Oral Surgery.....ouch!!!

This time hubby had to have extra bone in his lower jaw removed. It was located on the inside, where your tongue would rest. They made incisions on both sides and had to grind the bone down to where it is supposed to be, and then stitch it back together. It didn't take as long as I thought it would, but boy, he sure is miserable! I feel sorry for him, but there is nothing I can do except make sure he takes his pain meds on time and make him liquid meals until he is able to eat again.

Looks like I'll be busy waiting on him for a couple days, so I may not have a chance to stop in and read your blogs until late in the evening.....but I will catch up!

I'm getting real tired of all this, but I'm sure he is too! I'm sure that in a couple days he will start to feel better. Thank goodness this is the end of all the dental work he will be needing for a very long time! :)

I might as well have a job!

I say that because I had to get up this morning at 5:36. My phone rang and it was hubby telling me that he and his truck were stranded at the gas station on the hill near the freeway and could I come and get him. I wasn't happy about being awakened, but I put a smile on my face and told him sure. I put on the smile figuring he was already upset enough being stranded. You see, his son had his truck the entire time he was up deer hunting and was fixing it for him. I'm sure he is now thinking that if he fixed it, why isn't it working right?

Well, I threw a coat over some sweat pants and the t-shirt I sleep in and figured I would go get him and he would bring me back home and take my car to work. Wrong! I didn't know that he would drive to his work and then I would have to drive back home. Had I known he was running late (or thought he was anyway) I would have put some clothes on and at least taken a cup of coffee with me! He was afraid he would be late for work so he didn't want to take the time to deliver me back home. And it turned out that he was 15 minutes early for work so he could have taken me home, saving me from the 20 mile trip in to work and back. Gheeeez!

Now it has become my job to contact our son and tell him where the truck is located. If it wouldn't start for hubby I don't know what makes him think it will start for our son!

The above picture is not of hubby. It is one I found on the net!

Thoughts now turn toward Christmas.....

With the Thanksgiving holiday now behind us I can start thinking of shopping for Christmas. I can't believe the stores start advertising for Christmas earlier each year. I think the first Christmas merchandise I saw in a store this year was the day after Halloween. Come on, people! Isn't that pushing it just a little?

But now, I am ready to think about and even start shopping and decorating for Christmas. In fact, I am actually getting excited about beginning this special holiday season. Christmas is a wonderful time of year. People are usually filled with good cheer and well wishes for the entire human race. Oh, I know there are some who are "bah, humbuggers" but I refuse to let them get to me and ruin a perfectly lovely time of year with their bad attitudes! So in keeping with the true meaning of the Christmas Holiday, I am including an invitation that I received to a very special party and hope that you can make it too!




CHRISTMAS PARTY INVITATION


You are cordially invited to

A BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION!!!

Guest of Honor: Jesus Christ

Date: Every day. Traditionally, December 25
but He's always around, so the date is flexible....

Time: Whenever you're ready.
(Please don't be late, though, or you'll miss out on all the fun!)

Place: In your heart.... He'll meet you there.
(You'll hear Him knock.)

Attire: Come as you are... grubbies are okay.
He'll be washing our clothes anyway. He said something about
new white robes and crowns for everyone who stays till the last.

Tickets: Admission is free. He's
already paid for everyone...
(He says you wouldn't have been
able to afford it anyway...
it cost Him everything He had. But
you do need to accept the ticket!!

Refreshments: New wine, bread, and a
far-out drink He calls "Living Water,"
followed by a supper that promises to be out of this world!

Gift Suggestions: ; Your life. He's one of those
people who already has everything else.
(He's very generous in return though.
Just wait until you see what He has for you!)

Entertainment: Joy, Peace, Truth,
Light, Life, Love, Real Happiness,
Communion with God, Forgiveness, Miracles, Healing, Power,
Eternity in Paradise, Contentment, and much more!
(All "G" rated, so bring your family and friends.)


R.S.V.P. Very Important!
He must know ahead so He can
reserve a spot for you at the table.
Also, He's keeping a list of His friends for future
reference. He calls it the "Lamb's Book of Life."

Party being given by His Kids (that's us!!)!
Hope to see you there! For those of you whom I will
see at the party, share this with someone today!

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

May you all have a Blessed and Happy Thanksgiving. May you find many things to be thankful for this year. May you be blessed with good food and the company of your family and loved ones near.

Please welcome Dorothy Thompson!

I have a guest author, relationship expert, columnist, renowned authority on the Soul Mate phenomena, and queen of the e-books here today, please welcome Dorothy Thompson. The one we will be talking about today is "A Complete Guide to Promoting & Selling Your Self-Published eBook."

Welcome Dorothy! Let me jump right in with a few questions for you:

First, how long did it take you to gather and research all the material needed to publish an e-book that would help others publish and promote their own e-book?



