Scrapbookers I've taught

As you can see by the pages I helped others make, I work with strong color themes and keep the pages uncluttered by most of the crap available at the stores. I believe in throwing out all but the best photos and saving non-photo souvenirs and momentos. Postcards are great resources even for good picture takers.

Being a writer, I also believe very strongly in scrapbook journaling. Why put so much work in on a page if later no one will know who those people are or what they are doing?

I bought my husband a slip-in frame and he keeps a rotating gallery of grandbaby and wife pages in his office.

BEST TIP: new to scrapbooking and don't know where to start? Start with your most recent trip, recital, sports event and work your way backwards while keeping up with current events!

AOL chooses my blog as #1 of week

Thank you, AOL.

I've been an AOL member since my daughter got married and moved to Lubbock. Intra-state telephone rates are outrageous in Texas so we both signed on so we could "chat" in our own private chat room, using a weird title for our room. That's been a while - she divorced, remarried, and has a 4-1/2 year old now.

During the days of irrational exuberance in the stock market, I spent a lot of time on AOL's stock chat boards. Especially the one for AOL stock. I was very proud when one of my posts on the emotional aspects of investing was chosen as Post Of The Day. :( That stock went down $1,000,000, but it is still up ten times what I paid for it.

Wouldn't it be perfect ending if Time Warner published my novel?

Reno Sunrise

The first photos were taken from my room at the Atlantis. The second photo was taken from my Peppermill room in Reno. You can see the Atlantis Hotel & Casino in the distance. To do the photos justice, you really need to click to View Larger. To do the sunrises justice you need to have been there.

Reno Gambling Trip

A friend came into town and we played several days of video poker.

For those who do not play, video poker is basically five-card draw. You bet 5 coins per hand and can discard up to all 5 cards to try to improve your hand. You do not have to beat anyone but are paid according to a schedule on each machine. There are many variations, inlcuding the popular 3,4,10,50 & even 100 lines at a time.

Although I am not a "whale," I am considered a high roller. All hotels, meals, air fare, and Jay Leno show were comped. In spite of several good-sized jackpots, I broke even the first week after my bankroll started dropping as quickly as the temperature.

The first photo is what happened the next week when I took my friend back to Reno for her flight home. The dollar machine dealt me a Royal Flush. I was playing five hands, $5 each for a total bet of $25.

IGT manufactures these fun machines (I own their stock) and you can play on their web site, but it doesn't teach you the correct strategy. For that, you need to buy WinPoker or Frugal Video Poker, both available at Video Poker Home Page

Snow & Full Moon over Lake Tahoe

This is the first time in six years I haven't spent the entire fall at Lake Tahoe. After two early snow storms I just had to get out of Houston. Too late to get a cheap fare, even on Southwest, so I used a frequent flier award.

Flying into Reno I was told I would need chains to go over either of the passes to the lake. Lucky for me, driving restrictions were lifted just before I got to the top of Mt. Rose at 8,900' elevation.

It was still snowing and cloudy on the south side of the lake, making it look like a Currier & Ives Christmas card. It got even better when the clouds cleared overnight to reveal light from the full moon reflecting off the snow covered mountains. The moon set mid-morning the next day against a clear blue sky. As the sun melted the snow off the pines and rooftops it seemed to be raining from a cloudless sky.

One Sentence Story

A few years ago, over Thanksgiving week on the Caribbean island of Hispanola, in the Dominican Republic, just east of and over a mountain range from Haiti, on the beaches of the famous Amber Coast, I surprised my husband and friends from Houston, then half dozing in chaise lounges lined up in the shade of palm trees like so much beach flotsam, by repeatedly stooping at the edge of the surf to collect a satisfying mix of the two prettiest types of the worn smooth marbleized stones (flat multi-green clam-sized ones and translucent white marble-sized ones), which I then rinsed in my resort room's sink and took home in my already bulging suitcase and later displayed in a crystal vase filled with water which intensified the color, much as the ocean had done when I first saw them.

Walker Lake in Nevada Desert between Reno & LV

In the last six years I have driven the 500 miles between Reno and Las Vegas about fifteen times. I'll add to this journal as I find the photos.

Walker Lake

Topping a crest on 95 going south, the sight of Walker Lake always startles me. A real lake in the desert - both unexpected and natural looking. The barren beach-colored mountains and flats separate the lake and sky, both a polished turquoise.

I drive twenty minutes serpentining at the base of rocky mountains a very short distance from the shore of the lake. A lone pickup with a camper top is parked midway, the owner fishing alone. I used to see more fishermen, but then there used to be more fish. The lake, drying up, continues to become saltier as the water level diminishes.

