A compendium of Hercule Poirot stories.  861 pages of it.  I've been reading this for well over a week now and I'm almost done.  I needed a break midweek, though, so I tried reading some other stuff, too.

What's on your reading wrap-up this week?

Friday This n That

Yep, forgot to post yesterday.  Yep, forgot it was Thursday, too.  I'm all messed up in the timeline.  Derp.

In my defense, yesterday morning, I went outside to mow.  I was all prepared to get 'er done.  Mowed for like 20-30 minutes and was too pooped to continue.  I am a pathetic loser.  (And one, big, atrophied muscle.)

Night before last, I wrote 1122 words - which is the most I've done in one sitting since June of 2022.  Go, me.  Woo.  At least that muscle is recovering from its atrophy.

At my day-job, I typed a lot, but it was all short spurts - messages, emails, etc.  Every rare once in a while, I would type instructions - especially at the end there when I wanted to leave procedures for the next person who had to do my job.  I increased my typing speed by a lot, but only in short spurts.  Oh, and I can also take dictation of a sort.  They'd talk, I'd type while they were talking, and it ended up pretty much word for word.  (Sometimes, I'd edit what they were saying while I was typing because people don't always explain things in a linear fashion and they umm a lot.)

Accidental Death is now only 99c.  Have at it.

Project Hermes will be free starting July 4th for 5 days.  Have at that, too.

Just now, I was watching a doe and her itty-bitty fawn.  OMG, so tiny.  Nature is a beautiful thing, ya know.  And then you see her licking its butt and like... ew.

There's a photo being passed around on FB that supposedly shows a coyote with a deceased dog in its mouth.  Looks like a Jack Russell.  I guess the photo is some kind of warning about wildlife and your pets.  It doesn't look real to me.  Like where the coyote is holding the dog and the way the dog is hanging there, the physics are off.  Unless the dog was dead before the coyote picked it up and rigor mortis had already set in.  In which case, the coyote most likely found the dog carcass and is carrying it off, and didn't actually kill the dog.  I'm not exactly sure a coyote of that size could kill a Jack Russell of that size.  Jack Russells are pretty feisty.  Sure, it could happen, but I'm suspicious.  Anyway, look at everything you see online with a critical eye.

And yeah, be careful letting your pets out where wildlife can munch on them.  A gal who used to live here had her cat snatched right off her porch by a bobcat.  Or at least that's what she said.  I'm suspicious of that, too, because she wasn't always the most honest person.  It's believable, though.  We have bobcats and they wouldn't hesitate to much a house cat if they could.

And that's about enough out of me today.  Have you got any this n that to share today?

The Boiling Frog Who Jumped Away

This post was written a few years ago and never published.  It's more of a cautionary tale than anything.  I talk about this stuff so maybe someone else can take my experiences and help themselves out of a similar situation.

***

I'd like to start off by saying that never in my life have I ever been struck in anger.  But abuse doesn't necessarily have to take that form.

Sometimes I wish he had hit me.  From the time I was old enough to be interested in boys, I knew to never put up with anyone hitting me.  If he'd hit me, I would've gotten the hell out of there immediately.  But he never hit me.  Never hurt me... Not with his fists.  

When we first met, he was charming.  He treated me like an equal. He cherished me.  He loved me like I was supposed to be loved.  And then I moved in with him.  

Even then, it didn't happen all at once.  If he had treated me like shit right off the bat, I would've packed my stuff up and left him.  It happened little bit by little bit.  An unkind word here, a quiet dressing-down there.  By the time I realized where I was, it seemed like it was too late to leave.

You've all heard the story of how to boil a frog...  If you put a frog in hot water, it'll jump right out.  But if you put a frog in cold water and bring that water to boiling, you can easily boil it.  It doesn't realize the water is heating up.  It doesn't try to get away.  It just sits there until it dies.

He never came right out and called me ugly or stupid or fat.  He implied it.  He played on my own fears.  Are you sure you really want to wear THAT dress?  I can't believe you embarrassed me like that.  Don't touch that.  Don't do that.  Stay away from that.  

An example...  When we first met, he was almost computer illiterate and I was working a job in computer training and consulting.  I trained him on how to use his computer better and more efficiently.  I spent hours setting up a database for his business and inputting all the data he'd been keeping in a Word document.  But after I was done with that, I was no longer allowed to touch his computer because I might screw something up.

When I tried to read a book, he sulked and made life unbearable, so I stopped reading.  Reading, you see, took my attention away from him.  Even when he didn't need or want my attention.  

If I tried to be with my friends, he sulked and made life unbearable to the point I no longer saw my friends.  Until I had no friends.  Hell, he didn't want me to be around his friends either.  And heaven forbid, I had something to do with my family.  If he went, he was sullen.  If he didn't go, I came home to sullen.  