Hi Marcia, and thanks for having me! To be honest, this eBook is the accumulation of five years of research, but it wasn't until the last year did I realize the secrets to real book promotion. Five years ago, I started out with a children's book that was published by an e-publisher. I barely knew a thing about eBooks, much less how to promote them. It wasn't until I started self-publishing my own eBooks did I realize where I went wrong. For starters, I didn't take an active part in promotion. As a newbie author, I thought the publisher would do all that. After only a handful of eBooks sold over the years, I gave up on it.



Now, through trial and error, and a different approach, my eBooks are selling quite well. As in anything, it sometimes takes having you go under before you realize what it takes to come out on top. This I have achieved through "A Complete Guide to Promoting & Selling Your Self-Published eBook."



As for the time it took to gather and research to put this eBook together, I would say it took the whole five years to really figure out how to get people interested in a paperless book, and get them to buy one. People love print books, and I am one of them. But, eBooks are a whole different thing. People buy them for information mainly, and if you can provide that information that isn't available anywhere else, you have landed on a gold mine.



Next, is this the first book you have had published, either in paper or e-book?



Actually, this is my fourth eBook, and I also have print books I have either co-authored, or edited. All of my eBooks with the exception of the children's eBook, I have published myself. I like the hands-on control of self-publishing, and the profits can't be beat either. Where else are you going to make money off your books without having to share?



I am contracted by a small press publisher for books that I feel would do better in print. But, then, there are other books I have that are more suited for eBook formatting, such as one in which contains a lot of clickable links as in "A Complete Guide to Promoting & Selling Your Self-Published eBook."



One thing people need to keep in mind is your market when determining whether to go with print or electronic means of publishing. My eBook is interactive, so electronic is the only way to go. For fiction, I would recommend print because it's harder to sell in electronic format, but I have seen some eBooks do extremely well. Informational eBooks are hot right now. If you have a certain knowledge of a particular subject, put this knowledge into an eBook and sell it from your website. A lot of writers who are waiting for that NY contract or royalty statements from their already-published books find this an excellent way to make a little money (or a lot!) on the side.





Last but not least, what kind of money are we looking at to publish an e-book....from the actual publishing and promoting of it?



LOL, glad you asked. How does nill sound? If you have a program where you can make your own snazzy book covers, and have a way to turn a .doc into a .pdf, you're in the good.



If you don't have a program to make book covers, drop me a line at thewriterslife(at)yahoo.com, and I'll set you up with one. My rates are lower than anywhere, and I have a pretty good eye for what makes a good cover. I've been complimented quite a few times.



As for promoting, my eBook shows you hundreds upon hundreds of ways to promote your eBook without it costing you one red cent. Of course, you can buy ads, what not, but you really don't have to. And this is what it's all about—finding outlets to promote (which I have and are in the eBook), without it costing a thing.



If you would like to find out more about my eBook, visit www.thewriterslife.net/promoteebook.html

Thanks for visiting today, Dorothy. If any of you have any further questions for Dorothy please feel free to contact her at the website she has listed above.

Thanks, and happy promoting to you!

INHERITED OR DEVELOPED?

I was surfing blogs tonight and discovered some very creative ones. Not just in appearance but in content too! And it made me wonder why on earth I ever thought that I should start a blog myself.

I guess I just thought it would be a place to voice my feelings....to vent....to sound off freely. But after surfing and reading I feel it makes all my small attempts, on those rare occasions where I was trying to be creative, seem very ambiguous! I guess some people either lead a much more interesting life than I do and/or are just way more creative and witty than I!

And you know what else I discovered? That all the blogs that I find very entertaining are all written by women well, except for a couple. And those women are all in the same age range. There must have been a sale on 'creative genes' for a few years when these people were conceived and born. Some of these blogs are listed on my side bar and others are just ones I happened on by luck and chance.

Really though....don't you wonder why some people seem talented in so many ways and others seem to have received no talent whatsoever. Or if they have talent, maybe they never had the opportunity or the inkling to develop it. I'm a firm believer in thinking that talent does need to be developed or encouraged either by parents or some other outside forces. So maybe the credit not only goes to God for these peoples talents but maybe to all those others who influenced them and their creative ability!

And maybe the rest of us who wish to be creative just never had the opportunity or encouragement that we should have had.

Enough Already! - A short story

Okay, I have had enough! I am now a single mother of three young children after my husband passed away a few months ago. My children have all been sick with some kind of stomach upset and now I get a call about my 82 year old grandfather. He had been living on his own until recently. Before they discovered colon cancer and did the surgery.

Now he is recovering in the hospital. He doesn't like hospitals and has never before been a patient in one. I don't even ever remember him going to visit anyone who was a patient in one. He always waited until the person was home before going to see them. Even when his grandchildren were born they told us he didn't come to see us until after we were home and he could get his hands on us and hold us.

