Why I Love Great Danes
Current mood: cheerful

Danes Online

An especially good month. Click on the above link only if you want to smile for a little while, no downloading required.

12:31 AM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

News and Random Bits O’Stuff
Current mood: busy

Gonna hit the keyboard hard here, but first a few things to pass along:

After a long time of self-imposed abstinence, I have a new agent. This of course makes me feel all recharged and revved up, so I'm pounding along on my big novel project, HIGHBORN. Keep an eye here for word count/progress reports.

7:22 AM - 3 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

Revelation!

revelation -- noun: ...something that is revealed;
especially : an enlightening or astonishing
disclosure (from www.merriam-webster.com).

1:12 AM - 1 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Creature Capturing
Current mood: cheerful

The monsoons are, I hope, FINALLY on their way out here in southeastern Arizona. This is the longest monsoon season we've had since I've been living here-- it's rained almost every day since the beginning of July. The weeds are crazy, the bugs are crazy, I'm covered in mosquito bites. Every freakin' creature around here is growing to gargantuan size, dogs excluded because I very carefully watch their diets. Creepy crawlies are trying to creepy crawlie into my house at every opportunity. Moths, flies, mosquitoes, butt-bugs (black beetles that walk with their hineys in the air -- I have no idea what they really are but I can't resist playing with them), grasshoppers, even a frackin' SIX-INCH LONG DESERT CENTIPEDE (yes, the kind that BITE). I caught that one after yanking Ghost away from it; she was a quarter inch away from getting an extremely painful bite on the tender pink nose. And, of course, spiders:

3:39 AM - 2 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Zipping Along at the Speed of Summer...
Current mood: tired

Wow, look at that-- nearly a month since I posted. On July 25th on my LJ, I asked for good thoughts for Ghost. Ghost is now, thankfully, just fine... now. She really had us scared. It started with a diagnosis of hip dysplasia, which itself was a pretty horrendous thing with a not-so-good future. For right now, we would go with joint supplements and anti-inflammatories without steroids, since giving her steroids for her skin problems in the past is what made her so chubby. She had a severe reaction to the prescription stuff, and more than a few times, we actually thought we were going to lose her. Everything coming out of her was (gross warning here) projectile water, blood and bile, from both ends. She stopped eating. Stopped. She ALWAYS eats. At one point I was sitting at the top of the stairs and scrubbing at a stain in one of the very same spots that Lily got sick in the night before she died, and I could feel myself sliding toward losing it. $400 worth of meds and multiple vet visits and x-rays later, she finally started to get better... and Goblin got sick. Not nearly as bad, though, and what we think happened was that a stomach bacteria moved in on Ghost when she was at her weakest, and that's what Goblin came down with. A couple of days of the same anti-dia. and antibiotic meds and he was all better, at about the same time she was finally done with being sick. Kudos to my Dad for daily babysitting from two to eights hours each for five days in a row. All in all it was an $870.00 nightmare. Now, thankfully, it's like it never happened (well, except for the vet bill) and even Ghost's hip seems a bit better. Once her system settled down, we were able to start giving her the joint supplements again, she's lost a little weight (which is easier on her body), and she's limping less. ::whew::

Not much else to report. Work is a bear. I'm waiting for word on HIGHBORN, which has been sent out in the world in proposal and sample chapter form. I'm working on a short story for an anthology which has to be finished by the end of the month. We're breaking our backs landscaping-- spiffying up the front a little with some accent rock and trying to finally finish the backyard. We're going to be renovating a bit around here, and to that end we bought a bunch of new stuff to replace outdated old stuff. The day job is non-stop, no-time-to-breathe work and I haven't been to the gym in weeks. We're trying valiantly to clean out stuff from the closets and garages, but alas, we get sidetracked so very easily. The monsoons are (I hope) finally coming to an end, having gleefully saturated the ground so that the weeds have grown up to six feet tall in some parts of the property (yes, I said SIX FEET). We've started on the cleanup but there's a whooooole bunch more to do. And here we're only two weeks away from September!

Gaaaahhhhh!

2:44 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THE HUSBAND!
Current mood: good

Happy birthday to Weston The Husband (Weston Ochse) who turns...

hmmm.

Should I lie?

