Autumn Memories

Where did the weekend go? I spent the day, after church anyway, finishing up my autumn cards and now I'm tired. So that makes it a great time to put up a picture of fall. This is one of my watercolors, done from a picture of my son on a camping trip to the White Mountains. Every year in October we would take my mother, sister, Adam's friend Ben and our dog/s and head up to Northern Arizona for 4 days of camping and to enjoy the aspen.

This picture was taken when we were still going to the Double Cienega area, near Hannagan's Meadow. The moutains were ablaze with the yellow aspen. We used to hike through groves of aspen where the leaves would fall around us like rain and turn the light all yellow. It was magical.

Which is no doubt why there's a scene in The Shadow Within that came directly from those experiences. On p 261, where Carissa is on her way south from Highmount Holding, her party has stopped at Owl Creek to drink and refill their waterbags. As she is standing beside the stream, Elayne assures her that Eidon will make them a way, despite the dangers they face.

At that, a puff of wind coursed down the rocky streambed, rustling the evergreens and showering them in fluttering gold leaves shaken loose from the aspen on the riverbank behind them. The world turned briefly golden, and for the first time in days Carissa felt that sense of promise she'd known so briefly back in Highmount, as sure and compelling as it had been that night...

I always look back on those times at this season. The blue sky, the chill air, the campfire. The cattle in the fields, the elk bugling in the night. One time, Bear's first in fact, it snowed and we had to stay in a motel. Another time the snow was so bad we kept driving to the next town and the next town to find a place to stay indoors and ended up driving a giant loop around the state and home again within a day.

We won't be taking any of those trips this year, I'm afraid. I have a book to finish! And today the Lord informed me that it's time to rev up my rate of working. I am going to try to go from two hours of 100% concentration/sacred time to four hours. This morning, for the very first time since I started writing this book, I woke up thinking about it. That's an excellent sign that things are starting -- finally! -- to percolate.


~~~

Monsoonal Return

It rained over the weekend, pretty hard, and they're forecasting a return of storms, which gives me an excuse to share this photo from a couple of months ago, when the sun was shining in the west and the rain was moving in from the east. I wasn't sure the rain would actually show up, but I think it does pretty well.

The chainlink in the foreground is part of a little "atrium" we have at the backyard gate so we can have two gates into the yard, sort of a safety/containment feature for Quigley. It's worked out pretty well for us, especially with him.

Also in the picture is Adam's old gym set, and to the right, behind the grapefruit tree, our no longer used pigeon loft. Originally it was a chicken coop, then we got rid of the chickens and a few years later, started raising homing pigeons. Here's an old picture of some of them:


Today I took my mother for her fourth and final chemotherapy treatment, and this time everything went smoothly again. She's still having sensitivity problems with the drugs, particularly in the days following the treatments so they are giving her prednisone to counteract that. The doctor tried to get her to go for two more weeks, but since the data supporting this treatment came from studies that used four treatments he didn't have hard facts to support his advice, only a "gut feeling." She'd had enough of it all, though, tired of feeling bad, which this time was for over two weeks, and came in there ready to quit.

Next up will be radiation treatments, which seem like they'll be much less troublesome, but one never knows.


~~~~

The Thief Strikes Again

[It's raining! As I write this. A thunderstorm blew into town today. Lots of lightning, not much thunder. We took Quigley to the dogpark and got sort of rained on while he played with a Rottweiler.]

So yesterday amidst the whole cut-up paper clip incident described in the last post, I had informed Quigley quite clearly that I was very unhappy with him for getting something and running away and eating it before I could see what it was... very unhappy. Not going to have anything to do with him unhappy. Banish him to the backyard without even doing tricks unhappy.

Okay, yes, when I found the clip and realized he wasn't going to die, after all, and we weren't going to have to spend $2000 after all I put all that behind me and let him back in, so it only lasted the morning.

But still, it didn't do very much good. At the end of the day, I was in the dining room and things got very quiet. I realized I didn't know where he was so I went into the living room and found him coming in from the bathroom -- actually I think he was looking for me. So I could see what he had: the roll of toilet paper in his mouth and the funniest look on his face. Kind of "I know I'm bad/Are we going to play?" He was too funny, so I took a picture, then got the treat and traded it for the toilet paper and he didn't run away but gave it up easily...

----

Still Wordless

This is quite weird. I ended up looking through a rubber stamp catalog with my mother while we waited for the CAT scan on Monday. (Which, contrary to what I'd read on the Internet, took only 20 minutes, not the predicted hour.) After we had exhausted the rather skimpy catalog and she went away to be scanned, I still didn't read any of the stuff I'd brought, but looked through a Sunset magazine. As in, looked at the pictures...

Today I caught up on some chores and spent the rest of the day working on cards, figuring out layouts, playing with new stamps and papers, experimenting with different techniques and creating an "inspiration journal" that is really more like a "bungling..." er... "exploration and problem-solving" journal.

