A Contemplative Life

Today's view of Peace Round the World. More about that soon! Writing not as a career but not keeping novels in a drawer either.... Maybe another twenty years of writing post. Oh and an update on chickens, Owl in particular, the poor scraggly hen. Let's begin with Owl Chicken; she looks, um, sad. Terrible actually, even in this chickie-mama's opinion, lol. None of the hens who have molted have lost as many feathers as Owl and I wonder if when Camilla molts, will she somehow try to appear even less appealing, in her I'm the Alpha Hen even in the worst circumstances sort of way. Pullet-sized Owl a few hours ago, bless her! I have no idea as Camilla is keeping a tight lid on her molting timeline. Regardless, Owl is getting the bulk of it done before weather gets chilly. Good on ya Owl Chicken! As for the writing, or rather revisions.... I'm nearly a third of the way through a read-aloud with The Deadfern Miracles . It's always revelatory when reading one's stor...

My Lavender quilt-in-progress.... How now, suddenly, my heart is drawn to the Lavender EPP quilt when not long ago I didn't think I'd ever finish it. (And now that translates to other things, like certain novel series, Enran ahem....) Over five years ago I started basting shapes for Jodi Godfrey's Lavender quilt . It's from her book The Seedling Quilts , and in Godfrey's pattern, the EPP is surrounded by negative space. I first made the pattern with her Seeding Quilt sampler and I FELL IN LOVE with it, once I understood it. That took a while, staring at this beautiful design but not quite able to get my head around it. Then it was yet another English paper pieced quilt I just HAD TO MAKE. Several of those over the years, lol, but I've completed some. Yet for all my initial love of Lavender, other shinies overtook it. Shunted it to the end of the queue. Demoted it into a tote that despite being feet away from where I sit at night to stitch, it might as well hav...

The Warm Hearted quilt neatly folded and resting on the back of the couch.   I so badly want to sew on the Warm Hearted Quilt this evening, but my forearm still has an Aquaphor-covered wound and I don't want to slap a band-aid on it because band-aids of all varieties (plastic or fabric) give me a rash. I did receive good news today that the spot biopsied was benign, which is GREAT! I juxtapose that with a dear friend's youngest son, who is in his forties and suffering from lung cancer. Enduring toxic chemotherapy in the hopes he'll survive long enough so his youngest child, three years old, will remember him. Sigh. We can't plan life other than daft outlines for what we'd love to occur. A week ago, when I had the biopsy, I stitched hearts like all the other days I'd been stitching hearts; I had a piece of gauze taped over the wound and no Aquaphor in sight. Since then, I've done very little sewing on that quilt. This afternoon I managed some Peace Round the ...

The sunset at Samoa Beach from a few days ago.... Yesterday morning I sat down to write. Which meant first I read over the previous chapter, which took about fifteen or twenty minutes. Maybe fifteen. I had written perhaps two paragraphs, then my computer and monitor died. For seconds I inwardly shrieked. Going to my feet, I turned on the light, which worked. Which was even more frightening; what the heck was wrong? I called for my husband, who is a superhero; he noticed I had inadvertently with my shoe unplugged the power strip my computer and monition are both plugged into. DUDE! The computer turned on fine, my document saved, though not completely. A few sentences from that day's writing were all to remain before the document self-saved everything. For another few seconds I was.... Not terrified, merely slightly downcast. Yet I was also greatly appreciative that everything in the previous chapter I had altered was SAFE. No idea what I had changed, but those changes weren't af...

For the last several days hints of summer have muscled their way through an entrenched marine layer. A couple of hours of sunshine one day, another few hours the next. June Gloom is the theme, and I'm trying to be patient, but.... LOL. I'm very grateful it's not HOT here, and as for the sunshine, well, it'll come back one of these days. Gigi is in the Broody Hen condo and just about everyone else desperately wants in! Photo courtesy of my husband. The chickens don't seem to care; they're a year old today, going about their henny-penny ways, including Gigi going broody again, as well as a few hens molting. Hard to believe it's been a year since they hatched, and a nearly a year since we chose them, brought them home, and began our chicken adventure. The good thing about the marine layer is that I don't have to move their water container in and out of the sun. By the time the sun does come out, where the waterer sits is in the shade, not something I consid...

Diagonal Colours is an apt title for this quilt top/back, what I discovered a few paragraphs below, hehehe. I'm kinda on the last phase of revisions for Can't Be Done Alone: The Hawk Book Five , reading silently instead of out loud, although a few sentences have been murmured, making sure this or that wording is what I wish to convey. When I started this saga over twelve years ago, what I wanted to convey wasn't necessarily magical realism and historical fiction served in a women's fiction sort of way. What emerged was, well, all that and more. This is made from leftovers of a recent Rainbow quilt as well as newly beloved prints from Shell Rummel's beautiful Daybreak collection. Nearly halfway through a long tale, this installment starts to veer in different directions, not merely dealing with Eric's transformations or Lynne dealing with them or her assumed infertility. The chapter I've included below hearkens to other elements of the story, that of faith, ...