“The RoseBouquet”

The garden is doing well. I picked the first ripe tomato last night, however it appears to be the only one with blossom rot, that is, it has a flat brown bottom. (That’s usually a sign of over-watering, so I’m holding back on that some days now). There should be a bumper crop of the squash family if the fall is long enough. There’s lots of pumpkins started, though only golf ball size at this stage. I’ll have to read up on whether it is a good idea to cut off the big leaves so the sun can get at them.

We are finally having warmer, more summerish weather, yet I’ve tasted autumn in the breezes, so my thinking has shifted to what projects I want to get finished before I need to batten down the yard for the winter.

One thing I had meant to do this last Saturday was paint the back steps or deck with the dark green paint I’d bought for the fence. However, I was invited to a friend’s garden to pick some Nanking cherries. I thought I’d be done by mid-morning but he also gave me some crabapples, some rhubarb, and dill. When I got home I had to deal with cleaning the cherries and rhubarb and putting that away into the freezer. The cherries were over-ripe and turning to juice while I was still picking them!

By the time I got all that done, about 2:30 in the afternoon, I was getting quite weary. I’d been on my feet for hours, both in the Lynn’s garden and at my sink. So I sat down in my recliner with a snack, and soon dozed off.

When I woke after 4 pm I realized that I wasn’t going to get the steps/deck painted after all. But I decided to at least tackle cleaning out the back porch. When I had that all emptied and the windows cleaned I decided that I should go see if I had enough suitable paint left downstairs to do the window frames - while I could get at them so much easier. Sure enough I found about half a quart, and when the can didn’t want to close properly I decided that I might as well paint that right away.

Well, there was some paint left yet when I had done the two windows with white frames, so I tackled the third one that was sort of grey/mauve. Still I had paint left, so I re-painted the outer frame of the door into the kitchen. Even then, there was a bit of paint left, so I slapped than onto the frame around the door going outside.

The porch could still use some serious winterizing, and I found three holes where mice can get inside during the winter, so I want to seal those off yet, but hey, I felt great about what I had accomplished.

On Sunday my adrenalin glands and lymph nodes were exhausted, so I took it easier - meaning, I took an afternoon nap.

Switching to other worlds in my life; I have been blessed in so many ways, that I’m beginning to feel rather overwhelmed. If I were to list them all you might think I was bragging, but I assure you I know I am not worthy. Each time I find myself praising God for I am sure they are love gifts from Him.

Is it safe to share a few with you to show you what I mean without giving you the wrong impression?

A couple of weeks ago, a friend dropped off two bags of clothes for me. Someone had given a bunch to her and her daughter, and these were items they could not use. Well, there’s a number of nice pieces that I am happy to use!

Then yesterday, Joe carried up to my office a color laser printer. The mission had to order a more industrial model to cope with the load of printing we do, and the director and assistant director decided to give me the older model. We had it hooked up and working in no time flat. This is a huge blessing, as it is a printer that finally works. I’ve been limping along with several inkjet printers that had short-comings.

When I got home there was a belated birthday card in the mail from a deal penpal. She’s on oxygen now and wasn’t able to come visit me this summer, but she enclosed a sizable cash gift.

Do you see what I mean? I’m blessed left and right, up and down, inside out! I can only wish that for you too!

As for my web businesses - I was able to finish the sitemap on the BouquetofEnterprises.biz site last week, and yesterday nearly got finished with the bookstore pages related to my book reviews. A few more hours and that project should be up and running smoothly too. Another means of making money - I hope.

Tomorrow morning I plan to start on this other idea I’m going to keep secret until I see whether it will fly or not. I must confess though, that my imagination has a great time visualizing how it will work. I wonder how long I’ll be able to keep it secret. It’s stretching my seams already!

Many of us, when we first desire to “become writers” learn about freelancing for popular magazines, and we think that is where we will become prolific and famous. However, breaking into that field is a long, hard slug for most writers, and many drop out discouraged.

I just read something to confirm this. The freelance magazine field is not the best place to make a good paid career of writing. Someone had done some serious research, outlined an article idea and pitched it to one of those magazines. This is the reply she got;

“We encourage those with ideas for articles to submit the finished product on spec. If that article is accepted, then the pay rate is decided. It is quite a risk for the magazine to accept the idea of a story and agree to pay for it before seeing the final product, which may or may not be up to our standards.”

This writer wrote back to the editor saying that this “on spec” writing was a far greater risk for her. Especially if she was to take the time to research and work on a good article, without assurance of payment.

