Lisa R. Howeler's Blog, page 73

Sunday Bookends: Bookish outings, typos in books, Anne of . . . books, and lots of figure skating

It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, what I and the rest of the family have been reading and watching, and what I’ve been writing, and some weeks I share what I am listening to.

What I/we’ve been Reading

I was determined to finish Anne of Windy Poplars this week because I started it, not necessarily because I am enjoying it. I don’t like to not finish books I’ve started. I won’t lie. I skimmed the last few chapters. I’d heard from some other readers who have read Anne that this one wasn’t their favorite and I can see why. It isn’t a horrible book but there were parts that just dragged on. I mean, the Anne books sort of drag on anyhow. They are written some 100 years ago now and are in the classic style of “head-hopping” and over explaining, but this one was a bit over the top.

With that book behind me I’m planning to read Anne’s House of Dreams but only a chapter or two at a time.

I’m really itching for a cozy mystery so I wanted to delve into The Cat Who Smelled A Rat by Lilian Jackson Braun, even though it is one of her later books and they aren’t as good. I had purchased a mass-market paperback for my birthday this past year. When I opened it last night, all excited to read, though, I realized that there are tons of bizarre typos in it. Like spaces in the middle of words typos. Like I don’t know how this made it off-the-press typos.

I’m so irritated by these typos (I could deal with some missing commas, etc.) that I don’t know if I’ll keep reading this one. I do have four others in the series in hardcover that I haven’t read yet so I may grab one of them.

I picked up a book called A Case of Bad Taste by Lori Copeland at a library sale I mention below, so I am starting that today instead.

I’m also reading an ARC for an indie author, which I am also done with. It is called A New Day Dawning by Sara Whitely.

It releases on Tuesday.

What’s Been Occurring

I wrote a little about last week in the post I shared yesterday.

The Husband and I went to lunch in a town 30 minutes away yesterday and then visited a merchant center, which is sort of like a flea market. There they had a selection of old books, which distracted me for quite a while, mixed in with other items, such as cast iron pans, handmade products, dishes, DVDs, toys, clothes, etc.

For me, looking through old books is so exciting because I just never know what treasure I’m going to find there. I found a book by two “old time” Christian Fiction authors, Bodie and Brock Thoene, that I hadn’t ready before (though I haven’t read a lot of theirs) and one by an author named Sean Dietrich who I found on Instagram. He writes short little tidbits about life, which reminds me of my blog, or at least the early years of my blog.

After we left the flea market, we headed to a library book sale in a small town we pass through on our way home. Okay, wait, we actually stopped by Aldi first for a couple of items, and then we went on to the book sale. I had looked on social media to see if there were any book sales going on because – yes – I am addicted to buying books, just as The Husband said. I say he can’t say much since he stopped by a library to buy a used book on Friday too. Ha!

The sale was upstairs in a conference room of the library (which is in an old high school) and many of the books appeared brand new. A notice on the chalkboard said that the sale was $5 for one bag full and $3 for a second bag full. I could have probably filled three bags with the books we found, even though the selection didn’t look that large on arrival.

In the end, we came home with 22 books for $8 and many of them were hardcovers that looked brand-new. I picked up three books from the Mitford series that were library-bound and spotless. They looked like they’d never been checked out, which is sad because that means a bunch of readers really missed out. I was also happy because I added them to my collection since I’ve been trying to gather together all 14 of the books in physical form for my bookshelf.

I also picked up a couple books by Lynn Austin (Fire by Night and Candle in the Darkness), one by Francine Rivers (Her Mother’s Hope), two books by Lori Copeland (A Case of Bad Taste and A Case of Crooked Letters) and together The Husband and I picked out seven of the first nine books in the Walt Longmire series by Craig Johnson. We own those books already on Kindle, but I always say we never know when Amazon is going to stop their service or something weird will happen and we will lose all those books. I prefer to have the books I really like in physical form.

For Little Miss, I picked up a couple of Native American fiction books because she loved Children of the Longhouse so much and is now fascinated by Native American culture – at least when it comes to books. Those books included Walk by Two Moons by Sharon Creech, Sing Down the Moon by Scott O’Dell, and Zia by Scott O’Dell.

I also picked her up a few picture books.

I didn’t find any books The Boy might like this time around.

Do you do what I do when you see a book by a new-to-you author and read the first few lines to see if you will like the book? If the first few lines catch me then I snatch up the book, thereby adopting it and taking it home.

I didn’t do that with each of the books I looked at yesterday, but I did with a couple, including the Copleand book.

After we came home, Little Miss’s little friend came over to play for a couple of hours. Little Miss stayed with the little friend and her grandmother while we were gone too, so she had a full day of playing, which was nice because it’s hard to get her together with her friends, who all live a half an hour from us.

The day was extremely relaxing and exactly what we needed after the last month of craziness our family has had.

Today we will visit my parents for some lunch and afternoon watching of The Chosen.

What We watched/are Watching

Last week we watched the last two episodes of season three of The Chosen. You can watch them at www.angelstudios.com or on The Chosen app.

They were pretty incredible but I’m going to need to watch them again to take everything in that was touched on. I’m already looking forward to season four.

During the week I watched an episode of All Creatures Great and Small from the most recent version of the show and sniffled through most of it. It’s a very touching show.

The Husband and I watched an episode of Foyles War and really enjoyed it.

I also watched a documentary on Orchard House, which is the house that Louisa May Alcott lived in and wrote Little Women.

Last night I watched video after video on YouTube of ice skaters I used to watch back in the 90s – Scott Hamilton, Kurt Browning, Elvis Stojko, etc.

Browning just had the most amazing footwork. He has always been quirky and fun on the ice too. He has a style that I’d never seen in skating before and haven’t since.

I love watching him.

Elvis was such a powerful skater and Hamilton? Well, we was the inspiration for them all. What a showman.

