S.M. Johnson's Blog, page 17

SM Johnson ~ No coffee, no fuzzies, just NaNo

Sorry folks, very busy writing Dungeon 3, and must continue that. I'm having a blast with this one, and am hoping ya'all will love it.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

~SM

SM Johnson ~Fuzzy Friday ~ 6 reasons ferrets are terrible pets

Image from fanpop.comGood morning, darlings, and happy Friday!

I know that most people, when discussing the pros and cons of something, discuss the pros first. Yep. List the good stuff, then the drawbacks. I'm not sure why, except that maybe the human condition is somewhat programmed to be positive. And that's perfectly awesome, isn't it?

But I'm actually going to talk first about the negative aspects of having ferrets as pets.

I don't want the shiny-fun stuff to blind someone to the many reasons that people often give up their pet ferrets. Sometimes it's more than giving up, sometimes people are so frustrated and desperate to get rid of their rascally fur-babies that they release them to the "wild" - which for a domesticated ferret, is often a death sentence.

So while it is absolutely true that ferrets can be really fun pets, it's also true that they are high-maintenance animals.

1. Ferrets Stink. They do. Ferrets have a musky, very distinct "ferret" odor. Most pet store ferrets are de-scented, meaning their anal scent glands have been removed, typically at the same time as they are spayed and neutered. And as is the case of most "mill" animals sold in pet stores, these surgeries are performed at a much younger age than would be recommended by a veterinarian. Just so you know.

2. De-scented Ferrets still stink. And their scent is strong enough to cling to your clothing and hair. Ferrets have scent glands in their cheeks, like cats, and their cute little bodies naturally produce a kind of oil that keeps their skin and fur healthy.

If you have a group of de-scented ferrets, your house will smell like ferrets, and there's really not a lot you can do about it.

The more you bathe them, the more their skin dries out, and the more oil their bodies produce, so bathing a ferret frequently can increase his odor!

I had a group of five ferrets. The most effective odor control was cleaning their litter boxes and changing their bedding (t-shirts, pillow cases, and baby blankets) every day. And the house still smelled like ferret.

image from Small animal channel.com3. Ferrets need at least 2 hours of out-of-cage play time every day. Typically an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. They do sleep a lot, but a ferret that rarely gets out of the cage is a ferret that becomes more prone to biting and "mean" behavior. This means that even just a weekend away requires a trusted person to come and play with the ferrets. It means that when you've had a long day and come home late and exhausted, the ferrets still need to get out of that cage.

4. Ferrets are destructive. They don't chew electrical cords and such like rabbits or rodents, but it is almost impossible to litter box train them 100%, and they love to scratch and dig at carpet. Especially in front of any door you've closed to keep them out of a particular room. They will also get inside sofas and chairs and shred the stuffing. They will tear the thin fabric on the bottom of a box spring and rip out the foam inside. They will slide under a dresser and climb up the back of the drawers - either to sleep in your underwear drawer or stash treasures that they've stolen from you. They will climb curtains. They will obsess about getting down into the furnace vents. They are curious like toddlers, and this curiosity can cause them injury or death. Ferret-proofing (like baby-proofing) helps contain the destructiveness.

5. Many household items are dangerous to ferrets. Ferrets love rubber. They love to chew it. They love to eat it. And they cannot digest it, and in fact, because of their long skinny bodies and long, skinny intestines, can easily suffer from intestinal blockage. Which is potentially fatal and/or very expensive. We banned several things from our household: rubber bands, balloons, bungee cords - almost anything small and rubber that they might eat. We don't currently have ferrets, and I still feel guilty when I find a rubber band on the floor! I cannot imagine the ferret-hazards that would be found in the Sprite's room, among her millions of toys and small parts. Yikes! Sleeping under the fridge is dangerous, too - ferrets like it under there because it's warm, but there's a fan that could hurt them, and I always believed that if they fell asleep under there, the Freon could dehydrate them to death in just a few hours (although I'm not sure if this is truth or myth). In one of our apartments the gas hot water heater was in the bathroom. One ferret pulled off pilot-light access door, and they all rushed to investigate the pilot light. It was not a good day for ferret whiskers. Ferret proofing is essential for ferret safety.