Oh, and we've had a baby mockingbird that has just jumped out of the nest in our back yard today. Quigley started barking up a storm this morning and I went out to see what he had. The bird ran away as soon as Quig was distracted and I managed to intercede before he really pounced. Whenever he finds something new, his first reaction is to bark frantically and keep his distance. Then as he gets braver it crescendos into The Pounce. Which is very energetic and would probably crush a baby bird. If not, The Pounce is followed by The Bite-And-Shread.

Later, I thought the bird was gone, so we went out again. (He looks like he's right at the edge of actually flying, but so far all I've seen him do is run) Quigley found him right away. He was standing in the grapefruit tree treewell, staring at Quig who was not barking but sniffing very cautiously and with great interest. His nose got maybe 10 inches from the bird, when the baby opened its beak, flapped its wings and chirped, where upon Quigley backpedaled frantically and got out of there. When he recovered his courage and came back for more, I told him to leave it alone. (More like, "No, no, no! Leave the baby bird alone! No!"). He actually listened and obeyed, though, and we went back inside.

He's spent most of the day inside, which was fine since it was 109 outside, and he finds that too hot. He's been unusually lethargic ever since this heat wave got going. We took him on the three mile walk around the park last night and he was really dragging at the end. Even though the humidity's at about 10 percent , so the evaporative cooler's been working really well. Of course there wasn't a cooler on the walk, and it was still something like 99 when we were out there. But Quigley's still something of a puppy at 8 months and this is his first Arizona summer. Plus he gets to lie around in the house all day, so he's not really getting acccustomed to 100+ temps.

If the bird's still out there tomorrow, I think I'm going to try to take a picture.

May is Halfway Over

These are Desert Marigolds. They are common desert flowers. Most all the desert flowers are yellow because yellow is easiest for the bees and other insects to see so they can come and pollinate things. Yellow also goes splendidly with our blue skies and purple mountains!

Alas, spring is very nearly over now. Today it was 96 degrees according to my car thermometer. It was still 90 when we took Quigley for his walk at 6:30pm (three miles round the park now).

This has been a crazy month. Mother's day, the death of a friend's mother, a doctor's appointment (that shoots a morning's worth of time to work), a graduation reception, and last night my son's official graduation from the Eller Business College with a Master of Science degree in Management Information Services. Last week he was flown to San Diego to interview for a job, which he decided on Friday to take and will be leaving in about two weeks. On... um... June 1, in fact, which is also my deadline for this book. That cannot be coincidence!

It also means that get togethers we'd have put off until June can't be put off, so we're tending to do whatever comes up now because we know it may be a long time before we can do it again.

We also have an anniversary, a birthday celebration, and I'm on temporary duty watering my mother's yard while she visits my sister in New Mexico. Plus Quigley, who has settled down a great deal, though he's still AWFUL with visitors and still needs some sort of serious outing every day. We alternate between the two mile walk, the three mile walk and an hour or two at the dog park, where he is extremely friendly to all the people and really quite nice, except for the jumping up. They are mostly dog people though, so they aren't too bothered and he's not too intense about it, either.
Anyone who comes to our house for a visit, however, will be assaulted and mauled in his exuberance. He seems to think people enjoy being punched in the stomach by his paws, and also that they like to have their arms held in his mouth. We are having trouble getting through to him that they do not...

As for Enclave... I finished chapter 26 last week, then went back to address 24, which meant I first had to go back to chapters 2 and 5 to put in all the changes I'd decided they needed. That done, I finished 24 and am now about halfway through ch 27, lost in the chaos of all the possible things that could happen, trying to figure out which things will happen, and how they all interelate in terms of cause and effect. It's very fluid. I'm determined not to get all upset when the chaos comes, just take it in stride and wait for it all to settle out.

I am close to the end now, but I still don't know how far, exactly. Things are combining and telescoping in ways I hadn't anticipated, so what had a week ago looked like chapters and chapters worth of material, doesn't look like quite so much now. And it IS only a first draft!

Have a great week
Karen

Spring in the Desert

It's spring in the desert. The paper flowers, brittlebush and desert marigolds are blooming. The bees are buzzing. The snakes are out. The birds are nesting and singing. The wind is blowing with temps in the 70s and 80s... and clear blue skies with a bit of cloud for the sunset.

It's been beautiful.

Last Tuesday I took Quigley to the vet with high hopes the stitches would come out of his eye and the cone collar would come off. Alas, though the doctor looked in his eye and pronounced his healing to be much further along than expected -- "It looks GREAT!" -- and did take the cone off, he only took out one of the two stitches that were holding his eyelids together as a bandage. If Quig started to scratch it, then we had to put the cone back on. We could bring him out into the yard, but only if the wind wasn't blowing. (Several people have noted that our windy days started about when this whole thing with Quigley started -- and haven't stopped yet). And if we had him in the yard, someone had to stay with him to be sure that he "didn't get into any trouble." Whatever that means.