As I was falling down the YouTube spiral, I saw a video of Browning from last year and – oh my – he still is in amazing shape and skating well at the age of 56.

I spent 2 hours just watching the various performances and it was so relaxing. I need to take YouTube spirals like that more often.

Here are a few of the performances I watched:

What I’m Writing

Earlier today I had a breakthrough with ideas for a cozy mystery I want to write. I hope to start working on it this week.

I’m also going to be working on my Biblical fiction story.

I didn’t share much on the blog this week for various reasons, part of which I wrote about yesterday.

Your turn!

Now it’s your turn. What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this.

Saturday Afternoon Chat (with or without a cup of tea)

This weekend is very welcome after a very long week.

Today I’m sipping some tea with an insane amount of local honey. The Husband picked up some local honey that has a cinnamon aftertaste and I’m really enjoying it.

It was very delicious and relaxing to have tea when we traveled 90 minutes one way to take Little Miss to an oral surgeon consultation this past week. Little Miss has had some damage to her teeth over the years due to soft enamel and now she’ll need a procedure in March, which I am not looking forward to in many ways, but am in others. I’m looking forward to helping her teeth not become infected or cause her pain (which she doesn’t have now) but I’m very concerned that she will need anesthesia.

The good thing is that the surgeon we consulted with was amazing. He walked in, stuck his hand out, and said, “Hello, my name is Justin.”

Not, “Hi, I’m Dr….”

Instead he made it clear we are on the same level and he isn’t above us simply because of his degree.

He was extremely reassuring, interacted well with Little Miss, and left us dumbfounded with his kindness. So dumbfounded we almost forgot to ask questions. We weren’t used to being treated kindly by a person involved in dental care and let him know that which he said he was sorry to hear.

After we left the dentist, we found a restaurant for dinner and then headed back home north another ninety minutes. On the way home we saw a bald eagle going for fish in the river. Little Miss missed seeing it and lamented how her short stature causes her to miss everything exciting you can see out the window.

Our appointment was in Scranton and we saw a large library on our way out of town. Both Little Miss and I wanted to go to the library but it would have been hard to get out of traffic and find a parking space so we kept going. The Husband was impressed that   Little Miss wanted to go to a library so he decided to make up for her not seeing the eagle by stopping at a library in a town he has to visit often for work.

For a small town it has a very nice library and I’ve been wanting to go there and see the bookshop they have in the back of the library.

The bookshop is like a full-time library book sale and I was thrilled to finally see it. It’s a small room but it has several bookshelves lined with used books in very good shape that are for sale for $2 hardcovers and $1 paperbacks. The Husband didn’t let me stay very long for fear I’d wipe out our grocery money, but being there, looking through the books, was the happiest I’d been in weeks. I felt so calm and relaxed by being able to focus on something other than bad news.

I picked out three hardcovers, Little Miss picked out a book on Pegasus, and The Husband found a book for himself. We also found an entire set of the Lord of the Rings books, which was timely since the Boy and I will be starting The Fellowship of the Ring next week for school.

We were going to go back to the bookstore today after The Husband and I grabbed some lunch, but decided to find a restaurant a little closer. This made me a bit sad because I knew it meant I wouldn’t be able to go to the bookstore. That sadness led me to look on social media and see if any of the libraries in the town we’d be visiting had a similar type store and guess what? They are having a book sale and another, smaller library, that we will pass on the way, is having one too. I told The Husband about the sales and he informed me I am addicted to buying used books.

I’m okay with that. There are worse things to be addicted to.

(Interrupting this blog post to ask for prayer as I am having trouble focusing on The Boy telling me about video games right now while I am trying to write this. How can he possibly have all the lore of these games memorized but not be able to remember what he learns for school? Argh!).

The weather warmed up this past week just a little bit in the beginning and more later in the week. This gave us a chance to not stuff wood into our woodstove the way we had been previously while we tried to keep up with our heating oil bill. We were able to do that this week but now that we know how to utilize the heat from the woodstove more, we will be able to save on heating oil in the future.

We were able to just keep the fire at a nice gentle roll that left a warm glow in the woodstove but didn’t overwhelm us with heat this past week.

Our youngest cat loves the stove and somedays she looks like she is worshiping before it.

I will be glad when the weather is a bit warmer and I won’t have to start the fire or load it and the guys won’t have to haul wood in from the woodpile. At the same time, I will miss the coziness of it.

This upcoming week should be a bit calmer than the past few weeks. We don’t have any appointments planned other than grocery shopping at the end of the week.

The Husband has been doing the shopping for the last couple of months because he actually likes it. Weirdo. I’ll be taking over again this week, though, which I’m not exactly looking forward to since I’m not really a fan of grocery shopping like he is. Still, he does a lot for the family and deserves a break.

This post is jumping around a lot (hey, that’s normal for posts here!), but I have to share that I miss blogging. I have not been blogging as much recently because of either stress, things going on that I had to take care of, or trying to figure out how to market my books. I’m really tired of trying to keep up with social media to market the books and blogging is a stress reliever so I really hope to get back to blogging some more fun things the rest of February and beyond.  

So how was your week last week? Did you drink lots of tea or cocoa or something else warm? What’s on the sip list today? Let me know in the comments.

I leave with you two very entertaining performances by ice skater Scott Hamilton. An amazing skater and an even more amazing man and Christian. God bless him. It’s a joy to be able to look back at his performances. I’m so glad he shared this first one on his Instagram this week. I needed that pick-me-up. The second one is ten years later, which would have made Scott about 46 years old. It was the same year he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He’s since had two or, maybe, three tumors and a couple bouts of cancer but he’s still kicking and preaching Christ too.

Sunday Bookends: Need some lighter books, some classic movies, and getting to write Biblical fiction

It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, what I and the rest of the family have been reading and watching, and what I’ve been writing, and some weeks I share what I am listening to.