Image from SPcollege.edu6. Ferrets die of cancer. In my experience, ferrets almost always die of adrenal cancer, between the ages of 4 and 7 years old.  The picture to the right shows a hair-loss pattern indicative of early adrenal disease. Even with medical intervention, surgery, and supportive care [sub-cutaneous fluids, and syringe feeding a special diet ("Duck Soup")] it almost always kills them. Slowly. It is expensive financially and emotionally. My Duck Soup had a base of vanilla Ensure, and even now, almost 10 years later, the smell of vanilla Ensure has such a huge emotional impact on me that it makes me sick to my stomach. In fact looking at these pictures of sick ferrets brings back how helplessly sad it was to lose my fur-babies to this disease, one after another.

All right, this is my list of why ferrets make terrible pets. These are the things I'd like people to know before they bring a ferret home for the first time. These are deal-breakers for a lot of people, so it's better to educate yourself than find yourself in over your head.

Next Friday I'll write about why ferrets make wonderful pets.

SM Johnson ~Thursday Morning Coffee ~ Happy NaNo

Happy NaNoWriMo!

Busy, busy around here. We're in the middle of my mom's move - pretty stressful, but hopefully the really tough stuff is almost over.

As for NaNo - I cleared the 10,000 word mark yesterday, and maybe even discovered a couple of interesting plot points.

It's fun to play with Roman, Jeff, Jason, and Vanessa again. Dare and Zach will be making an appearance in this book, as well. I know I'm looking forward to it, hope you guys are, too!

This baby is warming up already. TWO erotic scenes in the first 10,000 words. Yay! Gotta love the hot stuff.

I don't have a title yet, though - so it's sitting around as Dungeon 3, Untitled.

Blah. That's pretty boring.

The first book is Above the Dungeon, which is the name of the Roman's club that was physically above Roman's dungeon. Yeah, that's me, extra creative.

The second is Out of the Dungeon - because there was a lot of Real Life interference in that book, and most of the scenes occurred somewhere away from the actual dungeon.

In book 3, Roman, Jeff and Vanessa are in Gigi's house in Minnesota, and working out their relationships and figuring out what their lives will be like after all the trauma of the 2nd book. I'm having trouble figuring out a title. Midwest Dungeon - meh. Not great. Minnesota Munch - argh. Too kitschy. And besides, I want the word "dungeon" in the title, for continuity. Guess I'll keep thinking about it, but hey, if ya'll have any suggestions, feel free to toss them my way.

Other book news... I've corrected an embarrassing bunch of typos in Out of the Dungeon, Amazon edition, and re-uploaded the file. Amazon notified me that there's a few more, though - sigh. So I'll be fixing those, soonest! Haven't got the fixes to Smashwords yet, but it's on my urgent to-do list.

Sheesh, that's about all I've got to chatter about today.

Have a great weekend, darlings. And if any of you are attempting to write 50,000 words in 30 days for NaNoWriMo - hey, you're not crazy. Well, maybe you are. But you're in good company with a bunch of other crazy people, so good luck and have fun!

~SM

SM Johnson ~ Fuzzy Friday ~ Ferrets anyone?

[image error] photo from Winston-Salem VeterinaryFur-babies, elongnated rats, carpet sharks, speed-bumps, fuzz-balls...

Anyone who knew me back in the day, will remember that I used to be really nutty about ferrets. And I mean really nutty. I was pretty much THE Ferret Lady for about a 100 mile radius around my town. I even fancied myself a ferret shelter for a little while, which was cool, except I didn't have good space for proper quarantine, and I didn't have associated veterinary care, so the little dream stayed little and was short-lived.

Click the picture caption to check out what Winston-Salem Veterinary has to say about ferrets as pets.

For ten years we had a "rolling group" of 5 ferrets. (A group of ferrets is actually called a "business" which always cracked me up, because "busy-ness" certainly fits a group of ferrets). Which is to say that five seemed to be about right.

Of course, we started out with one, a young albino female that we named Smokey. We found her in a pet shop in Ohio, on our way to Virginia. I was 21 and my husband was 22,  and we were about to experience the truth about ferrets:

Ferrets aren't just pets, they're a lifestyle choice.

