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Seeking new holiday traditions (Weekend Coffee Share #16)
Welcome to the Weekend Coffee Share, hosted by Natalie the Explorer! We had a quiet Thanksgiving week here in Satan’s Anus (where it’s currently 71F and sunny, so not so Satan’s Anus-y). It’s just the 3 of us now for the holidays–my husband, my adult son, and me. I really feel the shifting stages of my life around the holidays. When I was a kid, our celebrations were also small, just my parents and me, sometimes with brief visits from the few family or friends my father hadn’t driven away yet. Then after I became an adult, and my father died, it was just my mom, my then-boyfriend-then-fiancé-now-husband, and me.…
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Quick updates (Weekend Coffee Share #13)
Just a few quick updates for the Weekend Coffee Share (hosted by Natalie the Explorer) this week, because I’m swamped today. I hope to get back to my usual debauchery next week. So why am I too busy for a lengthy chat this week? Because: I spent a chunk of yesterday catching up with friends on Zoom (yay! Not quite an in-person coffee share, but pretty dang great.) This morning I have a couple of writing-related webinars from Sisters in Crime, including a gathering for the class I mentioned in last week’s post. The other is on crime scene investigations. Fun! (yes, we writers have an odd definition of, “fun.”)…
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Bisbee pics and saying goodbye (Weekend Coffee Share #10)
Good morning and happy Friday! Welcome to the Weekend Coffee Share, hosted by Natalie the Explorer. Grab a drink and a nibble, and let’s chat. When this post goes live, I’ll be in Flagstaff, a town in the Arizona mountains where I used to live. My husband is seeing his knee surgeon up there for a final post-operative visit, and I’m tagging along. Flagstaff is not what people think of when they think of Arizona. It’s almost 7000 feet above sea level, and it gets *cold*. I enjoyed the six years I lived there, but I so don’t miss shoveling snow. They got their first snow of the year this…
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New story coming out, bird rescue drama, and more (Weekend Coffee Share #2)
Good morning and happy Saturday! Welcome to my second post for the Weekend Coffee Share. Grab the beverage of your choice, get comfortable, and let’s chat. It’s Saturday morning as I write this, so let’s pretend we’re sitting on the back patio, smelling the roses and watching the bees work the cinnamon basil flowers. In last week’s post, I told you about our drive to Madera Canyon, but that was only half of our weekend adventures. I’ll tell you the other half in a minute, but first: Big news: my story will be on a podcast! I have a short story coming out as a radio play! It’s due out…
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Oop goes the arm (#SoCS)
This post is part of the Stream of Consciousness Saturday blog hop. Linda Hill posts a prompt every Friday; this week’s prompt is, “oop.” Find a word with the “oop” sound in it and use it in your post. Ya know, people shouldn’t provide this kind of a writing prompt to someone with the sense of humor of a 12-year-old boy. I’m so tempted to craft a five-paragraph essay about poop. Or maybe a haiku. But I will restrain myself and play around with some other “oop” words. A few of them apply to this week: coop – I’ve been cooped up in the house more than usual this week, because something…
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Looking Back on 2020, Episode 1: The Phantom Plans
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, we all made plans for the bright, shiny new decade. New year, new you! Set some goals! Live your best life! Uh, huh. Man plans, and God laughs. In the immortal words of Aerosmith: Dream On. Or, in psychological terms, a lot of us spent most of 2020 orbiting the bottom sections of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. In my case, I spent most of the year orbiting my laptop, held in place by the tractor beam of Zoom meetings. Could I strain a little harder for those metaphors? I bet I could. But I won’t. I promise. Seriously, despite what…
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My son has an associate’s degree!
This week’s post for the Celebrate the Small Things blog hop celebrates a not-so-small thing: my son is almost done with his 2-year associate’s degree! There’s no graduation ceremony this year (thanks, Microbe That Must Not Be Named), but he got a lovely box in the mail yesterday from his campus, with his class of 2020 tassel and membership card for the alumni association. My baby is an alumnus! In the fall he’ll move on to a 4-year university, but for now, we’re celebrating this milestone with him. And congrats to all the graduates out there! I’m sorry you don’t get to have big parties and ceremonies this year. I…
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P is for Patience and Persistence (#AtoZChallenge)
I grew up in the San Joaquin Valley in California, where every November and December, a layer of tule fog settles in. Sometimes it lifts during the day, and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it’s so thick you can barely see the end of your car hood. That’s when you hope the road you’re on has those little raised bumps along the shoulder, so you can ride on them to guide you. We called that driving by Braille. 0/10 Do Not Recommend. What I do recommend is walking in the fog, especially at night. There was something magical about a walk on a foggy night, when I could barely see 30…
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N is for Now (#AtoZChallenge)
What’s the worst part of quarantine? Not the boredom. I’m not bored. I don’t have time to be bored. I’m my usual committed self, swamped with Zoom meetings, writing, Zoom meetings, cooking, Zoom meetings, chores, Zoom meetings, gardening, and Zoom meetings. I could do with some boredom. Not fear of the virus. I’m past that. Or, rather, like the adaptable, resilient human I am, I have adjusted to it. We humans can adjust to nearly anything. What I mind is the uncertainty. I am a planner. I use two different to-do apps and used to keep a bullet journal (now it’s mostly a regular journal). I check my calendar at…
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G is for Gardening (#AtoZChallenge)
I guess that last post should have been named, F is for Failure, because after that post, I failed the A to Z Challenge. I am now a day behind, and judging by the number of items on my to-do list for this week (and it’s already Thursday–WTF??), I will be several days behind very soon. I’m going to come back to that thought in a moment. First, though, I want to say a few words about my other favorite activity besides writing: gardening. For those who don’t know, I live in a volcano field in a high desert, 7000′ above sea level. My soil is clay covered with about…
Janet Alcorn
Suspense | Horror | Romance
