Category Archives: Uncategorized

It has been a year that assaults everything I stand for and everything I value.  A new government came in despite my wishes, my vote, and my best efforts.  They instituted attacks on most of the things I care about.

Betsy DeVos became Secretary of Education despite being totally incompetent and not qualified for the job.  I define myself as a teacher, even though I have been forced to retire by poor health.  I value public education.  President Pumpkinhead put the pinhead in charge of education to shift public money from public education to private school systems so that the benefits go only to the wealthy.  I am ready to fight.  I believe the battle is worth fighting for, and if we lose, we may never regain what we are now losing.

But on a brighter note, I could lose our family home in 2018.  The city forced me to remove the pool.  I couldn’t get it repaired to their specifications, even though I came close and exhausted myself in the process.  I spent all my money on the debacle in order to avoid a tax lien that would’ve eventually caused us to lose the house.  I filed for bankruptcy.  I am struggling now to pay this year’s property and school taxes.  The school tax has gone up due to the State cutting funding again to public schools.  Texas appears to have to try the Kansas experiment for itself.  And I get shafted in the meantime.

My publisher, the one I was counting on to publish my best work, died a gruesome financial death, leaving me with lots of worried writer friends, a lot of manuscripts, and only myself to be relied on to get them published.  I started doing so on Amazon, basically for free.  I am now headed for complete self-published status.

I did complete one final journey with a vanity press to get Magical Miss Morgan published.  I hope to make some progress with that too, though I have no confidence left in any publishing company.  They are all a dying, greed-wracked industry intent only on exploiting people who are authors and people who think they can be.

I had a nudist adventure this summer, actually going to a nudist park as a nudist for the first time in my life.  So, in a way, I guess I have come out of the closet as a nudist.  Though I am still basically a closet nudist.  One day in the sun does not a social nudist make.  I am prepared, however, to face life as a homeless, penniless person.  My clothing budget should prove affordable.

I have faced a lot of losses in 2017.  I have faced unfortunate reversals of fortune.  But the one thing that remains constant and true, is that humor can help you through anything.  As long as I can still laugh about it, then it will be okay.  The world is not a place of tragedy.  It is a place of comedy.  And sometimes the clowns fall down.  But we don’t laugh at them because they fell.  We laugh when we see them getting up again.  And even harder when we see them doing the double-take at the banana peel that got them.

My parents are both still alive.  Both of them are octogenarians.   And they still give me presents at Christmas.  This year I spent my Christmas money on toys.   Yes, I found a Big McIntosh  and a Pinky Pie with special painted scenes on their sides.  I couldn’t resist.  This old man still buys and plays with toys.  Should I be ashamed of myself?  No way.  I’m in my second childhood.  I need a chance to play with my toys.

I bought a gingerbread house kit from Walmart once again, and we put it together on Sunday while my oldest son was home on leave from the Marine Corps.  This little photo essay is inadequate for fully understanding the scope of the epic mess we made, the sugary sweetness of eating the thing as we built it, and the challenge it was to my diabetes and diet.

I did not realize when I bought this kit that the gingerbread house was already put together and glued in place with sugar paste.  So the first step this time was chocolate frosting and candy decorations.

Last minute special touches only cost $1.95.

My son the Marine did the Christmas tree on the side in green frosting, not realizing that we had a package of green marshmallow stuff in the kit for that purpose.

I am told that the best part of the process was tearing it all apart and devouring it at the end.  I even ate a tiny piece myself.

I married into a Jehovah’s Witness family, so I have not celebrated Christmas since 1994.  They believe real Christians shouldn’t celebrate a holiday that has its origins in pagan Roman traditions because first century Christians did not celebrate birthdays or Christmas.  I suppose they have a point.  But being a Jehovah’s Witness is not really who I am any more.  The faith has left me more or less alone and isolated, and I don’t have much to do with them any more. My son is in the Marine Corps, a situation that caused him to be disfellowshipped and thrown out of the faith.  I am celebrating the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas with my son, home on leave.   He came home in time to help with my hospitalization recently for a heart scare that turned out to be nothing.  While all of that was going on, I self-published my novel Snow Babies, a book that is built from a lot of old Christmas memories and holiday regrets. We always need to do more to help others.  We need to come together more and care more and feel more and remember. Christmas is a time when people traditionally respond to those needs.  So I am living with that heightened sense of a special time of year again, for the first time in a long time.  And it means everything to me.  So that is it for the moment.  This is my merry time, and I have to hold on to every bit of it that I can.

Well, being in the hospital with heart monitoring machines is not the way I wanted to start the holiday season.    But I didn’t have a heart attack after all.   And it gives me fiction fuel for the future.