What I/we’ve been Reading

This week I finished Love and The Silver Lining by Tammy Gray. It was very different than most Christian Fiction books. The characters were very real and raw with a lot of flaws and many of those flaws were not fixed by the end of the book. This is part of a three-book series.

I found some of the romance scenes longer than they needed to be, but still enjoyed the book. I ended up skimming those scenes. They were very clean but also overly dramatic. I think the point could have been explained in only one page versus five or six in those instances, but that is merely a personal preference.

The book was a bit heavy at times so now I feel like I need a bit of a lighter book to give my brain a bit of a break.

Unfortunately, I promised to read another book for an author’s launch and this one looks a bit heavy too. I’ll let you know when I finish it and when it is officially out for purchase.  

To give myself a little break from the heavy parts of Love and The Silver Lining, I read Anne from Windy Poplars. I managed not to lose the book again this time.

I can’t seem to get away from books with some sadness or heaviness in it.

I’ve started one by Jennifer Q. Hunt called Some Through The Fire, which takes place during World War I. I do want to take a break from heaviness but I need to find out what happens to the characters so I will probably pick that up this week at some point. It’s very good if you are a fan of historical fiction.

I really do want to delve into Midwinter Winter, a series of short stories by Agatha Christie, but I really am having a craving for a The Cat Who book so the one I picked up for my birthday could end up in my hands this week.

Remember at the beginning of the year how I had planned out books I would read each month? Ha. Yeah, so far that has not worked very well, but that is okay because reading shouldn’t be structured. It should be fun.

Little Miss and I are reading Paddington at night again and Children of the Longhouse or The Cabin Faced West by Jean Fritz during the day for school.

The Boy is not reading a book right now as I look for another one for us to read for English.

The Husband is reading True Believer by Jack Carr.

What’s Been Occurring

I shared what’s been occurring on yesterday’s Saturday Afternoon Chat so you can catch up there.

What We watched/are Watching

This week we didn’t watch a ton because I was busy writing and trying to figure out my next stories and I made myself read instead of watch.

We did watch The Big Sleep with Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart last night. It had a very complex story and I kept getting distracted for some reason. It was very good but my brain wandered, my son came to talk to me about a show he’s watching, the animals were a bit wild, and I was working on this blog post.

We also started The Top Hat with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. We had to pause it an head to bed. I followed that one better because I set things aside and worked on focusing. Focus is my word of the year (which I will eventually write a blog post about) because I’ve been very bad at it recently.

Earlier in the week we watched an episode of Midsomer Murders. I watched an episode of Finding Your Roots with Julia Roberts and Ed Norton as the guest stars and I guess it was interesting, but I don’t know that I care about the ancestors of celebrities that much.

Tonight, when I get home from my parents we will be watching episode seven of season three of The Chosen and I am very excited since we weren’t able to make it to a theater for the final two episodes. We will watch episode eight Tuesday night. Or maybe we should just wait until Tuesday and watch them back to back but The Husband has a meeting that night so it probably won’t work out.

What I’m Writing

I am working on three different story ideas, but I think one is going to get dropped this week for another idea (a cozy mystery). The one is a story that doesn’t come out until August 2024 and is part of a multi-author project.

The other is Fully Alive, which I’ve shared a little bit of on here. It is a Biblical fiction story and I’m a little nervous about it. I don’t feel I know enough Biblically, but I’m praying about it and we will see where it goes.

This week on the blog I shared:

Saturday Afternoon Chat: Cold weather, warm fires, and Granda’s poemsA New Location/Newsletter for writing updatesEducationally Speaking: when it is a bad thing your child was brought up watching Wild KrattsIt’s going to go so fast.

Now it’s your turn. What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this.

Saturday Afternoon Chat: Cold weather, warm fires, and Grandpa’s poems

I did nothing this week. Like nothing. I haven’t even left the house once.

Nope, not sick. Not depressed. Oh, wait, yes, I am depressed, but that’s not why I didn’t leave the house. I just didn’t have anywhere I needed to go this week and it was very, very cold. Today it is 11 degrees as I write this and the high is going to be 23. The day started off at around negative five degrees Fahrenheit.

Thankfully tomorrow is supposed to be a bit warmer with temps climbing toward 40 degrees. I will take it after the frigid weather we’ve been having. It’s been so cold not even my adventurous younger cat wanted to go out most days and if she did it was for a very short time.

We have been running our woodstove full bore for the entire week, 24/7. Our pets have enjoyed it very much.

We have also enjoyed it since it has helped us save the little bit of heating oil we have left in our tank until we place a new order sometime this next week. I can’t believe how high heating oil was months ago (and still is really). That just started us on a snowball effect of trying to keep up with the bill and still pay our other bills and buy groceries. Eventually, the snowball became a full-blown avalanche and overran us, leaving us in a pile of Overwhelm at the bottom.

(Excuse the wood chips. We brought in a lot of wood this week and still had to sweep when I took this photo).

This week I was so thankful for the woodstove and electric heat upstairs in our house because without it we would have really been in trouble.

The Boy and The Husband bring in the wood for the stove most of the time but Friday morning I braved the wind and swirling snow to the woodpile behind the garage and brought a few logs in. I have short arms and a big head so I can’t carry as much as the guys can. Have you ever seen that scene in Meet The Robinsons? The T-Rex in it says that and I always think of that when I share about my short arms. I will post it below for your viewing pleasure:

I consumed so much organic peppermint tea with local honey this week to try to keep warm and calm, I was practically floating.

Last week I wrote about how Jesus helped to calm the storm in me while chaos raged around us, and it was the same this week. We still have a lot of weirdness going on and one situation that is not resolved, but this week still seemed calmer overall than other weeks. I had some anger issues over the one situation but was able to settle that a bit by venting to family and pacing a lot. Oh, and there was chocolate. There is always chocolate that is needed in those situations.

