“The RoseBouquet”

If you had your spring long ago, and have no snow or ice to melt away yet, you may not understand how excited we are here in the city of Saskatoon, and the province of Saskatchewan. We’ve had mild temperatures for a week straight now. It still freezes over at night, but in the daytime, by about noon the temperature is above 0, which means the water is trickling and flowing everywhere. Long stretches of sidewalks are clear and visible, although there are still spots with snow and ice on them. I found it tricky walking around them this morning. But when I walk home at 5 pm, much of that will have evaporated or run off, and in some places I still have to plod through patches of slush and water puddles.

We all know that a freak spring storm could still hit us, even after Easter in a couple of weeks, but our long cold winter is over, and we are almost giddy with delight. I still wear my long johns for my walk to the office, but I’ve reduced to just one pair of socks, and I’m wearing my purple parka instead of my full-length down-filled coat with the huge hood.

Inside my house Snowflake has been spinning in circles, trying to catch his tail. It really makes me laugh aloud. But in case it meant he was going crazy, I looked it up on the internet. It just means he’s bored. He’s had to find his own ways of playing by himself. I think he has spring fever too, for any time I open the door to the back porch, just to put garbage out, he’s right there, hoping for a chance to go outside.

Well, sorry, Benjil, you’re an indoor cat now.

He does like to explore the basement when I’m working down there on Saturdays. This last Saturday I went out looking for bargain priced vinyl flooring. I’d decided that would work instead of paneling the walls in the basement. But when I saw the prices, I dropped that idea. It would have cost me about $500.

I recalled though, the big rolls of upholstery fabric I had seen at the Habitat’s ReStore the week before, so I went back there. They still had some rolls left, though not the soft velvety ones I had admired. I picked out three rolls and went to check on the price with the lady in charge. Two of them were $15 each and one was just $5. Ah-ha! $35 was in my price range, and by my rough calculations, one roll would not be enough, two might, but I might as well take that third one and be sure.

It was mid-afternoon when I got started, but I managed to get four lengths tacked onto the pink insulation using pins and tape until I could get the glue gun worked under there. It’s sort of like wallpapering but with nice sturdy upholstery fabric instead. Each roll is about 60 inches wide, so by alternating the one with the medium blue textured horizontal lines with the fabric that is plain taupe with a blue thread running through, it seems to match well. I may use the third roll for furniture coverings, later. (It’s more limp, and in dark brown/green colours with some hints of vivid multi-colours scattered through). I’m not sure that glue in the caulking gun was the best kind. I may have to experiment a bit, but I think I like the cozy effect it has on the basement.

I didn’t think about it at first, but when Snowflake scampered over some of the fabric, I realized that if I don’t attach each strip very well, he may bring them down when he discovers he has traction to climb my walls. Another challenge to face!

In my work world, I feel like I had busy week last week filled with surprises. I had JUST finished the RoseBouquet last week Tuesday, when I was invited out to lunch with Priscilla and by Peter and Kathy Friesen from Manitoba. (Peter is my Dad’s cousin, and they have been missionaries in Mexico; and I just plain like them). We had a good time. I was able to set up the church website in my care that same evening.

Our Scripture Signs committee is getting active. We’ve met together two Wednesday afternoons in a row and are to meet again tomorrow. I don’t really have a block of time cleared for this work yet, so it is snitching from other blocks of time, but we are enthused now as we are trying this out. I feel as I’m still on a learning curve, and will be learning for a while, but I was able to create a couple of these scenic posters with a Bible verse on each last week, and another yesterday. It is fun work to do on the computer, right up my alley,. .. but I’m sacrificing tract designing time and email time to accomplish it.

Soon it will also be my responsibility to put them up on our WTM site, and offer them for free downloads. First we are trying to get a handle on what kinds we will produce and what exactly we will be offering. I’ll let you know when they become available.

Meantime, we’ve been mentioning our need for good scenic photos to some friends, and offerings have poured in. Yesterday I was trying to save them all to one folder, and was impressed when I saw that Reg had sent me 41 already. I had just gone to share them with Joe on my USB stick, when I came back to my computer and saw in my emails, there were two or three more, with several pictures attached to each!

Since I have this vivid imagination and can visualize quite easily, I think I see more than the other committee members, that this project can soon grow like Topsy and over-power us. Want to help us by praying for wisdom?

