Marie drove our truck to work, as usual, but I needed some stuff so I borrowed Mom’s car. I wasn’t going to be hauling lumber or anything.
I wanted a surge-suppressor, power strip for my new desk. I’d found one on Amazon: a Belkin model with 8 outlets spaced so at least one will work with a power brick and not cover another plug and it has a 90° wall-plug so it will allow the desk to sit closer to the wall. Good price too, but will take a week or so to get here and I have to pay shipping unless I order $35.00 worth of stuff to get the free shipping. I didn’t need $35 worth of stuff and it really rankles me to pay $6.00 shipping on a $9.00 item.
I looked on the (cringe) Wal-Mart web site. It showed a 6 outlet model of the same brand. It was on sale (being closed out, quantity limited) but it showed the Newport store carried it and had some in stock.
Wal-Mart was my first stop. Continue reading “You Can’t Have That”
Regrets do serve a purpose. When we regret having done something, we learn from it so we can move on and do better. It’s when we decide to pitch a tent in those regrets and live there that they become destructive.
In a world that is filled with an increasing amount of noise, it gets harder and harder to hear what is important.
I have always said that a serious writer needs a work space of one’s own in which to write. For one thing you need a place that is out of the main flow of family life where distractions abound. For another, if you work on the dining room table, you are always having to pack up your stuff and move out of the way. This is not much of an issue if you only write short pieces and have little in the way of notes to keep up with. But if you write longer or complex pieces – or a novel – you use a good bit of material you must pack away every time you pack off.
Psychologists say that after-Christmas Blues (or post-holiday depression, in their nomenclature) is a fact of life for an increasing number of people each year. The reasons for this include:
Do you know that Jesus was not born on December 25th? Or in December at all? Americans tend to think of the birth of Christ as being in winter, envisioning Joseph trudging through snow with Mary on a donkey. But all accounts of the announcement of Jesus’ birth state that there were shepherds abiding in the fields with their flocks. Winter in Israel tends to be cold and rainy. Sometimes it snows. Shepherds would live in the fields with their flocks during the fair-weather months of late spring, summer and early fall, but in winter Jewish shepherds sought shelter for themselves and their flocks. They would not have been abiding in the fields during the time we call December.
There is a tendency for authors, especially new authors, to discount the value of the established and venerated publishing houses: those establishments that have for, in some cases, hundreds of years provided the readers of the world with quality materials to entertain, inform, and enlighten. But suddenly the reverent awe in which we have always held these firms is being besmirched, like graffiti on a church, by a pair of hooligans: a bratty upstart called Self Publishing and his sidekick Indie Press. Oh, sure; their cousin Vanity Press has been prostituting herself for almost as long as the Big Houses have been around, but she pretty much kept to herself and offered little threat to them.