“The RoseBouquet”

We are blessed with almost daily rains. We did have one rather warm, sunny summer day last week. If you weren’t here last Wednesday, you missed it.

The forecast says that Friday will be another summer day, but if you leave the province for the Canada Day long weekend - shoot, you’ll miss this week’s summer!

Yesterday I took Dad into the city and we got a 3 month probationary contract with Blessings Christian bookstore for his cross necklaces made of horseshoe nails and coloured copper wire. We’re rather pleased with this, but Dad is worrying about keeping up with orders.

You see, if the batch of 30 he left there sells well, he will be able to make them for the 26 other stores in this chain! He’s already made 83 since the beginning of May, but I’ll have to go online and find him another wholesale supplier of nails.

I’m still fine-tuning the look and features of this blog, but today it formally begins. Subscribers to the RoseBouquet will notice some changes, and even some features missing that you saw regularly for a number of years. This is meant to streamline things so that producing the RoseBouquet won’t take me so long, however if there is a hue and cry to restore certain features, I’ll be more than happy to comply.

Except… The Refreshing Dew articles… would likely be reprints, since those took the longest, and I want to claim that time for writing freelance articles that I can send to editors and get paid for.

I plan to make regular, weekly entries under At Home…, What’s New, and whenever possible, Tips & Solutions. The Rose Closeup or profile of some friends I’d like to honour will be more occasional. I know myself well enough that it could easily evolve into a full-fledged weekly article. I’m trying to remember this is only suppose to take ONE hour a week. I really must TRY to be a professional writer, and that means taking time for it.

The Ruthe’s Roses section is going focus on some aspect of the novel. Today is is a profile of a couple of friends, (the way I used to do in the ezine some time back) but generally I want to be bolder in drawing attention to the book.

By the way, I was told yesterday that a reader of my novel, “Ruthe’s Secret Roses,” is eagerly awaiting the next book in the series. Well, I put in some hours on that last night, and will try to get in more yet on Friday. I’m on chapter 17 now, and having great fun writing it.

The renovation of the site is creeping along. I had a productive week last week, but lost some time yesterday to go to the city, and will lose more tomorrow morning as I go for an eye examination, and may get drops in my eyes, in which case it will be hard to see for a few hours afterwards. I’m also not sure yet when Dennis’ funeral will be, but I’ll give up business hours to attend that.

The Get Acquainted forms are definitely not working, and I hope to fix those as soon as I’ve finished the section I’m on right now.

However,.. ~GRIN~ we’ve promised to go to Winnipeg for July 9-13. My brother Ernie and his wife Penny want Dad to build them a 2-seat glider swing like he used to build years ago. I’ll lose 3 days of work then, but I’m calling it holidays. When you are self-employed you can do that.

I am moving ahead slowly with plans to sell stuff on eBay. Just waiting for my photos first.

The RoseBouquet is now a weekly blog. http://blogs.Ruthes-SecretRoses.com/
(You’ll need to register as a user to make comments at the blog. It’s only meant to keep out riff-raff who fill the comments section with garbage).

You can also get The RoseBouquet as an RSS feed in your news Reader. Just paste in this link; http://ruthes-secretroses.com/RoseBouquet.xml

Or subscribe to it as an ezine; http://Ruthes-SecretRoses.com/sub-ezines.html
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Do you wonder why certain readers are eagerly awaiting the sequel to Ruthe’s Secret Roses? Perhaps you ought to check out what this novel is all about. You can read the first six chapters right on this site, and get a good taste of the story of Ruthe and her dilemma between her city friends and her small town family.

Start here: http://Ruthes-SecretRoses.com/rsr/RSR-index.html

The price of the digital e-book, which you can download to your computer in a matter of minutes and read right away has come down to 5.99, but not all the pages are renovated to reflect that yet. If you see a different price, ignore it and email me for a suitable link.

Yesterday at noon I had a call from my friend Mary Petersen. Her husband Dennis died during the night. They would have celebrated their 14th wedding anniversary today.

Just three weeks ago she had placed him in the Parkridge Nursing facility because she couldn’t care for him any longer. He’d got pneumonia there, and she told me on
Sunday in church that she didn’t think Dennis could recover. He was too weak. Still we were both shocked at his sudden death.

Dennis had cystic fibrosis since birth, and was born with only one leg, which was like a floppy fin. His parents put him into a care home where he grew up to be a man with a full-sized masculine head and shoulders. He looked very handsome in his white stetson cowboy hat.

Mary met him while working in the home, and they ended up marrying, and moving off into an apartment of their own. Between Mary’s jobs, they continued to manage on Dennis’ disability pension. However these near 14 years were a great time of liberty and pleasure for Dennis, finally outside of an institution.

Our home is wheelchair accessible (Dad built a ramp in the garage years ago), so they liked to come visit here, and Dennis loved to tease us. Often it was to the point where Mary had to tell him that he was going too far.

He also loved Mary’s pet canaries, and spent hours talking to them as they sat on his shoulder. I could tell by all the bird manure on his wheelchair’s knapsack.

He is free as a bird himself now. We don’t want to take that away from him.

Welcome to The RoseBouquet. This is the ezine evolving into a blog, and it is experiencing some changes.

Like Ruthe, the heroine of my novel Ruthe’s Secret Roses, I think of my dear friends as roses. If you and I become friends, I consider you part of my bouquet.

In which case, your really ought to register so I know about you. This will allow you to post comments after my posts, and as we get more acquainted we can become true friends.

If you are afraid of forgetting to come back weekly, I suggest you get an RSS reader, and use the links on the right to get the URL you put into it. Then, whenever you open your RSS reader - maybe as often as your email, or simply leave it open all time your computer is open, you can tell at a click on my URL whether I have anything new posted here.