Several other professional writers agree that there is much more money available in the commercial writing field. Peter Bowerman of Well-Fed Writer says;

“We can debate these things, but what we can likely all agree on is that, 1) there’s exponentially more commercial writing work out there than magazine work (my friend concurs); 2) the vast majority of that work pays far better than the vast majority of magazine work (after all, corporations have more money than publications); and 3) that the ramp-up to decent profitability is far shorter in our field than in magazines.”

As I used to say in my signature, “The Internet is a Writer’s Paradise.” Just think of all those sites needing good quality text!

Bottom line: If you are looking for a career as a writer, check out copy and commercial writing for businesses. Do your creative writing as a hobby or for friends as favours.

You’ve met her granddaughters, Cathy and Muriel O’Brien in a previous Closeup, and I don’t want to spoil the surprises in the novel if you have not read the story yet, but I think I can dare to tell you a bit about her past, what brings her to who she is when Ruthe meets her. These details were not all part of the plot, so some got trimmed out.

Kate O’Brien grew up in England in her childhood, and later moved to Ireland, which was her parents’ birth place. They were entrepreneurs who tried to make a sale of whatever they could, just to keep body and soul together. In other words, sometimes they raided garbage dumps, looked for things they could fix or paint up and sell as antiques.

Kate was assigned the job of gilding old clocks and other knick knacks, or damaged art projects, because she had such a steady hand with a fine brush.

She also had a steady flowing tongue and had a lively wit. That was what helped her win the heart of a handsome landowner, and got her into a fine castle. She disowned her family, believing they would be an impediment to her rise in society.

It turned out that her husband’s family fell on great financial difficulty, and so she urged her husband Ian O’Brien the I, to sell the household goods for tickets to Canada. He was not used to hard labour, so at the beginning she had to support them with her old refurbishing skills.

Fortunately, Kate seldom forgot anything once she learned it, and while they had been in the castle back in Ireland, she’d learned quite a bit more about true antiques and their values. Ian was embarrassed, but she was able to restore their fortune, and get him a fine job as a banker. Of course, he learned to ask her advice on business agreements at home.

They had one son, Ian, who became a lawyer about the time his father died.

When he married Pearl without consulting his very controlling mother, it threw Kate and Pearl into bitter cross-purposes. They quarrelled over just about anything and everything. Ian usually gave up being the peacemaker and withdrew into the quiet ivory tower of his mind.

He felt he had done his duty to his mother when he had their home built next to hers, and that he was there whenever his mother screamed of a crisis.

Kate on the other hand, wished with all her might to provoke him to action She was ashamed to have a son so unlike herself, and was confounded that her attacks on Pearl could not rouse him. Kate feared that if he and Pearl ever came to ruin as she and her husband had in Ireland, he would not be as resourceful as she had been.

Ian and Pearl’s four children, as they grew older, gave her a wide berth too, and so Kate, completely out of ideas, took to her bed and decided to be an ugly old witch.

But she choose a bedroom on the second floor of her huge, greystone house, that had a window overlooking her son’s property. That way she could spy on their comings and goings.

To see what happened when Kate met Ruthe, you need to read the novel! Read more about it first here; Introduction Or, jump straight to the order page.

Did I talk about hot weather last week? Well, that was before the week was out. We’ve just had a weekend of cold, rainy weather. The rains we were looking for in May and June finally arrived now, in mid-August. I heard that farmers who had thought they would have to apply for insurance coverage on their crop failures now think they may get to harvest a bumper crop if only the frosts hold off for a late fall this year.

The weather is all mixed up this year at your place too, isn’t it?

Well I had something totally different happen to me on Saturday. I hope it’s okay to share this in mixed company.

I woke up with a severe pain in my bladder and was shortly convinced that it was a kidney stone. It was near the exit, so I hoped to pass it quickly. I took an aloe vera capsule and sat down gingerly at the computer to research and see what natural methods I could use to hurry it along. Mostly I read that drinking lots of water helps, and one site urged the drinking of 6 ounces of straight lemon juice followed by intervals of lemon and water.

I had already downed one tall glass of water, but I got another and squirted some RealLemon juice into it. I also prayed earnestly for deliverance.

The church had issued an invitation to the adults (read seniors) of the church to come together for lunch to meet a prospective new Associate pastor and his wife. I began to think i would just not show up. However, drinking all that water had me going to the bathroom several times, and just before 10 a.m. sudden relief. It was gone! It couldn’t have been more than the size of a poppy seed but what discomfort it had caused.

