Category Archives: my life

6 word memoir meme

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As I read yet another book review of a memoir this weekend, my husband told me that I should write one. I said that my story would be much too short and rather boring so when I ran across the following book I decided it was just my speed. A six word memoir! Written by Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser, Not Quite What I was Planning: Six Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure is a compilation based on the story that Hemingway once bet ten dollars that he could sum up his life in six words. His words were- For Sale: baby shoes, never worn. There’s a video on Amazon with examples from the book, it sounds like a fun read! I’d like to start a six word memoir meme and here are the rules:

1. Write your own six word memoir

2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like

3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere

4 .Tag five more blogs with links

5. And don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

It was actually a lot more difficult that I thought it would be, but here’s mine…

This too shall pass, I hope.

I tag Melynn at Breathing Easy, Sandy at My Inner Edge, Lisa at Books on the Brain, Janie at Ragamuffins, and Fighting Windmills.

If you haven’t been tagged but would like to participate go ahead and copy and paste this post to initiate your own string of the game, or post a comment with your 6 word memoir and I’ll post them later:)

**Blonde Momentos added a link to Smith Magazine on her memoir post where you can go and leave your memoir, they are collecting them for book #2!

be mine

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I know, I know, that picture is totally tacky, maybe even a little juvenile (okay, definitely juvenile) but I don’t care because it was fun to make! That’s me and my hubby last March on the beach in Carlsbad, California. We haven’t been on vacation since and we are getting the bug to bug out of Michigan once more. It snowed again yesterday, five more inches on top of a layer of slick ice, poor Mr. bookbabie slipped twice while snowblowing the driveway. It’s been a tough winter around here. This will be one of those springs where the entire state will wander outdoors on the first bright fifty-degree day without any coats on. We’ll all be grinning like fools as we tip our pale faces up toward the sun, our molelike eyes barely able to open against the glare, our hearts grateful to be putting another winter behind us (overwritten, but oh so true!). Today however, I am simply grateful for my partner. We’ve been through a lot together. You can’t be married for nearly thirty years without sharing a bucketful of joy and a few tears too. Happy Valentine’s Day my love!

If you and your sweetie have a stash of old love letters, my blogging buddy Bev can bind them into a handmade book for you, très romantique! She has a storefront on Etsy, a fabulous online place to shop for handmade gifts. Check out Bev’s store here.

monday moanin’

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Last week my doc told me that I have carpal tunnel syndrome in both wrists. It wasn’t a big surprise because I’ve had symptoms for a long time; numbness, tingling, and pain in my hands when I get cold along with fingers that are always so naturally chilly I can dip them quickly into boiling water and nab a hot noodle to check it for doneness. I have to strap on two lovely wrist splints every night now (very sexy) and I’ll visit my massage therapist and see if she can open up the carpal tunnel and relieve some of the nerve compression. I’ve been doing more writing and photography in the past few months, and even though I try to use good posture and support my wrists, I think that the added time at the computer has made things worse.

And here’s where the moanin’ part comes in. My body has disappointed me plenty over the years and I’m more than a little annoyed that it’s up to its old tricks again. I’ve dealt with chronic illness on and off since I was in my twenties and I’ve had to rearrange my dreams and goals many times to accommodate and care for the whims of this rather needy little body that I was born into. Living with chronic health problems has forced me to lead a more balanced life (which is a good thing), it has taken me on a journey that has taught me the value of self-acceptance, hope, and resilience (also good), but enough is enough already! So take note body, this is war, I absolutely positively refuse to give up any more territory to illness!

Oh, and that photo up yonder was taken just this morning, the sun actually came out today! The wind chill is 10 below zero but that’s okay, we are sooo sun starved here in Michigan this winter we’ll take it any way we can get it:)

My own prescription for health is less paperwork and more running barefoot through the grass. ~Leslie Grimutter

happiness unplugged

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I’ve been thinking about happiness today, trying to put a finger on what it is and how to hold on to it when you have it. Yesterday, I suddenly realized that I was quite happy, and I wasn’t the only one who noticed. When I went to the grocery store people kept looking me in the eye, smiling, and saying hello. It was strange because I usually feel somewhat invisible. Not in a bad way, more like in an undercover, superhero kind of way. Like I can move stealthily through my day and not garner a lot of attention. Perhaps it’s the writer and artist in me, wanting to blend into the background so I can observe and gather bits and pieces of people’s lives for later use. But there was no hiding yesterday. I felt like I had a spotlight shining down on me exclaiming, “Hey, look at her, she’s a happy friendly person!”

The interesting thing is, I woke up yesterday with the same blessings and the very same worries that I had the day before. When I did a search for books about happiness on Amazon I got 260,732 results. That’s a lot of books, most of them proclaiming that they can teach people how to be happy. Which is probably a good thing because when I searched for depression I got 263,382 hits. A close race, but unless the results are tallied in Florida, I would say that depression wins hands down. Where am I going with this? I honestly don’t know. Just like I don’t know why I was feeling bummed on Wednesday but woke up happy on Thursday. But I do know this much, even though I lost my cloak of invisibility it felt pretty good to be happy, so I’m simply going to enjoy walking in that spotlight for as long as it keeps on shining.

