Perle Champion

 Sundays I’m just going to post something out of my gratitude journal, and a picture.  This morning as I drove to Western for my Sunday paper, I had to pull over and sit on the hood of the car just at the crest of 14th Avenue at 21st to gaze at the breaking day.

I am grateful to have witnessed the gorgeous sunrise this Sunday morning. 

Now to curl up with the last drop of wine and a a book – Tonight it’s Rhonda Byrne’s ‘The Magic’.

When did Diet become a verb? I always considered it a noun.  My diet is what I eat day in and day out.  It was never a dirty 4-letter word; a verb for the torture du jour of odd food combinations, deprivations, and blatant lies of the perfect body you will have if only you follow their plan, whoever they are.

I’ve seen friends diet on and off their whole lives.  I know the many diets they tried didn’t work, or it worked for a while.  But for most of them, the moment they started eating their ‘normal diet’ they got bigger than they ever were. 

I blithely, and I admit it, went my own way wondering what the big deal was.  I’ve never dieted a day in my life; I never had to.  I was always on the go, ran or walked every morning, did weights at the Y, practiced yoga 2-3 times a week – yes, even when I had a job, a husband, and an exceptional child at home. 

But as I said in yesterday’s blog, I let go and I’m not happy with the result.  I still refuse to embrace diet as a verb, I just need to remember myself and reinstate all those good things I used to do just for me.  I know I’m still in there somewhere.

This writing a Blog a day is tough (NY resolution).  I’m not used to posting my stream of consciousness blurts.

I often just write by hand stream of consciousness suppressing my internal editor. Then I input it into Word and find myself editing as I go. Then I print it out triple spaced and take a red pen to it.

I’ve written 1200 words for a book review that had to be whittled down to 300-400 words. (Thank you Strunk & White).

Finally, I read it aloud to myself in the mirror – Amazing that those words I thought were gems can fall so flat when read aloud.  Before I submit work to my editor, it has to have a purposeful cadence, it must be prose.

But I promised myself to keep this blog a day resolution.  I’m determined to keep it up even if, as my Ken Roberts says, they are only ‘Mildly Creative’.  I just know some gems will emerge eventually.

Laughing burns calories.  A double helping of Cosby is good for you!

When you laugh, your heart beats faster, blood pressure rises temporarily; you breathe deeper and oxygenate more blood; your body releases endorphins – natural painkillers and you produce more immune cells.  You burn 78 times as many calories as in a resting state.  Your diaphragm, facial muscles and internal organs all get an internal massage.

After laughing, muscles and arteries relax, which eases pain; lowers blood pressure, and drops your pulse to below normal.

Sign up for the joke of the day, read the funnies instead of the news, tune in to a comedy instead of a crime show, or search YouTube for funny pet videos.

So, along with feeding your body better food, and getting your daily walk, laugh a little.

I love my i-phone, I really do.  Since the fire last year, it is my only phone and modem to tether my laptop to the internet, as I did not replace my land line, nor my dsl.  But as with most technology, we only love it when it works for us.

This is not such a day. Suddenly and without warning, it is no longer my friend at least with phone calls.  Since about noon today, callers and callees either don’t hear me or hear me badly.  Didn’t drop it didn’t do anything to it, just suddenly going round a corner it sounded a bip, bip, bip (or sounds to that effect) and that as they say was that.

I spend a good 45 minutes on chat with AT&T, to no avail.  Bertha even called me and confirmed that, yes, it sounded awful as if I’m cutting out.  She hung up, the chat times out and she left me a voicemail, saying to call Apple and good luck. Ah, Customer service?

Of course, I’m a few weeks past the one year extended warranty.  I’m convinced that too much of what we buy today is built to fail at precisely that time – some kind of programmed obsolescence.

I’m turning it off to rest over night, and I’ll deal with it tomorrow.

“After all, tomorrow is another day!” quoth Scarlet.  Yes, Scarlet,  it is. I’m going out on the balcony to enjoy a glass of wine and a glorious sunset and I’ll figure this out tomorrow.

Salut.

She heard the footfall of war on the horizon. 

The ancient call to battle long a hidden heartbeat of human

intolerance rising to crescendo now

become a discordant roar shaking the very earth that holds us.

Soon, too soon, the time was upon her

She could only hope their preparations were enough

to save them from total destruction by the Storm.

How often had humankind been sent back to the cave?

Through how many millennia had they picked themselves up and begun again.

She and her ken saw the signs but few heeded the warnings

now through the inertia that drives such events, the time was upon them

but she had no intention of going back to the cave.  This time

thanks to tireless, relentless planning, they might come out the other side

with enough left to prevent them losing themselves in a generation or two.

Only the sturdy, the able, the well-prepared would survive, and few enough of them,

It would have to be enough – it would have to be,

and we,

we the Wyse will be there.

Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to
write “very”; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just
as it should be.
– Mark Twain

Very damn good advice. I’m tempted to take that advice. It is easier when editing and redrafting to delete expletives and obscenities than it is to remove extraneous adjectives.

Sometimes, if I stop and read certain passages aloud, I can hear by the cadence of the words where the flow slows.

It’s a ponderous procedure, and I think using damn and its literary ken would make my rewrites go very uh damn much easier.  

It’s a dark and stormy night, and I’ve no time to write.  I’m reading. 

It’s just a bit of mind candy, and so perfect as the storm tries to batter its way through the plastic that covers my screened in balcony in winter.

I’ve a glass of wine at hand and Jazmine is purring on the back hump on this cushy loveseat that makes my balcony a sort of den.

The chanteuse of the moment, Adell’s dulcet tones waft out from the living room.

Between the covers, Lacey’s ex-lover Cole, falsely accused of murder has just tossed her over his shoulder as he escapes custody and flees Sagebursh.

Current lover, Vic is left in the dust as she revisits feelings long buried.

I’ve taken a minute to dash this off, because I must keep my resolution to post a blog a day come hell, highwater or indifference.  I will keep this resolution if not the one to lose 40 pounds.  I will, I will.

Do not misunderstand, Byerrum’s Crimes of Fashion mystery series is not a romance.  She’s in the same category as Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series or Laura Childs’s Scrapbooking Mysteries – their cozies.

All books have their place and I read almost anything.  I read around – from science fiction to science fact and theory, biography, history, mystery, fantasy and horror.  I’ll post a reading list some day soon.

But for tonight it’s Death on Heels by Ellen Byerrum that has my attention.  I’ll read it in a single sitting like a sumptuous bite of good dark chocolate.  The kind that goes so well with red wine.

So, I wish y’all as pleasant ‘a dark and stormy night’ as I’m having.  Gotta run now, Lacey’s on the tracks.