This Explains my Childhood

Frankly, I think that this is the best photo ever taken. Maybe because that’s my Gram holding her pet monkey (Gomer—who along with our Toy Fox Terrier growing up will be barring the pearly gates of heaven to me and my 36-First Cousins on my Mom’s Side).

It’s just a theory, okay?

It’s not that we did anything particularly worrisome. In fact Gomer was the one who yanked my hair and bit my bottom when I sat on his cage that one time. 

A Few of my Favorite Things 2025

These are a few of my favorite things from the past year. 

First being an eye massager. It might sound weird, it did to me when I received not one but TWO as gifts!

They don't massage your eyeballs. They gently press around them and come heated or both heated and cooled. It helps my dry eye and migraine before it really gets going, and even some of my vertigo. 

This is the first thing I've found that helps any of those things (except eye drops do help with dry eyes, if you're not allergic to them!). Since receiving them, I've given many as gifts. They're wonderful! They come in various brands and styles, so look at your choices and chose what works for you! 

No, I don't get kickbacks for any of these things. This is just a short list of things that really worked for me this past year!

Another favorite thing is a dog from the SPCA. (A cat even, if you roll like that!) It's a wonderful organization and this little girl in the lilac sweater is my latest favorite doggo. 

Yes, yes, she's not a thing. She's a person and thanks to the SPCA she's part of my family now!

Any of the online writing workshops from Peas with Honey. They're for any level of writing, including beginners. I've been taking these the past few months and I love them.                                                                                                                                                     It's always a real commitment for me to give up a couple hours on the weekend, yet I love every minute I spend writing with this teacher, Bibi. It's prompt writing using the Amherst Writers and Artists method, which is a positive reinforcement and inclusive type of writing workshop. It inspires writers to dig deep and put it on the page using fun and clever prompts.                                                                                                    I highly recommend Peas with Honey. It's fun and inspiring. It's done via ZOOM a couple hours about once a week. You can sign up for just one class or whatever works for you.                                                                                                                                         If you have any questions you'd like to ask me about it, please contact me through this website. I've written with this teacher for years and highly recommend this group. Classes have a bit of an international flair and they offer a variety of class types. 

Yellowstone

It must leave a Jurassic-size carbon footprint connecting flights from airport to airport to get to where you're going. That’s the reality of traveling from the little commuter airport where I live! Yet I do it because as the late great Freddie Mercury once said, Keep Yourself Alive. After doing time at my little airport, and then the Atlanta Airport, followed by the Salt Lake City Airport, I got myself to the Jackson Hole Airport during a torrential rainstorm. I dragged my luggage through all that rain because planes there let you off outside and there is no choice. (I’m skipping over the part about flying through a thunderstorm because I was so glad to finally get to where I was going that I didn’t mind that part.)

My rental car ended up getting super-sized, but why stop now? After driving through Jackson Hole in the dark and more rain, I eventually found the condo I’d rented and hurled myself into bed and slept. 

My first few days around Jackson Hole were spent exploring The Grand Tetons. 

Although I took countless photos, they don’t do any of the sights justice. The Grand Tetons are outside of Yellowstone. Yellowstone National Park is so enormous it's in both Wyoming and Montana. First I visited the Teton area. Then I moved into the Yellowstone National Park enormity. 

My photos just don’t capture the massiveness of these places, you can't smell the fresh air, or the way you can drive only a couple miles and go from gigantic mountains, to forests, to plains, lakes, geysers, canyons, and hot springs of every imaginable color. Even words can't grasp this place. Not to mention all of the wildlife. There are bison everywhere (think buffalo). Moose. Bear. Coyotes. Foxes. Wolves. The hassle of getting to this place is well worth the effort. 

After my days exploring the Jackson Hole area, I stayed in various places within Yellowstone National Park. I booked whatever availability there was in the villages within the park. In Grant Village I had a room, but also stayed in cabins at both Mammoth and Old Faithful. You do need to book about a year ahead, and that includes booking meals at the various restaurants. 