It was a lifestyle that I gave up in 2003 because the Sprite was on the way, and as too many other people have discovered, ferrets and babies don't mix.

But I'm having a bit of a ferret craving these days, which is some of why I started volunteering at my local zoo. I'm even dreaming about the fur-babies in my past: Smokey, Whiskey, Pepper, Mort, Princess, Uno, BB, and Henry Nibbles. And the ones who passed in and out of my door fairly quickly - JD, Zipper, and Spike. I'll be posting some pictures and telling you a lot more about them, as soon as I get some old photos scanned.

Fuzzy Friday is your place for ferret questions. What do you want to know?

Sample questions:

Why do ferrets make great pets?

Why do ferrets make terrible pets?

Why do you think ferrets and children don't mix?

What should I expect when I bring my first ferret home?

What is ferret proofing?

My ferret stinks - should I bathe him regularly?

What should I feed my new fuzzy friend?

What kind of litter should I use? And why can't I use clumping litter?

SM Johnson ~Thursday Morning Coffee ~ at the salon

Good afternoon, darlings! I had coffee at the salon this morning, while getting my "winter do".

Oh, yeah, and it's November 1st!

I took the plunge, ordered my t-shirt, and started writing the 3rd book of the Dungeon series. 50,000 words by November 30th. I'm not 100% confident that I can do it this year, but I'm sure going to try. If nothing else, my writing habits will be forced back on track - and just that can be considered a win.
NaNo Tee (neither of these people is me)I had just under 200 sales between Above the Dungeon and Out of the Dungeon in October! OMG, readers are blowing me away! I consider the month a success if I sell the equivalent of one book per day.

I almost fell over when I looked at my Amazon numbers earlier this week. And not just paid sales, either - the short story, My Fifteen Minutes, "sold" over 700 copies - IN ONE MONTH. Fan-fucking-tabulous!

So yeah, I'm heading into NaNoWriMo with awesome hair and a really great feeling about this book. Let's sex it up, shall we? Let's shall!

Sort of how we "vodka'd up" trick-or-treating last night. I'm so glad I finally figured out what those other happy parents have in their travel mugs.

All right, that's all the time I have - I've got a novel to write, darn it!

Have a great weekend, darlings!

Love, SM Johnson

SM Johnson ~ Thursday Morning Coffee ~ End of Exile

Good morning, darlings!

Well, it's that time of year again - the grueling month of November, which thousands of writers around the world look forward to and dread at the same time.

Perhaps you've heard of NaNoWriMo?

Oh yes, indeed, National Novel Writer's Month is almost upon us, the month in which a whole bunch of crazy writers attempt to capture 50,000 words of one novel in one month. It's a wonderful and somewhat daunting task... and yet it's only 1,167 words per day.

I had two thoughts in mind about NaNoWriMo this year - the first to write down the two short stories that have been flitting in and out of my head, each running probably 25,000 words or less... or to skip the NaNo thing entirely and give myself the month off.

But, grrr, I've been in exile on hiatus for so very, very long already, and not writing is not healthy for me, for the following reasons:

1. I get depressed
2. I get lazy
3. Winter is coming (refer back to reason #1)
4. What the hell is clanking around inside my dryer?
4. My stress levels soar out of control, which leads to
        a) skin problems, specifically eczema
        b) physical problems, specifically ulcers and decreased immunity to colds and flu
        c) relationship problems, specifically I am bitchy and impatient
5. Little things like socks on the living room floor piss me off to an irrational degree
6. What is that godawful noise coming from the dryer?
6. Insomnia. Because I tend to fall asleep working on whatever scene I'm planning to write next
7. Compassion Fatigue

(Wikipedia) Compassion fatigue (also known as a secondary traumatic stress disorder) is a condition characterized by a gradual lessening of compassion over time. It is common among trauma victims and individuals that work directly with trauma victims. It was first diagnosed in nurses in the 1950s.[1] Sufferers can exhibit several symptoms including hopelessness, a decrease in experiences of pleasure, constant stress and anxiety, and a pervasive negative attitude. This can have detrimental effects on individuals, both professionally and personally, including a decrease in productivity, the inability to focus, and the development of new feelings of incompetency and self doubt.[2]


You see? Even though writing novels is a bitch as well as a total pain in the ass, I fool myself when I think I can live happily without this activity.