But at least he didn't have to wear the cone any more! I took him to a nearby park after our appointment and we walked around. Then I brought him home, put his sleeping crate back together, put the furniture back the way it was before the cone arrived, and called my husband. Two minutes into the conversation I had to hang up because Quigley started to scratch his eye. So I put the cone back on, disassembled the crate, put the furniture back into its cone configuration and sighed a deep sigh. It's 85% healed the doctor said on Tuesday and we don't want to lose that...

So we have continued as before, though with a few modifications. We don't have so many medications to give, and those we do are much reduced. I've stopped being so paranoid about taking him outside. We don't stay a long time but windy or not, he needs to be outside a little. I stopped using the leash when I took him outside into the back yard. I started barricading him in the dining room and removing myself from his presence when I felt the need for separation. I realized that I cannot keep a speck out of his eye, nor do what the doctor said whe should do. It's impossible with the dog that we have. I still can't really leave him alone, so that means I can't go anywhere during the week. And we've had to take lots and lots of walks. To the point that yesterday I got a cramp in my thigh and so have to cut back on the walks!

I also put the dog, his recovery, my actions, and the book into the Lord's hands and with varying degrees of success, left them there. And this last week, somehow through it all I managed to get chapters 19 and 20 written, and today I worked through ch 18. I have two separate storylines going and tomorrow I will continue the one from 18 into chapter 21. I've been asking the Lord if I should email my editor and ask for more time, but He's not given me a definitive answer on that, and since I'm not sure how many more chapters I have... it could be ten, which might actually get done in the time I have left. Or it could be more, which might not, I'll give it a few more days and see how things develop.

Of course, if some new crisis arises then that would change everything but for now... we'll see. We have only one more day of the cone and see the vet again on Tuesday. Maybe this time my hopes will be realized!

Karen

Poppies

The poppies are blooming! In some places, they carpet the desert with orange. Our skies are blue and clear. The breezes are gentle. The temps are in the mid to high 70s... It's dry and just wonderful to be outside. As one of my friends says, we live in paradise!

Have a great weekend

Karen

Progress, not perfection

Time for a picture.

This is a shot of a canyon tree frog taken by a friend of mine on her travels through the riparian areas of our desert. I think he's pretty cute.

Well, it was a busy weekend, and promises to be a busy week with doctor's appointments, rehab appointments, birthday celebrations, and Thanksgiving already looming in the near future. We're going to use a wild turkey this year; the one that's already in our freezer. Should be interesting.

We have just discovered the return of the termites -- they build little exploratory mud tubes down from the ceiling in the living and dining rooms. Last night (after I'd just finished decluttering the bed in the office/bedroom) we had to take everything out of the closet and put it on the bed so my hubby could climb (literally) up into the attic and see what was going on. He replaced some boards, but still needs to treat the area with termaticide, so the stuff is staying on the bed for now. But! I am using this opportunity to start decluttering the closet.

One of Flylady's sayings is "Progress, not perfection." I'm adopting it in my cleaning (whatever I do, it's cleaner than it was if I'd done nothing) and also in my writing. It's a nice little mantra to head off the, "But I don't know if this is the best/perfect way to do this scene." Instead, I just plow ahead, shoehorning the stuff in as I can and moving forward. I'm on chapter 9 now, having redone parts of 4 and 8. I had thought last week that I would be radically changing the second scene of ch 9, but now I think I'm going to leave the flow of events more or less as they are, and tweak them a bit. That's for tomorrow.

Have a great day
Karen

ARIZONA

A friend from the San Francisco area sent me this link to a fantastic slideshow set to a song by Rex Allen, Jr. about Arizona. Since we're soon to have our annual Arizona Bible Conference, it's been making the rounds, but I wanted to share it with those of you who haven't seen it yet. I have been viewing/listening to it at least once a day, and then I can't get the song out of my mind! Since I've been to nearly every place pictured, it stirs old memories and reminds me of how much I love where I live!

http://objflicks.com/arizona.htm
(make sure you have your volume on)

Enjoy!
Karen

Power Outage

Well, the huge storm that I reported on last week was nothing compared to what we had on Saturday. This is a picture of the blowing gusts of rain. It looked like fog but wasn't. I've never seen anything like it.

That happened when the storm first blew through from the west. There's even a scrap of our car canopy (shredded by the storm on Tuesday) there, which no doubt was blown out of one of the trees. We keep finding bits of it in various places. Something like 11 power poles snapped along one of the roads in Tucson on Saturday. That day, though the rain started violently, the storm didn't move on like they usually do. It just rained and rained all afternoon. Streets filled up, intersections flooded, all our dry riverbeds became rushing muddy torrents. Not surprisingly, there have been nonstop power outages.

Speaking of those, after my rainbow post a friend from Texas emailed me with the most wonderful observation.

"Since my house is all electric," she said, "like you there is not much that one can accomplish without the flow of electric current."