Hiking was my favorite activity during this trip. There are geysers and hot springs dotted over the park. They even ring Yellowstone Lake, which is incredibly huge. The pathways are mostly made up of decking material and you're safe to walk around as long as you stay on the paths. You can purchase these honking huge cans of bear spray for going off the grid hiking too. 

I'd seen the videos of tourists doing foolish things, but what took me by surprise is that it's going on in real time every moment you're there. I saw people stick their fingers into bubbling hot springs, people darting off the clearly marked paths, to run across thin earthen crusts full of oozing bubbling smoking geysers and variations of other volcanic activity, just to get a better picture. Every snap of your camera takes another fantastic picture. There's no need to risk your life. People raced toward wild animals to pet them. Where I live in the shire is full of wildlife. I've been battling a mangy little black bear all summer trying to keep him out of my trash. I know you don't fool with WILD ANIMALS. THEY DO NOT FOLLOW YOUR RULES. THEY DO NOT LIKE YOU. THEY LIKE FOOD. Including your trash. 

Obviously, too many of us don't live near wild animals on a daily basis. We have forgotten what they will do to your house for a half cup of birdseed at 2:00 a.m. We have forgotten how strong a four-hundred plus pound animal is. But, DUDE, don't you see the horns and TEETH? Don't make them remind you. 

Although, look at those sweet baby eyes! It's a trap!

I cannot wait to go back. 

It's September for a while

 

Here in the shire, September is the best month. The forests are still green, with only a few traitor branches sneaking in some autumn color. The skies are pristine blue with floofy white clouds that look like they fell out of a storybook. Our thermals are the best in the world, so sometimes you'll see a glider drifting soundlessly in circles over the low-slung hills. 

Mostly all I want to do this month is play frisbee with my favorite Golden Retriever. It's a heavy yellow and blue water disc that I slam to the ground so it'll roll far and Rupert can pretend he's chasing a rabbit into the woods. There's no real limit to how long Rupert and I can keep at this. He's one of those dogs who will NEVER EVER stop playing, and I literally hurt my arm from throwing that frisbee for hours and days. I've had to learn to throw it well with my other arm, or not play as much, and we can't have that. Playing with a dog is an excellent way to put off sitting in front of the computer and writing. As much as I love to write, I love to spend perfect days with a dog too.

My last book that came out was a Chicken Soup for the Soul Cat Stories one. I got to do a zoom call with some of the other writers and I have to share that it was a delight to see all those zoom boxes with writers looking out, most holding cats. This summer I've taken classes and read books and made art for fun,

and I did whatever Rupert felt like doing, too!

Twenty-Four Years of Chronic Vertigo

 

Ugh. Twenty-four years of chronic vertigo isn't a badge I want to wear. It's not even some grand accomplishment to brag about. Like I've survived this or endured this! Go me! It's not like I have a choice. It won't go away for pity's sake! 

I have a friend with Parkinson's Disease and she says that people will tell her how brave she is because she travels the world solo and continues slogging along in her beautiful DIFFICULT life despite the disease, but she says that she isn't brave because she has absolutely no choice but to fight it and move along. I tell her the bravery is in fighting it and doing her absolutely best despite the challenges but I get what she's saying. 

For me, I'm brave every day I don't have vertigo. I'm an absolutely hot garbage mess when I get it. Even though I've had it for twenty-four years now, it still comes as an absolute surprise every single freaking time I get it. I don't really know why I get and I get it when I get it, and I don't know what brings it on. (And I have a small hill of paperwork from trying to find a pattern of cause and effect.) It just shows up and I never know its coming. 

Sometimes I get it when I'm sleeping and sometimes I  wake up to it. Sometimes I get it when I throw back my head and laugh and sometimes I get it when I'm sitting and reading or watching a movie. It comes when it comes and I see no rhyme or reason to it. 