The fact is that I write because I can't not write. It's what I do. It's how I process, how I seek revenge, how I live alternate lives. Writing helps me to stop obsessing on the small irritations that are a part of daily life, the stuff that makes you crazy if you let it. And it helps me cope with some of the bigger stuff, too - like working on an inpatient locked psych unit, which is not always easy. Trust.

I have read a slew of awesome books during my hiatus (find reviews by SM Johnson on Goodreads and Amazon), but it's time to look forward to November and all that November will bring.

Like my mom moving into her new condo.

Like the first snow fall, which I can hardly stand to think about, but which comes on barely-noticed whisper-soft-slippered-feet so long as I'm deep into a NaNo novel.

Yeppers. Let's do that, k?

So all I have to figure out is what to write.

I have at least 50,000 words left to write on A Year of Sundays. If write it for NaNo, it's a slight breaking of the rules, which state one should write a brand new project. But I would write 50,000 new words, and I certainly wouldn't count the words prior to November in my NaNo word count. So I'd probably complete the first draft of the thing itself, which I could then feed to you, my readers, in weekly installments.

Or I could write a 3rd Dungeon book.

Above the Dungeon and Out of the Dungeon are both selling beyond my expectations, which, admittedly, are fairly low. I am thrilled beyond belief to sell one book per day, with a goal of selling 30 books per month. So far in October I have sold 120 books from Amazon alone, and 428 "sales" of the free short story My Fifteen Minutes.

This astounds me. I have been missing from the blogosphere and social networking for at least two months, and I'm still selling books.

So here's a huge THANK YOU to every reader who's purchased one or more of my books. I hope you loved them, and I'm sorry if you didn't, but you took a chance on me, and that is absolutely priceless.

And if you have an opinion about which book I should concentrate on in November -  Sundays (clean and sweet) or Dungeon (down and dirty) - go ahead and leave me a comment! It would thrill me to make a decision based on what readers want most.

Expect to see me blogging regularly again come November, and thanks for having coffee with me!

Have a great weekend, darlings.

PS - there were two pennies in the dryer. I know, just call me Sherlock.

Coffee, but not on Thursday ~ Hands

I wish I had beautiful hands.


Hands touch, soothe, excite, comfort. Hug and hold and type and jot thoughts down with a pen.

My husband's hands are rough and callused from all his hard work. Sometimes his fingerprints stand out in stark relief, marked with grease. They look strong and capable, and ever the more erotic against the smooth skin of my thigh or waist.

Ahh, but I digress.



A writer ought to have amazing hands, don't you think? Hands like this:

image from xcitefun.net

image from Care2.com
For most people hands just exist, down there at the end of their wrists, very convenient and helpful. I doubt they think about them all that much, until they get a sliver or a paper cut.

I have crone hands, and I am aware of them almost every minute of every day.


Not because they are ugly. If it were just ugliness, I could get a manicure and a sweet polish job like that glittery metallic purple.

I have eczema that currently manifests all stress into my hands, and so my hands hurt all the time.

My child grabs my hand to lead me somewhere, and I gasp in pain.

My husband holds my hand and brushes his thumb against my skin as a gesture of affection, and I hold my breath, wondering if I can pull my hand away from him without hurting his feelings.

I walk past a sink full of dishes two dozen times before I'll finally sigh and pull on heavy-duty purple rubber gloves to tackle the job. The gloves don't even help much - dry is good, but heat is still bad.

Shampoo - aargghh. Absolute torture, burning into my flesh like acid. I buy brands that aren't tested on animals, because the cruelty of animal testing is very real to me. I test it on myself every time. And it hurts.

I open and close doors with my elbows whenever possible.

The other night I tripped in my daughter's room and fell straight down onto my side, crashing to the floor like an old oak in the forest, the litter of toys on the floor causing bruises and abrasions to my right ankle, hip, flank, and shoulder. It didn't even occur to me to try to catch myself, because anything made of hard plastic with an edge would tear up my hands.

I wonder if a palm reader would get lost on an endless journey, following the lines of my palm?




I think I'm a little lost myself, today.

SM Johnson ~Life Stuff Update

Good morning, darlings!

