A Free House Moving?

Motivated by Casey Hester on the Texas Flip and Move TV show, who to sweeten the pie for bidders (he needed a certain amount for his flip house to break even) offered a free house moving.

Okay, I thought, when it comes time to sell my book how can I be different?

What could I offer as an incentive?

See I need a little help from my friends.

My book won’t come out for probably another year, but I’m thinking about it. Bookstores have gone kaput. Golly, I just saw this morning that Toys R (backward) Us has gone bankrupt. That was toy heaven when my kids were little.

Have people stopped buying toys, electronics, books?

Nope.

They are buying online.

So, how do you stand out online?

Well, you can move a house if you have enough strong backs.

I’m not a salesperson. I don’t believe in talking a person into buying something they don’t want. I don’t believe in seeing everyone you meet as a potential customer. I hate being in that little room at a car dealership, left alone with my husband to “Talk about it.”

Didn’t I go there to buy a car? So, give me a good price, be nice to me, and I’ll buy it.

Of course, I might be “Just looking,” or checking out their cars so I can buy the same model at that cheap joint down the street. So I guess they must hook me.  But I don’t like that. Just give me what I want and I’ll buy it.

I think that if you want something like insurance, something everyone needs, but doesn’t want to buy, that you are there as a facilitator, to be of help, to make the painful process easier, not to strong arm the customer.

How can you be of service and not be pushy?

Am I off track?

A book is somewhat different. A person must want to read it. And they must know enough about it to make it a “must read.”

That’s where the reader comes in.

A book is something you write because it speaks to you, but then a book without a reader is like a seed planted on pure obsidian.

That’s where the reader comes in.

Well, I have a year to think about it—a lot can happen in a year.

Any suggestions?

And then Seth Godin’s blog popped up with this:

#Your fast car—Seth Godin

Right there, in your driveway, is a really fast car. And here are the keys. Now, go drive it.

(Want the car.)

Right there, in your hand, is a Chicago Pneumatics 0651 hammer. You can drive a nail through just about anything with it, again and again if you choose. Time to use it.

(Don’t want the hammer.)

And here's a keyboard, connected to the entire world. Here's a publishing platform you can use to interact with just about anyone, just about anytime, for free. You wanted a level playing field, one where you have just as good a shot as anyone else? Here it is.

 Do the work.

(Want to learn this.)

P.S. Still doing my photo a day. www.travelwithjoyce.com

Fun, Box Springs, Work

  

That’s Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. After the serious blog of last week, this one is frivolous. 

Are you in?

The fun was visiting the Carousel in Albany Oregon. When friends invited us to visit a carousel, I thought, O.K., an opportunity to be together, to visit, and I love carousels. I just didn’t know how much I would love this one.

And since I have kept my agreement with myself, to take a photo a day for thirty days, I thought, Wow, a photo opt.

I didn’t know how astounded I would be. That was the most exquisite carousel I have ever seen. Husband and I rode it. How could one resist?

Yes, and I posted more than one photo that day on Instagram. I couldn’t’ resist that either.

All the animals on the carousel were hand carved and hand painted, a three-year process for each animal—two to carve, one to paint, and there were months of curing. One cannot ride an animal until it is trained. Whoops paint cured.

The attention to detail was exquisite, the unique adornments art in themselves. And although each animal was one of a kind, they all fit together like a collection on the dress design show #Project Runway.

I almost fell on the floor in awe and envy of the artists.

The pavilion that housed the carousel was a work of art, too, as were the tables placed around the periphery of the room. The tops had been hand painted each with a different carousel animal.

I am even reticent about posting pictures. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but this carousel must be experienced to be fully appreciated. I know that not all my readers live in the vicinity, so here you are folks, but if you are ever here, know that I did not photograph all the animals. I left some for you to experience live.

And I must visit again. With an appointment, a guest can visit the basement where craftspeople carve and paint the animals.  A notice said more were on the way. I saw the drawing of a proposed bison, a bucking horse, a bird…and in the photos below you can see a few animals in process—these were displayed next to the gift store. And there were some antique animals on display as well; one was a Zebra named Sweetpea. That’s my dog’s name.

