Blog

Along with all the usual gratitude, I have a LOT to be thankful for this year, not the least of which is my mother’s improving health.  It’s really funny how even just out of surgery, her color already looked better than it had in months.  I am very thankful for the team at her hospital, her doctors, her surgeon, and everyone involved in her recovery.

I am also thankful for Cozy Cat Press, and all the readers of TIARA TROUBLE, who have made it such a success.  You have no idea how much I appreciate you, and on December 1, I am going to tell you how we are going to use TIARA TROUBLE to help out some people in need.

It’s also very exciting to tell you that I have a new book deal with Omnific Publishing.  I was thrilled to get their offer while Mom was in the hospital, and just got the executed contract back this week.  I’ll be publishing a romance novel with Omnific under the pen name Nicole Lane.  That’s a happy nod to the writing partnership with Nicole Vlachos that launched the concept for PLAYING ALL THE ANGLES.

Hopefully, I can get back to a regular blogging schedule in the next couple of weeks.  And finish MISS MAYHEM.  Does it seem like my world is revolving around writing just now?  Yeah.

Happy Turkey Day, everyone.  Gobble!

p.s., these Michael Bolton Honda commercials bug me.

I never liked this house. 

We moved from a pretty little Colonial, open floor plan, 2-story, on a wooded, water lot in Virginia, to an ugly, ranch style (gold and brown carpet throughout, and terrible, terrible wallpaper that is still here),1-story off a drainage ditch in Texas.  Granted, we could have moved into a castle, and I would have sulked.  I loved our house in VA, water rats and all (because I wasn’t old enough to be bothered by rats that were as big as our Shih Tzu.)

My first impression of this place was eating Patio burritos in front of the empty fireplace. Have you ever eaten a Patio burrito?  They are terrible.  They have all the makings of a real burrito, but taste like shoe.  It was fitting.  Because this house had all the makings of a good house–lots of rooms, a good backyard, a good climbing tree in front–but it tasted like shoe.

I didn’t like it.  I was afraid of it, and our fearless Husky seemed to be, too.  We thought we had lost her the day we moved in. Hours later, after searching the streets for her, we found her under a bed, against the wall, shivering.  My sentiments exactly.  Although, after a short lifetime of loving to hide under my bed, I suddenly had a reason never to venture there.

We had traded water rats for water bugs and drainage ditch rats, and no matter how clean the house was, there were those bugs.  Hated those.  They blended in with the brown carpet, so sometimes you didn’t know one was there until it had run across your toe.  They climbed curtains, and bed hangings, too. There was that incident with the canopy netting I tried to install, that has put me off canopies entirely.

If the uglies and the bugs weren’t enough, there were all the thumps and creaks of a new-to-us house to get used to.  Squirrels, rats, and oppossums in the attic and walls competed for attention, and I swore the place was haunted.

We hadn’t been here too long, me nursing my 11-year-old suspicions about ghosts, before the next door neighbor clued me in that a suicide had taken place in my bedroom.  That was just the cherry on top of poo sundae.

Mom has been in this house for 32 years, since we moved in on November 4, 1981.  I have never learned to like it, much less love it.  In fact, I still hate it.  It’s like I hold this house responsible for everything bad that ever happened to me. To be fair, a good number of bad things went down in this house.

It’s funny to have a grudge against a house.  I have loved, or at least had some fondness for every other home I’ve been in–apartments included. 

I probably just need to get someone to come smudge it out with sage. 

This isn’t the ideal setup, but I found out how to connect the keyboard from my iPad to my Android phone, and I now have the ability to blog.  There was no way I could have typed out a blog entry with my thumbs.  This small thing alone has brightened my dulling mood.

You see, I am a terrible nurse.  I am not a care giver by nature.  Oh, I’ll help you, but I will be resentful and hurried about it.  I think a lot of that is because I am afraid of hurting someone worse, and if I don’t touch them, I can’t hurt them.  The rest of it stems from how much I hate touching gross things, and getting my hands dirty.  Wound care is my idea of hell.  Having someone cough up bloody phlegm into a kleenex and then hand it to me is horrifying.  Guess what I’ve been doing.

At the hospital, it was hard, but there were real nurses there to do the things I could not force myself to do (like give a sponge bath around all the tubes sticking out of my mother’s body–oh my word.)  When I got her home, I had a very similar reaction to having brought Thor home from the hospital.  It went, “You cannot do this to me! I don’t know what I am doing!  I will accidentally kill her if you leave her in my care!”  I haven’t killed her, and haven’t even caused her significant hurt, but I’m still kind of wild-minded about the potential for damage I could cause.

My mother’s breastbone is glued and wired shut, and her chest is glued and stitched back together, and she has several other stitched up places where veins were transplanted.  She is healing well, and is doing better than I had expected, but she’s still a patient dealing with a nurse who has limited patience.

I’m pretty proud of myself that I have not lost my mind, or my temper.  Because, when you add all my ish about sick people to how much I hate for my mom to be sick, and the usual mother/daughter fun that comes of having been stuck in a small room together for 6 days, and going stir crazy from cabin fever for another 4, you have me primed for a dramatic meltdown. 

Now that I have my “space” back, in the form of being connected to my blog, I feel better.  It’s my own little bit of territory carved out, where I don’t have to worry about anyone other than myself. ME.  ALL ME!  ONLY CHILD ME!

I am so thankful my mother is alive, and I honestly don’t mind doing anything for her.  I just wish I were one of those kind people who enjoy caregiving, instead of being the kind of person who wants to just shove you out of the nest and yell, “Fly, sucker!”  My fantasy sibling loves nursing people back to healthy.