The Great Basin Desert covers Nevada, lapping onto nearby states like the ancient Lake Lahontan it once was. No water falling or flowing within the basin ever reaches the sea.

Blue Moon

 

Excerpt from my novel-in-progress, "Cowbird Lodge, NV" -- (Becky is driving from Reno to Vegas to do something she dreads but must do.)

An oldies station came into range and Becky sang along as they played "Drivin' My Life Away," from the year she and the Professor were together.

A few moments later, the biggest brightest full moon rose over the Timpahute Range to Becky's left.  Barely aware of the road, she stared, mesmerized by the beauty of the silhouetted mountains against the indigo sky.  As the road angled, the moon disappeared behind the next mountain and it was over.  Surely, she would never in a lifetime see anything that stunning again.

And then, because she was in the right place at the right time, a small miracle happened.  More rare than a blue moon, a mere trick of the calendar, this moon rose again - repeating the process in all of its perfection.  Becky watched, fascinated.  Then, it became obscured by another mountain, and this time she was filled with anticipation and hope that she would be given yet another chance.

With the odometer at 419 Becky saw a red glow over the mountain.  On the horizon the faint vertical shaft that was the laser from the peak of Luxor Casino's pyramid beckoned her.

I'm dreaming of ... early retirement

As the country-western song says, I'm "too old to die young."  The challenge of planning and having a meaningful retirement seems to have snuck up on me.  Bertrand Russell wrote that "to be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization, and at present very few people have reached this level."  Although I don't think we have any more successfully completed this task now than when he wrote it in 1930, we are getting ready to try.  We Boomers are getting ready to indulge in a mass-retirement the likes of which the world has never seen.

This is our last chance to get it right.  We are the same generation who turned our children over to franchise daycare and let the passive, mindless entertainment of television suck up whatever energy was left after our two-career work week.  We've abandoned our religions, hometowns, and spouses at an alarming rate.  We've made divorce, single-parent homes, and only children commonplace.

I think that these could all be symptoms of one central problem - the inability to prioritize, to see the difference between things that are important and things that are merely urgent.  Walking the dog after work may be urgent, but having a valid will is important.  Yet the dog rarely goes unwalked, but few people I know have reasonably current wills.  Our lives are so full of urgent clutter that without a clear vision, one gets bogged down before ever getting to life's important tasks.

Will Rogers said,  "Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save."  That was also written in 1930 -  maybe people turn more introspective in financially hard times.

I accept the challenge, "to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."  Or die trying.

Books I recommend for writers

Our Texas home is two blocks from a Half-Price Books that keeps a great inventory of writing books.  I've built up a library of about a hundred and I love them all.  I'm currently looking for a copy of "Letters to a Fiction Writer" edited by Frederick Busch...

Thunder and Lightning by Natalie Goldberg

The First Five Pages by Noah Lukeman

The Plot Thickens by Noah Lukeman

The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler

Writing the Blockbuster Novel by Albert Zuckerman

On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner

Setting by Jack M. Bickham

Stein on Writing  by Sol Stein

I Could Tell You Stories by Patricia Hampl (memoirs)

The Art & Craft of Novel Writing by Oakley Hall

Writing the Novel, from plot to print by Lawrence Block

Favorite Movies

                                                   TOP TEN

These movies are my comfort food, I never tire of seeing them.  If I am packing, cleaning (yeah, like that happens), magazine reading, sick in bed -- whatever -- I will frequently choose these from cable over something I have not seen already.

Big Chill

Rainman

Pretty Woman

Moonstruck

Mermaids

Michael

Nobody's Fool    (There's Richard Russo again!)

As Good as it Gets

Paint Your Wagon

Continental Divide

                                                   OTHER FAVORITES

City Slickers

Galaxy Quest  (I don't know if my love of this funny movie is because of my early exposure to sci-fi geeks)

Heart and Souls (a sentimental favorite because, like the flapping of butterfly wings in chaos theory, it changed my life) 

My 10 Favorite Books

Empire Falls by Richard Russo

Widow for One Year by John Irving

Cider House Rules by John Irving

Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler

Once and Future King by T.H. White

Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon (non-fiction)

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Hawaii by James Michener

Lying on the Couch by Irwin Yalom

Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell (non-fiction)

OTHER FAVORITES

Particles and Luck by Louis B. Jones (a quirky slapstick for intellectals)

Fooled by Randomness by Nassim N Taleb (math philosophy?)

Positively Fifth Street by James McManus (fact-packed but great poker memoir)