Discover a new world within the pages, bound by an Oath.
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I live in a nice neighborhood of very nice houses with very nice lawns and gardens. Our house is a bit of an outlier in that it is one of the more modest houses, and the back part of the property is wooded and natural. A third thing that makes us different is our slightly unkempt perennial garden. Most properties have well-trimmed, boring shrubs with lots of mulch. In a neighborhood such as ours…
Yesterday my elder grandson found two skinks in the garden fire pit. He called his brother and me over and we gathered around the pit and admired their beauty. They are magnificent little creatures, with orange heads and vibrant, iridescent blue tails. And they move extremely quickly! As we watched them, we realized that they were trying to scale the walls of the corrugated fire pit but could not.…
My sequel to Bound by an Oath is in the works. The Lesson of the Ravens is being edited as I write. But meanwhile, here are some thoughts of my daily walk. Today is garbage day in our neighborhood and as I walked around, I tried not to be judgmental about what people were throwing out. I did say “tried”. Recycling is not very prevalent in this part of the world, and re-using is even less common. I…
The American holiday of Thanksgiving is fast approaching, and if you live in the USA you will find yourself increasingly subjected to articles, blogs, vlogs, memes etc. about ways to encourage a spirit of thanksgiving in your life. It gets a bit cloying after a while. And yet, cultivating a spirit of gratitude is one of the most powerful ways to dispel depression and gloom. And I can attest to the…
If you saw my video clip announcing the publishing of this blog you already know I sustained a “major injury” last night while sleepily caressing the feet of Truman our house cat, or as I like to call him, our house panther. I don’t know if he bit me, or scratched me because I was half asleep, but the blood flowed for a couple of minutes. He was unceremoniously dumped off my lap, onto the floor.…
I didn’t write a blog post earlier this week because the muse wasn’t with me, and now I’m absorbed in the terrible waiting for hurricane Melissa to make landfall in Jamaica. When we lived in southeast Florida, we had several friends who were from that island nation. We’ve since lost touch, but our fondness for the country and its people remains. I can only hope that those who could seek shelter…
Those who know me know how disenchanted I am with the publishing business. It is not, my friends, like it was for Louisa May Alcott, who took her precious manuscript “Little Women” to a publisher in Boston and who was thereafter taken care of like a precious asset. Publishing is now an ethically murky business where the worth of a manuscript is not at issue, only how many sales they can make in…
With all the recent attention given to the annual awarding of the Nobel prizes (I wonder why?) I began to mull over the fact that the most coveted of these prizes is the Peace Prize and that it comes out of a nation that was once a very violent culture. Are the Nordic people now more peaceful than other cultures in the West? Have they evolved further along the continuum that leads from brutality…
An event that is unequivocally historic took place on Friday October 3 rd . The 106 th Archbishop of Canterbury was announced to the...
Last week I shared a post on Facebook that amused me. It was a simple meme that asked if the reader was ready for the fall, and it posed...