Just a brief note before I leave for the silly 12 hour shift I just agreed to work. The picture here is of my "office" - at the bottom right you can see my laptop screen sitting on the kick-out of the cloud chair. Yeah, a little nostalgia is good, you think?

The construction is sooo very almost practically done! Yay! There's trim work left to do, wall/archway fix, and a small bit of painting, and a tiny bit of tile work that needs to be finished in a closet. Maybe all done by Thanksgiving - that would be totally cool.

So lookie - my downstairs bathroom!



Shower and tile Shower and window

Above the sink/toilet

It is all very lovely. The coffee colors are peaceful and make me happy. I've repeated the colors in the kitchen - maybe I'll put up some pictures of that the next time I get a few minutes to hang out here at SM Johnson Writes.
Honestly, ought to change my blog title to SM Johnson Writes Paints.
Hope ya'all have a great week, darlings. I'll be collecting boxes for my mom's move, and hopefully we'll have some idea of where she's moving TO by the end of the week. That would be awesome, wouldn't it?
xoxo
~SM

SM Johnson ~Thursday Morning Coffee ~Sorting it out ~

Ahhhh, well, the weather is getting cooler. A lot cooler. Like there were some snow flurries last Friday night.

Brrrrr.

With the threat of snow comes a shift from the inside of the house to the outside. The plumbing for the new shower needs to be connected under the house, a furnace needs to be installed in the Man Cave, and the trampoline surface and safety netting will need to be taken down and put into storage.

Ahh, the fierce and terrible imminent winter.

Anywhoo. I was going to talk for a minute about sorting things out.

Specifically... laundry.

I know, that's weird and random. But the laundry has built up, you see, between the remodeling/redecorating and the going to work, the pile is a bit overwhelming. I actually paid IzzyG to bring it all downstairs, where I shifted and sorted for probably a half an hour.

And I was thinking... when I was a child helping with the laundry sort, I made piles of whites, and lights, and darks, and colors. A pile for sheets. A pile for towels.

As a young adult, I carried the laundry from the apartment to the car and from the car into the laundromat. At the laundromat, the sorting went like this: stuff as much as possible into the two triple-loaders to wash, and then use as many dryers as available to dry... because it was the cheaper to wash large loads, and faster to dry small ones.

I used to write long, detailed letters to a friend of mine while I was at the laundromat. It was probably my last snail mail correspondence friendship. And of course, after the washing and the drying, it was carrying to the car, and carrying back into the apartment.

It was all such a tremendous pain in the ass. And yet one could get a week's worth of clothes washed in about two hours, so it wasn't all bad.

These days, with laundry facilities at home, I have a whole different sorting process, that's basically based upon end result.

It's pretty simple, really, with a few main categories:

Linty, Non-Linty, Black, Jeans, and Colors.

Oh, and the sub-categories of Sparkly and Non-Sparkly.

Linty stuff includes towels, sweats, fleece pants, and socks.

Non-Linty is sheets, scrubs, athletic pants and a couple specific tee shirts.

Black is the husband's shirts and the child's yoga pants, and anything else that's black and non-linty and non-sparkly.

Jeans - pretty self-explanatory, right?

Colors are most of IzzyG's clothing and most of my tee-shirts. Sparkly can be washed with colors, since most of IzzyG's clothing sparkles. What can I say? She's like a crow - attracted to shiny things.

Okay, so there's the random thought for today.

Now, how about checking out the home project progress?

Here's the wall tile around the shower - yay! The white rectangular thing leaning against the wall to the far right of the picture is a freshly painted radiator cover, all set to be installed.

What's interesting about the wall tile is that it is the exact shade and dye-lot as the floor tile, but because the opposite wall is brown, it looks much darker than the floor. But darker in a very pleasing way.

Here's another photo with some of the new (and dirt-cheap) wall art:

Well, actually, that's kind of a lie - because both of these pieces I bought for the living room. I especially like the one on the right, which faces a similar but less bright wall hanging directly opposite. I did find another, similar but not the same piece as the one on the right, which I could hang on the opposite wall next to the window (pictured below), and I might actually go pick that up on Friday. These pieces are seriously cheap - six to twelve dollars - I mean, how can you beat that?