When she said this I immediately thought of the spiritual life -- which she mentioned in the next line as well. What a perfect line to analogize getting back into fellowship after we sin! As believers our houses are "all electric" and there isn't a thing we could accomplish without the flow of the Holy Spirit... I love it!

And while during a power outage you give thanks for all the service people that jump to the task of getting the power back online, we in our spiritual life can give thanks that Jesus died on the cross for every sin we'd ever commit so that all we have to do is turn on the switch. We create our own power outages, reacting to circumstances or people in life, and Jesus already did the grueling work that allows the power to go back on as soon as we're ready to throw the switch. Without it, our souls are as dark and useless as an all-electric house without power.

Happy Monday!
Karen

Rainbow After the Storm

Tuesday night we had another big storm. It blew threw around five pm while we were doing Bible Class. About twenty minutes into class, lightning struck close and loud and the power went off. By then the wind was blowing like crazy (60mph gusts, they said) and the rain was pouring down along with marble-sized hail that was battering all the front windows of the house so hard I thought it might break them. We went out into the dining room to discover that the car canopy had within ten minutes been totally shredded!

Wow. I love these storms! They are amazing.

In half an hour it was over, but the power didn't come on for three and a half more hours. I was amused to find how much of a hole no power makes in one's life. Suddenly all the things you were thinking of doing that night... you can't. And furthermore, everything you think of doing now, with the power off, you realize you can't do! (Which is why I had no post for Tuesday.)

At first I went outside where it was still light, and also cool, fresh and still sprinkling. I wrote in my journal for awhile as the rain stopped and that's I saw the rainbow (above) -- it was a full rainbow arcing over our street, so perfectly the street seemed to be heading straight into it. Unfortunately I couldn't get both the street and the rainbow in the camera's viewfinder, so I opted for the rainbow and took two pictures (see above) You can see the light pole on the right side of the left picture and it's light fixture protruding from the left side of the right picture. Pretty cool.

Later, when it got dark, I went inside and listened to Bible class on my Mp3 player, and realized... I can't cook my dinner! The microwave doesn't work. LOL. We are SOOO spoiled! Anyway, I put on a headlamp, ate peanut butter and jelly and started reading Michael Crichton's State of Fear, which is partly relaxation and partly research.

Speaking of, I've gotten stuck on the second scene in Chapter 7, working my way through it very slowly. Today everything just went blank, so finally I gave up and did other things... Maybe tomorrow I'll move it to the point I can at least leave it. Crichton's book is actually quite timely in its descriptions of a couple of things.

Grace,

Karen

Huge Storm

All the highs and lows and moisture pulls have lined up and our monsoon is now in full swing. We had a huge storm last night (Saturday). The wind was blowing like crazy and the rain was coming down fast. They said our area got 1.23 inches in twenty minutes. "Coming down" is a bit of a misnomer, though, since the rain was blowing horizontally. I'd have taken a picture but all the windows were streaming with water and the visibility wasn't too great even apart from that. The back and front yards became lakes and the street was a river.

My husband was flying in from LA, due to arrive at 8pm with the storm in progress at our place at 7:45 and moving directly for the airport. Our county was under a severe thunderstorm watch, and also an urban and small stream flooding advisory. As it turned out, the plane was diverted to a holding pattern over the Tucson Mountains to the west and didn't land for half an hour. When my husband finally got on the ground and back in the car -- all the power was out. That means there were no stoplights, and not enough police to cover them all.

He had thought to stop at a fast food place to pick up dinner on the way home, but all the places he'd had in mind were dark and powerless. Finally he found an El Paso, northeast of our house and got carry-out. Turns out about 18,000 customers lost power in the storm. Our house seemed to be part of an island where the power had not been knocked out. Most likely because I was in the middle of listening to Bible class when the storm hit. LOL!

Grace,
Karen

PS. The picture is from today, not part of the storm on Saturday.

Too Much Trusting?

Another criticism of Return of the Guardian-King that came up in the April Blog tour was that some felt there was too much trusting of Eidon in it. In fact one person phrased it as "Come on and jump off this cliff, dearie, and Jesus will save you." That phrasing almost knocked me over, for reasons I'll explain in a bit. Another person claimed that too much trusting is unbiblical.

Now, I will be the first to admit that it's very possible the issue was visited a bit too many times in the course of the book and that if I did a subsequent edit, now that time has distanced me from it, I might agree the references needed a bit of a trim.

On the other hand... I'm not sure trusting God can ever be visited or mentioned too much. At least in life. And if I did so in the book, it's likely because every single day, sometimes every hour, I was having to trust God to get me through the writing of that novel. It seemed that I never knew what I was going to do next, that the days were passing faster than the words were accumulating and I was having to fly through it by the seat of my pants. Scenes would appear and be written down without any sense on my part of what they were doing there, or how they fit in the overall scheme of things. Weekly, sometimes daily I had to let go of my compulsiveness and really not think about schedules or guilt and just relax and trust the Lord to see it through. And when I was faced with doing that, sometimes it literally felt as if I were jumping off a cliff.