This was, of course, not the case when we were with his family.  He was so loving and attentive around them.  He morphed back into the man I first met.  I was beautiful and smart and he loved me.  He was that way around strangers, too.  Suddenly, he was the man I fell in love with again.

Except the man I fell in love with was an illusion.  

One night about two and half years in, we had one hell of a fight.  I don't remember what start it.  Maybe I tried to stand up for myself.  Again, he never hit me.  The words and accusations he threw were far worse.  So vile and disgusting, I won't repeat them here.  I was ready to leave him then.  The next day, he came to me on his proverbial knees, apologized with some excuse or other, and suggested we go into couples therapy.  I was all for it.  Maybe I'd get the man I fell in love with back.  Maybe a therapist would finally show him that not everything was my fault all the time.  

Therapy never happened.  It was just another trick of his to make me stay.

Another 6 months down the road, everything was happy on the surface and we talked about buying a house.  He went and looked at houses without me.  He picked the house without me.  He bought the house in his name.  He picked out all the furniture.  And we moved into his house.  He didn't want me to meet the neighbors.  He didn't want me to walk around the neighborhood.  We'd moved into a pretty cage.  I swear if he could've he would've fix it so I didn't work, so I'd never have to leave my cage.

Shortly thereafter, I was away at a sales conference in a dinner meeting and all I could think about was not wanting to go home.  After the meeting, I would have to head for the airport for my red-eye flight back to him.  I prayed for the plane to crash so I wouldn't have to go home.  That's when I finally woke up.  I would rather die than go back to that man.  So, why die?  Why not just get the hell out of that hellacious relationship?

Still, I didn't immediately go.  I'd just been tired that night.  It wasn't really as bad as I was thinking, was it?  A couple days after I got home, I invited my parents over for dinner to see the new house and stuff.  He was working when they came over.  It was always better to see my family when he wasn't home.  Unfortunately, when he got home and heard they'd been over, he blew up.  How dare I invite people over to HIS house when he wasn't home?  

The camel's back finally broke.  I told him I was leaving.  I spent the night in Owl's room and the next morning, before he woke up, I took her out of there.  We went to breakfast and then to my parent's house where I asked if they wouldn't mind watching Owl so I could go move my stuff and whether it would be okay if we stayed with them for a while.

When I got back to his house, he was waiting for me.  He didn't believe me the night before when I said I was leaving.  He still only thought this was some kind of game I was playing, looking for concessions or sympathy or something.  I set him straight, then started packing my stuff and moving it to my car.  After the first trip to the folks', when I got back, all my stuff was in the hall and he was gone.  Whew.  

Then the calls started.  Every night, him trying to get me to come 'home', so nice and so apologetic.  Eventually, I told him if he didn't stop calling, we were getting the phone number changed.  He stopped calling.  Then he happened to see me out and about and decided to follow me.  It was like a lame car chase in a bad movie.  Rushing down the freeway with him yelling out the window and scaring the holy shit out of me.  I drove straight to the state police post and sat in their parking lot until I was sure he was gone.  I never saw him again.

Dad didn't understand why I left him and kept encouraging me to patch things up.  After all, I'd been with him for three years.  The guy's friends and family didn't understand why I would do such a thing.  I was certainly a horrible person for hurting him so bad.  None of them ever knew what went on behind closed doors.  No one ever saw because the marks he left weren't visible and I never told them what was happening to me.  I was ashamed I'd let myself get into that situation.  I always thought of myself as a strong woman.  I was the first person to advocate for abused women to get the hell away from their abusers--to wonder why the hell they stayed.  And there I was in an abusive relationship myself.  For three years.  I felt like a fool. 

And even after I knew I was being abused, it wasn't 'real abuse' because he never physically harmed me.  He rubbed my soul raw, he flayed away at my sense of worth and of self until I lay in tatters. On the inside.  I was his pretty doll to dress up in sexy clothes and show off at parties.  And as long as I kept my mouth shut and toed the line, he was happy.  

Now, after reading all that, one would think I would never let that happen again.  Sorry to disappoint, but I did it again.  Not quite to the same extent, but I got Mental Abuser 2.0 a few years after I ditched the original version.  Stupid, stupid, stupid.  Lucky for me, after I got out of that relationship, I spent a year learning how to be alone and like it.  And then I found Hubs.  Twenty years of awesome... you know, once I understood that Hubs was a good man and stopped cringing every time I thought he might be mad at me.  And learning it was okay if he was mad, because he still wouldn't treat me like shit.  

I didn't write this for sympathy or for pats on the back.  It happened.  I survived it.  It's done for me.  I wrote this because there are far too many people out there living through the same situations I lived through.  I want them to know they can get out.  I want them to understand that they don't deserve to be treated poorly by anyone - especially by someone who is supposed to love you.  Being alone is better than being with someone like that.  Really, it is.  

And abuse is abuse - even if you can't see the marks it leaves.  

