Doors – William Blake
17
11, 2021
15
11, 2021
The Wandering Pickleball Paddle
Hubby-dear is a Pickleball addict. He wears his hat all the time which leads to questions. Because he loves the game, he’s always eager to share. He’s been responsible for growing the sport every place we’ve lived.
Hubby-dear also carries paddles, nets, and balls in his car for a quick demonstration. If someone wants to learn, he offers one of the extra paddles.
During our great Texas Ice Apocalypse remodel last February, Hubby-dear invited one of the workers to join him on our local city park Pickleball courts. The young man didn’t have a paddle, so Hubby-dear lent him my Ol’ Yellow paddle from his stash.
The young man played a couple of times. He loved the game so Hubby-dear let him keep the paddle until he could get his own. He even wrote his phone number on the paddle so the man could call with questions.
Fast forward to two days ago, Hubby-dear received a text from a car dealer in Mississippi. He’d found a yellow Pickleball paddle in a car he bought at a car auction in Texas. Was it Hubby-dear’s?
After an exchange of texts and calls mostly about Pickleball (the car dealer was a Pickleball addict too), Hubby-dear gave the car dealer our address.
The paddle arrived the next day via next-day delivery!
I think I was happier than Hubby-dear. I’d played many a game using Ol’ Yellow until health issues forced me to retire. These days I watch Hubby-dear win local championships with his partner.
I may not play, but Ol’ Yellow is back in Hubby-dear’s supply basket awaiting the next new Pickleball convert. Who knows where the paddle will end up next?
If you haven’t played Pickleball, stop by your neighborhood courts and watch. And, yes there will be a court somewhere close by.
Pickleball is the fastest-growing sport in American.
12
11, 2021
Aha Moment
A Blog by Chicken Wrangler Sara
I grew up memorizing large numbers of Bible verses. This serves me well in troubled times.
One passage I still remember is out of the book of Ephesians chapter 6. There, Paul describes spiritual armor including an instruction to gird your loins with the belt of truth. I memorized most scripture in the King James translation and didn’t really understand what it meant to “gird your loins” until recently.
I like to wear long, full skirts. They are especially useful in teaching as they allow me to move around and sit on the floor without revealing any body parts best left covered.
This poses a problem in the chicken yard. The skirts drag on the dirt and gets caught in the chicken wire.
I started tucking the hem into my waistband.
Then I discovered how to “gird my loins.”
I take the back of my skirt and bring it through my legs and tuck it into my waistband.
It may look silly, but it keeps my skirts clean!
10
11, 2021
8
11, 2021
Beware! Shopping Time is Phishing Time
Holidays bring increased buying.
Shopping, especially online like so many of us are doing these days, means phishing time for hackers.
Email scams called phishing are an easy form of cyberattack that supplies everything a hacker needs to steal information to ransack personal and work accounts.
The earliest hackers were known as ‘phreaks’ or ‘phreakers’ from those names came phishing, a modified version of fishing…to steal your private information.
It’s been around since the mid-1990s. Since then, the concept has been tweaked so that everyone from the most brilliant techie to the lowly church mouse is susceptible.
Early attempts to scam came with tell-tale signs like strange spelling, weird formatting, low-res images, and messages that often didn’t make sense. Some remain easy to spot today like a long-lost relative who wants to leave you his fortune.
Most of today‘s scammers are more talented when it comes to creating fake logos making scams extremely difficult to spot. A skilled hacker can disguise emails to look like it’s coming from your friends, family, colleagues, and even your boss.
Emails arrive with subject lines about prizes to entice and catch the eye. Remember, if that email ‘prize’ seems too good to be true, it usually is and it’s likely a hacker phishing for your personal data.
Fake emails from your bank or health care provider are trickier to spot. These come with ‘URGENT’ message subjects designed to panic victims into making an error. Some look convincingly legit…until you check the sender source. Always check the sender’s email address. See how below:
If the email address is not visible, you can hover your mouse over it and see who it’s really from. But, if the email is suspect, you shouldn’t click. Instead, go to your web browser, log into your account, and address the financial or health issue there or call directly.
Sadly, phishing isn’t limited to email. There’s vishing (suspicious phone calls) and smishing (messaging services). Even apps trick a target into what the scammer wants. Phishing is also a popular method for installing trojan malware or ransomware.
As Adrian Monk says in his Monk series, “It’s a jungle out there.” Protect yourself this holiday buying season. Don’t be some hacker’s phish. Watch for scams.
