Tag Archives: Celebrate

Celebrating….Reading (but read on…)



We have another Friday – another week come and gone, and time for this blog hop, the brainchild of Viklit (check the linky below) that provides a wonderful chance to sit back, think and smile.  And share.  I’ve been blogging for a bit, from the standpoint of how many months or years are involved. But there is a lot I did not know or appreciate until I stumbled across this blog hop and started participating. 

Do check the other posters and celebrate!  It’s hard to feel upset or hopeless when a number of people open your eyes (mine, at least) to the small wonders that are well worth celebrating. 



Peanut butter and Jelly and a good book…

I wasn’t able to post last week, and I missed it.  But I have an offering for this week.

I love to write.  I like storytelling, and I love my characters.  It sounds odd to those who don’t write, but characters take on a life of their own.  For me, at least, it is separate from my work – once I distance myself. 

Oddly enough, writers often forget to read what they have written.  And that is a shame, because it’s rather like forgetting to cut yourself a slice of the cake you’re serving up. 

So here is what I am celebrating this week:
Enjoying the fruits of my labor.  It’s actually an enjoyable read. 

What do you have to celebrate?  Why not join?  See below.

 
http://www.linkytools.com/basic_linky_include.aspx?id=179014

Small Celebrations – Old Love


Today I am sitting in my usual seat, looking up the hill after a rainy night. The soil is no doubt soft enough that I can dig up that big Norway Maple in my front yard.  the one that keeps dropping leaves in autumn. 

17 year old BJ on the right







I can reach my teacup, but it is a stretch.  There is a sort of roadblock between me and its brown, hot goodness.

In this photo, large, black, with a face full of white whiskers, he is on the right.  I’m celebrating old love because BJ (‘Black Jack’, a Bombay) will be turning 17 years old on Wednesday.

Dawn love is silver,
Wait for the west.
Old love is gold love –
Old love is best

lifting a cup of tea this morning for old BJ

(Note: Frida, beside him, is nine years old…) http://www.linkytools.com/basic_linky_include.aspx?id=179014

Small Celebrations – Little Things


Another Friday is here and I’m thinking of the small things I’m celebrating at this moment:

I just poured boiling water into a cup with a teabag.  Bewley’s Irish Morning tea.  Not Fortnum & Mason, or other such, but strong, straightforward and bracing.  It will taste good.

I woke up this morning to find Orlando curled up by my pillow and purring.  Not Orlando Bloom (but then, he needs to bench-press a few dozen pounds regularly to suit my taste) but Orlando a Burmese cat who likes to be a pirate:

Lando is quite the fellow, and he also serves as a full colonel in the United States Army Special Forces (Green Beret).  He was recently deployed to Afghanistan, and when he returned for rest and recreation, he confessed to a sudden and profound yen for shish kebab and mountains.  He does look on the bright side, and he’s a fairly uncomplicated fellow, so awakening to the sound of him purring beside my pillow was something to celebrate.  (Also the fact that he hasn’t tried to bite me during our photography sessions.  But I digress.)

So what sort of celebration is this?  That people can see these silly photos and not decide that I am certifiable?  Perhaps.  Worth celebrating.

It is also Friday, and I’ll be doing some gardening on a weekend that is supposed to have temperatures in the 70’s.

Oh – and I can finish my Liebster Award post (thank you, Ms. Haugh) and get that posted as well.

Now to go put milk in that tea.

Small Celebration – PROOFREADING aids!


Small or large?  This is a good question.

Let me just say that I am celebrating several things.  They have to do with a book I reissued in Kindle, with a new cover, part of a series, free on KDP.

Celebrating?  What?

Well, let’s see:

1.  the cover design.  I’m happy with it.  I already posted about that, but

2.  I decided to do a trial run with Microsoft Office (free for 30 days; monthly fee after that)
It made inserting clickable chapters and such absolutely easy, and – but I’m getting ahead of myself.

So, the book is free.  I want to make certain it’s the best it can be.  I get it set up for Kindle which, with this new MS application, is easy.

