My writing business, snow, and my son's visit

Sometimes it is better to write a little than not to write at all. I like this blog because I feel like I can write tiny posts without it harming anything.

Some of my other blogs are there for more important purposes, and so I write articles with a minimum of 500 words, and sometimes much, much longer. The pressure to write long articles is enormous because they do better in search engine results.

Today I've set before myself the task of writing 2 articles. One is a revision of an unpublished old article on what to do if your home business gets more business than you can handle. The other - I think will be on parental rights for disabled people.

And now, a prayer:

Heavenly Father, please help me with my writing. You alone know how hard this is for me. You are the only one who watches as I stumble and fall, and you know how much failure has become the norm for me. Please help me today and every day to get my work done and to write articles that are truly useful to those who need to read them. Let me do it all for You. In the name of Your Son, Jesus Christ, Amen.

It snowed all night on Thursday/Friday this week and we're expecting a lot more snow before Christmas. In the two years since I moved to Idaho, I've never seen deep snow. I saw deeper snow when I lived in Happy Camp, in California.

It gets a lot colder here, though, and the snow freezes to the pavement, whereas in Happy Camp the roads were usually cleared right away. People here drive on frozen, icy packed snow like it was just nothing.

This is what I saw when I woke up Friday morning. This is what Northern Idaho is supposed to look like in the winter... though too often I see no snow at all. The snow here is only four inches.

When I went into my office (a bedroom in my apartment) I saw that my window was iced over. I'm trying to train myself to take photos whenever I see something awesome... because I know it won't last long. Something will change. The ice melts, or light patterns change. So I snapped a few photos right away.

Once I settled into my office chair, which is a chaise lounge with a card-table desk that goes over it, I saw this sight out that window. The roofs, covered by white, and the icy window slowly warming.

That table is for filing. The little green-topped Truvia jars are what I keep little things in - like rubber bands, buttons, paper clips, etc..

Last week I decided to sponsor a poverty-stricken child in Mexico. I wrote about it on my Prayer-Power blog: Prayer for Children Living in Poverty. I love this little girl and want so much to be a blessing to her and her family, and her town. Her name is Brisia and she's eight years old, of Mayan descent.

A few weeks ago my youngest son came by to visit. I hadn't seen him in over a year so this was a wonderful event for me. I had to walk down to the truck stop on the corner, and he came rolling in with an 18-wheeler.

We ate dinner together at the Subway in the truck stop. This is how he gets his vegetables... something only a mom would spend time thinking about, I guess.

Okay, I'm ready for another visitor. Who wants to be next?

I'd better go do some serious writing now.

I Spent the Morning Reading About Bigfoot

I've been a Bigfoot blogger for ten years now. Go ahead and laugh if you want to. It is weird how these things happen.

There's always been curiosity about the big elusive creature. Does anyone forget the first time they saw the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot video?



When my 2 youngest children were about ages 6 through 10 we took a lot of "home school field trips" and several times were in Trinity County, CA - to visit Weaverville, the Joss House, the museum there, and the area around Clair Engle Lake, aka. Trinity Lake. As we approached Trinity Center, CA - there was a Bigfoot statue, and I was immediately drawn to it. "This is what I've been looking for," my heart told me. "They're here."

Ever since I first heard about the town of Happy Camp, I wanted to be there. Happy Camp, CA is a very remote small town in the center of the Klamath National Forest in Northern California. On January 11, 2000 I moved into a cabin-like house there, surrounded by the forest. The house was just outside of the town, in a semi-secluded area. There were other houses nearby.

The town of Happy Camp is full of Bigfoot statues now, but when I moved there, the only Bigfoot statue was the one in front of the post office.

There were also "Bigfoot footprints" painted on the sidewalk in front of the liquor store, and many of the businesses in the town were named after Bigfoot. There was the Bigfoot Trailer Park, Bigfoot Towing, and the Bigfoot Car Wash. That was in 2000 - several years before JavaBob opened his restaurant, JavaBob's Bigfoot Deli. Now that is closed but there's a place called the Bigfoot Store that has a deli in it, across the street from where JavaBob's restaurant was.

Brandon Tennant of Idaho, and JavaBob Schmalzback in JavaBob's Bigfoot Deli late in 2005, in Happy Camp, CA. At the time we met Brandon Tennant, he was doing research while organizing a Bigfoot conference held in Pocatello, Idaho in 2006.

