Luanne Castle's Blog, page 22

Next Stop on the Rooted and Winged Blog Tour: Interview by Anthony Avina

The newest stop on the Rooted and Winged blog tour by Poetic Book Tours is an interview of me by Anthony Avina.

You can find it here:

Interview with Author Luanne Castle

A Lovely Review of Rooted and Winged

A huge thank you to Sheila Morris for her lovely review of Rooted and Winged on her blog. I tried to reblog, but my reblog button doesn’t work right, so here is the link!

Rooted and Winged – poems by Luanne Castle

Back from Being Gone

The gardener and I got back from Yosemite the other day. We hadn’t gone on vacation since pre-COVID, and had already lost points in the time share thingie that my parents had given us years ago. So we used some points to stay near Bass Lake and go to Yosemite. We’d been to Yellowstone, Glacier National Park, etc, but never Yosemite.

We also wanted to get away from some family troubles, if possible, although that didn’t happen as they followed us there heh. The best part of the vacation was spending some time with the gardener away from our jobs (we work together at home), housework, yardwork, and cat chores. We cooked easy gluten free meals in the kitchen of our condo. Bass Lake was ok, and we had a nice day in a rental boat on the lake, but it’s not a lake like Coeur d’Alene, George, or Tahoe, which are my preferred lakes (spoiled much).

Yosemite had some brilliant granite formations, but the Glacier road is closed all year, so we didn’t get to see everything. And we didn’t hike much (because of my bum foot) or camp (because of my good sense). Yosemite seems to be all about the hiking and camping. For return visits to national parks, Yosemite wouldn’t be near the top of my list, but some of these views were breathtaking.

El Capitan, Clouds Rest, and Half Dome (and the rest)

For some reason I screwed up our flights, probably because of all the family stuff going on this summer. It’s been hard to concentrate. I didn’t realize American had nonstops between Phoenix and Fresno and, instead, booked us on flights with layovers. That turned out to be a big mistake for the trip home. Took us sixteen hours. Then SWA discovered that in Vegas, at the layover, employees neglected to load 2/3 of the baggage! That included ours. We had to stand in first one line, then a second one, until 2AM while daughter waited in the cell lot for 3 hours. She had work next morning at 8. I felt terrible about it. For some reason I felt a little better when the SWA employee womanning the second line declared the whole situation RIDICULOUS!

I hope you’re enjoying the blog tour for Rooted and Winged!

Next Stop on the Rooted and Winged Blog Tour: A Winged Guest Post

The newest stop on the Rooted and Winged blog tour by Poetic Book Tours is a guest post I wrote about birds, poetry, and a particular bird in my new book Rooted and Winged.

You can find it here:

Guest Post: Rooted & Winged by Luanne Castle

I love how The Bookworm interacted with my guest post, too.

On the same (loose) topic of “wings,” I got a shot this week of one of my winged favorites. Our delightful dragonflies in Arizona are bright orange.

The gardener and I are back from a trip to Bass Lake and Yosemite. I’ll tell you about it in a future post!

Next Stop on the Rooted and Winged Blog Tour

I hope that you will follow the Rooted and Winged blog tour by Poetic Book Tours. Today’s post can be found here:

Luanne Castle

For the tour schedule, check out the tour website:

https://poeticbooktours.wordpress.com/2022/08/27/rooted-and-winged-by-luanne-castle-sept-oct-2022/

Please Join the Rooted and Winged Blog Tour Now in Session

I hope that you will follow the Rooted and Winged blog tour by Poetic Book Tours. Today’s post can be found here:

Interview With Luanne Castle

For the tour schedule, check out the tour website:

https://poeticbooktours.wordpress.com/2022/08/27/rooted-and-winged-by-luanne-castle-sept-oct-2022/

New Poems Up at Sheila-Na-Gig Online

Grateful to Sheila-Na-Gig online journal and editor Hayley Mitchell Haugen for publishing two of my wolf poems. These poem are not in Rooted and Winged, but rather in a future project. I really love these poems (haha) and hope you do, too.

Both poems are “how to” poems:

*”How to Make a Hand Shadow Wolf”

*”How to Digest the Wolf”

Two Poems at Sheila-Na-Gig

 

I hope you’re having a lovely holiday weekend and that you join me for the Rooted and Winged blog tour beginning September 15.