I then update the paperback.

Typesetting error (insert loud ‘ARGH!’)  I pull up the thing, find the problem, fix it, I think…  Then I see the page numbering, which is all messed up.  At this point, uttering curses, I settle down to fix the pagination which, trust me, is a major pain. 

It was not.  This new MsWord is a dream.

All done.  I’m celebrating!  …And I hope you all have something really good to celebrate this weekend!

Celebrating – A Task Finished


SMALL CELEBRATIONS
It’s good to be able to open your eyes to the things around you that are worth celebrating, even if they are as small (relatively speaking) as a smile from a stranger that you know would easily become a friend.  Stepping into a brisk May breeze, watching the flowers push their way through the soil, even though you know jolly well you’re a terrible gardener.
Today, though, I’m celebrating completing a task I’d been thinking of for a long time.


I’m writing a series of historical fiction set in Egypt and centered around the city of Memphis.  It is known as ‘The Memphis Cycle’, and that city, and the families that lived and ruled there, provide the thread that ties the stories together.  Three are published, one is  coming out the end of May, another should be coming out in November, and four others are in varying stages of development.  
 
Here are covers 1 & 2.  #2 is scheduled to be published May 31:
 
 
The covers fell into a sort of theme – statuary or sculptures against a background that referred to something in the story.  As the series developed, I began to want them to be visible as a related group.  So I redesigned them, keeping the original ‘art’ work, but putting that into a framework specific to the stories..  These are covers #3 and 4.  #3 is projected to be published November.
 

The line under the image is a hieroglyphic text with the name and attributes of the king ruling at the time of the story.  It seems to be working out.  Here are covers 5 and 6.  #5 is in the works, but it is an involved story and will need another year (maybe two) to complete properly.  #7 is out. 

 

 

What really tickles me is that my entire family is artistic and I guess maybe I can pretend to be. (Pretend is the word, too.) For example, while I work with photographic images for my covers, the figure crouching in the corner of Lord of the Two Lands is my own work and is a silhouette drawing. But I’m celebrating, for certain. It’s something I’ve wanted to do in a long time, and it’s coming on the heels of a new release and a reissue.

So join me in a cup of cyber tea, a glass of cyber wine, a stoup of cyber ale, or maybe some cyber lemonade. I’m celebrating!

 

Small Celebrations – Busyness (a guest post)


Good morning, good readers and bloggers.  Diana Wilder, being quite busy with the subject of this post (as you will see) has asked me to step in and post for her, explaining why she is unable personally to post this morning.  It is, of course, a pleasure for me to do so.  The gods know she has done enough for me over the years.
 
She is, as she so divertingly puts it, ‘up to her eyebrows in editing’, and as she is putting the final polish on a story involving His Majesty my father, and myself at a younger age, she is also impatiently looking forward to working on another story set some fifteen years later in which I, unfortunately, make something of an ass of myself.  But it features four of my sons, and that is always enjoyable.  And she describes me, privately, as a ‘bonny fighter, if  distressingly gullible’ – I  call it wishful thinking – ‘and a bit of a doofus as to strategy’.  History shows that I was a statesman, not a strategist.
 
She is also polishing an older story – set in Paris (in my time it was most likely a pile of mud upon which wretched barbarians squatted and squabbled) – with an eye to putting it out on Kindle without a great deal of fanfare.
 
All of this has her, as she says, ‘crazy busy’, but she is also delighted.  She informs me that only those who have gone through extensive dry spells can understand her delight and celebration at running mad in this way.  She will be visiting the other blogs on this ‘hop’ (such an undignified term!) as she can.
 
She makes her apologies, informs you all that she is raising a toast to all your celebrations, and knows that those of you who are running in the same lines of madness will understand and celebrate.  She also directs me to inform you that she is providing one and all with some ‘eye candy’ here.  I am blushing at the compliment.  Now if they could just find a better place to put the sheath for that dagger I would be a happy man.
 
Ramesses
by his own hand and seal.