Bigfoot Lives in Idaho
Brandon Tennant illustrated this.
Buy at Amazon.

I was always curious about Bigfoot, and wondered why so few of the Happy Camp local old-timers had anything to say about it. They acted like it was a joke, but they loved the annual Bigfoot Jamboree, a three day annual festival over Labor Day weekend.

By 2005 JavaBob was president of the Chamber of Commerce and I worked in a small office across the street from his deli. The chamber needed a focus for marketing Happy Camp and chose to market it as an artist's retreat town. I told JavaBob that we already had a theme in the town - and it was (and still is) Bigfoot.

Monsters, Myths, and Me
By Robert (JavaBob) Schmalzbach
Buy at Amazon

Anyhow, I got serious about wanting to find the truth about Bigfoot. I wanted to know why this town claimed a theme of Bigfoot but then denied any knowledge of Bigfoot sightings in the area. So I bought the domain name for my blog, Bigfoot Sightings, and started doing research.

I've never seen one, but many credible people have, and I know they're real. I collected no less than five Bigfoot sighting reports about sightings that happened within a mile of the cabin I lived in, there in Happy Camp.

When I moved to Idaho in 2013 I wanted to be able to continue Bigfoot research in the forests around where I live, in Northern Idaho. I live in Post Falls, which is on a prairie. No Bigfoot here! And I have no car anymore... so I can't do field research. But I do intend to continue working on my blog, which has been silent for many months now. I spent this morning "cleaning it up" - ie: making format improvements - and reading the amazing comments people leave there about their Bigfoot sightings.

I do believe I'll be blogging more there, soon. It is time for me to compile the rest of what I know about Bigfoot sightings in the Klamath River Valley.

... I said yesterday that I might write more about Keith today, but I'm just not ready. Maybe soon, but not today.

Update 8/23 - I decided to write about Keith on my other blog: How Comforting it is to Know He Takes Care of Us

An Update - My Life During 2013 and 2014

A lot has happened since I last posted here.

1. In March 2013 Bob's instability and indecisiveness helped me reach a breaking point for my residency in Happy Camp and for the relationship. I became 100% determined to move and leave him, to the point that my emotions died. I truly felt emotionally flat and desperate to change my situation there.

2. I decided to move to Idaho, and proceeded to downsize. Bob wanted to go with me. I threw away bag after bag of needless things, gave things away, gave most of my books to the library book sale, gave writing books to the Chamber of Commerce, sold what was left of my furniture including my grandmother's bedroom set which I really didn't want to sell... but I realized the need to sell my furniture so I could move more easily. [It turned out to be a good idea.]

3. The day before my move to Idaho, Bob annoyed me for the last time by threatening to burn down the house with me in it, and I told him I never wanted to see him again. He finally (!) agreed to remove all his possessions from the U-Haul truck we were loading, and the house, and he vanished into my memory. I missed him for a while, but no longer do. I'm happy he's no longer part of my life. He is a narcissist and I needed peace of mind . . . and indeed, I do have peace of mind now.

4. I gave my car to Bob before he vanished. I gave my van to my son... neither were working well enough that I wanted responsibility for them anymore. I decided that I wanted to be car-less so I'd be forced to get more exercise - walking and cycling.

5. I drove myself to Idaho, but not before I nearly died from heat exhaustion while cleaning out the house I vacated.

6. I found a nice apartment in Post Falls, Idaho only hours before I would have been forced to live in a homeless shelter.

7. Two weeks later I walked into a church for the first time in many years, and gave my life and heart to Jesus.

8. I attended a lot of church services and Bible studies, and made new friends. All my closest friends here in Idaho are Christians.

9. I started the Book Lady YouTube Channel and made a lot of videos in 2014.

10. I was baptized on July 4, 2014. Freedom in Christ.

11. I trained myself to ride a bicycle and took a 37-mile bike journey on October 4, 2014. I rode on the North Idaho Centennial Trail from the Washington state line to the end of the trail on the eastern edge of Lake Coeur d'Alene.

12. Now I'm in the process of moving again, to another apartment in Post Falls. I'm leaving a ground floor apartment to live in a third floor apartment. . . and I'm very happy about that.