Which is why that phrase so startled me. I had not realized until I was working my way through RotGK how much I had always used guilt as a motivator. How I would set up a series of goals to accomplish -- like "finish the scene today," or "complete the chapter in accordance with my schedule," or "work on the book for four hours and get ten pages written" -- and then when I failed, flail myself for that failure.

But guilt is a sin, and I knew that. It is not the way God wants us to live our lives. When I came to the point of realizing what I was doing, and that I had to stop making myself feel bad for not having accomplished my plan, I remember thinking in a sort of horror that if I didn't have that guilt and the subsequent "Bad Girl! BAAAD!!!" to regulate myself, I might not get any work done at all.

That was the moment when I realized what I was really using to motivate myself. And not only that, but that I'd done it almost automatically for all of my life. To let go of that, to let go of schedules, to totally stop thinking about how I was going to accomplish the writing and leave it all to God -- that's when I stood at the top of the cliff and realized He wanted me to jump. About like standing on Plateau Point in the Grand Canyon and looking down at the green ribbon that is the Colorado River (see photo, above). And jumping. It was not an easy thing to do...

So, is there too much reference to trusting in Return of the Guardian-King? Possibly. Is that really a bad thing? I don't think so. Too much trusting is better than not enough. Is it unbiblical? Perhaps it can be, but I don't believe it was for me in my life, nor for Abramm in his... But I'll leave elaboration on that for tomorrow.

Grace,
Karen

Seeing the Doctor

(At left is a picture of the main room of our deluxe suite at the ranch.)

Today I went to see the orthopedic surgeon. He pressed on my swollen foot, looked at the x-rays, asked me a few questions and confirmed, yes it is a distal fibular fracture, stable, closed, and, from what I can tell, the most benign of these sorts of things. I don't have to have a cast, but can continue to use the boot as a cast, can walk on it as I can tolerate it, and can even take it off when I'm just sitting around.

It's more a nuisance than anything else because there's all this folderol with the huge boot that makes it look like something really bad, and it's not. Okay, yes, I did break my ankle, but there's no real pain, for the most part, unless I walk wrong -- and I'm getting good at not walking wrong. I don't have to lie in bed for weeks waiting for it to heal enough to put weight on it, and don't even really have to use the crutches. In fact, I can actually walk on it without the boot if I'm careful, though this is not recommended.

On the other hand, the reason I can walk on it is because the fibula is not a weight-bearing bone, which means it's going to take longer to heal than the tibia would -- six to eight weeks, he said. Six to eight weeks of wearing this boot...

What I can't figure out yet, is that he said I should be able to drive. But how I could manage to work the pedals with an inflexible foot the size of an elephant's? Maybe I'll have to go out and practice.

Anyway, I seem to have had one new, big distraction every month now since I've started Black Box and the broken ankle appears to be the distraction for June. Despite that, I did do a bit of editing on chapter 4. In fact, as I said before, this might actually be a good thing for the writing in the long run...

(At right is another picture of our room at the ranch, this one taken from where the door is in the first picture, but looking back toward the window and our view. )

Grace,
Karen

Tanque Verde Ranch - The Accident

Continuing our weekend anniversary celebration at the Tanque Verde Ranch, we got up bright and early Saturday morning and arrived down at the corral at 7:15 for our hour-long scenic walking ride. It wasn't hot yet and the trail wound through saguaros and then a mesquite forest. It was fun, easy and a beautiful desert morning with lots of birds. We returned in time to eat breakfast at the dining room (they have a continental buffet plus you can order eggs, bacon, french toast, etc off the menu). Then it was back out for our lope lesson.

I thought this would be half an hour of loping and trotting around the ring -- enough for me to find my riding seat after ten plus years of not having done it. Instead the wrangler got the six of us who reported for testing mounted, then took us out to an arena and told us we had to, one at a time, take our horse from a standing stop to a lope and keep it loping once around the arena. During that time she would evaluate us for position, technique, comfort, etc. (Your butt is never supposed to leave the saddle, your legs are not supposed to cling to the side of the horse, you aren't supposed to grab the saddle horn and your hands and arms should be quiet and in control, not flapping all over the place.)

When we were done she passed five of us (including me) and the other fellow she worked with a couple more times before finally telling him he'd have to take the Intermediate lesson.

On the way back they told us we could go on the lope ride, which was to leave immediately, even though we hadn't signed up, so we did. It was the best loping ride I've ever been on. There were four of us plus our wrangler guide and it lasted an hour and a half. The loping parts were fantastic and for satisfyingly long stretches. When the first one just went on and on, I was amazed. I used to guide at a stables in high school and on our trail there was only one loping section. It was about a quarter of the first one we went on at the ranch. Yes, the first one. There were about five or six others in all, each just as long. Mostly I did okay, but it wasn't until the last one that I really, finally found my seat...