Speaking of imagination… Oh no! Guess what? Today I was going to write another short story for the Short Story Game, but I have been working really hard and have just finished a page about my book’s heroine, Ruthe, and her gift of a vivid imagination, and an ability to visualize. (Sigh!)

Well, since I’ve had only one real compliment on my short stories, I suspect there may be more interest in this article. I warn you, it is a bit long, as I was more thorough on this topic than I am on some others.

Maybe I’ll come up with a short story next week - what do you think?

What would it look and feel like to be a young woman who calls upon God in every crisis and always seems to get answers? You can vicariously experience this through the novel, Ruthe’s Secret Roses.

Do you have a vivid imagination? Do you easily visualize scenes and conversations that go on and on? Do you do well at predicting what your family or friends will say in any given situation? Creative ideas drop from you like dandruff? Then you are blessed with a very special gift from God, a creative imagination.

You may have been told it is a curse, that it is a runaway imagination, and often it is said as if it is a dirty thing.

(In fact, there is a certain realm from which I stay far away, where a vivid imagination is considered a tool of the devil. I’m not going to the area of immoral fantasies). Let’s stick to a discussion of a healthy, creative imagination. This is to do with a mind that can visualize scenes and conversations vividly and discern the thoughts and intentions of others.

Such creative visualization is required gear for a creative writer or a poet, or an artist. These gifted people cannot express a great idea or theme if they cannot first imagine or visualize it.

Isn’t it odd that we encourage creative kids to express their ideas until those ideas go to areas we don’t approve of, and then suddenly we start squelching their ideas? This proves that while an imagination is a gift from God, it needs to be trained and disciplined to produce good and godly things instead of the ugly and filthy.

Did you know that our imagination is not so much a work of our mind, as first of our spirit - that part that communes with God? A thought may be planted in our mind first, but truly inspired ideas come from our spirit in fellowship with God’s Spirit. Next, our mind, and then our hands and mouth, are the means by which these ideas can be expressed, and it is our soul, the seat of our personality, that colours our ideas and makes them uniquely ours.

Ruthe’s Vivid Imagination

I would like to introduce you to Ruthe, the main character in the novel, Ruthe’s Secret Roses. She has a very creative, vivid imagination. - Very! This shows up repeatedly in how she can visualize with great clarity and detail what others may be thinking and feeling. It is almost as if she can hop into the other person’s mind and see things through their eyes and thoughts. Some might call that having visions but this is unique. It is not prophetic so much as the ability to identify in her imagination with the other person’s perspective. The wonderful thing is that she doesn’t just live vicariously through others, but she has a strong sense of right and wrong and what solutions that other person needs.

Her scariest times are when she gets into a new situation and has nothing from past experiences or reading with which to tell what could happen next. However, because of the principles she believes in, she plunges in, expecting ideas and answers to show up when needed. (Her principles and courage lead to another topic we’ll cover another time). An example shows up immediately in the first chapter where Ruthe drives around and around a block in the city, feeling certain that someone in that noisy place with the pulsating neon sign.

She was also able to visualize at least two businesses for friends who needed . . . .

[To read the rest of this article go to: Vivid Imagination and Visualization ]

Spring arrived on the weekend. Above zero temperatures and water dripping everywhere. The snow drifts shrunk together and those alongside the streets became black because of all the slush splashed on them from the passing traffic. By Sunday most streets were clear again down to the pavement, and it started to rain.

But yesterday we had a fresh layer of snow. Today the temperatures are colder again, though the sun is shining. Our spring has setbacks like that, but we know now, that the big changes are coming. A number of people came to church on Sunday with just shoes, not boots on. I didn’t dare do that as I still have snow and ice around the car in the backyard, but oh–h, waves of spring fever are making me excited.

I’ve written about spring fever before. See the article below in Rtuhe’s Roses, which I wrote about 6 years ago. I featured it in my novel too, as about this time of year I go through this spell of impatient for all the stages of spring to hurry through.

Somehow I’m convinced that people who don’t have as severe a winter as we do just don’t get as excited as I at the coming of spring, but if you do, please tell me about it.

Incidentally, several friends have been asking about my cat, Snowflake. I try not to wear out the friends who don’t care for cats, but it is probably time I do so soon. I’ve been thinking of a photo series. I just need to get to doing it, and preparing them. So hang on… I’m going to get to it soon - I hope.