For more advice on how to protect yourself from phishing. This blog post from Microsoft has more great tips. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/protect-yourself-from-phishing-0c7ea947-ba98-3bd9-7184-430e1f860a44
5
11, 2021
Odd Egg
A Blog by Chicken Wrangler Sara
One thing I enjoy about our eggs is the variety. Store-bought eggs seem to be uniform – all brown or all white and all the same size. Our eggs are all different colors and sizes.
Recently someone has been laying particularly interesting eggs.
At first, I thought it was an anomaly but there was another just like it a few days later.
I wish I knew which chicken was laying these odd-shaped eggs. It is most likely a white hen from the school. The brown hens usually lay brown eggs.
I was explaining this to some children once and someone asked, “do the green eggs come from green chickens.” Makes sense but that’s not the way it works.
Seeing all the different eggs in our cartons makes me happy. It is kind of like looking out at my classroom and seeing the wide variety of students. They keep life interesting.
3
11, 2021
1
11, 2021
Who Reads Romance Novels?
The answer might surprise you.
Romance novels are the largest genre of all literature.
- One-third of all mass-market fiction sold is romance novels.
- Romance book sales exceed $1 billion every year, selling more than many other genres combined.
Lots of people read romance. The consensus has always been that romance readers are single women in possession of cats and in want of a man.
The 2017 Romance Writers of America study blew that theory out of the water. According to their survey, romance readers are:
- Eighty-two percent Female
- Eighteen percent Male
- Average age: 35–39 years old
- The highest percentage of readers fall between the ages of 25-34
- One-fourth of the readers are male
Nielsen BookScan’s data reported people of color make up roughly one-fifth of the romance buyers, while people aged forty-five and older hold more than 40 percent of the market.
Romance fiction is as diverse as our world. Each title is unique in tone and style, setting (any place or time), and varies in levels of sensuality—ranging from sweet to extremely hot. That’s why readers come back repeatedly.
Choices include series novels or single titles. Series can mean books issued under a common imprint/series name usually published by Harlequin, Check here for a list of Harlequin’s series lines. Another series type is stories written in specific locales or about specific families. Marie Force and Bella Andre are popular series authors.
Single-title romances, longer romances released individually and not part of a numbered series, are another option. These stories have deeper plots with romance playing the key role.
Entertainment, relaxation, and escape are most often cited as reasons for reading romance novels. The main appeal of the genre lies in the fact that the stories fulfill reader expectations. All romance novels have a central love story and an emotionally satisfying ending.
Themes vary and whether you enjoy contemporary dialogue, historical settings, mystery, or thrillers, you’ll find a romance novel waiting to offer an escape and a reassurance that things can end on a positive note.
If you haven’t tried a romance, let me suggest my latest release at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Or you can check out my other titles on my website Choose from series and single titles.
You might be surprised at how much you enjoy the escape.
29
10, 2021
25
10, 2021
I missed Punctuation and Grammar Days
Neither are official-official holidays so there are no consequences. I’ll do better next year getting my blogs up on the actual dates, but in the meantime, here is my white-rabbit-late blog.
If you’re not familiar with the designation, both days are set aside to celebrate the underappreciated art of using correct grammar.
Jeff Rubin selected Sept. 24 in 2004 to be National Punctuation Day as “a celebration of the lowly comma, correctly used quotation marks, and other proper uses of periods, semicolons, and the ever-mysterious ellipses.”
Martha Brockenbrough, founder of the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, added March 4 as National Grammar Day to encourages everyone to use grammar correctly in both verbal and written language.
I love the reasoning behind the date. The National Grammar Day website states. “Language is something to be celebrated, and March 4 is the perfect day to do it. It’s not only a date, it’s an imperative: March forth on March 4 to speak well, write well, and help others do the same!”
These days our communication relies increasingly on our written word skills. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t email or text or post comments on social media. Correct grammar and punctuation are important.
I always need help with grammar and punctuation. If you have as much trouble as I do, here are my recommendations:
For help understanding how each punctuation mark is used, try this fabulous clickable chart here. Once on the page, you click on the punctuation mark and a page with the explanation opens.
Nitty-Gritty Grammar is a humorous guide to correct grammar.
Or for serious writing, try The Elements of Style
For grammar help as I write in Word 365, I use Editor, an editing tool embedded in the word processor.
For Grammar help when composing emails and social media posts, I have installed the Grammarly software program.
You can get the free version or pay for a premium version at https://www.grammarly.com/
Lastly, just for fun, enjoy this YouTube version of Victor Borge’s Phonetic Punctuation skit. It’s old but still hilarious any day of the year.