On our third or fourth time to lope, we were heading down a wide wash, and I saw a rabbit and then a quail dart across the trail ahead of the guide who was running about three horse lengths ahead of me. Shortly after that my horse spooked, pulling up hard and dodging suddenly to the right. I went off on the left and hit the washbottom -- soft sand, so I was thankful for that. Of course that was terribly embarrassing. I got up. Felt a bit knocked about but basically okay. Nothing really wrong... I got back on and off we went.

Soon we were loping again and all was well. Except that as we would slow from the lope into a trot my right ankle began to hurt intensely. I couldn't recall doing anything to my ankle in the fall, so I thought maybe I'd hit it on a rock and bruised it. Loping and walking were no problem, and as I said on the last long lope I finally found my seat.

We came back, dismounted, I had to fill out some paperwork because I fell off (cringe) and then we started to walk up the hill to our room. My ankle was hurting, but I could walk on it if I stepped right. Then I started getting woozy and kept having to stop and sit down. That was weird. Nothing hurt badly enough for that. Maybe I was dehydrated...

Well, to make a long story short, after lunch we went into town to get my ankle x-rayed and turns out I have a distal fibular fracture. I was in complete disbelief. The doctor said that in the torquing that obviously sprained my ankle the tendon actually pulled the end of my fibula off, breaking the bone (the fibula is the second, slender bone of the lower leg). Fortunately the fracture had closed and the piece was back in line, so they gave me a huge black boot/brace and crutches and a referral to an orthopedic specialist.

I wasn't about to let that ruin our celebration, however. That night we went to the Western Barbeque down in the cottonwood grove (without boot and crutches -- I didn't feel like I needed them that much and I didn't want to get them dirty). The next day after breakfast, I sat on our back porch, wrote in my journal and sketched the desert while a mama ground squirrel and her baby wandered nearby.

The whole spooking incident and then the bizarre break are so weird, it's obviously part of God's plan. There was nothing anyone did wrong or could have done to prevent it. It's just how it is with horses. They spook sometimes and people fall off. It's actually the third time I've been injured from a fall off a horse (though certainly not the third time I've fallen), and not nearly as bad as the last time, when I sprained my right shoulder and left hand. To have that injury now would really shut me down as far as writing goes. For it to be my leg actually helps the writing, I think, because I'm going to be pretty much a captive in my office! I suspect that's going to motivate me finally to start making some serious progress on this next book.

And it sure wouldn't stop me from coming out to the Tanque Verde Ranch again. In fact, I'd like to try that loping ride a second time. Accident and all, I had a great time.

Grace,
Karen

Tanque Verde Ranch

Over the weekend my hubby and I went out to stay for two days and two nights at a local dude ranch to celebrate our anniversary. Or, well, the last five or six of them, which we hadn't had time to celebrate when they had actually occurred. It was well worth the wait!

The Tanque Verde Ranch is located in the foothills of the Catalina and Rincon mountains to the east of Tucson, about half an hour from our home. The brochure material calls it "high, wide and handsome," and it certainly is.

Because it is offseason (ie, hot) the ranch gives summer specials which enabled us to get a deluxe suite for a very reasonable price (that includes everything -- rooms plus all the meals and activities). We arrived Friday afternoon just in time to take the Sunset Desert Hike, something of a misnomer at this time of year since the sun doesn't set until about 7:30. The hike began at 5pm.

We and a man from Pittsburgh went along with our guides, an older couple (ha! they were probably our age!) employed by both the ranch and the park service at the nearby Saguaro National Park. It was a mild, mostly flat, looping hike about two miles long, and though hot at first, as the sun lowered in the sky and a breeze started up it became very nice.

The cicadas were out in force so the normally silent desert droned with their high buzzing calls and they seemed to zip out of the foliage and dart in front of us constantly.

As shadows began to lengthen, I got some really nice shots of the desert. The photo immediately above is looking north toward the ranch buildings and the Catalina mountains. (the one previous to that, is looking due west, into the setting sun, so the saguaro spines are backlit) The picture below was taken when returned to the ranch. It's in front of the main dining room and also the place where the hikes begin and end. The hanging basket hides the corrals which are off beyond the grass.

Once we got back, we cleaned up and went to dinner. Their southwestern-themed dining room has high ceilings with wood beams and saguaro rib linings, and looks out on the swimming pool with the great blue ridge of the mountains looming behind the desert beyond. As we ate, it slowly turned pink.

When you enter the dining room as a paying guest, they hand you a menu with five gourmet entrees to choose from. I got a veal saltimbocca covered in mozzarella with these little new potatoes fried in bread crumbs. It was excellent. My hubby got the prime rib. Everything was astonishingly good. Even the blueberry pie for dessert.