My carver daughter’s teeth will probably ache at seeing this opportunity, although, it is all volunteer. Talk about a labor of love.

2. Box Springs:

There is a mountain range outside Riverside California named The Box Springs; I always thought How strange, almost as bad as Drain, Oregon, but here I am talking about true box springs. You know, ones that go under a mattress.

We invested in a pair of box springs to go under our King sized mattress. We have been sleeping on a platform bed, one that has an air bed on top, and does not need springs. It’s one you hear so many ads about, a “Sleep number,” bed where each sleeping partner can, with a remote control, adjust their side of the bed. No compromise there. The trouble was since it was so low; it was like crawling up from a squatting position. And in the middle of the night—you can imagine.  Now with the box springs, it has been brought up to civilized height. I’m a happy sleeper.

3. Work:

That was Monday. I got the first two chapters of my manuscript back with editing comments. Now it looks as though it is glued together with red ink. I am happy for the comments, though, for it is just what I need. Elaborate here, adjust this, put this over there. Great input. I am so afraid to bore people that I tend to be cryptic. That works for blogging, not so much for a full-length book.

My editor is the best. She is a gift.

Carousel work in process: 

A Poodle dog about to become a carousel mount. 

The horse is before it has its glossy top coat. I like it this way, but I guess it wouldn't hold up to wear.

Patterned after the artists own rescued a retired Grayhound

Who do You Trust?

 “I just spent 90 minutes talking about authenticity dressed in an outfit I only wear to funerals.”—Brene’ Brown

That was today.

This was yesterday:

 “Trump isn’t crazy. We are.”--Allan Francis.

I had to laugh out loud when I read that. Not because it was ha ha funny, but because it was pathetic funny.

Trump has scared so many people that six dystopia classics have suddenly jumped to the top of Amazon’s top seller list. 

They are Orwell’s 1994 and Animal Farm, Huxley’s Brave New World, Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. Margaret Attwood’s Handmaid’s Tale and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Psychiatrist Allen Francis, twilight of american sanity (small letters his.) “A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump” writes that “Being a world-class narcissist doesn’t make Trump mentally ill as many diagnosticians claim.  

It makes him even more fearsome because he isn’t. 

If he was we could excuse him, kick him out of the Presidency, or dismiss his blatant blow-hard tactics.

“Insanity in individuals is somewhat rare, but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”-- Freidrich Nietzche

Well, crumb, and here we are sitting right smack dab in the middle of it.

Perhaps that readers are turning to the classics will make us saner people.

Francis wrote the criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder. While other diagnosticians are correctly noting that the disorder’s defining features fit Trump like a glove (grandiose self-importance; preoccupations with being great; requiring constant admiration’ feeling entitled; lacking empathy; and being exploitive, envious and arrogant) still Francis maintains that it does not prove that he is mentally ill. 

Actually, it has gotten him fame, fortune, women and now political power.

That people call Trump crazy is to ignore a deeper social sickness.

Simply put, Trump isn’t insane, but our society is.

An individual can be dead wrong and not be crazy, but for a society to be dead wrong is scary.

Used to be the world was huge, the resources boundless and self-preservation necessary for personal survival. (Often they didn’t know where their next meal was coming from.) The survival instincts that worked for fifty thousand years now need to be redirected into a world that requires cooperation.

I don’t know what a big hairy dilemma looks like but I know he has horns for I am sitting on one.

Why would we elect a man so blatantly against the earth, global warming, woman, immigrants, ethnic differences, conserving resources, and world trade?

Throw out a phrase, “Make American Great Again,” and enough Americans believed it to elect Trump, not to mention that Hillary was demonized to the extent that even women didn’t trust her.

I think it was the Archie Bunker phenomenon (TV’s All in the Family). Archie began as a laughable bigoted buffoon, and he became popular. Perhaps people appreciate an individual who lets his thoughts spill out his mouth without censorship, and without any care about what others think. It is what they wish for themselves.