I’m still working on my basement reno project and really hope to have that done before it’s time to go digging in my garden and flower beds.

Barbara Good, of http://Barbara-Good-Books.com, suggested last week after reading my article “To Which Reader Are We Writing,” that there is another category we can write for - one I didn’t really cover. It is the reader who knows nothing about the topic we are introducing, but who will give us a read if we make it interesting and easy to understand. She’s right! It is quite a delightful challenge to write for such readers.

That reminds me; at SiteSell, in regards to the SiteBuildIt! method of building websites (SiteBuildIt!) Ken Evoy teaches that we should write for the reader who is seeking information on a particular topic. If you build a website on a topic or area of expertise that you know well, and have the right search engine optimization, the readers (and buyers) who are hunting for exactly that information will come to your site. They are all ready for you to teach them and often, to sell to them.

Clearly I need to update that article to include the uniformed reader and the seeker for knowledge. I wouldn’t be surprised bur that there are many more categories. Can you suggest some more to me before I tackle my revision?

I have a new web design client in my new church where I attend. I hope to get a little start on that today. It’s one of those jobs I can do from home in the evening.

I did have an interesting little job yesterday. An older gentleman, one of my Dad’s friends lives in a retirement condo here in the city now. I had promised to deliver some boxes of old newspapers to the archives which is located in the basement of that complex, so when he emailed Sunday night to say the had bought a laptop and needed me to come show him how to use it, I decided to squeeze all of that into one afternoon yesterday.

He’d got a good deal buying it from someone passing through who needed cash, and he was pleased to hear it had wireless, so he could sit in his recliner to use it instead of sitting in the chair in his bedroom. So the first challenges he gave me were to find out how big his hard drive was in there, and how to set up the wireless to work. I took a while at it, and finally realized that I was stumped and had to call Sasktel his/our ISP. The man there walked me through it after confirming that the gentleman was really authorizing me to have this private information on his behalf. He had to do something from his end to make the router for his desktop allow the laptop to latch on by wireless. Once he did that, we were flying.

He wanted his MS Office 2003 installed, so I did that.

Then to make sure his sound and video worked properly I took him to the website of my favourite online radio station. He spotted their links to a free online Bible School, and wanted that, so I signed him up to that as well, and showed him how to listen to the lessons or sermons. The gentleman was as tickled as a little kid with a new toy.

It was time for him to go down to the dining hall for supper, and for me to leave, but he figures he’ll call me again to come in as his techie.

Well, there’s much more going on, I can only give you a few glimpses. This morning I raced around to pickup another woman’s laptop, which I am to fix. We’ll see where that takes me.

Yesterday I started - what I hope will be a good article for the ‘meet the heroine of my book’ series. It’s on imagination and visualization, but I can see that it needs more work than I can pull off today, so that will have to go on hold a week or so.

You recall that next Tuesday is the last one of the month, so it is time for the Short Story Game. I feel like I’m playing all by myself, and not getting much feedback I’m not sure if my spontaneous stories are going over like lead balloons, or what. However, I think it is developing a skill at short story writing, so I don’t want to give up just yet. Will you join me? Next week I’ll be changing the ingredients again.

Meantime.. today’s article…will be one from a few years back, when I described the spring fever I was having. It’s back again!

(Don’t know why I hadn’t thought to do this last week)… For many years now, I have belonged to Suzanne Beecher’s email book club. She has 12 clubs in fact. I choose the Good News club, which has inspirational book excerpts. It’s totally free to sign up for as many as you want.

Each day, Monday through Friday, Suzanne sends you a five-minute read from the book of the week in that club. By the end of the week you have read approximately 18 -25 or even 32 pages of a book. That’s enough to get a good taste to see whether you’d like to go out to buy or borrow the book at your library. That alone is worth a lot.

But there’s more.; Suzanne is a friendly lady who writes a short piece before the book read to talk about whatever interests her. Many of her 20,000 club members write to tell her that that even if the book of the week doesn’t interest them much, they love her personal notes. I do too! Sometimes she talks of her cats, or of running down the street with her bubble-making machine, or people she has met, or the things she learned from her grandmother, and about past businesses she has run. Suzanne loves to bake chocolate chip cookies, and will sometimes announce that the next person to write her has a chance at getting a package of her famous cookies mailed out to them. She always comes through too!