After dinner we sat on the porch to watch the sun set. Then it was off to bed in preparation for our busy Saturday: first the walking ride, then breakfast, then the lope lesson that, should we pass, would enable us to take the loping ride to a chuckwagon breakfast on Sunday...

More tomorrow...
Karen

Unbelievably Nice Weather

Today is the coolest June day we've had since 2000. It was only 89 degrees. Clear skies, a bit of a breeze. Wonderful!

Yesterday's trip to Cartridge World to get my ink tank refilled went pretty much as I anticipated. Though it started out smooth enough, after I installed it at home the light that showed the ink was low kept flashing -- even though the tank was now full. A couple of phone calls later revealed to me that the Canon MP350 big black ink tank is the only one they can't get to work right. (the printer's other ink tanks can be refilled fine). We actually did get it to print, but the printer can't tell how much ink is in the tank anymore. I knew it would be something strange... So I didn't get a whole lot done yesterday. At least my arms and wrists were feeling better. As they are today.

Today I floated around most of the day, trying to concentrate and failing, trying to work and ... not seeming to in any direct way. I wrote some nonstops, prayed, wrote in my journal, walked in and out of the office. It was strange the way I would read through all the elements of the chapter I'm working on, trying to see the pattern, trying to see what was the most important thing, to see how it all fit together and have nothing whatsoever seem to gel. As soon as I'd get to the end of whatever I was reading, it was as if I'd read nothing at all.

I have been contemplating the fact that it is part of the spiritual life to be content even when God is taking things away from you that you really care about, and when it really starts to look like He's not going to do what you hoped He would -- what you had trusted Him to do. Still, you look it in the face and you accept it (He's not our own personal genie after all; His plan is not about making things go the way we want) and go forward with the plan. Whatever He's going to do, you know without a doubt it will be better than anything you could come up with in your own pathetic little plans.

Today I was reminded that I also need to be content when the words and story don't come as I'd like, either. No different than anything else in life, but somehow it seems like it is because I keep thinking that I'm in charge of this. But really, if I could have written the chapter I would have. If I could have figured out the problem I would have. It wasn't for lack of desire. Or time. Or opportunity. Finally I just gave it over to Him and relaxed.

About forty minutes before time for Bible Class, a paragraph suddenly fell into place. Then a couple more. And after class, a few more things moved and shifted and took on a better shape. So in the end, I actually did make some measurable progress today. And I'm grateful.

Grace and peace,
Karen

Post Tour Reflections & Other Things

Echinocereus flowers

It's spring in the desert: the blue, blue sky overhead, the purple mountains looming at the end of roads lined by brilliant yellow paloverde... The cactus are all blooming, as are my amaryllis -- a white and a red. A pair of flycatchers are making a nest in the paloverde across the street, and yesterday I found five lemons on my poor lemon tree -- which was hit very hard by the snow this winter. Five lemons! Hooray.

The tour is over. Return of the Guardian King has been officially launched (as far as I'm concerned, anyway), and I want to say thanks again to all who participated. The praise was by turns extravagant, gratifying, embarrassing, hard to believe, heart warming, giggle-producing and sobering.

The complaints were... difficult. They're always difficult, and bring out my very human tendancy to put way more emphasis on the negative than on the positive. I could get twenty reader letters praising my work to the skies, but the one that tells me all the things the reader thought I'd done wrong -- that's the one I take to heart. For awhile anyway. It's weird how that is. We do the same thing in contemplating the future. A weird medical test comes back and we fear the worst instead of focusing on the best. We submit our book to an editor and it seems much more likely the editor will NOT like it, than it does that he (or she) will.

Or maybe some people are just like that -- those with a tendancy toward pessimism. The optimists are on the other side, always, and, sometimes even delusionally, assuming the best.

Delusions aside, I have to say that optimism in general is much more suitable for members of God's Royal Family than pessimism. We all know how our story ends, after all -- in heaven with our Loving Father forever. If God is for us, if He loves us with a perfect, intimate, never faltering love, how can we be pessimistic? We can't, and I have gotten away from the pessimism as I've grown. But taking negative comments too seriously is still a weakness I cave in to far too often.

On the other hand, the complaints do make you think. Do I agree with what's been said? Is this perceived fault actually a fault? Or just a preference? Or perhaps -- and I'm seeing this more and more -- the result of a reader bringing a different frame of reference to the work than I did. Change the frame of reference, change the template with which you view the events of the story and perhaps the fault will disappear. It might even become a strength. I have some things to say about that with respect to one of Dean Koontz's books as well as my own... But not tonight.

The vast majority of tour posts, though, were not complaints but fun, interesting, creative, instructive, enlightening and funny. I am so grateful that people took time out of their busy days to read my book(s) and then blog about them. And I learned many things from it all. I learned to sit back, relax and watch things unfold rather than jump to hasty conclusions. I learned that some readers came to my books in the first volume, struggled with elements they saw as flaws and faults and later, when their perception changed, looked at it all differently. I learned that people prefer to comment on thorns than rosebuds , and that some thorns can be quite amusing. I learned how bizarre it is to have one's work analyzed as some kind of standard for others to learn from. I learned that there are more typos in the book than just on page 185. (And participant Heather Hunt finally has her review of RotGK posted over at Title Trakk. Thanks Heather!)