 It is a child that has never grown up.

Why we can't stay silent on social issues due to fear of criticism or getting it wrong.--Brené Brown,  BA, MA and PhD.

And then today happened.

As I listened to Brene’ Brown talking about “Belonging, Courage, and Constructive Conversations” on Marie Forleo’s show, I was reassured about the health of our society when nigh on to 40 million viewers showed up for her Ted Talk.

I am reassured when attendees in the thousands plunk down funds and go to a Tony Robbins event to confront their psychological, financial and spiritual issues.

Brown points out that we are hard-wired not to hurt each other for we are a social species.

But, to harm another first we need to dehumanize them.

When the president calls women, “pussy,” or “dogs,” it renders them subhuman.

On the flip side when we call him “a pig,” we are doing that as well.

This chips away at our soul.

It is a moral exclusion and at the core of every genocide.

If they are sub-human then we can justify eradicating them

People are hard to hate close up.

What is Trust?

Brown says there are 7 elements to trust, and these are observable and testable.

Her anarchism for those elements is BRAVING

B is for foundries, what’s ok, and what’s not ok.
R Reality. Say what you’ll do, and do what you say.
A Accountability
V the vault. Think of the cone of silence. It is a safe place where trust is shared. Sometimes we “talk out of school” to make a connection. However, we are telling stories that are not ours to tell.
I Integrity, choose what’s right over Fun, Fast, and Easy. People don’t do discomfort well. We have become a society of fun, fast and easy. 
Both Brown and Forleo said that the important things they achieved in life were not easy.
N Non-judgement
G Generosity. Assume positive intent. In the absence of data, it is human nature make up stories. We can run a long narrative of how they did us wrong when we aren’t facing them head on. (Remember it is hard to hate someone close up.)


The earth still laughs in Flowers.

This Gerbera Daisy from my porch wintered over. I was surprised to see its little green sprout in the planter box, and so I tenderly watered it, and look what I got. 

I have high hopes for it as winter is coming on. 

Perhaps we, too, can winter over.


 From my daughter’s trainer:
“Avoid realistic goals.”
“With realistic goals, you will settle. Instead set realistic time frames.”

I like that man.

5 Good Reasons to Drink Coffee

I began drinking coffee when I was 18 years old out of desperation.

I was then a dental assistant, and we worked from 8 a.m. until 1:00 p.m. our lunch break.

 I was starving.

So I began drinking coffee mid-morning.

We used Cremora in those days.

I tried it with the creamer, didn’t particularly like it. Tried sugar, liked it less, but gradually found it palatable with the creamer without the sugar.

One day, the second dentist I worked for piled a heap of dental plaster (same color as Cremora) into my cup of coffee and stuck a sign in it, “Cream gone bad.”

I tried to get back at him later by partially blowing up a weather balloon he had bought, and stuffed it in the closet so when he opened the door to get his smock, he would be met with a floppy pile of escaping rubber.

It partially backfired on me, for when I came back from lunch, he was working on a patient in his dress shirt. He asked me to get the pen out of his pocket, and, chuckling under his breath, sent me to face the balloon.

However, I knew it was there and squeezed past the rubber, found the pen and took it to him.

Well, you know he had encountered the balloon earlier.

I wish I had seen it.

Okay, I was talking about coffee.

I have gone through thinking the caffeine wasn’t good for me, so I drank it decaffeinated.  When I read that the chemical used to decaffeinate was worse than the caffeine, so I tried steam-decaffeinated. Thinking that dairy wasn’t that good for me, I tried soy lattes.

I stopped drinking coffee when I was pregnant, which is probably a good idea, and if the mother is breastfeeding, the baby has to process the caffeine.

If a breast feeding mother isn’t careful about spacing her caffeine intake and her breastfeeding sessions it can lead to a caffeine build up in the baby's system. To give you an idea of how long it takes, the half-life of caffeine for a newborn baby is about 3-4 days, compared to 2.5 hours for a six-month-old. For an adult, it's about an hour and a half.

