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A beautiful day in the neighborhood #5: Mexican yucca at the Tucson Botanical Garden
OK, so I’m cheating just a little bit. These cool plants aren’t, strictly speaking, in my neighborhood–but they almost are. The Tucson Botanical Garden is here in midtown, only about a mile from my house. If you’re ever in the area, I highly recommend a visit.
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#CMMC: New Year’s Eve at the Grand Canyon
Cee has created a new photo challenge! Can you tell I love photo challenges? This one is Cee’s Midweek Madness Challenge (CMMC), and this week’s theme is, words ending in W. I went for the obvious winter choice, SNOW. I’ve told the story of my first trip to the Grand Canyon on this blog before–recently, in fact, in my New Years Time Travel post late last month, so I won’t repeat it so soon. I will say that winter is a wonderful time to visit the Canyon. The North Rim is closed in the winter, but the more popular South Rim is open year-round (assuming the roads are passable, and…
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#CWBC: Road through Monument Valley
This week’s theme for Cee’s Black and White Photo Challenge (CBWC) is Vanishing Point.
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#FOTD: Trillium
For Cee’s Flower of the Day photo challenge. When I lived in Portland, I loved anything that bloomed in winter or early spring, anything that added a little color to those dark, rainy days. In the late 90s, we salvaged a bunch of native trilliums from a construction site (with permission), and they bloomed faithfully every year.
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A beautiful day in the neighborhood #4: Christmas Truck
Rudolph the red-nosed pickup Had a very shiny hood And if you ever saw it You might even call it good And this, folks, is why I’m not a poet.
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New Name, New Look, New News
What’s with the new name at the top of the page? No, I didn’t get divorced (sorry, all you hot dudes, I’m still taken). Instead, I decided to adopt a pseudonym. No, I’m not on the run from the law/drug smugglers/the paparazzi. I just decided that I did not, at some future date when my first novel is published, want to sit across a conference table at work from someone who has read one of my sex scenes and knows I’m the author. I once had to sit across a conference table at work from the doctor who had done my most recent pap smear. That was weird enough. Over…
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#CBWC: Early morning at the Camp Magruder Boat House
This week’s entry for Cee’s Black and White Photo Challenge (CBWC) includes photos depicting in or on water. As the pandemic wears on, I find myself looking back at old photos and reliving old memories of times when we could travel and gather. Better days are coming, but in the meantime, I find joy in remembering some of my favorite places. Every fall we would take our son to our church’s annual family camp at Camp Magruder. Magruder sits on a strip of sand, with a lake (shown in the pic) on the east side and the Pacific Ocean on the west. For 2 days, our son could play with other kids…
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#FOTD: Spring crocus
When I lived in wintery places like Portland and Flagstaff, I loved crocuses, because they bloomed so early and brought a little color to the drab late winter landscape. Hang on a little longer, they seemed to say. Sunshine and light are coming. That seems an apt message for this time of year and these times we live in. Hang on, y’all. Sunshine and light are coming.
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A beautiful day in the neighborhood #3: red tails in the trees
We’re still getting used to being city dwellers after spending the last 6 1/2 years in rural Flagstaff. One of our biggest surprises has been the number of birds in our midtown Tucson neighborhood. We have tons of doves, flocks of them in the trees and foraging in our front yard, along with a few pigeons and some other birds I haven’t identified yet. The coolest of the avian life forms, though, are the red-tailed hawks and cooper’s hawks. The red tails have a nest in a huge eucalyptus tree down the road from us, and they hang out in the dead tree in front of my neighbor’s house. My…
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7 Reasons Why I Will Hate Your Book
Happy IWSG Day! For those who are new here, I participate in the monthly Insecure Writers Support Group blog hop. This month’s optional question is: Being a writer, when you’re reading someone else’s work, what stops you from finishing a book/throws you out of the story/frustrates you the most about other people’s books? The more I learn about the craft of writing, the more I read differently. I notice problems in other people’s writing to which I would have been oblivious before. Before, I might have noticed that I wasn’t really into a book, that the book didn’t hook me or engage me or hold my attention, but I might not have…
Janet Alcorn
Suspense | Horror | Romance