On Tuesday I released Shores of Mercy to the world finally. I was glad to have the book out there and the Spencer Valley Chronicles almost complete. As I mentioned in a post on my new newsletter site I plan to have five books in the series when it is all done, but for now, I am taking a break from the series to work on a couple of other projects. You can read about that on my new Substack site, which will only be used as a newsletter for my writing. I will most likely only update it once or twice a month, if that at this point, so if you do subscribe to it, don’t worry – I won’t spam your email every day or week.

I tried to get some writing in on a couple of the new projects this week and then realized I have no idea where the new books are going so I will need to do some more brainstorming and plotting on those.

I may not have gone out much this week, but the rest of my family did. The Husband took Little Miss to Awana on Wednesday at my parents’ former church. On Thursday my parents drove two miles north to see my 90-year-old aunt whose health is not doing well. They made me a nervous wreck because they had to call me for directions, couldn’t hear through the cell phone at one point, and then my mom called out my dad’s name and said, “Oh my!” and I thought they’d had an accident.

Then they decided to stop for dinner on the way home as if they are grown adults and can do what they want to do. I told them that they have to check in when they are going to be out past their curfew but they didn’t seem to listen to me. Parents are so rebellious sometimes.

It is almost like they are trying to get back at me and my brother for the times we were out and didn’t call them and tell them where we were, so they were home worrying about us. Not that either of us actually went out that much. My brother and I were both fairly tame growing up and also stayed close to home. If we did go out it was down the road to a friend’s house or in the yard to read a book. Yep, we were that boring, and proud of it.

I was originally supposed to drive my parents up to see my aunt but then my dad got all morbid and said he’d rather if something happened, it happened to just two family members and not three so that my children didn’t lose three family members at one time. He thinks such pleasant things, doesn’t he? But, yeah, he had a good point.

Last week my parents sent me home from their house with two huge boxes of blankets, comforters, and flannel sheets. They have too many and decided they needed to declutter. They met my brother and his wife for lunch and gave them a bunch too.

One of the blankets I immediately said I wanted was my grandmother’s – my dad’s mom. We lived across the hill from her (over the creek and through the woods to grandmother’s house we went) for my entire life until we moved in with her when I was in college.

She used to curl up in a tiny ball in the corner of this curved couch she had and cover herself with this afghan. She weighed about 100 pounds and wasn’t very tall so the thing covered her almost entirely.

My mom asked if I knew why she used to tie a red piece of ribbon to the bottom of it. I had no idea.

“She didn’t want to have the part of the blanket that was down by her feet up by her head when she laid back down,” Mom said.

Oh. Well, that’s one way to do it. I don’t think about such things but my grandmother apparently did. I have not yet tied a ribbon around the fringe of the blanket but I have covered up with it a couple of times, cried and least twice, and felt very sentimental every other time.

As an aside, I picked up the habit of rinsing out my mug several times under the faucet before using it to make sure it is totally void of leftover soap or dust of any kind. Grandma used to do that and now I do it and can’t stop. It’s my one, small OCD tendency.

Later in the week, Dad brought me a box of poems from my grandfather, which he wants me to place in some kind of scrapbook after I read through them.

It was all a little bittersweet because there was a series of poems in there written about a year before Grandpa died while my grandparents were on a trip to Maine. I never got to know the man since I was two when he died. My mom says I was afraid of men and even him because he had such a deep voice, but shortly before he died she’d leaned over to say goodbye to him (he was in a hospital bed at the house) with me in her arms and I impromptu leaned over and kissed his cheek. She said his expression was one of delight because I had never done anything like that before. He passed away not long after.

My grandfather was such a large figure, reputation-wise, in the family and community, though, so in many ways it feels as if I have known him all my life, even though I never really did.

He wrote a lot of poetry and kept very simple journals that mainly detailed what the weather was, what he’d had for breakfast, where he had gone that day, and who he had played cards with (usually some close friends who are distant relatives and the same couple my parents would later play cards with as well, even though my mom hates to play cards. Ha!).

Dad said he has a ton of large, padded, yellow envelopes with what looks like more of his writing in them spread out at his house. Looks like I know what my job will be Sunday afternoon.

Does your family hold on to family memorabilia or writings as well?

In addition to Grandpa’s writing, my dad also has quite a few items from my great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents, including a blood letter (not sure of the technical name for this) from my great-great-grandfather who was a doctor in the 1800s. This is the same great-great-grandfather who fought in the Civil War and whose brother also fought and then died in Libby Prison. (Trying saying great-great three times fast. After a bit, the words start to sound funny. *snort laugh*).

He also had a box of gold nuggets from my great-great-grandfather but we’re not sure why they are there. Dad thinks that maybe he was going to invest in some firm that was gold panning but he isn’t sure. The nuggets and the box they are in are probably about 200 years old. The nuggets look totally fake to me, but what do I know?

The full word above is “glass” but the g and l are on the other side of the box.

My dad gave The Boy a small framing hammer that my great-grandfather used to frame windows, including the one at the school of the local Catholic Church that we can see from our house. You know, the one with the bell that rings five times a day and the one I’ve featured in photos on this blog a few times.

After all this rambling I am sure you need a warm-up on your beverage. I shall pause while you do that.

Here is our intermission music:

Seriously, though, I do need to wrap this post up as it is dragging out, but I think I will pick up about Grandpa’s poems in another blog post later this week.

I hope you had a wonderful week last week and have a better one this week. As usual, feel free to share what you are drinking today in the comments and come back tomorrow for Sunday Bookends, where I share what I am reading, watching, listening to and writing.