I like the brighter square art on the top right better than the darker square art on the bottom right. I mean, the back-lighting makes the photo look darker, but I also think it makes the art look darker in Real Life.

I did find a pretty decent valence to put over the window, and that'll cut down the glare. We'll have to see - the valence has a lot of green tones, and I'm not altogether positive that will work.

So tomorrow I will start painting the kitchen, in the same tones as the bathroom. Once again dark on the top, light on the bottom. I still have tons of cheap art, as well as coffee-themed towels and rugs and such, so continuing with the same color scheme is going to work out nicely.

Here's the kitchen prep so far - the ceiling is taped, the trim is taped. The door-frame isn't, because it's going to be dark. The window trim will remain light.

See the wooden valence above the window? A row of Snap-On die cast cars lives up there, and O. M. G. - the dust build-up on them was really gross.

But they're nice and shiny now, and they'll be returned to their shelf - hopefully tomorrow. And yes, the tiny brown car on the far left of the pic is Maiter. Because you know, the owner of a towing business just has to have Maiter.

So there you go - you know what's up with the rest of my week. Working the weekend, and looking at another condo with my mom on Saturday.

Things are coming together at a steady pace, and it's all right.

Oh! One more thing before I go - some cool people are doing BDSM Bedtime Stories, starting in October, where a lovely male reader is going to read some naughty excerpts. I've been invited to offer an excerpt, and this I have done.

I'll be posting links here, on Twitter, and on my Facebook fan page, so watch for that.

Have a great weekend, darlings!

SM Johnson ~Thursday (late night) Coffee ~

Progress has been made. Yay! Last Saturday my husband put down the tile and Sunday he did the grouting. Monday and Tuesday I painted most of the bathroom. Last night the husband installed a new toilet, re-installed the bathroom sink, and put up the shower surround.

I went shopping at the Family Dollar and found all kind of really-cool-but-super-cheap decos.

Tonight I finished the painting. All I had left was some touch up stuff and part of a wall that needed a bit more fixing.

I did a kind of two-toned thingy, and it looks pretty damn good. In fact, the husband was very worried about putting a dark color on the top half of the walls with a lighter color on the bottom - which is opposite of what most people do - but he thinks we should do the same in the kitchen (!).

This is the window. To the left of the window is some gray stuff called dura-rock, which will be covered with the same tile as the floor. Which is the same tile on the kitchen floor, and the mud room floor. The top color is called "coffee kiss" and the bottom color is "toasted almond." Not that it means anything to anyone else, probably, but just know that the husband doesn't like change, and he really has a fetish for white.

Mechanics, right? They want white tee-shirts, white walls, and DEFINITELY white switch-covers because it's not like their hands get dirty. Bwahahahahahaha! (See left - white vanity top, white toilet).

He bought the Super Flush 5001 (ok, he made that up), capable of flushing a small child, but it didn't work out.

See, behind our toilet is a hot water radiator that sticks out 2 inches from the wall. The Super Flush 5001 (capable of flushing a small child) and most other toilets have a 12 inch "foot"-print (omg, that's double punny- I think I'm pun-drunk), meaning 12 inches between the wall and the hole in the floor where the icky poo-poo goes away. So the 2 inches of radiator means our toilet must have a 10 inch footprint.

They don't make the Super Flush 5001 (capable of flushing a small child) with a 10 inch footprint.

But I guess it's not a tragedy. Our child is no longer small, so that's not going to work out anyway.

Here's the mirror above the sink - yeah, it's old and has a broken corner, but it's actually recessed into the wall, and so far we haven't found anything that will fit in there, so I might have to get new mirrored glass cut to fit and just live with the thing. Meh, whatever. See my nice sharp line? Isn't that cool? I used a level, a pencil and frog tape to make that beautiful line. It still ain't perfect - but what the hell, we're not perfect, either. Virgo though I might be, I am not anal enough to achieve perfection with a paintbrush.

I still can't believe I managed to paint "not white" and he's not freaking out. Now I've just got to figure out some kind of border that's not too crazy but not too boring.

I had two ideas tonight, each of them brilliant in their own way.

1) paint puzzle pieces in the two different wall colors and glue them in layers.

2) glue a whole hot mess of buttons onto the wall.



Of course, I did not suggest anything so silly as to glue them directly to the wall, because I knew my husband-who-hates-change would freak out a little. So I thought I'd glue them to a chair rail or trim piece, then nail that to the wall. But if you can make a picture frame out of puzzle pieces or buttons, why not make something that imitates a wallpaper border?

So far, he's vetoing both ideas, although I can tell you on good authority that this kind of thing looks great on a scrapbook page.

Tomorrow I might hang pictures and stuff.

I mentioned the cool-but-cheap art, right? I'll be honest - this stuff is cheap because it is cheaply made. The frames are for the most part plastic, the pictures mass-market prints, the sayings somewhat overused. But you know, it's going to be hanging on the wall. It's not like people are going to be touching or messing with it all the time, so I expect it to last at least until I get tired of it. And they're all square, which fits in with the whole ceramic tile theme.

I got three "key" art - shadowboxes with old-fashioned keys inside and quotes. And yeah, the quotes are terribly cliche, I'm a writer and I love words, and these are the kind of cliche that I like:

"Love is the master key that opens the heart."

"The key to happiness is to live well, love much, and laugh often."

"When one door closes, another one opens."

I found another cool square thingy that says, "Believe there are no limits but the sky." That's one I haven't seen around a whole bunch, but it makes me happy.

The picture to the right is just an sample of how nice this cheap stuff is going to look on my coffee kiss walls - this one says, "Cherish yesterday, Live today, Dream tomorrow."

Dang, huh?

I'd really like the quote from Tiffany Wilson: "Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass, it's about dancing in the rain."

That's one of my all-time favorites, because so often we find ourselves waiting to be happy when this, that, or the other thing happens. I'll finally be able to relax and be happy when I... (get married, buy a house, pay off the house, pay off the bills, get a new car, get a new job, have a child, raise a child).

We forget that yesterday is gone and tomorrow isn't here yet, and let our opportunity to feel happiness and contentment today pass us by while we're stuck between longing and hoping.

Remembering to live in the moment is called mindfulness.

It's mindfulness that forced me to recognize last Sunday that the chaos was taking over and fighting it in order to keep to an arbitrary blog schedule was futile. I could stress myself out about it, or I could remind myself that the world will not end if I don't blog on a schedule for a few weeks.

It's mindfulness that reminds me that I don't have to pout and cry out "I quit!" because I don't have a lot of time to hang out in front of the glowing screen. Notebooks and pens are perfectly portable, and, if nothing else, IzzyG spends several hours a week at karate. I can choose that for writing time, rather than whine about not having any writing time.

It was mindfulness that reminded me to take a deep breath when I got to work yesterday, so I could shake off my less-than-stellar morning, which included a coffee-pot malfunction, and a cracked iPhone screen.

Yes, I feel frustrated that I never got around to buying an OtterBox or a LifeProof case. I felt even more frustrated that the damn phone slipped out of my fingers and dropped TWO INCHES onto the counter and cracked. I probably would have had to have it out of a case to charge anyway, and it STILL would have happened. Ha!

But you know what? I can feel as angry about it as I allow myself, and it still doesn't change the fact that my iPhone screen is cracked. It's a done deal. I can't change the moment that it slid out of hand.

And hey, cracking the screen actually knocked some sense into the stupid face-sensor that's been broken and not working properly for the last six months, so there's actually a silver lining, kind of.

I know the husband is itching for an iPhone 5, so maybe I'll get his phone, and he'll get an upgrade, and the whole thing will come out in the wash. Because even though the man hates change, he loves having the latest gadget, while I really don't care. I like web browsing and getting email on my phone, but other than that, I'm not too picky about the phone.

He actually tried to buy me a new computer for our anniversary this summer, and I refused. I don't like the latest and greatest gadget. If my electronic stuff works the way I want it to and doesn't give me any trouble, then changing it nothing but a pain in my rear end.

All righty, then. This got pretty chatty.

Next project: Paint the kitchen walls. Yikes - compared to the bathroom, the kitchen is HUGE.


Oh, remember the shower walls? Here, I'll remind you here (right).



And then lookie here to the left - it's an awkward picture, but ahhhh, much better, hmm?

Happy Friday darling. Have a great weekend!