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Celebrations for March 8 – Small Pleasures


 

(folks, I don’t know why the date says March 7.  I posted this at 12:10am eastern US time on March 8…)

Years ago, when I was in college, my friends and I had one of those ‘what would you do if…’ discussions.  You know the sort of thing:

 

What would you do if you knew you were going to die tomorrow?

(I always wanted more information: how am I going to die? Am I supposed to know in ADVANCE?  So, the question is What would I do if I knew I were going to die tomorrow – apart from having a full systems blow of a freak-out episode?) 


Why don’t men dress like this any more?

If you could only go on one date this year, where would you go, and with whom?

(You mean no other date for the rest of the year?  So this would be my dream date?  Does sitting at home and eating rum raisin ice cream while playing footsie with Keanu Reeves – love the eyes – count?  No?  Whyever not?)

 

Quick! What did you eat for supper last night?
Fugu Sashini

(I hate that question!  I could have cooked a cordon bleu feast for friends using truffles, vintage Dom Perignon and fugu sashimi and I won’t remember after being put on the spot like that.) 

There is one question of those, however, that I always enjoy answering.  This is because, for me, it expresses the things I find perfectly luscious and celebration-worthy:
 

 – What would you buy if money was absolutely no object at all?

Can you smell the lavender?
You mean if I could afford ANYTHING?

– Yes.

Oh…  Oh, my.  Let’s see… 

1.  Every evening, when I got into bed, it would be to clean cotton sheets – and not too high a thread count – crisp is the word – that were freshly washed and hung out to dry in the sun – then ironed.  Yes, and three pillows on the bed.  AND a down comforter, crisp and white.
 
It’s the sun that gives the lovely scent…

2.  Clean, brand new clothes every day.  This would be excepting my jeans, which would be nicely broken in and spotlessly clean.
 

3.  Flowers in every room.  Fragrant ones.  Freesia, lavender, sweet old-fashioned roses. (and visit this blog, which provided this lovely bouquet: http://jeanniesgarden.blogspot.com/2010/10/october-bouquet.html) 
Ahhhhhh……

4.  A view of either mountains or ocean from every window.  Ideally, it would involve both.  I am not sure where that would be, but nevertheless – if I looked out the window it would be to see something splendid.  (I lived in a place, once, where every window opened to a view of a wall.  it was terrible.)

 
This is Barbados.  I’ll take Kauai.

5.  I would own a desk like that owned by Beauty in Robin McKinley’s book Beauty – the first iteration – when she first comes to The Beast’s castle.  Stocked with all sorts of paper and pens.
 

Who needs sugar with these?
6.  And, whatever the season, fresh, ripe raspberries whenever I wanted them.  Or fresh, wild strawberries, so small and sweet that sugar is not only unnecessary but laughable.

 

I’ll never be that wealthy, mind, but if you think it through, that list represents many of the things I find worth celebrating.  The crisp feel and smell of good paper, smooth, clean sheets, berries like the ones I picked at my uncle’s farm a lifetime ago.  The sweet, almost honey-like smell of my cat’s fur.

 

She does have sweet-smelling fur…

They are all worth celebrating.

 

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Celebrating Sesame Seeds



Today I’m celebrating something very small. Sesame seeds. I love the things. I’m always happy to encounter them, whether in ‘benne candy’ (those oblong rectangles of solidified honey full of sesame seeds that I always try to suck on and end up crunching), sesame chicken or hamburger rolls. I think it’s part of the human condition to chase sesame seeds across our plates, lick our fingers, catch the seeds, and bring them to our mouths.

This is a scene from a story I’m working on. It takes place in Egypt, God save the mark, and the two people are sitting in a plain, dockside tavern and discussing something very serious over a lunch of bread and, perhaps, some fish:

     “There is that.” Intef reached for the jar of beer. “I can send troops over tomorrow, but it will be in a rush.”
     Seti frowned and sat back, absently chasing sesame seeds with a fingertip.  “That might be a good thing,” he said after he licked the seeds off. “As soon as it can be arranged at any rate. Space is limited there – best to set up an encampment.”