Should I make myself look good by saying he's younger than me and I cradle-robbed? Should I tell everyone we should all celebrate that he has lived to see yet another birthday despite his wild ride through the Army and his adventures thereafter?

Should I tell them about the time a tribal chief in another country once offered him a woman as a gift and all he could think about was (because the Army won't let you have any gift worth over something like $65) ...

"Is she worth $65?"

And then, because anything over $65 has to go in a warehouse:

"If she's worth more than $65, will she be okay in the warehouse?"

Oh, the options of story telling do abound.

::hee hee::

2:01 PM - 2 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Progress...
Current mood: calm

I have been working pretty hard on HIGHBORN for the past month. Most of that has not been on new writing, but on completing the outline. This was needed both for me-- I knew where I wanted the novel to go but I needed a sense of how it was going to get there-- and for an agent I'm hoping will take me on. So over last weekend, I finished the detailed outline, polished the first 60 pages of HIGHBORN to the highest shine I could, and finalized two one-page pitches for what could be books 2 and 3 if this was to be considered for a series. It all went out on Monday, said agent received it on Wednesday, and now we wait. My fingers are so tightly crossed they look like pretzels. I've brought the goal number down to something a little more realistic; anything above 100,000 is cream. Here's the progress meter:

1:17 PM - 1 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Middle of the Night Walk Report
Current mood: calm

So it was actually kind of fun, although I was rather taken aback by the poop-out-ness of my team mates. MK, who talked me into this to begin with, got up out of his lawn chair and walked with me for about 20 minutes, then bombed out and went home. EE walked with me for about a half hour after that, then collapsed with her husband and twins in an RV. Incredibly, I was actually kind of energized, so I walked the rest of it by myself, be-booping around the track and singing along with the music coming out of the Kareoke (I have no idea how to spell that) machine on the stage... and doing a better job matching the words than the teenagers there, if I do say so myself. I said I'd do two hours, and by gawds, that's what I did. I took a 5 minute break to eat potato chips (for some reason I got ravenously hungry at about 4:10 a.m.) and let myself go home when I saw the sun come up at 5 a.m.

I managed to raise $370.00 for the American Cancer Society. Thank you to all my wonderful contributors-- you know who you are. Also thank you to all the wonderful people who donated on your own, bought luminaries, or donate a few dollars throughout the year. It all counts, and you all rock.

:-)

8:42 PM - 1 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Last Chance !!!
Current mood: bouncy

Yes, I am repeating myself: In only a few hours, I will get my sorry buns up in the middle of the night (2:30 ayam, to be exact) and go walk around Veterans' Memorial Park for two hours as part of the American Cancer Society Relay. If you can spare even a dollar or two, please sponsor me on my ACS Relay Page. Every dollar helps to fund research to conquer the cancer demon that wants to be in all of us. Thanks!

5:49 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

A Very Important Thing: Cancer
Current mood: tired

In a bit under a week, on May 9th (technically May 10th, but let's not get lost in the details), I'm going to get up at 2:30 in the morning, go to the center of my little town, and walk with a bunch of other people as part of the American Cancer Society Relay. I can't think of anyone who hasn't been touched by cancer, either by personal experience with the disease or by losing someone who has. Over the course of my life, cancer has taken my Uncle Garlon, my LJ friend Richard, acquaintances Al and Cookie VanderSluis (husband and wife, who died from different types of cancer only a few years apart), and my very good friend from Rudnick & Wolfe, Dorothy Harrington. My grandmother fought off cervical cancer before chemo was ever invented, and here and there in my family tree the disease pops its despicable head up before being, thankfully, beat down. My beloved Chanci, a Great Dane/Lab mix I had for 10 years, succumbed in 1991, after being whittled down in a single month to little more than a bag of bones that I had to carry up and down the stairs.

That's the bad news. The good news is that we are constantly searching for and finding ways to combat all the forms of this horrible disease, and we will not stop. Not now. Not tomorrow. Not ever. So if you can spare a few dollars-- literally, ANY amount-- please sponsor me on my ACS Relay Page here:

http://main.acsevents.org/goto/yvonnenavarro

Thank you... and thank you, again, to the people who have already been so generous!

5:42 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment