Sunday Sundries--Some Goodbyes for a While

Okay, all the paperwork is in to the FLMA and short-term disability folks. I have several ugly XXXL shirts to wear after surgery (oh, yeah, you'll see pictures later). I got some light plastic plates and bowls, then also got some light plastic lidded cups to use over the next few weeks. A buddy who's been through shoulder surgery got a long handled body scrubber in purple.

I'm almost ready.

A few more things on my list. I'm having lunch with some friends in the next few days. Went out with my hubby for a big dinner last night. Got some things at Wally afterwards, including another package of dark chocolate Klondike Bars.

So, transferred some pictures from my one device to the thumb drives. Finally got some pictures of a neighbor kitty that comes to visit every once in a while. It looks like a Japanese Bobtail, but might be a Manx. Friendly critter, seems well fed

Lets me rub the belly:

I let it know I won't forget, even though I won't be out to give lovins for a while.

We went out to lunch at a Mexican restaurant and I saw a young man at the bar that looks like one of my characters. Awesome.

He had a nice voice too.

Got another thrill--I replied on a blog and won an autographed book from one of my fave authors, Grace Burrowes. She is a rising star in the Regency field. I'm really pleased at her success.

I'm grateful for this book, because one of my characters is a medically-retired Marine. Grace and I discussed the sad effects of PTSD on our soldiers. It will be on my reading list while I'm laid up after surgery.

I've been spending breaks at work walking around the center, looking at how my co-workers decorated their desks. I really loved the patriotic balloons we got for good surveys and here's a cluster of some:

I can haz balloons....

One of my co-workers organized a group to crochet and weave/knit hats for kids at the Vanderbilt high risk nursery. Here's a small bit of her yarn stash:

A team member draws on stones with Sharpies and she did a Guy Fawkes mask face for the guy that sits next to me:

Another team member has this cool model on his processor:

So, I'll miss a lot of these things and people I see every work day.

For a few weeks, I'll be confined to my love seat and downstairs of my house. I'll need my husband or my friends to cut my food or to lift anything over a few pounds. I will be typing with my left hand. My cats are already starting to freak, as is my husband.

We'll be fine. I may or may not be posting regularly while being off work. But I will try to keep in touch. Take care!

Monday Musings--Time Shifting

I am a creature of the night. I struggle if I have to go to sleep before 2 a.m. If I have to be functioning before say, 10 a.m., I need massive amounts of caffeine. Unfortunately, I never developed that taste for coffee, so I usually end up sucking down Diet Mountain Dew or iced tea. But this is kind of my drift:

I have always been this way, even as a child. My father worked for the railroad and he and Mom were up all hours of the day and night. They would drag a friend home from the clubs at closing time and sit and talk for hours or fix a steak dinner at one o’clock. They would wake me up to hear a drunk, rambling story about my brother who had been killed when I was nine. I was trained to thank the stranger and go back to bed.

An interesting childhood, huh?

So, guess who had to be in at work from 8 a.m. to 5 p. m. all last week? That would be this gal. 

I love being part of a group on Facebook called 5am Writers, but for me, any writing done at 5 a.m. gets done because I’m still up then. Needless to say, not much writing got done last week.

I did get to meet a lot of new people at work. Arnish showed me a video of him helping get rid of a refrigerator at his church. They didn’t want to carry it down the stairs since it didn’t work, so they thew it off the loading dock. It was cool. When he found out I was a writer, he got a little worried. He’d been friends with writers before and had been given this warning:

The woman sitting behind me had gone through shoulder surgery similar to what I will have and she had some great advice. While this wasn’t our issue, it made us laugh:

This is the huge concern:

At least while I’m home healing from surgery, I won’t have to see this:

And I’m really lucky I won’t have to put up with this:

I will have to put up with this:

And a portion of my books will be written with only my left hand. I’ve been practicing the past few weeks. It will be slow, but it will get done.

So, thanks for following me on this journey—I’ll try to keep in touch and keep you amused!

Sunday Sundries--Slambook Question: Biggest Smack Up Side of the Head

I mentioned in previous posts about the slambooks I used to pass around with my pen pals as a young girl. I would make little stapled booklets out of pretty paper with different questions with spaces for certain numbers of people to answer. The last one on the list was to send it back to the originator. I got very few back.

I got some information late last week and this week that smacked me up side of the head. I need rotator cuff surgery on my right shoulder. Here is the link for WebMD:

http://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/rotator-cuff-repair

Here's an image of what we're dealing with:

Yuck, I know, right?

After the MRI, which was another of the weirdest experiences I'd had in my life I do not wish to repeat, I was told I had "significant damage." I fell back in November and there is cumulative damage that aggravated the injury in April, when I carried all those bags on our trip to Las Vegas. Duh. We tried to fix it with physical therapy and a cortisone shot directly in the joint (Yuck, again, right?), but when I do things, I do them big. The surgeon will actually be doing four procedures.

So, surgery is scheduled in the middle of August. I had to apply for FMLA and short-term disability and I am so grateful I have good insurance through my work. I will be off work six to eight weeks, with my right arm and hand basically useless. My husband has asked for time off too, as I'll need help doing a lot of minor and major things.

Here's the first amazing coincidence: one of my heroes is a medically-retired Marine who was shot while serving in Afghanistan in the right shoulder. That was decided years ago. Now I'll know some of the physical therapy he needs to go through for the scenes in the second book in his series.

Did I mention I'm right-handed?

Did some research and I've practiced using my left hand. My husband is a lefty and he laughs at me. When he was in a motorcycle accident, he had the sense to smash up his right hand.

I had a little experience several years ago where I slipped and landed on my right elbow. I had a few weeks of trying to use my left hand and it wasn't easy, but I could get a lot of things done.