There are many variations of vertigo. Mine can be like full spinning or turning to look at something and staggering because I forgot not to ever do that, or tripping off an elevator because holy crap we just landed, or this fun little bounce bounce bounce thing that my head sometimes does when I'm not actually moving, or having to avoid anywhere with a ceiling fan swirling because holy crap everything is spinning, or a clock pendulum going back and forth and making me feel like I'm swinging back and forth, or news scrolling along a screen, or, humiliation upon humiliation, actually not being able to stomach a rocking chair. 

And some days I'm fine, and almost normal. Or at least I can fake it many days. When this first started and when I gave up on getting any answers to why or help from the medical community, I made a bucket list and went skydiving, hiked The Grand Canyon, ran races, traveled the world solo some, and I didn't die. Yet. 

It's just that there are many days when it feels like I'm going to die because I'm spinning. At this point in time I can honestly say that dying isn't my fear, it's the spinning. 

This is not an every single day problem, thank god, and I don't usually have all of those things happening at the same time. Once, a doctor suggested I try a daily antihistamine to see if it helped, and I didn't get bad vertigo for TEN ENTIRE WHOLE BLESSEDLY AMAZING WONDERFUL MONTHS. But then I had an allergic reaction to NSAIDs and had it for two months. That was last year. 

I think my vertigo is a perfect storm of a MAST cell problem and it stems from chronic migraine because it's mostly intertwined with migraine headaches and allergic reactions. They all showed up at the same time in the same year with each other. I do get BPPV (Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo). That's those ear crystal rock thingies that break off  in your semi-circular canals in your hearing apparatus. There is something called an Epley Maneuver that can help reposition those suckers. That rollover is not a one-trick pony. It depends on where in the canals the crystals break off. It works when done properly by someone who knows what they're doing and can tell where in your canals those crystals are wreaking havoc. 

A specialist can tell where your crystals are by reading variations in the nystagmus in your eyes. If it is done improperly, they can make it a lot worse. I actually have a doctor who specializes in BPPV and she's great. The problem is that when my BPPV gets activated it will continuously act up for weeks and weeks and weeks and forever (a month of vertigo is equal to forever I promise). Also,  I'd like to invite whoever calls it benign to give it a whirl for twenty-four years. 

There is also something called PPPD which is Persistent Postural-Perceptual Dizziness, which in my words means if you've had vertigo for decades, your brain expects it and in that expectation, it can create some of it. Brains are amazing but coupled with the things that your body can have go wrong, it might not always be trustworthy. 

Mostly I write these occasional vertigo columns to reach out to others who might have it. I'm not a medical professional in any way shape or form. I'm just another spinning body in this universe, and I DO NOT like it. When I read up on vertigo, which I like to do when I have it and I'm trying to not to move my head for days, I'll hold my phone off to one side of my vision and try to read about vertigo from the corner of my eye, without moving my head. I'm kinda waiting for someone to have a cure I can get on Amazon. What I notice is the same old same old, although there is more information now than ever. I see lots of, "Once you go through menopause, it usually stops." Just shut up. No it doesn't. (Like growing out of puberty will cure your acne! LIAR!) Okay, maybe for some one or two persons menopause stopped their vertigo, although I suspect it's more of a hypothesis than a reality. Because if that's a thing, that retiring your uterus means stopping chronic vertigo, there'd be a lot of women asking surgeons for an early retirement of said uterus. 

Ten Years of Greece, How do I Love Thee?

 

For the past ten years I've been going to Greece every summer. Except that year when no one was allowed to travel, I spend weeks to months packing, planning, and plotting my journey. Then a few days travel there, followed by a few weeks being there, and wrap it up with a few days traveling back home. 

The odd thing is that every year I go to the exact same place. Most years I go to write with Women Reading Aloud. Though I arrive early and stay long after. I've never been to Santorini, or any of the popular islands. Often I'll check out places or sights on the mainland during my journey, Athens, Kalamata, Meteora. My favorite museum—The Acropolis Museum—my favorite hotel in Athens—the Airport Sofitel—my favorite Greek Salad.