Now, not pregnant, not breastfeeding, and knowing that fat is a necessary ingredient to any diet,  I can pour on the cream, and chug down the coffee. 

I love it with half and half, hot or iced, especially iced.

And when I heard that coffee is good for us, I began drinking it in earnest.

Got my computer, got my coffee. I’m set.

And now not only can I drink it guilt free, but I find it is healthy.

1.     Studies say drinking coffee will make you live longer.

More than 35 studies have been done covering more than 2 million people that indicate coffee directly influences what Public Health Nutrition calls “all-cause mortality.”

Those in the study that drank 3 to 5 cups a day saw more benefits than those that drank 1 cup a day.

Brace yourself.

2.     Current studies on coffee have deemed it a “health elixir” that not only protects the heart but also lowers the risk of several cancers as well as the risk of Parkinson’s disease.

Coffee lipids act as a safeguard against some malignant cells by modulating the detoxifying enzymes. According to #About.com, men who drank six cups of coffee a day reduced their chances of developing type-2 diabetes by half, and women who drank the same amount cut their risk by 30 percent.

3.     Coffee is super-concentrated with flavonoids, an antioxidant compound well-known for its antiviral, anti-allergic, anti-platelet, anti-inflammatory, and antitumor benefits.

4.     Drinking coffee may be a potential treatment for Alzheimer’s, according to a 2010 study published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. The study found that caffeine treatments in mice led to a lowering of the levels of Abeta, an abnormal protein believed to be responsible for #Alzheimer’s. Not only did this treat Alzheimer’s, but it also seemed to lower the chances of developing it at all. Additional studies have continued this line of research into how coffee might influence Alzheimer’s in humans and, while the jury is still out, positive evidence is accumulating.

5.     Because it enhances blood flow to the brain, coffee is a rapid mood enhancer. It helps us think, keeps us alert and promotes a sense of wellbeing.

Totality

What Are The Chances?

When you live about 40 miles south of the path of the Solar Eclipse’s Totality, it makes sense to drive a little north.

And so, that’s what we did.

On Saturday husband and I scouted parking places for the upcoming event on Monday. $100.00 parking places? Nope. Crowds of 10,000, no again.

We found numerous places close by the Corvallis Municipal Airport, and in the path of almost 2 minutes of totality.

On Monday as we were in route up highway 99—it was between 8 and 9 in the morning and not crowded-- my daughter, son-in-law and grandson ahead of us called to say they found a place within close range of the airport, a beautiful spot by trees, on grass, and with shade. Perfect--except for one thing.

It was on private land.

The owner gave permission though, and it was there we met our family all prepared with an ice chest of food. Other people, to the owner's dismay, joined us, and all were respectful and left not a scrap.

Below is a picture of the sun through a hole in a paper place projected on a white board. This is the concept of a pin-hole camera.

The pilot of a light plane, his trail like chalk on a board, outlined the sun. 

Husband dear was intrigued at finding a Mylar balloon floating high above our heads, and apparently three vultures did too, for three were circling.

Dum de dum dum.

My naked eye couldn’t see the balloon, guess his vision is better. I could see the vultures though, I wonder if they thought they were coming to a barbeque.

The dark moon—invisible to us until it began its sojourn across the sun’s face began as a bite, a crescent, a half, a three-quarters.

Husband dear set up a small telescope and this is a picture taken with my phone/camera peeking through the lens.

The dogs didn’t want anything to do with this event, and hid out in the vehicles. I wish they could tell us what they were seeing or feeling.

I, too, felt off-kilter, a bit dizzy, but I thought perhaps it was because I was looking up so much. Don’t know. Sometimes we doubt our feelings. One reason people have so few other-worldly experiences.

Eerie dim-darkness enveloped the countryside.We watched as the moon crept across the face of Ra, and then El Whamo.

We ripped off our glasses. And there it was, the corona.

Glorious.

Awesome.

