Tag: Houndstooth

Mindful Monday

Today is for beginnings. I have a couple of art projects I began that will become gifts.

We seem to be moving into a more moderate weather period, which means I started long overdue work on Aaron’s Garden–pruning, plant replacement (required a shopping trip), cleanup, and a few salvaged items from backyard decorations will find a new home there.


Last spring I found these rocks under leaves when I cleaned the carport. I meant to add them to the garden, but they’ve been sitting on this windowsill ever since. They’ve now been moved one step closer. =)

Succulents waiting inside for new pots, fresh soil, and the succulent food I give them.


Need to get all these leaves from the front porch and the garden bed into eco-accepted bags and on the curb.


With all the leaves, twigs, and other debris removed, tomorrow is the day I’ll get everything out, watered, and gardenish again. It was great to be outside a lot today–and also to walk through our local garden center, which was hit pretty hard by recent winter weather, but they’re restocking.

It’s clear enough to see our planetary neighbors and constellations in the night sky. Amazing!

I ran out of time today to revisit an old manuscript. I don’t have the original draft, but I’ve found some other false starts that may get my imagination taking on yesterday’s dragon. Tomorrow!

How do we make love stay?


Let’s begin with this photo of my Dan Fogelberg 1983 Greatest Hits album that was lost in the Harvey flood. I’m pretty sure I have all his work that was drowned on the CD collection I bought, but it’ll never be the same as lying in a candlelit room and listening to the albums, staring at his photo on the cover, and traveling through all the journeys he took me to all the places in my imagination.

Though it was an album of greatest hits, it also had a couple of new songs on it, and one of those was “Make Love Stay.” I wondered from the first moment I heard it if it was inspired by Tom Robbins’s novel Still Life With Woodpecker. Of all his novels, this is one of two that I’ve read so many times they have a permanent residence in my brain. Because of this book, for years, I kept a sealed pack of Camel cigarettes in one desk drawer after another in every home, school, and business office I was in.

From the novel, this excerpt:


“Who knows how to make love stay?”

1. Tell love you are going to Junior’s Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if loves stays, it can have half. It will stay.

2. Tell love you want a memento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a mustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay.

3. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.”

Though I can in no way approach the kind of writing Tom Robbins creates, I know with every fiber of my being that the heart of one character I created would sing when he read this–and he’d read it over and over.

I think that passage probably had that same effect on Dan Fogelberg. In his own words:

Fogelberg later described “Make Love Stay” in the liner notes to a retrospective album as a “sinuous piece written around a chapter of Tom Robbins’ Still Life with Woodpecker”and as “a musical question that, unfortunately, eludes me still.”

Gray Thursday


Just my legs in the mirror’s reflection as I waited for my post-op exam, where all looked good. Did have something put on the wound which is still burning a little three hours later, but that’s all right. I’m very grateful for my entire medical team from my primary care doc to the specialists and nurses, PAs, and NPs who always take good care of me.


I have a long way to go to finish the beginning of the first coloring pages in the “Mountain Jewels” section of The Magical Unicorn Society Official Coloring Book. This group of unicorns is gray (of course!), each with distinct mane, tail, hoof, and horn colors in red, green, blue, and purple.

Tom’s working from home at his desk next to mine in the office. Though I usually don’t sit in the office when he’s working, the range of music his phone is streaming is excellent, so I’m working quietly next to him. I took that photo mainly so I could show that I’m FINALLY having my first coffee in nine days because I finished my antibiotic (doesn’t get along with coffee) yesterday. We still have snow melting outside, but I craved cold coffee.

I’ll add the finished coloring pages to this post later.

We have dogs all around us.


Like the princess and the pea, Anime rests on four layers of blankets/beds.


The smol dog Eva hogs the heater.


Jack and Delta: Uneasy are the heads that claim the daybed against interlopers.


As promised, below are the newly completed pages from this book. Excerpts from the book include this info: Mountain Jewel unicorns are known for their short tempers and gruff personalities… [They are] wary creatures who don’t often trust humans… Found in some of the harshest environments on Earth, [they] can survive high altitudes and cold temperatures…and are fiercely loyal to each other.

A writer’s heart


This resonated with me when I saw it today, and that’s all I’ll say about it.

I hadn’t planned this, but a doctor’s appointment I spontaneously made on Wednesday and was scheduled the same day, led me to a referral to surgery on Thursday, when I had a very minor surgical procedure that went fine, with a follow-up next week to conclude things. Probably the most challenging part to me is the antibiotic I’m on which requires a bland diet and no dairy. I’m already bored with what Debby said is the BRAT diet: bananas, rice, applesauce, and toast (dry). I have no interest in rice by itself. In the mornings, I’m eating oatmeal (I never use milk with it anyway), then for other meals I switch between apple sauce and bananas, and dry toast and saltines. No coffee or tea. Just water and occasionally for a treat, a little cranberry juice. Nurse Debby is handling my four days of dressing changes.

When Tom took his vacation between Christmas and New Year’s, he was finally able to put time into recovering files from the backup drive of a computer that died in early 2020. (We’d misplaced that drive and thought after searching other backup drives that everything was lost.) We weren’t sure that whatever hit the dead computer hadn’t also impacted the contents of the rediscovered drive, but he transferred literally thousands of documents to another external drive. Today, I began accessing some of the contents for the first time.

I feel, like the subject of a previous post, that I’m time traveling, having already sifted through hundreds of personal photos I thought were gone. It’s been surreal, because so many of those photos encompassed our sale of The Compound, our move to Houndstooth Hall, the Harvey flood, the deaths of Margot and Guinness, the new dogs that came into our lives to become Anime’s pack and our little friends–just so many dogs and people and things.