Find Me at Substack Today . . . and a New Poem at Verse-Virtual

After getting feedback from y’all (I so prefer y’all to the Michigan “you guys” I was brought up with) I probably will start to ease into Wednesday posting at some point. First, though, the blog tour for Rooted and Winged begins. Poetic Blog Tours schedule starts Thursday, September 15 and lasts through October.

Today you can check out my 100 words on writer Amie McGraham’s substack blog Micro Mashup where every post is 100 words. https://morningpagemashup.substack.com/p/keep-it-100-cbe Feel free to comment over at Amie’s site.

Also, the online community literary journal Verse-Virtual has published one of the Rooted and Winged poems about my maternal grandmother here: https://www.verse-virtual.org/2022/September/castle-luanne-2022-september.html Thanks to editor Jim Lewis.

If you would like to interview me for Rooted and Winged or have me write a guest post for your blog, please don’t be shy.

Let’s make it a good weekend!

Best Day to Publish Blog Posts?

I’ve been posting on this blog for almost ten years, generally once a week and usually on Monday mornings. Unfortunately, Monday mornings are not very good for me any more because Mondays and Tuesdays are so busy. I am thinking about switching posting days to Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday, and I wonder what you think about that. I would love for you to complete this poll. (Notice that I am not giving you the “I don’t give a rat’s behind” option).

Do you see a poll above here? It’s supposed to be here but I am not seeing it! Thanks for letting me know. If you want to give me more information, feel free to leave a comment below. If you have any insights on the best times to post, I’d love to hear so that I can put that information into my decision making hat.

Poetic Book Tours is going to be starting a blog tour for Rooted and Winged beginning on September 15: READ ABOUT IT HERE.

Make it a wonderful week.

My Wacky Migraines

I was recently diagnosed with something called vestibular migraine. Or hemiplegic migraine. Or maybe both. There is a difference because vestibular is awful, but hemiplegic can be dangerous. Apparently there is no way to tell for sure, but I am not going to accept that answer. Story unfinished. But let me back up.

For twenty-four years, I have been plagued by something that was called “complicated migraines” by the neurologists I had seen. After Loma Linda mistakenly diagnosed me with TIAs (mini-strokes), UCLA and, later, Barrows in Phoenix, diagnosed these episodes as complicated migraines.

They are a migraine disorder, but they are not migraine headaches. I used to get the headache version until they turned into this other sort of migraine. In fact, I had some horrific migraines when I was a kid–seven to ten years old. The version I’ve been getting for 24 years is generally without headache. The symptoms include sudden severe vertigo, heaviness, inability to stand or sit, weakness, burning through the sinuses, widely fluctuating body temperature, brain fog, squinched up face on one side only, numbness of limbs, nausea, vomiting, falling asleep at the tail end of the acute episode, etc. It’s very difficult to go anywhere by myself, and this is why I don’t travel alone any longer. I can’t attend concerts or sporting events with lots of lights. I had to leave daughter’s wedding reception early once the goofy lights came out. Although we had planned ahead, what the DJ thought was mild was not. That’s ok because her friends all had a wonderful time, and I was tired anyway.

When I moved to Arizona, the complicated migraines got worse in that I felt sick every day and had acute episodes every couple of days. I had to go on preventative medication in the form of a blood pressure med. The meds kept the acute episodes from happening so frequently.

I would say my migraines have been under control for a dozen years until this spring when I started feeling sick (sore eyes, nauseous, slight vertigo) all the time. So I went back to Barrows, to their headache clinic. That’s where I was diagnosed with vestibular and/or hemiplegic migraines. No such thing any longer as complicated migraines.

My worst trigger is light, especially flickering artifical light. Fluorescents always have a flicker, even if you can’t see it. But LED can be bad, too. And fluorescents that have a noticeable flicker are the devil. When I have to go under artificial lights, such as the doctor’s office or grocery store, I wear a brimmed hat and sunglasses. Other triggers are sleep disturbance, stress, too much paperwork where I have to look down instead of across (computer better than paper on the desk or table).

Another thing that happened in the last few years is that I occasionally get migraines with very traditional aura in the form of sickle-shaped kaleidoscope images. And, yes, it is as vivid as in the image below.

I am going to try to continue to search for answers. My symptoms are consistent with having both conditions at the same time, but I haven’t been able to find anyone yet with my regular set of symptoms. There are rare individuals who have both vestibular and hemiplegic, but the forms occur at different times. Some of my regular symptoms apply to vestibular, and some apply to hemiplegic (especially the one-sided face squinch). So onward. And in the meantime, please hand me the hat and sunglasses!