Whew! Well, I felt so much better that I decided to go to the lunch after all, and then shopping for more grout for my basement projects. Which I did. Then I did some major cleaning in the basement and sorted the tools neatly into my Lady’s tool cabinet.

I still feel great. Though I seem to have lost a lot of tension and find myself sitting around more relaxed than usual.

For the last two weeks I had been working on an article about my experiences with taking aloe vera capsules. I thought I had it finished on Friday and uploaded it to my aloe vera site, but yesterday I added the experience related above about the kidney stone as I really think the aloe vera was a major factor in herding that stone through my system and helping it to exit fairly promptly. When I recall how much trouble my Dad had with his stones, and the surgeries and after-bleeding…. whew, I know I have much to be grateful for!

If you want to see that page, go to aloe-vera-capsules

Yesterday, after supper, I went out and planted six different herbs and perennials that I had bought at a discount in the rain on the weekend. I’m thinking ahead now; if I fill my flowerbeds with perennials they will spread and fill out each year all by themselves. It will be much less labour-intensive for me. Basically just watering on the dry, hot days.

Then I came in and spent the evening on the quarterly newsletter, Reflections for WTM. We had all but one page, and two graphics already, but no one seemed to know what to put on that one blank page. This is where I have to step in and be a writer as well as the layout editor. It seemed to me that we ought to have something about Thanksgiving as that holiday will come before the next issue goes out. But just what to say about Thanksgiving? Hm…! Well, after a while it came together. Then I had to send it to the committee members to see if it is acceptable.

Does that ever happen to you too? When you need some answers, or what to write, you just pray, and without getting stressed out over it, start looking around, and jotting down ideas. Before long things come together, and lo, it is often fairly good. If you get others to look at it and give you feedback and you polish it some more, it can turn out quite good or excellent.

Don’t you just love it when things come together like that? I’m sure you do. It’s a chance to spy God at work in our lives.

Now I’m watching for some really great graphics to come through from two other individuals - this week!

Are you aware of some BIG changes over at MyPowerMall? The drop in the USA economy had really slowed things down there too, and a number of Ginny Dye’s team were urging her to drop the Fr E e Business mall. They saw it as a hindrance to really making money with the program. She had meant to keep her word about always making it accessible to everyone but was finally persuaded and so last week all the gears on their sites and their literature shifted to cut out the no-cost Business Mall.

If you already had one, do not panic. Ginny “grandfathered” all of us in, so we don’t lose what we had, but we are urged to upgrade to the WorldChanger Mall.

You know, as I got over my initial shock and read through all the thinking and explanations I realized that she is right. The whole system works better when everyone is paying the $15/month and getting $7 back for everyone on their frontline downline. On top of all that, if you sign up now you can get $600 worth of certificates/coupons for the groceries and gas you buy locally. (You send in your receipts, $100 worth per month, and you get two $25 VISA gift cards each month). So your monthly fees are easily covered - and beyond, for the first year or more.

Anyway, I’m planning to upgrade this week, and I’m planning to help out my downline in some creative and unusual ways, so why not follow in my tracks? http://MyPowerMall.com/Biz/Home/30799 You really should go see the NEW videos Ginny has put up. Quite impressive!

(Let me introduce you to two of the roses in my novel, Ruthe’s Secret Roses).

The O’Brien sisters are the first new friends the heroine of my novel makes when she starts her adventures in the city. They remain loyal to her throughout the story.

Because they came to my imagination when I was a young teen, no more than 12 or 13, I have lived with them a long time. At first I seemed to experience things through their eyes. I learned to explain my faith to others by explaining it to them.

Ruthe meets the younger sister, Muriel, first when she goes driving up and down the streets to look for someone in need. After rescuing the 15 year old auburn-haired teen from a dreadfully embarrassing situation and taking her home, our shy Mennonite country girl ends up meeting their mother.

When Mrs. Pearl O’Brien is dying, Muriel calls on Ruthe again at a crucial time, but Ruthe drops all to rush in to help her find Cathy.

Ruthe soon observes that the sisters are opposites in many ways, but both are so eager to learn more about the Christian life from her, that she ends up in their home any time she can work a little visit in between her shifts as a telephone operator. Always she is greeted with loyalty and high regard.

The O’Brien sisters have two brothers, also totally different, with different effects and relationships with Ruthe, but we won’t go there right now.