I thought I’d share a poem from Grandpa to close out today:

Listen all here’s the deal,
You’re a cog in the wheel.
Some with a brush, a cloth, a comb,,
Others will pills as they roam.
Quiet you down, ease your pain.
All the duties not the same.
Others are just the nurses aid,
Let’s not forget the cleaning maid.
Some prepare for a transfusion
Inject iv’s its utter confusion.
In every bed there’s someone sick
All ring at once want you quick.
Samples of blood as you go along
Go to the lap to see what’s wrong
Temperature, heart beats, pulse and pressure
Ah yes, ‘tis work beyond measure.
Rub your back, arms they clutch
Get you up on a crutch.
And doctor’s orders you must obey
Among other things in the day.
Don’ know where we’d all be
Without that wheel don’t you see.
You jot a word on our chart
Yes everyone’s a vital part.
Yet ‘tis rewarding to the soul
To keep the wheel so she’ll roll.
So at years end, the yuletide season
We love you all, that’s the reason.
As these words we pause to write
Have a wonderful day and peaceful night
~Walter H. Robinson.

Saturday Afternoon Chat: Cold weather, warm fires, and Granda’s poems

I did nothing this week. Like nothing. I haven’t even left the house once.

Nope, not sick. Not depressed. Oh, wait, yes, I am depressed, but that’s not why I didn’t leave the house. I just didn’t have anywhere I needed to go this week and it was very, very cold. Today it is 11 degrees as I write this and the high is going to be 23. The day started off at around negative five degrees Fahrenheit.

Thankfully tomorrow is supposed to be a bit warmer with temps climbing toward 40 degrees. I will take it after the frigid weather we’ve been having. It’s been so cold not even my adventurous younger cat wanted to go out most days and if she did it was for a very short time.

We have been running our woodstove full bore for the entire week, 24/7. Our pets have enjoyed it very much.

We have also enjoyed it since it has helped us save the little bit of heating oil we have left in our tank until we place a new order sometime this next week. I can’t believe how high heating oil was months ago (and still is really). That just started us on a snowball effect of trying to keep up with the bill and still pay our other bills and buy groceries. Eventually, the snowball became a full-blown avalanche and overran us, leaving us in a pile of Overwhelm at the bottom.

(Excuse the wood chips. We brought in a lot of wood this week and still had to sweep when I took this photo).

This week I was so thankful for the woodstove and electric heat upstairs in our house because without it we would have really been in trouble.

The Boy and The Husband bring in the wood for the stove most of the time but Friday morning I braved the wind and swirling snow to the woodpile behind the garage and brought a few logs in. I have short arms and a big head so I can’t carry as much as the guys can. Have you ever seen that scene in Meet The Robinsons? The T-Rex in it says that and I always think of that when I share about my short arms. I will post it below for your viewing pleasure:

I consumed so much organic peppermint tea with local honey this week to try to keep warm and calm, I was practically floating.

Last week I wrote about how Jesus helped to calm the storm in me while chaos raged around us, and it was the same this week. We still have a lot of weirdness going on and one situation that is not resolved, but this week still seemed calmer overall than other weeks. I had some anger issues over the one situation but was able to settle that a bit by venting to family and pacing a lot. Oh, and there was chocolate. There is always chocolate that is needed in those situations.

On Tuesday I released Shores of Mercy to the world finally. I was glad to have the book out there and the Spencer Valley Chronicles almost complete. As I mentioned in a post on my new newsletter site I plan to have five books in the series when it is all done, but for now, I am taking a break from the series to work on a couple of other projects. You can read about that on my new Substack site, which will only be used as a newsletter for my writing. I will most likely only update it once or twice a month, if that at this point, so if you do subscribe to it, don’t worry – I won’t spam your email every day or week.

I tried to get some writing in on a couple of the new projects this week and then realized I have no idea where the new books are going so I will need to do some more brainstorming and plotting on those.

I may not have gone out much this week, but the rest of my family did. The Husband took Little Miss to Awana on Wednesday at my parents’ former church. On Thursday my parents drove two miles north to see my 90-year-old aunt whose health is not doing well. They made me a nervous wreck because they had to call me for directions, couldn’t hear through the cell phone at one point, and then my mom called out my dad’s name and said, “Oh my!” and I thought they’d had an accident.

Then they decided to stop for dinner on the way home as if they are grown adults and can do what they want to do. I told them that they have to check in when they are going to be out past their curfew but they didn’t seem to listen to me. Parents are so rebellious sometimes.

It is almost like they are trying to get back at me and my brother for the times we were out and didn’t call them and tell them where we were, so they were home worrying about us. Not that either of us actually went out that much. My brother and I were both fairly tame growing up and also stayed close to home. If we did go out it was down the road to a friend’s house or in the yard to read a book. Yep, we were that boring, and proud of it.

I was originally supposed to drive my parents up to see my aunt but then my dad got all morbid and said he’d rather if something happened, it happened to just two family members and not three so that my children didn’t lose three family members at one time. He thinks such pleasant things, doesn’t he? But, yeah, he had a good point.

Last week my parents sent me home from their house with two huge boxes of blankets, comforters, and flannel sheets. They have too many and decided they needed to declutter. They met my brother and his wife for lunch and gave them a bunch too.

One of the blankets I immediately said I wanted was my grandmother’s – my dad’s mom. We lived across the hill from her (over the creek and through the woods to grandmother’s house we went) for my entire life until we moved in with her when I was in college.

She used to curl up in a tiny ball in the corner of this curved couch she had and cover herself with this afghan. She weighed about 100 pounds and wasn’t very tall so the thing covered her almost entirely.

My mom asked if I knew why she used to tie a red piece of ribbon to the bottom of it. I had no idea.

“She didn’t want to have the part of the blanket that was down by her feet up by her head when she laid back down,” Mom said.

Oh. Well, that’s one way to do it. I don’t think about such things but my grandmother apparently did. I have not yet tied a ribbon around the fringe of the blanket but I have covered up with it a couple of times, cried and least twice, and felt very sentimental every other time.

As an aside, I picked up the habit of rinsing out my mug several times under the faucet before using it to make sure it is totally void of leftover soap or dust of any kind. Grandma used to do that and now I do it and can’t stop. It’s my one, small OCD tendency.