The hospital called me to tell me that he refused to keep any kind of covering on his body. He was literally sitting around naked and refusing to cover himself up. What was I supposed to do? They asked me to come and try and reason with him. Fat chance, I thought! He's always been a stubborn man, now he's a stubborn OLD man!

I have to quickly find a sitter for my 3 young children. Thank goodness for great neighbors, and I find one who is willing to take on three little ones to her already busy schedule of caring for her own three little ones!

I back out of her driveway and head down the road. I look in my rearview mirror and in the street behind me, I see my youngest son running down the road after me waving his arms and screaming. I stop immediately and when he reaches the car, I am standing beside it and I scoop him up in my arms and try to console him. You see, he is just under three and has been frightened of my leaving him ever since his dad passed away. He is so frightened of being apart that he doesn't even want me to close my eyes when I go to bed at night. He will often sneak into my room while I'm asleep and shake me and say "Don't close eyes, momma".

I return him to my neighbor and we pry his arms and legs from around my body and she must hold him tightly so he doesn't chase me again when I leave this time. He will be fine once he calms down and realizes that his brother and sister are with him.

I drive the thirty miles to the hospital, park the car and take the elevator up to the third floor. I walk down the hallway to the nurses station and speak with the head nurse. She informs me that he is being unreasonable and I need to go and speak with him about his dignity and not sitting there in all his glory!

I enter his room and sure enough...there he sits stark naked with everything exposed. I say "hi Grandpa, what are you doing?" He replies that they have stolen every article of his clothing and they won't give it back to him and he wants to leave....NOW! I ask him to cover himself with the blankets on the bed until we can sort this out because I am embarrassed to see him naked and he obliges. He tells me to go and speak with the nurse and find out why they stole his clothes. I humor him and leave the room. I go back to the nurses station and explain to them that he is at least covered up now and they ask me to try and calm him down enough where they can give him some medication to relax him and let him sleep and hopefully when he awakens he will not remember this episode.

I return to his room and explain that the nurse and I will try and locate his clothes but it make take a while and in the meantime he needs to get some rest. I ask if it is okay if the nurse gives him some medicine to relax him while we conduct the search. He is agreeable and takes the medication. Soon he is sleeping soundly and I sit down to wait for him to awaken in a few hours.

When he awakes, he is more like his normal self. He is remaining covered, calm and has no recollection of the happenings of a few hours ago. He seems surprised to see me there and asks me why I didn't wake him when I arrived so we could visit. I am amazed that he remembers nothing of my embarrassment, but pretend nothing happened also so he won't be embarrassed either.

Grandpa passed away a few weeks after they transferred him to a rest home. Goodbye Grandpa and rest in peace.

AMY

I spoke with my sister today and she tells me that Amy is making remarkable progress toward renewed health. Thank you God! And thank all of you who prayed for her recovery.

She has been home from the hospital one week now and for the first time in a very long time she is breathing without any outside help from oxygen! She even took a walk down the road to the mailbox cluster to retrieve her mail. I am amazed at the spunk this young woman has. I know first hand what it's like to be split down the middle, so to speak, and have your heart worked on. I know the pain she has and is going through and I know that she still has CF and still has a long arduous journey in front of her. But I also know that with God's help and the great attitude and strength of her faith she can make that journey as fun-filled and enjoyable as her health will allow.

I hope and pray for a lifetime of good things for her, her husband and her daughter. I pray that God will bless them with many more years to share their lives together.

She Lied

She told her folks she would be playing at her girlfriends house for the whole afternoon. She lied. She was going to be in so much trouble, but she had no idea when she lied that they would go to her friends house looking for her!

But, that is exactly what happened. And she wasn't there. Her friends mom told her folks where she was. Of course it was somewhere they had forbidden her to ever go. Into the woods where the hobos stayed when they jumped off the train and waited for the next one to come along and take them somewhere else on a new and different adventure. She loved to go into those woods. The hobos were nice. They weren't mean and awful and they certainly weren't looking to hurt any kids. They liked kids. They liked the way the kids listened to their many tales of where they had been and what they had done. The kids were a great audience. Grown-ups just wouldn't appreciate the stories these men told and their way of life. But to a kid it was a magical way of life....something a kid could dream of doing instead of having to grow up and be responsible. It sounded like so much more fun than the lives their parents led.

So that's where they found her.....sitting around the hobos campfire with her friend. They told her and her friend in a calm voice to get up and go home. The girls didn't hesitate to move. Mom and dad were much too calm and she knew she and her friend were in some deep trouble. She walked the few blocks to her friends house and left her there and headed home to wait for her folks to arrive.

It was some time before her folks got there. They had stopped at her friends house and spoke with her mother before heading home to deal with her.