The photo above is of my daughter-in-law Meagan, my niece Aryielle, and Mr. bookbabie at a family dinner. Every time Meagan smiled at her, the baby totally cracked up, it was so funny and sweet we had tears streaming down our faces from laughing so hard. I wanted an image that illustrated happiness and every time I see that picture I can’t help but smile:)

Some people never find it, some only pretend, but I just want to live happily ever after every now and then. Jimmy Buffet

snowflake zen

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This past Christmas my seven year old niece danced out on to our deck while it was lightly snowing (she rarely runs or walks anywhere, she twirls and flits about like a little pixie). Suddenly, she came back into the kitchen shouting, “Look, look, I caught a snowflake and they really do look like snowflakes!” Balancing on the tip of her index finger was a single white snowflake that was so big you could see its intricate shape with the naked eye. The adults laughed gently and went right back to their conversations, but Laurel continued to stare with awe at the snowflake as it melted and disappeared. Of all the gifts she opened that day, none elicited the same amount of excitement and joy as seeing the divine design of a snowflake with her own eyes for the very first time.

My sister Carrie took that photo of a snowflake on our mailbox at Thanksgiving with the macro setting on my Canon G9, it seems to be a year for giant snowflakes here in Michigan. If you’d like to make your own virtual snowflake, click here and start snipping!

Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand and melting like a snowflake… Francis Bacon, Sr.

book heavens

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The Guardian Unlimited did a story recently about the top ten bookshops around the world. These are not your corner Barnes & Noble’s. One is in an 800 year old church, another provides books to British Royals and has been around since 1796, and the shop pictured above is a converted theater. Below is a photo from my own much more humble home office/library. When we first bought the house my husband wanted to call it “the library”. I think he had visions of retiring there in the evenings, sinking into a well worn leather chair, sipping his favorite red cab and smoking a fine, hand rolled cigar. Well I crushed that dream before the perfect shade of taupe paint on those walls was even dry! I mean, he doesn’t even like smoking cigars, he only does it when he’s with his friends after golf, it’s sooo totally a peer pressure thing (and it’s sooo not good for him). We do have lots of books in there though (my books) and a leather desk chair (my chair) at the computer (my computer) and we ended up calling it “the office”, sorry Mr. bookbabie. That darling collage on the spare chair of me and the mister and our two pets (who are now in pet heaven) was done by artist Claudine Hellmuth. After our dog Nikki died, it made me too sad to look at it, but now I’m trying to find the perfect place to hang it. I just snapped the photo this morning and as you can see the living room is flooded with sunlight. I hope it holds, I plan to go for a walk later (Melynn), even though it’s cold, cold, cold!

vote for bookbabie!

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amazon.gif I have some super exciting news today. A while back I had the local noon news on and the talking head briefly mentioned that Amazon.com was having a contest for new writers. The thought crossed my mind that it was an unusual thing for the news to be reporting on, and my first inclination was to go about my day and not look into it. But if you’re a regular reader of my blog you’ll know that I often write about the importance of paying attention to those little “taps” on the shoulder from the universe, so I figured I’d follow my own advice and go ahead and upload one of my novels just in case that was one of those moments. My book was accepted into the contest (which was pretty exciting in itself) and last night I learned that my novel, The Wonder of Ordinary Magic, was chosen from 5000 entrants to be a semifinalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest! And here’s where you, my wonderful, smart, lovely, loyal readers come in (yes, that was a kiss up…too much?). I need you to go to Amazon.com, read the excerpt of my book, and like it enough to review it and rate it. Click on the contest badge (or any link in this post) and it will take you to my page in the contest. When you get there click on the “Download for Free” button. It takes you to a window that lets you read an excerpt on-line, download it, or e-mail it to yourself. If you like what you read please go back to my page and leave a good rating and a review, that’s your vote.

***I just found out that if you’ve never shopped at Amazon you have to create an account before you can review, and you can’t review unless you’ve bought something. I’m not happy about this turn of events and I certainly don’t expect anyone to buy something in order to rate my book. Apparently this has always been their policy for reviewing products on their web site, it’s their way of keeping the riff-raff out. Oh well, if you’d like to learn more about the novel click here and go to my website where I tell “the story behind the book”. Feel free to tell all your friends and family that bookbabie needs their vote!

this too shall pass

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The first thing I do when I get my O Magazine is turn to the last page to read Oprah’s letter. This month she talked about how repeating the mantra this too shall pass helped her get through the recent scandal at her school in South Africa. Those four words have brought solace to many people over the years, myself included. I put the quote on a couple of T-shirts and it was written on the blackboard in my kitchen for many months. I wasn’t familiar with it until I got very sick one night last year. I had a nasty reaction to a new medication that not only made me physically ill, but at one point made me feel like I was losing my mind. Not a good feeling. So I was curled up on the couch (after getting home from the doctor who said I would just have to wait until the drug got out of my system), feeling like I was about to become unstrung as they say, when suddenly I got those four words: this too shall pass.

The strange thing was, they weren’t part of the confused illness spawned soup that was swirling around in my head. They were written on four sheets of pure white paper that floated up and out of the craziness that was engulfing me. I almost felt like I could reach out and pick them up. Which was weird enough in itself, but the really cool thing was that I immediately felt such a sense of peace wash over me that I was able to relax enough to go to bed where I slept off the remainder of the medication side effect. The next day I googled the quote to try and find it’s source. It seems its origin is up for some debate. It’s often attributed to Abraham Lincoln, poet Lanta Wilson Smith, and to a proverb about King Solomon. In the end I decided it didn’t really matter where it came from, it helped save me from what could have been a long, frightening night of illness. I still slip on those T-shirts now and then when I need to remember those four simple words. Gam zeh ya’avor…this too shall pass.