     “That may take some time,’ Intef said.
     “That’s what I am afraid of.” He looked for more seeds and then shrugged. “And that is why I am uneasy.” He hooked the gold pendant from beneath his tunic, slipped it over his head, took the ring from the cord and handed it to Intef. “If I need the forces at once I will send to you. This ring is the token I will use. It does not matter who carries it: the request will be coming straight from me.”

They could easily be sitting in McDonald’s chasing sesame seeds across their plates.

There is not a lot that sesame can’t improve in any form. (Toasted) sesame oil adds a lot of flavor, sprinkle a handful in a dish and it adds looks and taste:

I’m going to have a toasted sesame bagel for breakfast, and I’m going to chase all the seeds.

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Small Celebrations – A Wonderful Invention


We’re celebrating the small things weekly. This week I’m celebrating a wonderful invention that has saved the world a lot of pain. What is is? Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

We have, here, a photo of tea cups, as the Chinese used them: They certainly are pretty – I love the color, but in one way you could say that they’re lacking. Still, this is the shape of teacups over the course of millennia. Even in eighteenth century England, when tea really took off. Here’s a depiction, by Hogarth, of a family in which two members are enjoying a cuppa. Looks just a little awkward, doesn’t it?
It is awkward. I’ve burned my fingers, slopped hot beverages on my lap, scowled at a high level of nearly boiling water and shaken my head.
Awkwardness doesn’t count for much if you are dealing with a fad, which Tea has always been, not that I’m complaining. I drink a cup or two in the morning. Strong, hot, laced with milk. I love the stuff.

But, you see, I am the beneficiary – along with most tea and coffee and hot beverage drinkers – of an invention that revolutionized the drinking of hot things. The Cup Handle. the invention that is this week’s small wonder. Here is a sample in all its European glory (though I did see samples produced by the Chinese):

Look at it. It’s elegant, balanced, decorative – and practical. You won’t be putting those burned fingers in your mouth and wincing. I never realized how wonderful this was until I thought about it (and went to a top-notch Vietnamese restaurant that had the old style cups, ending up with my fingers in my mouth, eyeing the elegant white porcelain cups with raised eyebrows). Yes, they’re a great invention, and they are this week’s small triumph.

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Celebrating Small Things


I’m celebrating the small things – the little victories, the moments that make you catch your breath, smile and move on. I remember an advertisement for something – I forget what it was (canned beans? frankfurters? does it matter?) that included a song that went:
 
Simple pleasures are the best –
All the little things that make you smile and crow!
All the things you know…
Life’s simple pleasures are the best…
Are the best in all the world.
Simple pleasures are the best.

This is a blog hop – weekly for now – suggested by VikLit (you’ll like her blog!) as a way to commemorate our little victories week to week.

This week I’m celebrating finally getting on a schedule of regularly scooping my cats’ litterboxes. 

(Please accept my apologies for making you spit coffee over your screens.  I assure you it was not intentional.)   But you see, scooping cat litter is my idea of the sort of thing you are forced to do in the Gulag.   I always feel like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, weeping copious tears into his beard – I don’t have one, so must make do with my bathrobe – as he maneuvers the slotted scoop under the clumps, grimacing at the smell and wailing in dismay as his hand shakes and he drops a load of damp crumblies all over his bare toes.  Why his toes are bare at the Gulag is beyond me, but mine are bare when I scoop litter, so I will extend the comparison.

But this week – finally – I said ‘If it’s worth doing it’s worth doing well!’, rolled up my sleeves, assembled a large plastic bucket, lined it with trash bags and started scooping.  I’m not sure my cats believe I’m really doing it on a regular basis.  One – the big, old fellow, black with white whiskers – went tearing out of the room, bug-eyed.

THAT is my small thing to celebrate.  Where’s the caviar?  (Did they offer that in the Gulag?  No – probably vodka and pickles.  Nasty ones.)

As I said, this is a blog hop – go visit these other fun blogs – and it might be safe to sip your coffee now…http://www.linkytools.com/basic_linky_include.aspx?id=179014