Later in the week, Dad brought me a box of poems from my grandfather, which he wants me to place in some kind of scrapbook after I read through them.

It was all a little bittersweet because there was a series of poems in there written about a year before Grandpa died while my grandparents were on a trip to Maine. I never got to know the man since I was two when he died. My mom says I was afraid of men and even him because he had such a deep voice, but shortly before he died she’d leaned over to say goodbye to him (he was in a hospital bed at the house) with me in her arms and I impromptu leaned over and kissed his cheek. She said his expression was one of delight because I had never done anything like that before. He passed away not long after.

My grandfather was such a large figure, reputation-wise, in the family and community, though, so in many ways it feels as if I have known him all my life, even though I never really did.

He wrote a lot of poetry and kept very simple journals that mainly detailed what the weather was, what he’d had for breakfast, where he had gone that day, and who he had played cards with (usually some close friends who are distant relatives and the same couple my parents would later play cards with as well, even though my mom hates to play cards. Ha!).

Dad said he has a ton of large, padded, yellow envelopes with what looks like more of his writing in them spread out at his house. Looks like I know what my job will be Sunday afternoon.

Does your family hold on to family memorabilia or writings as well?

In addition to Grandpa’s writing, my dad also has quite a few items from my great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents, including a blood letter (not sure of the technical name for this) from my great-great-grandfather who was a doctor in the 1800s. This is the same great-great-grandfather who fought in the Civil War and whose brother also fought and then died in Libby Prison. (Trying saying great-great three times fast. After a bit, the words start to sound funny. *snort laugh*).

He also had a box of gold nuggets from my great-great-grandfather but we’re not sure why they are there. Dad thinks that maybe he was going to invest in some firm that was gold panning but he isn’t sure. The nuggets and the box they are in are probably about 200 years old. The nuggets look totally fake to me, but what do I know?

The full word above is “glass” but the g and l are on the other side of the box.

My dad gave The Boy a small framing hammer that my great-grandfather used to frame windows, including the one at the school of the local Catholic Church that we can see from our house. You know, the one with the bell that rings five times a day and the one I’ve featured in photos on this blog a few times.

After all this rambling I am sure you need a warm-up on your beverage. I shall pause while you do that.

Here is our intermission music:

Seriously, though, I do need to wrap this post up as it is dragging out, but I think I will pick up about Grandpa’s poems in another blog post later this week.

I hope you had a wonderful week last week and have a better one this week. As usual, feel free to share what you are drinking today in the comments and come back tomorrow for Sunday Bookends, where I share what I am reading, watching, listening to and writing.

I thought I’d share a poem from Grandpa to close out today:

Listen all here’s the deal,
You’re a cog in the wheel.
Some with a brush, a cloth, a comb,,
Others will pills as they roam.
Quiet you down, ease your pain.
All the duties not the same.
Others are just the nurses aid,
Let’s not forget the cleaning maid.
Some prepare for a transfusion
Inject iv’s its utter confusion.
In every bed there’s someone sick
All ring at once want you quick.
Samples of blood as you go along
Go to the lap to see what’s wrong
Temperature, heart beats, pulse and pressure
Ah yes, ‘tis work beyond measure.
Rub your back, arms they clutch
Get you up on a crutch.
And doctor’s orders you must obey
Among other things in the day.
Don’ know where we’d all be
Without that wheel don’t you see.
You jot a word on our chart
Yes everyone’s a vital part.
Yet ‘tis rewarding to the soul
To keep the wheel so she’ll roll.
So at years end, the yuletide season
We love you all, that’s the reason.
As these words we pause to write
Have a wonderful day and peaceful night
~Walter H. Robinson.

A New Location/Newsletter for writing updates

Hello! I was going to share a writing update today here but then realized, I have a new place for those kind of updates and wanted to share that instead. I have set up a Substack/Newsletter where I will be sharing about my writing journey and other tidbits once or twice a month.

If you want to know what’s been happening with my writing, what is coming up with future books, etc., you can check out this month’s newsletter HERE at this address… https://lisarhoweler.substack.com/

If you subscribe, you will get the updates in your inbox when I post.

I will still be posting my regular ramblings about life here on the blog whenever the mood strikes me, though I do have regular features on Saturday ( A Chat and A cup of Tea) and Sunday (Sunday Bookends).

And I’m sure there will be times I’ll update you about my writing here as well.

Educationally Speaking: when it is a bad thing your child was brought up watching Wild Kratts

She makes sure I know how much she knows about animals anytime I tell her we are going to study animals for our science lesson.

I choose animals because I know they interest her but every time I choose animals as our subject I brace myself for her to say what she always says, “I already know that about . . .” whatever animal we are studying.  

Last week when I started an amphibians and reptiles curriculum she rolled her eyes.

“I already know all about them already,” she told me.

So I asked her a couple of questions I had a feeling she wouldn’t know. She narrowed her eyes at me and admitted she didn’t know everything about the particular amphibians we were talking about but then decided I needed to learn something too. She asked me what the difference between tortoises and turtles were. I told her I wasn’t sure so she ticked off several differences, which I can only assume she learned on Wild Kratts.

She’s been watching this show since she was probably two.

“It’s great,” I thought back then. “She’s learning while being entertained.”

The problem came when she actually started taking in all the information and regurgitating it. Now we are here in second grade and she sometimes does know a lot of what I am teaching her about the animals, but sometimes she doesn’t. Getting her to listen to see if she knows what I’m going to teach her, or not, has been a bit of a challenge.

Luckily, she’s starting to take a chance and listen to the lessons and seems to actually be enjoying them.

On the day we learned about snakes we had a game to play with the lesson and she loved it. There were a lot of questions she didn’t know the answer to and it seemed to, at first, deflate her a little, but, then, once she knew the answers she was proud to play the game again with her dad and show him what she’d learned.