They came in and at first just stood there and looked at her without saying anything. How she wished they would say something.....anything! But they just looked at her with that disappointed look parents get when you've really screwed up and you know it. Then they said "What do you have to say for yourself?" and then they walked into the kitchen and poured a couple cups of coffee for themselves and waited for her to come into the kitchen. They never told her to come to the kitchen, it was just something she knew she would have to do. Why oh why had she gone into those woods? She was sorry, but sorry wasn't going to cut it this time.

She entered the kitchen and sat at the table staring at the table top so she wouldn't have to look at them and see the disappointment on their faces. It seems she was always disappointing them in some way. She wasn't perfect like her older sister and she wasn't the baby. She was stuck in the middle and even when things weren't her fault, she got blamed for them just because of her birth order! It wasn't fair. But then it wasn't fair of her to lie to her folks about where she was going either. Maybe someday she would learn. If only she had already learned to listen to what they told her she wouldn't be in this mess. But here she was.....ready to face her punishment.

Then they dropped the bombshell on her. They asked her what kind of punishment that she thought would be fair to her. WHAT? This is a terrible spot to be in. Trying to think of an answer that would be fair to her and fair to them. They didn't ask for one that would be fair to them, but it was just one of those things she knew they would expect. Besides if she acted mature enough and was fair enough about the punishment maybe they wouldn't be quite so hard on her and would tell her that what she had come up with was too harsh afterall.

She decided that grounding for 2 weeks and having to clean up supper dishes without any help from her sisters for the next 2 weeks would be sufficient. And guess what? They agreed. No, but wait, I didn't really mean it, she thought to herself. It was just a starting point. They were supposed to say no and feel sorry for her and give her a much lesser punishment. She couldn't be expected to really have doled out her own punishment, but that's what they did. And then they told her that she was being much harder on herself than they would have been.

She cried herself to sleep that night. And she did learn.....that was the last lie she ever told them.

The news is getting better.....

Amy is feeling better than she has in a long, long time. She left ICU late Saturday or early Sunday. According to my sister, she is acting much more like the Amy we use to know. Joking around with her hubby and giving him a hard time (all in fun, of course)!

We still don't have the results of the biopsy but the thinking on that is that if it were malignant we would have heard right away. At least that's what we're hoping it means. We are very glad she is feeling so much better and I want to thank everyone of you for your prayers. It means so much to me to know there are blogger friends who really care about what is going on in my life. ;)

Update on Amy

Amy is out of surgery and doing okay right now. We don't have the results of the golf ball size tumor they removed but the doctor thinks it is benign. We are praying he is right about that. They also found a hole in her heart that she must have been born with and went undiagnosed for her entire life, and they were able to repair that. So, if the tumor is benign she should feel better than she has in a long time in spite of having Cystic Fibrosis.

Thanks to everyone who prayed for Amy and her family!

This is a photo of Amy taken in June of this year when I was out there for her brother Tom's wedding reception. Amy is sitting beween her husband and her daughter.

Just a short post as I am very busy keeping Drew occupied. Well, it's not really that hard....I just like to spend as much time with him as I can. We've watched Nemo upteen times and I've played cars until I'm out of gas....LOL.

He's napping at the moment so I'm taking a break. I had to call my sister in Denver and see if Amy(her daughter and my niece) was out of her heart surgery yet. She told me she was, but they haven't been able to see her yet. Amy is still in the recovery room. I now know that they removed a tumor from her heart but don't know if it was malignant or not as of yet. The worst would be malignant....there is nothing they can do for her if it is. She's 37 and is married and has one almost grown child. Still......

If anyone feels like praying for her we surely wouldn't mind!

Okay, I have gotten the Halloween pictures from Kentucky so I can now post all of the trick-or-treat grandkids under the age of 6. The one to the left is Drew dressed as a chicken. Isn't he too cute? The next one is of Trenten and Ty. Trenten is a crew member for Lightning from the Cars movie and Ty is a monkey! Cute costumes also. Okay, I'm a little prejudiced, I can't help it! Next picture is of my grandkids in Kentucky that I don't get to see very often. My son-on-laws mother was nice enough to loan her camera out for the evening so they could take some pictures and send them via e-mail. Darian is Superman and KeAira is a cheerleader. And the next one is their baby brother, Cayden, who is dressed as Bat Baby! I didn't get a picture of Amber, Hunter or Harley since none of them came trick-or-treating here. Harley did come over the next day with her Mom and Dad to use the garage to change a tire, but didn't have her costume on.

My sis-in-law did stop by with her two children Telyse and Kameron and her niece Shaila. I took a picture of them and also one of my sis-in-law wearing the shoulder pads her neice wore under her football costume. She's a real clown sometimes and she is a riot to be around!

Well, I guess I can't post the picture of my niece and nephew. Blogger has been acting up all day and that is how long it has taken me just to load the pictures that I was able to post. I think it is having a hissy fit of some kind. And you know what? It's starting to piss me off!!!