R.Z. Halleson's Blog, page 3

Thirsty….

Is being thirsty the same as being driven? Maybe, in some sense it is, but rather than being compelled toward achieving a goal, as “being driven” implies, being thirsty, points more toward longing for something that has not yet been achieved.

In the Beginning

Halleson describes an incident that has determined the values and the choices throughout her life.… Read More In the Beginning

Update on: What??? My Hard Drive is Toast?

Okay, so I tried downloading another installer that had a different number, and got the message Error code 0x80070652.

Growing Up … and Growing Out Of

What about the children who were abandoned by their parents? How were they to resolve the relationship with the people who gave birth to them if they never met them, or if their memories of their parents were so vague that they couldn't picture their faces? What if their parents were known to them, even present in the household at times, but were so consumed with their own survival that children were seen as obstacles in the way or as objects to be manipulated and used for their own selfish purposes? How were these children to grow up mentally and emotionally healthy? What if the parents were abusive?

What??? My Hard Drive is Toast?

Nine months later, the Spectre died. Really died. The so-called Blue Screen of Death with the error 0xc000000f was all that I could get. I ran all the diagnostics that I could on it, and all tests passed except that the hard drive could not be found. When I tried to run a diagnostic test on the hard drive, I got a message saying that "this media is not relevant to this computer." 

We are the Last to Remember

The lack of television in our early years meant, for most of us, that we had little real understanding of what the world was like. Our Saturday afternoons, if at the movies, gave us newsreels of the war and the holocaust sandwiched in between westerns and cartoons. Newspapers and magazines were written for adults. We are the last who had to find out for ourselves.

Downsizing: Letting Go of Cambodia

Here was the story of the life of Norodom Sihanhouk, some of it in his own words. He tells of the Buddhist prediction of Black People coming to Cambodia and emptying the streets and buildings of the cities and villages. The Khmer Rouge came, he says, and they wore black pajamas. They were the "black people" that had been predicted. The prediction was true. “It was astrology!”

Becoming an Activist

All of our lives changed on January 20, 2017 when Donald J. Trump was inaugurated as the forty-fifth president of the United States of America… and I do mean ALL of our lives changed. I have never been a political activist in all my 81 years on this earth, but the inauguration of a man to … Continue reading Becoming an Activist

How to Talk to a Liberal

We are on our own to work out the language that we use in trying to speak to our counterpart and actually be heard. In return, are we listening so as to understand this person's worldview and its merits? Continue reading →

What Happened to Clara?

From Kirkus Reviews: ...Halleson clearly has a strong understanding of the Norwegian-Americans who populate her novel, and their depictions seem extremely authentic. She’s equally skilled at representing the criminal mind, and the passages from the perspective of a kidnapper are chilling.... Continue reading →