One day, she decided I needed to learn what the difference was between crocodiles and alligators. So she made me watch a Wild Kratts episode that talked about the differences. I said, “But wait. I’m supposed to be teaching you.”

She said, “Well, you’re teaching me and I’m teaching you. It’s a win-win. See?”

Then she clapped her hands together.

That’s what’s been so much fun about homeschooling. Learning with my kids.

Yes, Little Miss. It’s been a win-win.

It’s going to go so fast.

 

I’ve read comments online from people who don’t like it when an older parent reminds them that the years go so fast. They don’t like what they feel is a passive-aggressive way of saying that they are a bad parent, that they aren’t slowing down enough and enjoying it.

I, however, often see the comment for what it really is – a feeling of melancholy from the other parent that those early years went by so fast for them they feel like they missed a lot of their children’s childhood.

If I ever say to you that the years go by so fast, I’m offering it to you as a reminder to slow down, soak it up, enjoy the simple things and stop worrying about the dumb little things – mainly what other parents think of you and your parenting. I say these things because so often I have failed at doing them myself.

The childhoods of your children really do go fast. Those early years that are so exhausting and mentally draining, in retrospect, are actually very short, which is a good and a bad thing. It’s good because that time will be short. It’s bad because you’re going to learn so much during that time but you won’t know it until it is over.

Never in your life again will another human being love you or need you as much as that little person loves you and needs you right now.

Never in your life again will you be able to see the world through the eyes of an innocent child and fall in love with being alive again.

I was looking through photos this week from several years ago and, yes, it did hit me how fast the years go by. I was glad I could look back and see that there were days I slowed down and enjoyed it and recorded it. There were many days I soaked it up. I let my kids be kids. I decided I didn’t care what others thought of me. I didn’t care if people driving by our house raised their eyebrows at my kids standing knee-deep in mud they’d made with our hose.

I can look back and know my kids made memories and had real childhoods of exploration. I can look back and know that I was not a perfect mother, but I was a mother who did her best to let my kids be kids. I was, and am, a mother who recognizes it really does go by so fast and that the only way to hold on to it all is to record the memories in writing or visually.

I want to have good memories to record.

They won’t always be good, but I’ll do my best to make sure that a larger portion of them are good.

Reminding parents of younger children that time flies by doesn’t have to be foreboding or scolding.

It can also be encouraging and one of the most loving things you can ever say to another parent.

Sunday bookends: Losing books and cats, more Mary Berry, and snow days

It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, what I and the rest of the family have been reading and watching, what I’ve been writing, and some weeks I share what I am listening to.

What I/we’ve been Reading

This week I am moving back and forth between Love and The Silver Lining by Tammy L. Gray and Anne’s House of Dreams by L.M. Montgomery. They are definitely two different styles of writing with one being contemporary fiction and the other classic literature.

I found Anne of Windy Poplars between my bed and wall yesterday morning after losing it for two weeks. I was so excited to find it and took it with me when I took Little Miss to gymnastics. Later in the day I sat down and looked in my bag for it and it was gone. All I can figure out is that I left it at the gymnastics studio. So aggravating. I really wanted to finish that one.

The Anne books are a little drawn out and rambly, but I still like them. They are a total distraction from real life. I like to read books in a series in order if I can so it irks me that I can’t read Windy Poplars before Anne’s House of Dreams. It’s definitely a “first world problem,” of course.

I abandoned The Jane Austen Society. First, I haven’t read Jane Austen, so I was bored with all the characters gushing over her like she’s the only author who has ever existed. It’s similar to how I feel about many of the “bookstagrammers” on Instagram who act like she’s the only author in existence.

The other issue I had with the book was it was taking for. It took forever to get to the point and the characters weren’t really very likable at all to me. Once a “gd” got dropped, I was out. I had a feeling the swearing would only pick up and while I am not completely opposed to swearing, it just felt totally out of place in a book about Jane Austen.

Love and the Silver Lining is a romance of sorts but it has a lot more to the plot than the romance so I am enjoying it. I still don’t know if I buy the whole idea that two adults of the opposite sex can just be friends, but, hey, we’ll go with it for the sake of the book since it is well-written.

Once again, like Tammy’s first book in this series, Love and A Little White Lie, I can’t stand the one character. Here he is again in this book, and I still want to smack him for being a bit of a whiner. Ha. I think that Tammy wrote him this way on purpose, of course. He’s going through some growing pains, so it makes a lot of sense that he’s the way he is.

After I finish Tammy’s book, I’ll be jumping into something a bit darker, if my mood allows for it. I’ll probably get back into the next Longmire book or Midwinter Murder: Fireside Tales from the Queen of Mystery by Agatha Christie.

Little Miss and I read Paddington at night every night this week. During the day we are re-reading Children of the Longhouse by Joseph Bruchac. Next week, though, I hope to start The Cabin Faced West by Jean Fritz.

What’s Been Occurring

I shared in yesterday’s post that we had some snow last week.

You can catch up with what’s been going on in our world in that post. Spoiler: it’s not a lot.

Yesterday, Little Miss had a friend over and they climbed up on the hill in our neighbor’s yard and made a snowman. Little Miss’s little friend actually did most of the rolling and I was very impressed with the way she shoved that huge ball of snow up the hill with little effort.

They used frozen blueberries for the eyes and mouth, which attracted the deer later in the day, much to the girls’ delight. The temperature got up to almost 50 degrees yesterday, so the snow was melting fairly fast. The sun was out too, which was nice to see since it seems like we’ve had way more cloudy days than sunny days this winter, which is, obviously, normal.

I didn’t have a chance to get a photo of the snowman because I was inside the house cooking some fried chicken that Little Miss had asked me to cook for her. I’d made the same recipe earlier in the week by simply sprinkling season salt in a bag of almond flour, putting the chicken in and shaking it up, then frying it in canola oil. Little Miss was so thrilled with the chicken she asked for it again this weekend.