Usually the only islands I see are Skiathos and Skopelos in the Northern Sporades and only those because I need to pass them on my way to Alonissos, my favorite island. Maybe it's indicative that I don't need to see all of the islands in Greece to pick a favorite. I've been married to the same man for forty years. I didn't have to meet them all to know he was the one for me. I know when something works for me. This man. This island. Dark chocolate. I'm happy. Sure, I like to try different trips, different places at times. This place, however, doesn't change. As long as I can get myself through the long and arduous journey, that's where I'm going. 

Know what I do there? Other than write with WRA, I mean? Nothing. I go to my favorite beaches, drift in the sea, lay under an umbrella or right on top of the stones on the beaches. Sometimes I sit by the sea in a taverna with a cup of cappuccino, fresh watermelon juice, or water and I don't even think. I'm just there. Once, a particularly annoying person kept saying, "Oh, you go there to meet a man." Please, girlfriend, I have a man. I'm not in love with another man. I'm in love with an entire ISLAND, with an entire PLACE, COUNTRY, SEA. Some people do not understand love at all. Greece is very easy to love. 

     

There is So Much Condemnation in the Eye of a Bird

 

A House Finch built a nest in an artificial tree by my front door. 

Anytime anyone opened the front door or came on the porch the Finch flew away. I tried not to open the door and everyday I tried to sneak a picture when Mama Bird was away!

At some point I realized I could spy on her through the glass of the door. She did not appreciate this at all and gave me the stink eye when I did it. For a week or two she sat on her eggs and I used the side door, mostly. 

There is so much condemnation in the eye of a bird. So much, "What grief are you bringing to my nest?"

Then this happened! A baby bird hatched at last. This is after a couple weeks of me peeking through the glass and whipping the door open when I saw she was gone. Then I'd again hold my phone over the nest and snap a photo quickly and shut the door. 

Now this. I thought they were all hatched. But later, I checked again.

Now how did that happen? I think that the little ones were sleeping on their shy sibling. Maybe Mama Bird rolled it back out. 

Look at these little raptors! Beaks and eyes and everything. It took days for them to look so fully formed!

Sadly, this baby bird story doesn't have a happy ending. Last night I was on a ZOOM call with other Chicken Soup for the Soul What I Learned from My Cat authors. Too bad I don't have a screenshot of that big zoom call filled with authors, half of them holding a cat. It really looked adorable yet this morning I wasn't feeling anything good towards cats. This morning I woke to an empty nest and when I checked my RING camera, this is what I saw. 

After all the hard work of that Mama Bird, now I understand some of that condemnation in the eye of a bird. I've no idea whose cat this is but I'm going to move that decorative tree so no other birds make the mistake of nesting in it. 

Another Book! It Comes Out on May 20th 2025!

 

Writing for Chicken Soup for the Soul makes me so happy. Yes, I'm still writing novels too. There are several that need to see an editor before publication. Not to mention a publisher before publication! The Chicken Soup books are easy-peasy. I write a story and send it in and they do all that magic that turns it into a book! This is exactly my speed right now.

New stories are forever clogging up my attention by cutting in front of books I'm working on. Short stories have become my solution to that. A lovely anthology like Chicken Soul works just perfectly. Plus, I enjoy reading them too. I like to read as much as I like to write. In fact I write because then I can write the exact story I want to read at that moment. 

This is my cat story. It's about Norman Bates, he is the coolest cat I've ever known. The meanest cat also, which is why he wound up with a serial killer name but that did not decrease the cool factor. 

Actual Photo of the real Norman Bates

Hope you enjoy my cat story and the real Norman Bates!

