Maybe a Butterfly After All: according to my friend . . .

Last night after the worship encounter evening at our church (all music, no sermon) I talked to my friend about my travel plan, and she said I was going to be like a butterfly. She said I came here to North Idaho like a caterpillar, and have been in a cocoon for a long time (my comfy apartment?) and now will be coming out of the cocoon to be like a butterfly in my future travel (and service) life. I thought it was cool synchronicity that she came up with the butterfly analogy right after I'd written a blog post claiming not to be a social butterfly!

#vanlife

Truth is, the van life will put me into much closer contact with other human beings in the future, and maybe that's one of the reasons I must go there. Right now, I spend most of my time in an ivory tower. A nice two-bedroom apartment on the third floor, with a great view. Today my great view started with wet streets, from rain, and now, in the last hour, turned white with big snowflakes. Like I said, snow was on the way.

Gratitudes:

1. So grateful for the worship encounter evenings at my church, once a month. Awesome experience last night! Give it all to Jesus - and trust Him for the right results - in EVERYTHING ...

2. I'm grateful for the discussion I had with my friend (Nita) about prayer . . . about how we need to give every situation to Jesus in prayer. He wants to hear our concerns. He already knows! But He wants us to be able to identify and verbalize our concerns to Him, and trust Him with them. For example - my difficult relationships with siblings and a few other family members. I can't fix a thing and have done plenty to mess things up... so I feel my efforts are hopeless. This morning I was ruminating about my situation again, and realized that this is a situation I need to identify, pray about, and give to the Lord, and He will do His Will... which is the best thing that can be done for all involved. Praise the Lord!

3. I am grateful for Naomi's neglect of me (parental estrangement) because it has taught me to understand what God feels when His children turn away from Him. Ah, the pain of it all . . . but I was one of those children turning away from Him toward false gods and false prophets, and now that I've been welcomed back, like the prodigal son, having spent so much of my life in ignorance (agnosticism, the word, derives from the Greek word for ignorance) I'm finding Jesus still loves me, and shines His light on me, and gives me the full heart I've always yearned for. I know I am loved, and what is better than that?



Plan for the day:

1. Figure out a new budget, heading into 2019, accounting for travel expenses

2. Write a book review for my lindajomartin.com blog . . . I want to review the best books I read during 2018. I'm starting with Blue Highways.

3. Walk 4000 steps and cycle 30 minutes on my exercise bike while listening to an audiobook

Currently reading:

1. The Nightingale, by Kristen Hannah. I passed the half-way point and now I'm headed downhill. That's what the second half of a book feels like to me - the downhill half of a hike.

2. Jesus Calling, by Sarah Young. I've been reading this devotional since last summer, and like it a lot. It always reminds me how much Jesus loves me.

Some Recent Articles I've Posted

I haven't written here lately, but that doesn't mean I haven't been writing.

Today I wrote about how God takes care of us:

When Things Don't Go Right

The past two weeks I've been working on the 2016 rebuild of my Literature For Kids website, posting some of my inventory of articles about how to write for children.

Place Children's Story Characters in Unusual Settings - Literature For Kids

Themes in Children's Fiction - Literature For Kids

And more.

I also posted three new articles at FightCPS last month, and three at Klamath Design.

There are others....

At Bennachti.com I wrote: Mocha Coffee Fashion and Basic Blogging Instructions.

At my River Girl site I wrote The Chinese Prospectors of Happy Camp and River Girl by Kelley Mickwee, A Song.

I wrote other places too. I started an archive of art products I like at Kit.com: Artista

Well, this is the work that I do. Writing is apparently my "passion" in life... that and my savior, Jesus Christ, who keeps me happy and provides all I need.

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.

To Homeschool or Not to Homeschool

I started homeschooling my children in 1995. I loved the adventure. My son wanted to be homeschooled, after being bullied in kindergarten by a group of girls.

I researched curriculum and educational activities, took my children to the school supply store, read novels to them, and loved them always. We went on numerous educational trips to state historic parks, to drive the entire Mother Lode highway, and even drove to the Peace Arch and Canada, all in the name of home education.

I wanted my children to learn at their own pace and study what they wanted to learn about. Mission accomplished.

Years later, my family members still think I was wrong to homeschool them. According to what they think, I should have left them in school to be bullied and get a cookie-cutter education so they could be just like everyone else.

What I have now are two adult children who are capable of creative thinking, who are independent and self-supporting, who are unique and capable.