There are photos I don’t remember taking. Places I don’t remember going. For example, I found photos that I think might be from Mark Rothko: A Retrospective in the Beck Building at the Museum of Fine Arts in December 2015. I vaguely remember going to an exhibit in years past, and I have bad photos that inform me this was probably the one. We were in the middle of selling one house, moving into another, it was the holidays, and I was working crazy hours, so I’m not surprised it’s all a blur.

These were a couple of photos I found in my files, probably taken with my phone, that I think were part of that exhibit. I could probably find the first one online if I wanted to do a deep dive in image searching. The second one looks like it’s behind glass, reflecting paintings from another wall, and I’m not sure the colors are true. It could be more of a challenge. Regardless, Rothko’s art always feeds my soul and seems like the perfect way to finish my red-themed week.

Lovely day

Today was a good day. My friend Debbie and I enjoyed a long FaceTime call. Texts from Lynne sharing her thoughts on new chapters she read from the work in progress boosted my spirits. I think I’m finally ready to take on the next chapter.


Tom and I did a bit of housekeeping and later had a nice afternoon and dinner with The Brides. (Debby and Timothy weren’t able to join us, but our four dogs did get to spend a few hours with Aunt Debby, so at least they felt spoiled and happy.) Pepper came with her moms, full of health and vigor, and I felt like it had been forever since we saw her. And once again, I got NO photos of her, especially when she was romping in the back yard. I never take all the pictures I mean to take.

Rhonda and Lindsey wanted to extend Tom’s birthday celebration with a couple of gifts. I’d made a hearty homemade soup and cornbread, and we had lemon poundcake.

To finish off the week’s blue theme, here’s a picture of a mushroom lamp Debby gave me for Christmas that will live in the writing sanctuary giving off its soft light.

Even websites get the blues

There’s been a lot of activity around Houndstooth Hall for the past few days: plumbers, electricians, and utility company inspectors coming and going. This has kept the dogs riled up. I did manage to make a traditional New Year’s Day good luck and prosperity meal, this time with ham, biscuits (Tom made), steamed broccoli, turnip greens, and black-eyed peas.

The dogs violently spoke out about these strangers all over the property, and my brain couldn’t possibly have written in such an environment. I did manage to get a new banner with events, people, and dogs from 2024 on here. I also did something long overdue (not done since 2022) and cleaned up the original Timothy James Beck website. There were broken links, strange coding characters messing up pages, some pages even had our OLD P.O. Box address (and I’ve had the current one for around ten years). The author photo collages were so outdated that I deleted them–basically, the site was a hot mess.

I picked this banner photo from the TJB site because it has two very blue covers–my week’s theme color–three, if you count the cover we always called “Adam Wilson’s denim-clad ass.”

I know some HTML code thanks to this site, but there were things I had to research, and I managed to learn new tricks and fix the invasive and bad code. I hope it’s all correct and up-to-date now. There’s a page on the site with reviews and quotes from readers. I haven’t read any of that in years, and when I did, it gave me quite a lift.

I told Tim and Jim from now on, when I start feeling like I haven’t done much, I need to treat that page on the site like a scene from the movie Soapdish. Sally Field’s character Maggie, a daytime drama actress, would go with the show’s head writer Rose (played by Whoopi Goldberg) to a mall in New Jersey. Rose would pretend to “notice” Maggie and start fan-girling, which would make people in the crowd stop, stare, recognize, and rush Maggie for autographs, telling her how much they loved her and her show’s character, “Celeste Talbert,” and it would help Maggie emerge from her funk.


Since I snagged the TJB banner from one of my Flickr albums (related to book publicity), I also noticed this blue-dominant photo to share again. It includes Mattel’s Summer doll, who I bought in 2008 (on a shopping trip either before or after an amazing dinner Lynne treated me to) specifically to publicize this book. Summer (named Jandy in the novel) started a whole world of sewing, top modeling, Mattel Model Muse doll buying, and the Runway Monday series on LiveJournal.

You never know when another muse may come along, as I was reminded today. But that’s a story for another time. =)

Shake it up

My last snow-themed post of the week came from this coloring book and officially brings Christmas week to a close. Christmas itself hasn’t been stressful, which isn’t always the case. I managed to get everything done even though I left most of it until December. NOT Christmas things have been more stressful, but that’s just part of life. All the friends and family we communicated with in one format or another help keep things happy. We have so many and so much to be grateful for.

I hope this guy gives you a smile and serves as a reminder that shaking things up can sometimes be a good thing, and regardless, they settle down in time. I don’t know why his tree looks yellow. It’s green on the page.

ETA: I had a couple of fruit stickers I wanted to add to the page of fruit stickers in Wreck This Journal, and after I did that, I began flipping through the pages until I came to the one for “Rubbings.” It had a single entry on it (“Cowboy”), and I thought of my leather bracelet sitting just across the room on my bookshelf. So I did a rubbing of that, which seems right on this date.

Today was our Christmas celebration

We had a great Christmas today! The company we keep:

Debby, Timothy, Tom, and me.

Today’s menu:
Roast beef cooked with potatoes and carrots (and gravy), along with fresh green beans, fresh broccoli, and rolls.

Dessert was Tom’s German chocolate birthday cake, which Anime (lower left) got absolutely none of.

Then came the frenzy of gift giving which I think left everyone happy. Of course, some of my gifts will show up here sooner or later. In the meantime, I owe a photo for the “snow” theme.

Since it isn’t snowing here (though we did get a lot of rain today), here’s a throwback photo of me bundled up in thermal underwear, jeans, a shirt, a hooded sweatshirt, and a jacket, in what is probably my favorite snow day memory with friends–except for later having that red VW surgically removed from my head. College was hard.