(I don't mention Owl much in this, not because she wasn't part of it but because we'd be here all day if I included my thoughts and feelings about her in all this.  I tried to hide as much of it from her as I could.  No child should be exposed to that stuff.)

Sunday Update 6/22/24

Okee dokie, I ate something yesterday that left me feeling gross this morning, so this might not be the most awesome of Sunday Updates...

First things first - because it always comes first... writing.  I wrote twice this past week for a total of 1684 words.  I had intended to write more, but I didn't.  The first writing session left me with an ouchy hand the next day, and being the big baby that I can be sometimes, I put off writing again for several days.  The next session wasn't nearly as hard on my hands, so yay.  But I really need to get myself into the writing groove, so that every night I am sitting here for at least a half hour, banging away at the keyboard.

Another writerly thing is that I set Sleeping Ugly up with a three day freebie deal.  Friday - Saturday - Sunday.  Which means today is the last day and if you haven't taken advantage of this, then your time is running out.  I've moved 42 books as of this morning.  Small beans in the scheme of things, but considering I'm only reaching people through Facebook groups designed for this type of marketing AND considering those 42 books are more books than I moved all of last year and a good part of '22, I'll take it.  Maybe those freebies will encourage people to buy the other two books in the series.  Maybe it'll get me a new review or two.  I have hopes.

To that end, I'll be running freebies and sales a lot over the next three months, just to make something happen.  Keep following this page or follow me on Facebook for up to date info on that jazz.

In reading news, I've been reading the same book all week - Poirot's Casebook.  It's a boatload of short stories by Agatha Christie, all involving Hercule.  It's pretty awesome, but I've read like 350 pages so far and I've only reached in the middle of the volume.

I was active 5 our of 7 days this week.  Cleaning mostly, but I did get a walk in.  I did what I call Loop +, which means walking the entire neighbor circle, plus the little short road.  That makes it 1.1 miles and puts me at 24.4 miles for the year so far.  My calf muscles are still protesting that walk.  I didn't weigh myself this week.  Mostly because I've been eating like a horse, so I don't expect to see a downward change and I don't want to see an upward change. LOL

In baking news, I made Parmesan-encrusted pork chops.  Then I got a wild hair and made brownies one night.  Both of those... so good.    It's really getting too hot here to bake a lot, which is why I try to do it in the morning, but sometimes a gal just has to have brownies.  Warm, with ice cream.  

Other than that?  I'm sure other stuff occurred, but my brain is toast today.  

How are things in your world?

Saturday Snippet

Saturday Snippet... Hmm... sounds like a plan... But what to share?  Would you want a snip of something I'm currently working on?  

“You don’t even care that your brother is lying in a ditch somewhere.”  The voice coming over the phone line wasn’t an unwelcome one, but Duke Noble’s head was pounding after a night on the town and the shrillness of the tone was one he could’ve done without.

 “He’s not lying in a ditch somewhere, Mother.  He’s probably on a three-day bender,” Duke said as he tucked the receiver against his shoulder and lit another cigarette.

“But he hasn’t been in his apartment in weeks.”

“I’m sure you’re exaggerating.”

“There’s dust all over everything and the food in his refrigerator has spoiled.”

Duke sat up.  “What were you doing in Harry’s apartment, Mother?”

“I was worried.  And it wasn’t as if I was breaking and entering.  He gave me a key, after all.  I thought I’d just pop over and check on him.”

The thought of what his mother could’ve encountered upon entering Harry’s apartment almost made Duke spit his coffee across the room.  Harry was a died-in-the-wool bachelor and more than something of a lady’s man.  On any given day, all sorts of individual ladies could be found in various states of undress in his brother’s abode.

Or would you rather have something older?

A cute and fluffy bunny hopped across the meadow toward me.  His shiny button eyes twinkled and his tiny velvet nose wrinkled.  Next thing I knew, the little bastard whipped out a laser pistol and shot me in the ankle.  “That’s the last donation the ASPCA gets from me,” I thought.

Looking back, that’s how this whole thing got started.  One minute I’m enjoying a beautiful summer day, the next, I’m running for my life.  It was as if the whole species  of lagomorphs suddenly decided they’d had enough of being darling, and decided it was high time they took over the job of King of the Forest.

It wasn’t until much later I found out about the space ship.

(Everything is, of course, unedited. So cut me some slack.)

Do you guys need a lead in for these things - like what it's from or some kind of basis for the scene?  In the case of both of these, they're the beginnings of their Chapter Ones, so they really should already give you an idea.  :shrug:

Freebie Friday

Hi Everyone. It's morning here and you know what that means? Well, beside the fact that I am a half-awake troll, mainlining coffee and fending off overactive kitties? It means SLEEPING UGLY is free starting today.

Looks aren’t everything… And curses aren’t real… Yeah, right.

(Go here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07GM24Q48 )