John Otte's post on my depiction of Christianity in RotGK was particularly gratifying and his final Wednesday post, Sin Boldly, was great. If you've not read that one, I encourage you to do so.

I also learned through this tour that there really are Christians who do not believe that we have a sin nature, and do not believe the Scriptures teach that. I read those words with my mouth hanging open. Then I closed my mouth and decided I would challenge myself to lay out some of the reasons I do believe the Scripture teaches we have a sin nature, even as Christians.

But not tonight. Tonight I'm tired. I've stayed up way too late the last too nights reading Golden Fool (Robin Hobb), so I'm not going to strain my brain here. I want to be ready to work on Black Box tomorrow, after not spending even one minute on it in the last two weeks. Tomorrow I'll need to find a way to get back into it. My hubby helped me get started tonight on our walk around the park as we discussed electromagnetic pulses and how they might affect a vehicle going at a high rate of speed along a curvy desert road... I'm hoping if I don't push things too hard now I will have more energy for working tomorrow.

Grace,
Karen

True Wealth

One of the things that struck me on the Garden Tour last weekend as we were driving amongst the foothills mansions on Tucson's north side, was that as a child of the king I really wasn't as out of place there as might appear. The mansions' owners, on account of their great wealth, had surrounded themselves with beauty, luxury, security and ease. Whether I ever have that kind of lifestyle in my life on earth or not doesn't really matter, because I know that in not too many years I will have it forever. What is heaven but the ultimate in being surrounded by beauty, luxury, security and ease?

And in heaven we can be assured of enjoying it, while on earth, now in these fallen bodies, that is often not the case. Even if we were given a mansion and all the beautiful things that go with it -- fine furniture, koi ponds, soaring windows, cactus gardens full of exotic African plants -- after awhile we'd become familiar with them, and would gain little more pleasure than I get from finding new buds on my lemon tree after it froze so hard this winter, or from settling into my very comfortable bed at night, or curling up on the not-so-lavish -- but comfy -- couch with a good book.

Those wonderful things are pleasurable, but really only for a season and only in a limited manner. When troubles come, as they always do , all that luxury and beauty really won't bring peace or happiness. But as children of the ruler and creator of the universe, the Papa who owns all the gold and all the silver and the cattle on a thousand hills, we can have something far greater -- the mind of Christ. A mental attitude that finds beauty, luxury and peace in every day that comes along, and that's better than any wealth the world can offer.

Peace,
Karen

2007 Garden Tour

Every year about this time, my mother and I spend a Saturday attending the Tucson Botanical Gardens Home Garden Tour. There are usually from 7 to 8 homes sprinkled about the city that have been selected as part of the self-guiding tour, and they span the gamut from low cost to high, whimsical to contemporary, low-water use to lush and tropical. It's always a fun time, seeing all the different ways people have designed their gardens, both for beauty and for food.

The picture above is from the first house we visited which boasted an incredible cactus garden on a patio/veranda overlooking spectacular views of the city and the mountains. You can get a partial sense of that view from the picture at right.

This year's tour was one of the best we've been on. In fact, because of a usage conflict I had to bring a regular film camera and ran out of film in the front yard of the third house. Unfortunately that was also the one whose owners had transformed the back yard swimming pool and spa into a koi pond.

I had no idea how mesmerized I would be with those fish. They were huge! At least two feet long -- about 17 of them, many of them award winning fish -- and obviously quite weighty. They were drawn to people standing at the pool's edge, weaving back and forth through the water in an intricate dance with a powerful, even regal sort of grace. Mostly they were red-orange and white but there was also among them a golden one. I've read enough about the magical and rare golden carp that it had to have been added on purpose. After I'd stood there awhile, the owner came up and offered me a couple of handfuls of food to feed them with. Boy was that a kick, watching them rise out of the water with gaping, toothless mouths to shovel up food and water both.



I got no pictures of the koi, but I did get at least get a couple of the hedgehog type cactus (echinocereus) blooming near their front driveway. (The huge pink and yellow flowers in the shot at left)







At a different house, I got a big kick out of this entryway with a bright red gate and bright blue post foundations (there has to be a better name for those -- pilons?) Inside is a quiet courtyard with chairs, fountain and flowers. Oh, and the front door, too.


The weather was beautiful (as must be obvious from these pictures), and we had a fine time. You'll be seeing more shots from the various gardens from time to time in this blog. For now I'll end with this shot of the mountains to the north of Tucson, the Santa Catalina's (where a 40 minute drive takes you from saguaros and paloverde trees to aspen and spruce). Note, in particular the cloudless blue sky!


Grace,
Karen