You really ought to meet Suzanne! Go here to look over her bookclubs and sign up for at least one. DearReader.com

We’ve had a long spell of super cold temperatures again this winter. It’s normal here in the Canadian prairies. But it has held on now for a long stretch of weeks, and I’m looking for signs of spring. It’s like a fever. My father who is 87 often sighs too, “I wish spring would come!”

We know it will. We’re just impatient now. So we watch for clues that it’s just about here.

Just in case you’re not sure if you’ve ever had it, here is what you watch for.

Like, I check the thermometer in the mornings when I get to the kitchen, and it is a few degrees warmer than the day before.

I go for my walk and note that the air doesn’t ring every sound as if it’s a crystal bell any more. The air seems softer, moister. The snow under my feet has a more soggy texture instead of the sharp cutting, crunching sound at each step.

Look! That naked tree just dumped a clump of snow off its branch!

Listen; that’s a crow! So I scan around and - there! Right behind the store, is a big black bird, the size of a young chicken, and it is cawing as if calling for someone.

Over the next day or two the temperatures come higher, and suddenly one afternoon, they creep above freezing, at 0C!

Now I’m almost giddy on my walk, pulling my feet up out of the sucking, soggy wet snow at each step, and looking around for any bare patch where the sun has melted the snow through to the street or the grass.

Hark! I’ll hear the sounds of dripping. So I look for the corners of houses where the eaves trove ends are, and sure enough, water drips. At night they will be frozen icicles, but the next day they will melt again, and in a day or so, the sound will be like a bubbling brook.

Dad always puts some rain barrels at the bottom of the downspout by our back door, and he measures the progress of spring by whether he got a whole, or half or three-quarter full barrel each day.

During the winter whenever people meet or talk on the phone they discuss the temperatures on their own thermometer. (Not all are tuned quite right). Now it turns to, “I saw two crows today!”

Very proud is the one who can say, “I was in the back pasture today and saw . . . .

Read the rest of this article here; Spring Fever

Remember those two screws I put into my ceiling last week? Well, guess what, my cousin Gary came Friday evening and nailed it up properly and then mudded (plastered) the crack to prepare it for me to paint. He came back on Saturday afternoon to do it again, and once more last night to do the final sanding. My crack has disappeared, and when the weather gets nice enough to have doors and windows open for ventilation I will paint my ceiling in the main office/living room and the bathroom. Gary prepared the ceiling there too.

I feel quite blessed!

One way I have of returning the favour is to create and print and cut some business cards for Gary. He would gladly take more such reno jobs if people would hire him.. I gave him a pocket full of cards on Friday night, and now plan to print some more to pass around among friends and ask them to pass them on further.

Gary has a job working with a cement truck but that is seasonal work so there’s nothing to do but wait through this winter weather.

Speaking of weather. did I lead you to believe that spring was around the corner? We got fooled. Another winter hit us last week with bitterly cold temperatures, and yesterday a fresh snow fall. Today the sun is shining again, but those above 0 Celsius days are back off a while again.

Oh well, when it comes, we will throughly appreciate and celebrate spring.

Speaking of celebrating - a Big, Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all my Irish friends and wanna be Irish. Today is a big holiday for you.

Further to my report last week on my friend’s computer, and my long saga with it, good news came on Thursday evening, when my friend phoned me to say that her husband had heard that high speed is coming to their village this spring! Whoopee! The dialup method won’t be needed then! So I’ve re-installed the latest OpenSUSE 11.1 and been fine-tuning it. I want to finish that up this afternoon, and prepare a reference card of notes to help her get started in this new, much more secure computer, when she comes to pick it up tomorrow.

I really love this dear friend and wanted to do my best for her, but I am also relieved that I will get some little pockets of time back for my own use again.

Meantime, another woman who rents office rooms up here in the WTM building too, is dropping off a laptop today for me to fix next.

Much as I try to be productive with a detailed daily agenda, life keeps jostling me with new challenges. Those are sent by God to keep me flexible and to provide for my living.

I know I promised a series of articles to introduce Ruthe, the heroine of my novel, but yesterday I got started on an article about writing, and knowing that there are a number of writers who are readers here, I thought I’d use that article today. It’s called, “To Which Reader are We Writing?” We’ll get back to that new series yet. If you are a long-time reader of the RoseBouquet you know that I jump around to the various topics that interest me.