Second amazing coincidence: the son of my hero mentioned above is left-handed and I have most of his story written. He is a baseball player (many pro-athletes are left-handed) and becomes an architect after his pro career (another career for those south paws).

Third amazing coincidence: Left-handers' Day is August 13th, right before my surgery on the 15th.
http://www.lefthandersday.com/tour2.html (where the above graphic came from)

While I was hoping for some time off for me to get some writing and organizing done, this was not what I meant. God is indeed laughing at me. I promise I won't obsess about it too much over the next eight weeks, but I still need a lot more practice typing with just my right hand and copying and pasting.

After all:

So, what was your biggest smack up side of the head recently?

This next week, I'll be in training (like I'll remember any of this when I get back....), so I'll be working a day shift instead of my usual nights. Yeah, it's going to be weird. Take care and be sure to stop by for a visit to follow my adventure!

Sunday Sundries—The Odd Week

I know, welcome to my world, huh? 

Truth is, my life has been odd lately. It’s been a series of series, coincidences, feeling overwhelmed and doing my best to play catch up. But mostly:

And

I did a fair amount of editing on SEVEN DAYS—ROB AND MARY. Had to do a bit of proofreading, because that’s how I roll. I found this one that made me laugh:

This is another I had to look at twice:

It kind of hit close to home because one of my friends is looking for work and frustrated because almost all the jobs require you to apply on-line now. She is suffering from a super slow computer:

I wish I could hire her as an editor/formatter, but alas, that is not her skill set. I need her help setting up an Etsy store, though.

But, my second book is essentially done. I wrote the three scenes that are the bulk of Saturday evening in various notebooks. Just need to get the words from them and in my mind onto the screen. But, Rob and Mary’s voices are so much different from his brother (Will) and her sister (Elizabeth), I re-read the first part of the book to get back in their heads and remind myself of the word choices and styles. 

And I’ve figured out a way to organize notes that works for me. For the past year, I would copy and paste something (recipe, quote, short article, etc.) into a Word document in no particular order. OneNote was frustrating, because when I work on the files on my desktop, I can’t save the changes from the flash drive to the laptop or to the netbook I use while at work. So, I copy and paste into MS Word documents on the specific topics. Food is sorted into Main Courses, Side Dishes, Breakfast, Beverages, etc. I have a file on military notes, a file on parenting, one for jokes, another for quotes and so on. I sorted over two hundred pages of notes last week.

I was told, after a MRI (one of the oddest experiences of my life) that I have “significant damage” to my right shoulder. I’m going in for an evaluation Monday to see if I need surgery or if I can get by with something minimally invasive. 

They were playing an oldies radio station in the headphones, some Foreigner and a Beach Boys song. Of course, my nose started itching and the metal under my right arm got hot enough to actually burn my skin. It was not pleasant. You better bet I'm working it into a novel somewhere.

But the oddest thing is this involved my right shoulder. When I started my novels seven years ago, I gave my hero a major injury in the right shoulder. Payback, huh?

Take care and have a great week!

Sunday Sundries--From Our Past

I got to speak to a cousin this weekend I hadn’t talked to in forever. Carolyn is Uncle Bill’s daughter. He was my mom’s younger brother. Carolyn is tracing the family history and has found so many wonderful things.

We talked about the tons of pictures Mom and Dad had in shoe boxes in the attic. I come from a long line of pack rats and I've been trying to scan in the old photos, letters, newspaper articles, etc. and put them in some kind of order. Here is one of her at a long ago Christmas:

Carolyn is a few years older than me, a breast cancer survivor and a proud mother. My cousin Melinda and I spent a week with her family when Dad had surgery at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, back in the 1970s. Here’s a picture of us at a petting zoo:

Carolyn was horrified having to spend time with her younger cousins, but I have  good memories. We’ve only seen each other since then a few times, at a party for an aunt and at her mother’s funeral, then her father’s.

Her brother came to my parents’ funerals. It is sad we’re at the age where we usually only see family and some friends at life events like that.

I was jealous she got to visit with another cousin a few months ago I haven’t talked to in years. We keep talking about a family reunion, but no one has done anything about it. There was a family reunion in the 1960s at my parents’ house. Here’s a picture of us kids:

We talked for well over an hour, with me filling in some blanks and telling stories and Carolyn talking about the Ohio branch of the family’s research. Among our relatives, was an engineer great uncle who had a thermal physics equation named after him. We also had another great uncle who marched with Martin Luther King Junior and was friends with Rosa Parks. Pretty funny that my dad’s side of the family had friends who were members of the KKK. 

So, we come from a long line of smart people. There were also some odd coincidences. This picture of women from the late 1800s brought up some interesting information. In my novels, two brothers marry two sisters. Two of the sisters in this picture married two brothers.

And how cool was that? 

One relative was an author on Jewish history and quite famous in Germany. I wrote one of my characters as Jewish in 2009. 

The family was descended from a Baron and had a castle on the Rhine River. Another cousin recently retired from teaching German and made many trips to Germany and I made one of my heroes a member of the French royal family, with a castle.

Another relative was a hero in the War of 1812. I had one of my heroes reading a book on that topic. Again, amazing.

I was concerned that I had two coincidences that brought my hero and heroine together in my first novel. There is a third at the end that ends, shall we say, badly. But, with so many in my life, I think the literary gods are watching over me and smiling. 

So, I know we hear all the time about writing what we know. I say we should write what we don't know and find out by research and listening to old family stories. There are too many that have been lost, too many pictures that were tossed because they weren't labeled and no one knew who they were. Take the time to seek information out and be sure to back up and share it. I sent Carolyn several empty flash drives for her to fill with her newly discovered treasures. 

Are you the family archivist?