The temperature dropped 20 degrees. It was unsettling to feel how vulnerable we are, drop a shade over the sun, and the result is immediate—darkness and cold.  A star, thinking it was night, blinked. Whoops it wasn’t night. A minute and 50 some seconds later a crescent of Ra appeared. Put on glasses!

We toasted good old Ra’s  return with a glass of champagne.

Later on that day at a garden shop, I read “Our sun is the only one known to grow vegetables.”

In the town of Corvallis a woman came up to us and asked how the dogs fared. She and her family drove up from Oakland California. She said it was probably her only opportunity to witness such an event. Her husband said maybe it would make him a better man, but he wasn’t noticing that happening. I said it was accumulative, and would happen over time.

I feel that the eclipse was a pause for the earth. Maybe we gave her a breather.  Just think, mother earth had a moment to collect her wits while some estimated 7 million people stopped whatever racket they were doing, driving, yammering, computer punching, and looked up.

What are the chances of seeing a total eclipse? 

This was the first total eclipse to occur completely bisecting the U.S. since our founding fathers declared us a country.

The moon’s orbit takes it directly in between the earth and the sun every 18 months or so, however, this one was unique for it darkened populated areas, and not in the middle of the ocean or a desert or some ice encrusted continent.

What are the chances that from our perspective the sun and the moon are exactly the same size?

The moon is 1/400^th the size of the sun and it is 400 times closer to us. 

Eventually total eclipses will be no more, for the moon is moving away from us at the rate of 1 ½ inches per year. Rats. I don't like that idea. The last total eclipse will be about 620 million years from now. 

The corona, the gas jacket around the sun, is millions of degrees hotter than the surface of the sun, which is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. 

Scientists don't fully understand why. One explanation offered by NASA  is that the gas collects “heat bombs” that fly off the sun into that gaseous layer where they explode giving off heat.  The corona extends far into space, and affects solar winds. Eclipses give scientists an opportunity to see, and thus to study, the corona.

Story Has a Will to Survive

Ah ha! I got my .com back. So Wish on White Horses is now
www.wishonwhitehorses.com

I picked up a used book the other day. The book was published 27 years ago and within the pages of that book I found a slip of paper, a note from a friend to the person to whom she was gifting the book. 

“I simply couldn’t let the 75^th of a friend of 40 years slip by without letting you know that I am wishing you the best of health, wealth and happiness for at least another 75!”

I felt touched upon by a piece of antiquity.

Tell me, have you written a story? Did you write a quick journal entry? Did you write down a secret?

Here's something fun: Take out that scrap of paper, tuck it away somewhere, behind a wall board, in the shed, under a stepping stone in the walkway. (Better wrap it in something durable.) Put it in a jar to exist among the nails and screws in the shop.

Maybe it will be found, maybe it won’t.  

Think of Anne Frank’s diary kicked aside by a Gestapo’s boot?

I’m not saying our addition will be as illustrious as Anne Frank’s—who wants that experience—but we have a song to sing.

Doesn't it give you a thrill to find a recipe written in your grandmother’s own hand?

Our ancestors lived and loved had lives like ours, or not like ours, we want to hear about that.

Did they stand on a hillside, eyes cast skyward and ask some of the same questions we are asking? Did they rail at God?

It was a secret railing, but grand kids, great grand kids, and great great grand kids ought to know about it.

Except it has blown away…

You might find that the people who inhabited your old house, or that dilapidated farm in the country, a foundation now of crumbling concrete, with vines encrusted, once belonged to your grandparents. And each spring daffodils, those planted when the house was young, come up trying to tell the story of those who lived in that house.

Were those daffodils fertilized by the dust of human experience?

Maybe some of that dust came to you, it sat on your bureau, you wiped it up with a damp cloth, you threw it in the washing machine. It went into the sewer, into the water purification plant, whoa, maybe you drank it. Perhaps, instead, it went into the ocean.

In the ocean it dissolved among all the many other droplets. As mist it flew off the crest of a wave blown by the wind. It collected in the sky, joined by a million other droplets, and the cloud that they made, when its belly was full, rained, and watered the daffodils.