I'm happy with the way my homeschooled kids turned out. My family members may want to denigrate my homeschool efforts, but as I recall, they were not there to help. I'm the only one who knows what I went through and why I did what I did.

Mommy Angst

I've been informed by my daughter (age 16) that I'm in big trouble because I'm not perfect (let me count the ways) - obviously an occupational hazard when you're a MOM.

Mea Culpa Baby.

My shortcomings of the day: (1) mentioned that she consumes more than 50% of the ice cream locally whereas she accounts for only 25% of the local consumers, and (2) didn't buy enough when I went to the grocery store. Gee, I didn't have much to spend - could that have anything to do with it?

Now that I've been put in my place by the 16-year-old expert who also believes I should leave my dh because he doesn't do enough around the house... I think I'll have a party. (Looks like a pity-party to me. Please forgive me.)

Yesterday was my oldest child's 32nd birthday. Yes, that means I've been doing the motherhood thing for 32 years and I'M NOT PERFECT YET. Well excuuuuuse me. I think I need to give it up and retire. My youngest will be 15 on June 1. Yay.

I put a "Happy Birthday to Joshua" on my Coast to Coast AM Weblog.

Speaking of kids...

Speaking of kids... my second daughter's birthday was on January 14. For some reason that morning I started my journaling (I journal in a notebook regularly) and this poem insisted on being written:

Happy Birthday Naomi! - You're 24 today. :)

Even though you're far away
You know I think of you every day.
I wonder what you say and do
And is the world being good to you.
I wonder if you're happy now.
If you are, please take a bow.
But if your heart is sad and blue,
Remember the love I have for you.

...
Anyhow, after writing all that sappy stuff I tried to decide what to do with it. You see.. Naomi is my child who decided years ago never to talk to me again. She was raised by her father and his girlfriend, doesn't know me hardly at all, and apparently believed some brainwashing the barren g/f did in order to have "a child of her own." Long sad story... which I'm tired of relating.

So I was trying to decide what to do with my birthday poem. I thought about posting it here or on one of my websites just hoping someday she might find it. I thought about leaving it in my journal only just in case she might someday read that. Then I suddenly decided to send it to my oldest daughter and ask her to forward it if she had the heart to. Well, guess what - she did it! I'm so happy. Naomi may hate me, despise me, whatever... I don't know. But I do know that 24 years ago on January 14, 1981 I gave birth to her. It hurt one hell of a lot - in fact that was my most painful birth of the five. I loved her from before her birth and still to this day love her and I've never stopped. So on January 14... I feel the day belongs partly to me. The poem, to me, felt like a gift from God. It was that spontaneous. I even had a good cry over it, and usually I hate crying, but this felt good.

Moving

I can't believe I'd even consider moving from my wonderful home in Happy Camp... but we are really thinking about leaving sometime during the next year. The main reason is because our teenage daughter doesn't have any friends here, plus she's nearing college age and needs to settle into a college town before that time comes. We would like to stay near her during her early adult years. She's even talking about staying in our home past the age of eighteen. My son will probably want to do that too, though we haven't talked about it. He's 14 and I don't think he's even considered moving away from us eventually.

So my daughter's choices of college towns are Eureka and Santa Cruz... both very nice seaside areas to live in. We're planning to move to Eureka because its closer to where we now live. Plus we like what we've seen of it on our many visits there.

I'm sure only a person who's lived in the absolute boonies (like where we are now) could appreciate what we see in the town... in terms of advantages. Here we have no choices... like there's just one grocery store, one pizza place, one clinic, etc. But in Eureka we'll have so many things available to us, its mind boggling to us.

The only problem is.. we don't want to get rid of our pets. I know if we were willing to do so I could get a rental there right away and be moved, but we won't let our pets down... they love us and don't deserve to be abandoned to strangers. I don't want to break their hearts.

So, knowing that finding the landlord that will let us move our pets into their house will be like locating a needle in a haystack... I've decided to advertise for a home by making a new website that will show who we are and list what we're looking for in a home. I'm going to make the website structure and my daughter will be installing the detailing.

I've already offered her a part time job in my web design business... she's so good at site design already and I like her style!

Bewilderment Avenue

Remember that road sign... Linda Jo Highway? (See two posts below this one). Well, I think I've already come to Bewilderment Avenue. It happened like this. My daughter finally got a blog going this year. I will not give you the link because its a privacy issue. But I'm happy to say she's been writing extensively and I'm very proud of her somewhat profane efforts.