The Glitter Globe and Living with a Vestibular Migraine Brain

A Glitter Globe is how I think of my vestibular migraine brain. If you were to float your brain inside a skull filled with water, that's what a vestibular migraine feels like. That is not as much fun as it might sound. It comes with an entire grab bag of other symptoms like head-lightning, thunder-war pain, flashing eyeball lights, occasional bouts of blindness, and since brains are connected to everything else in the human body it can also access pretty much everything else and wreak havoc and chaos inside your fun-house body on a whim. 

Mostly I think of my brain as a sort of high-strung terrier that I must pacify so he doesn't go berserk. When I book a flight, Poopsie-Woopsie must be considered. He must sit on the aisle so he can make a wee anytime the mood hits. (If you don't think bathrooms and migraines are connected, I assure you that they can be.) Poopsie must have plenty of sleep and access to water at all times. If you get dehydrated, the migraine brain gets pissed-off and that must be avoided at all costs. How do you not get dehydrated on long-haul flights and days of travel? You drink water and pee, and pee and drink water the entire trip. If you spend an entire three-hour layover doing that, airport security will sometimes want to give you an extra screening. 

My terrier brain suffers from food-allergies and antibiotics sometimes causes me anaphylaxis. So we carry safe food with us and epi-pens and tend to shun medications. Over the years I've gotten somewhat good at keeping Poopsie happy. I attend the Migraine World Summit to look for other tips to care for this whiny bitch of a brain. I've even found a doctor who specializes in vertigo and she's incredibly skilled at figuring out what kind of vertigo it is this time (mostly where inside the itty bitty vestibular system within my ear canals things have gone haywire). Fortunately for me the worst of my vertigo presents as Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo (BPPV). 

Once, I went almost an entire year without vertigo. My regular doctor had recommended I try a small dose of daily antihistamine for all the allergies (we don't want Poopsie to scratch all her hair out). It helped! As the owner of a migraine brain I was ecstatic. But then I took meds for a leg injury and Poopsie lost her sh*t as they say. 

Apparently NSAIDs and migraines don't like each other. That's something I should have known. I had to take him to the emergency room one morning when he couldn't see. For two months Poopsie carried on howling about migraines and vertigo. It has taken a lot of loving care to calm him down and we're still having the chronic vision glitter while simultaneously drinking all the fresh clean water in the state. Poopsie actually wore out the flush handle on a toilet from all the constant wee's, then had an allergic reaction to those nice scented Bath & Body Works hand soaps. I thought he'd chew the palms off his hands (paws?) from itching.

What's Your Favorite Book?

 

This is one of those questions where I have strong opinions and can out talk about anyone. If you ask me about hot button topics or current events, I'm much less opinionated and more curious about what you think of those things. Though with books, I want to know what you're reading too. Only you might have to shout to be heard over my tirade about the books I love.

As a child I fell in love with The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner. That was my first grade love and the first stories I remember fan-fic rewriting endings to in my head. At some point around then I found a copy of The Forgotten Door by Alexander Key—that was my first fantasy story. It's about a boy who falls through a doorway into another world. It's a thin book and a worthy read for adults too. 

Yes, I loved the Little House books. There was something slow and peaceful about life on the prairies that calmed me when times were rough. I read and reread those. E. Nesbit books are also a childhood favorite. Five Children and It is delightful but I also adored The Railway Children which may or may not have inspired The Boxcar Children. Feel free to fight with me about that in the comments. 

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J.R. Tolkien and why The Hobbit is my most beloved of them could surely ignite some scorn among the bibliophile crowd. Though I read the Harry Potter books as an adult, and I loved them. J.K. Rowlings book The Casual Vacancy is brilliant in my opinion. If I could, I'd replace all copies of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorn taking up space in high school curriculums with it. 