After the girls came in, I began looking for Scout, our younger cat, thinking I had let her out again. I went out back and called for her several times and even braved the dark between the house and garage, to go and see if I locked her in there. I prayed that a bear wouldn’t eat me since Little Miss and I were alone last night (The Husband was at an assignment for a freelance job and The Boy was spending the night at a friend’s.)

Lately, she’s been sneaking upstairs and curling up on top of Little Miss’s dresser and I started to wonder if that might be where she was, so finally, I went and looked and that was where she was the entire four hours I looked. I didn’t look the entire four hours, actually. I looked and called for her off and on during that time.

What We watched/are Watching

The Husband and I finished Brokenwood Mysteries, which was a bit sad. We are hopeful there will be a ninth season at some point. From what I read online, a ninth series is being planned. One of the actresses let that slip on her Instagram.

We also watched a couple episodes of Miss Scarlet and The Duke, the new Night Court, and The Rockford Files.

Little Miss and I watched a lot of Mary Berry, including Mary Berry’s Favorites. Little Miss says Mary is her favorite cook beside her own grandmother.

“Oh, and you,” she added.

Hmmm….well, thank you, kid. Honestly, though,, I’d love to taste Mary’s food and I think I’d choose her as my favorite behind my mom as well.

We are always fascinated with Mary’s kitchen hacks. Last night I was fascinated by how she used a melon baller to take the seeds out of a cucumber. I told Little Miss to watch and she said, “I’ve seen people do that.”

I said, “I’ve never seen anyone do that.”

She scoffed, stood up to head to the bathroom, looked over her shoulder, and said in a light tone, “Hmmm, where have you been?”


What I’m Writing

I planned to add some words to Fully Alive, my Biblical fiction story, last week but never got around to it. Honestly, I got too wrapped up with making reels and marketing material for the release of Shores of Mercy this week.

This coming week I hope to actually write, including a few blog posts I started last week, but haven’t finished.

What I’m Listening To

This past week I listened to some Mercy Me and Matthew West.

Now it’s your turn. What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this.

Saturday Afternoon Chat and a Cup of Tea: Snow and letting God calm the storm in me

Come on in out of the cold and have a seat.

Excuse the mess. We’ve been busy this week doing crafts, homeschooling, and being outside in the cold.

What have you been busy doing this week?

This week I don’t have anything too exciting or new to drink, but I am glad to have some local honey to put in my organic peppermint tea. I ran out of honey early in the week and added sugar as a sweetener which was completely awful. I haven’t put plain sugar in anything in years, other than a cup of tea a few months ago when I was, again, out of honey.

I never realized how sickly sweet it was. It was so sweet that it actually made me feel sick to my stomach. I cut back on sugar over a decade ago and I won’t lie and say I never eat sugar, but I don’t put sugar in tea or on cereal any longer. It’s just too much to me. If I sweeten things it is with honey or maple syrup or molasses. I think I shared one week that I like to add maple syrup to my hot cocoa, which is only plain cocoa powder mixed in hot milk. I don’t use the cocoa mixes with sugar added because it’s simply too sweet for me.

Don’t worry — I’m not a sugarless snob. I still have candy bars and some cookies or cake, although very rarely on the cake and cookies. I simply don’t have the cravings for sweet food as much as I once did. I do, however, still crave chocolate, so I’m not sugar-free.

Winter remembered it was supposed to be – uh – wintering this past week and dumped a few inches of snow on us over a couple of days.

Little Miss and Zooma the Wonder Dog were super excited because they love the snow. I don’t really love the snow but I went out with them and took some photographs and shivered. After the first little snow, both Little Miss and Scout ended up a tree, but they were both short trees so both of them could climb out easily.

Eventually, we went back inside and I started a fire in our woodstove and The Boy made us homemade French fries while we finished our school lessons. It was really a nice, relaxing day

We had another storm on Wednesday and Little Miss and Zooma the Wonder Dog enjoyed their time in the snow again.

Since we are low on heating oil and have an outstanding bill from the insanely high oil prices, we are trying to run the woodstove more often and I’ve been surprised by how well it is heating the house. It did heat the house well before but we never let it run past our bedtime until this week. Now it heats the house all night as well, which means we can reduce our oil usage and turn down the electric heat.

I was very stressed when I realized how low we were on heating oil. It seems like we’ve been getting hit with a lot lately and this seemed like something else. It isn’t easy, especially if we really do run out of heating oil before we can afford another order, but we really are very lucky. We don’t have it as mad as many people. Our house, while old, is in very good shape, with a fairly new roof and siding. We were lucky the woodstove was in the house when we came here and that it keeps us warm on cold winter nights.

We are able to afford food and lately, people have been giving my parents food they can’t use from the food pantry and they’ve been passing that on to us.

We’ve truly been very blessed by God, even when I feel lost and worried about the future.

There are still some appointments coming up for my youngest that have me worried, but I’m doing my best to trust God each step of the way.

Last week Little Miss had some trouble sleeping. She wasn’t sure why, but she simply couldn’t sleep. I was very upset by this because I was tired and worried about her but also about how I’d function the next day. Eventually, after about three hours, she did fall asleep but by then I was wired and wide awake and my anxiety was high. I prayed and suddenly I felt a strange calm settle over me. I felt almost happy. I closed my eyes and prayed for a couple people, thought about some ideas for a future story and eventually drifted off and jerked awake fifteen minutes later. Then eventually I drifted off altogether and managed a few hours.

As I was drifting off I thought about how sometimes God doesn’t calm the storm raging around us, but, instead, he calms the storm within is.

I need that calm right now, certainly, with all that’s been going on. Only God can calm the storm within us and it’s something I need to remember as much as I can.

It was good to have that reminder pop into my head that night, or morning, and I don’t think it came from my own mind alone.

Have you had any reminders you needed lately?

And what are you drinking today to help get you through your day? I certainly hope it’s some nice tea or cocoa.