Muriel lives in the shade of her blonde sister, Cathy, who is an extroverted party-animal, who wants to have fun, make sure she marries well, and likes to tease and pit her boyfriends against each other. Well, at the beginning, this is how it is.

Once they learn to trust Christ as the only way to God, and discover that Jesus is a real and constant Friend they can talk to at any moment, there are some leveling changes. Cathy seems to grow up and becomes a responsible chatelaine in their father’s home. She’s very tactful in social situations.

Muriel watches Ruthe’s innate ability to identify with and counsel underdogs, and decides she wants to be like that too. She sets her heart on learning to be a social worker.

Ruthe has a passion to seek out people in trouble and before long she’s meeting others and her life gets divided into many little compartments, as she honours the confidences her wide range of friends. However, the O’Brien sisters are her constant and loyal friends.

In fact, when she begins to compare her friends to roses, she decides that these two must be yellow ones, for she read somewhere that yellow ones stand for faithfulness and loyalty. In her mind, they are teaching her, not only a lot about city life, and how the richer folks live, but constancy in one’s relationships.

Well, that booklet for Western Tract Mission I was telling you about last week got done, and I sent it off to the professional layout designer. We are now waiting to see what the cover and general “look” of the booklet will be.

An odd thing happened on the Wednesday morning though. I had given it the working title of “There is …Peace” but we needed to meet as a committee and choose the final name. Three of us voted for that name, but one person had another suggestion. As we discussed it and bounced more ideas around, we ended up adjusting this other suggestion and in the end agreeing to go with “Inner Peace Factor.”

We had another surprise late in the afternoon when the man from the printing house came over to talk to us about an idea to help us save some money. He suggested a different size altogether. With that we could save about $2000 on our total printing bill. Well, two men on our committee said right away, that wouldn’t work for us. But as we asked more questions and tried to understand how their presses worked, another suggestion came out of that. Turns out that turning our booklet in the landscape rather than portrait format, we can save even more money. Hallelujah, now we could afford to ask for 100,000 copies to be printed. A number that had been our ideal goal if enough funds came in.

Recently I finished updating all the book reviews in my Sharing Library on this site, Book Reviews. While I was doing that I was also copying the direct links to those same books at Christianbook.com and at Amazon. My goal was to create sort of a quick catalogue with direct links for those who might want to go looking for the books I had reviewed. I have just managed to finish one such page for the Christian Fiction books that can be found at ChristianBook.com and another one for the non-fiction books. I’ve linked to them from the index for the book reviews, but here’s direct links if you want to go see;
Christian Fiction
Non-fiction Christian Books.

I hope to do similar pages with the Amazon links.

This summer has been unusual in that it has not been hot very many days. The few that we’ve had were scattered apart. But this week the heat is building up and it is is suppose to go to over 30C today, and continue in this range until Sunday when it will plunge downward again.

Now I’m not sure what your favourite temperature is. I’m not much one for a lot of heat. Yesterday’s temperature in the mid-20s Celsius was just perfect for me. However, the summer has been fairly cool inside my house, so that I usually have slept with extra blankets layered on me, and huddle under a fleecy top or even my quilt cozy most evenings at the computer. I’ve felt sort of cheated because our winter just past was so very cold, and I had rather looked forward to some hot days of summer, so I could get out of my winter clothing and put on some cool dresses or summerwear. I had about resigned myself to a not-hot summer.

Ah, and I’ve figured out why my house is cooler than outside. It’s so old it was built with slat and plaster rather than drywall. Though it is crumbling in places, that plaster is hard as a rock. You’d think a wee little house would heat up soon enough, but this house of rock keeps the heat out unless I open all the doors and windows. I’m grateful for that as a rule.

Yet, now I get to revel in the general outdoor and some indoor warmth for the rest of this week! Well, to a degree. If it should get too unbearably warm, I have a couple of fans, and even Dad’s old window-box air-conditioner set into the kitchen window.

At the office here we have air-conditioning that kicks in at a certain temperature. I can only stand that for a short while if I’m truly hot, like when I’ve just walked over here and spent half an hour in the sunshine and working off some calories with a good stride. But I’ve been here less than half an hour and already I’ve turned up the thermostat to the point where the air-conditioning kicks out and lets the room warm up again.

Right now I’m really glad I’m alone in this office, and don’t have to contend with someone’s taste in temperature.

How about you? Do you get to control your temperatures? How does this summer suit you?