My reading in high school tended toward more popular novels from the New York Times bestseller list books than the classics. The classics I hit harder as time moved on. I love Dickens, D.H. Lawrence, Edith Wharton, Twain, Austen, although another controversial opinion is Tolstoy. I'll never forgive those sixty or so pages about Vronsky's horse and when Anna Karenina threw herself under the train (oopsie spoiler alert) my only thought was honestly, well, thank god, because if I had to spend another minute in her brain I might have done the same). Sorry. Not sorry.

My favorite Stephen King book is The Body (it's retitled Stand by Me when they made it into a movie), although The Stand is neck and neck there. So good. My favorite Dean Koontz is (Sorry Mr. Koontz, you know what I'm going to say here) Watchers. Give me a good futuristic science experiment with a human level intelligent Golden Retriever and I am compelled to purchase all your books forever, but I do keep going back to read Watchers again. 

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon is a book I've loved since the 1990's when it came out in one of those old Book of the Month clubs where you actually got a little catalog in your snail mail and picked the titles that appealed. She's written so many sequels with such rich story that I've long suspected that she is in fact Claire and her husband is Jamie and they're here from the 1700's. Prove me wrong. The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley is another fabulous read. It's the King Arthur story from the point of view of Morgan Le Fay. Though I think the writer was posthumously cancelled. I always like to tell people to read that little story (it's a tome of epic proportions). It's brilliant story. 

On top of my popular book loves are all of Michael Crichton's (Jurrasic Park, Timeline, Andromeda Strain) and even his posthumously written book Eruption, I incorporated piles of non-fiction in my book love-a-thon too. Stephen Hawkins A Brief History of Time (every time I reread it I make a mental note to do that again because I can almost follow this time), or The God Particle by Leon Lederman, anything by Brian Greene and Neil deGrasse Tyson too because when it comes to science, I am a fan. 

Although The Ends of the World by Peter Brannon makes me want to get a PhD in Geology and spend a lifetime with fossils and rocks. It's a story about the five mass extinctions and I found it incredibly uplifting and fascinating, and I will never stop tormenting my husband about the fact that scientists found the missing link lizard somewhere around Hyner Mountain, Pennsylvania because his people kind of hail from there. We've been married since about the day after those lizards crawled out of the ooze so I'm always shopping for such information to torment him with.

Speaking of lizards, War with the Newts by Karel Chapek is one of the best stories I've ever read. This Czech writer and his brother were on Hitler's public enemy number one lists when the Nazi's marched into Prague. It is astonishing to me how what might be considered older books are possibly more relevant today than when they were written. Another couple favorites are All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doer, and having watched it on Netflix is not the same. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini astonished me because growing up in a small town in Ohio in the 70's and 80's was apparently incredibly similar to Afghanistan about that time. That realization really stretched my brain.

Now, I'm going to add only Art /Spiegelman's Maus Books because it's thundering outside and here in The Shire that means the power is going DOWN, plus my husband since the Devonian Period keeps interrupting and my brain is hitting bumpy tracks like that one in Anna Karenina. So, to the book club that asked me what my favorite book is, this is my answer. Sometimes I don't exactly follow directions as you can see. 

Don't Think I Don't See You

 

You may think I'm not looking, I am.

You may think I don't see you, I do.

You may think this is a sure thing, keep thinking that.

Making Art When it's Storming

 

The power goes out here in The Shire quite often, so I'm used to that. Sudden darkness, confusion, losing my place. The computer has battery backup, and there are pencils and paper if it lasts long. Storms can be distracting though and sometimes my handwritten work turns to a list of things to do when the electricity or internet returns. Sometimes my notes become doodles or I dig out glue sticks and make a collage next to a short story. 

Rarely, I start cleaning or organizing my office. Occasionally I'll meander off and clean or organize something in my house. Connectivity is important when you clean, so that you can get online and order cleaning supplies or boxes to store things you've sorted. You can't do that in a bad storm. 

All this noise in the world has made me decide to downsize a third of most everything. Clothes. Things. Not books of course, let's not be crazy. Everything else though. We need breathing room around here. Without power there's not much I can do but make space in which to breathe easier.