Anyhow, she managed to get the attention of her father (who hasn't seen her since she was three months old) and her paternal grandmother. So after about a month of visiting her site he finally started emailing and imailing with her. She was happy about that. Then a few days later he started badmouthing me and saying he wanted to sue me because he thought the kids weren't educated well enough. This quick judgment call was based on him quizzing her in imail on what she knew about World War 2 and the Constitution.

My daughter responded by calling me into their imail chat on MSN. This was the first time I'd chatted with him in years. I exchanged a few emails with him a few years back but other than that hadn't talked to him since we separated in 1989. And instead of being friendly he was attacking me and threatening to sue. And he claimed to be paying child support even though we didn't receive it. Hmmm.

Then a few days later I imailed him, we got through some anger and eventually agreed to work together for our kids' best interest and not to fight and sue each other in court. So I went to see a family law attorney in a town two hours distant from our home. Then I wanted to imail him to tell him what I found out, and discovered he's blocked me on MSN.

So this is Bewilderment Avenue. I've got no idea why he's cut off communication but I will guess it has more to do with his own failings that with ours. And by the way, the Family Support department says it hasn't received that child support he claims he sent and they're doing the research to see if it went to a different county or to the state.

Hit By a Car

My boyfriend keeps a scanner in our bedroom. This morning he heard a boy on a bike got hit by a car near the CNR Center in the old downtown area of our town. This was right after my 14-year-old son left to go visit a friend. On his bike. So naturally I jumped into my car and drove down there to see if it was my son. It wasn't.

The victim was a much younger boy who by the way lived through the experience just fine so don't start crying. I talked to the poor woman who was driving the car. She was still shaking and terribly upset. She said it happened up on Indian Creek Road. Two boys came down one of the dirt roads out of the hills as fast as they could on their bikes and without looking or stopping rode right in front of her. She hit the smaller boy, then he asked her to drive him to his grandparents' house which was downtown near the CNR Center.

It reminded me of the time my brother got hit by a car when he was seven and spent a month in a body cast in the hospital. As I recalled there was not much liability since my brother was riding erratically and wasn't looking where he was going.

I guess it is time to review bicycle safety with the kids. My son rides as fast as he possibly can around this town. He's very fast. I will corner him and discuss safety with him.. probably tonight during our homeschool session.

This semester I'm reading a bicycle touring manual with him so this will give us plenty of time to talk about the hazards of the road.

My Daughter Wants My Attention

I've had a rough day. My daughter is a teenager. I love her to pieces but I get frustrated.

For example today she sent me some bad IMail messages. I ignored them so she came out here and unplugged my computer when I was in the middle of doing something. I pointed out I was totally innocent of doing anything to provoke her messages or other behavior... she finally apologized but continued to want my attention, etc.

Lots of time spent with her.

Then she went to her bedroom... I just had to go back there to see if she was okay and then she trapped me in her bedroom. Big mistake to go in there!

Teen Foster Child in SF Turned to Prostitution

I had such a quiet day today. Just what I needed. I stayed home all day except for taking my daughter to her hiphop dance class and picking her up afterward.

I spent a lot of the day researching news about child welfare. San Francisco's Examiner has a really depressing series this week about a girl who was in state custody who became a prostitute. She was living with her mom in SF when that started, and when mom found out she took her daughter to another town where they were staying temporarily in an old hotel. Child welfare workers didn't think that was good enough, so they took the girl from her mom and took her back to SF. There, the girl ran away from the fosterincarcerators and entered the prostitution world full time, at the age of 13.

She was refused re-entry into a foster custody situation after six months. Whenever the police picked her up for prostitution, nobody ever bothered to call her mother. Instead the police just dropped her back off at the dept. of human services, and she would walk in the door, out the back door, and go back to her pimp.

This is all sick enough but at age 15 she was found dead in a lake... that's why she's being written about in the paper. The paper is accusing the city and social service meddlers of being responsible for her death as much as the actual murderer, who got away with it. I agree - they made a good call on that. So anyhow, I went through a terrible depression over that this afternoon. ::sigh::

Okay... so then I had to rest in bed for a while to get over it. Now I'm up again and listening to an old Art Bell show from 1997, about Atlantis. I decided to make another graphic..... this one is called, "Something's Missing."

Keith likes this one...... he said it would make a great CD cover. My daughter prefers a different one.... strange... well, the graphic she likes (Pink World) is really too strange for me. My favorite from this week is Leaves.... I made that one into this week's desktop wallpaper, and when I get ready to put up my design website, I'll be putting my wallpaper online for free use. That's the plan.