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Archive for 2013

Half Light – My Favorite Movie

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged demi moore, favorite movie, half light, hans matheson, mysterious movie on April 6, 2013| 11 Comments »

I’m sitting here watching, again, my favorite movie, Half Light. I found this movie by accident, or I should say, my husband found it. One time, several years ago, he was in the video store and picked it up, thinking it looked like something I would like. He was right. I later bought the movie on DVD. I was searching through Netflix this morning, looking for a mystery to watch, and I saw it. I had to watch it again.

Why this is my favorite movie:

1. The setting in Scotland is BEAUTIFUL.
2. Even though it’s not scary, it’s eerie.
3. The people in the town are strange and mysterious.
4. The acting is great – Demi Moore and Hans Matheson.
5. There’s a romance between a tortured writer and a mysterious lighthouse keeper.
6. There’s a couple of really strange twists that I didn’t see coming.

There’s so much to love about this movie. My husband doesn’t really like it. It’s not his kind of thing. I absolutely love the mysterious, creepy feel of the movie. It IS my kind of thing.

So maybe you should give it a try. I have to warn you…something very tragic happens in the beginning of the movie, and it’s really bad. So if you can’t handle stuff like that, you better not watch it. But the thing has to happen to set up the rest of the movie. And don’t expect a normal HEA. I wanted to scream at the movie. But there is some satisfaction. The only thing that might frustrate you (it did me) about the movie is that there are a few things that I think were left unanswered. But I think that’s kind of on purpose so you can draw your own conclusions. And there’s a couple of times the townspeople speak in Gaelic, and you never know what they said…unless you speak Gaelic.

Okay, I’m going to unpause the movie and carry on.

P.S. I’ve apparently posted about this movie before because when I was doing the tags for the post, some of the stuff automatically came up, so I’ve used those tags before. LOL

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Fitness Friday – Back in the Saddle

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fitness, getting healthier, health, losing weight, weight loss on April 5, 2013| 9 Comments »

I’m back in the saddle again…. Okay, so I like Aerosmith. 🙂

I was happy with the scale this morning. After the 2.5 gain last week, I wasn’t sure how this would play out. Honestly, I got back on the scale the day after the weight gain. I had actually lost most of it the next day, so it was definitely water weight.

Anyway, when I’m showing my stats today, I’m pretending last week didn’t happen and going from the week before. Otherwise, I would show a BIG loss this week. And although I would like to brag about that, I chickened out and wouldn’t do my little stats table last week, so I don’t really deserve showing the big weight loss. LOL. We’re just going to pretend last week didn’t happen at all.

Btw, I’m wearing some size 14 jeans that were hanging in my closet. These are a bit smaller than the 14’s that hubby bought me. My new jeans are relaxed fit, but the ones in my closet are more form fitting and more flattering. I’m so glad I can wear those again! 🙂

So here are my stats for this week. Remember…last week didn’t happen. Hee hee.

Stats for this week:
Beginning weight: 193
Today’s weight: 171.5
This week’s loss: 1.5 lbs.
Total loss: 21.5 lbs.

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Get Your Southern Speech Right!

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged getting southern speech wrong, southern speech, southern speech in books, y'all on April 4, 2013| 19 Comments »

Can I complain a little bit without sounding too bitchy? It’s about a book I just read where there’s a southern woman whose way of speaking really gets on my nerves. Well…it’s mostly one thing. Yes, the author dropped her “g’s” where the “ing” is used, and that’s pretty accurate for most southerners. I do that a lot. But here’s the problem. Southerners do not use “y’all” to speak of ONE person. “Y’all” is short for “you all”. It’s not short (or long) for “you”. I would not say to a friend “How long have y’all been waiting here?” or “I hope y’all feel better soon.” I would say the above phrases to more than one person, but not to one person. (If anyone from the south is reading this and disagrees, then you certainly speak differently than people do where I’m from. But the person in the book was from my area.) In the north, the same phrase is usually “you guys”. At least in northern Ohio where I have cousins who say “you guys”. I always teased them about that, saying “I’m not a guy”. I would say “y’all”, they would say “you guys”. But when referring to one person, we both said “you”. In the book I read, it sounded so awkward when that word was used referring only to the person she was speaking to. It drove me absolutely crazy.

Anyway, do things like that bother you? If you’re from a certain area, and the author portrays the speech in that area much differently than it really is, does it make you want to scream? I don’t usually mind when little things are wrong, but when they mess up our southern speech, it really bothers me.

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Sunday Update 3/31/13

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ROW80, sick cat, Sick husband, writing on March 31, 2013| 14 Comments »

I really don’t have a lot to say this morning. The three days I planned to write this week…well…it didn’t happen. Yep, life got in the way again. I sliced my palm on Thursday, had a church thing to go to on Friday night, had a sick husband on Saturday…. Yes, after all this stuff with his ankle, now he has a toothache. A BAD one. And all the emergency dental places he called weren’t working this weekend. He almost passed out yesterday, so I didn’t leave him all day. My mom went to the drugstore for us and filled a pain prescription he had. His regular dentist can’t see him till Wednesday, but he’s going SOMEWHERE tomorrow. This is hurting him worse than his broken ankle. So it makes me hurt, too, almost to the point of crying. 😦 And his face is starting to swell.

Oh, and I have a sick cat. It’s Oz throwing up this time instead of Willow. So it looks like a vet visit.

I hope everyone else had a better week!

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Black Dagger Brotherhood – Weird Expression

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged black dagger brotherhood, gangsta language, gangsta speak on March 30, 2013| 9 Comments »

I recently posted about the Black Dagger Brotherhood Series by J.R. Ward. I mentioned the gangsta language they use. One of the reasons this bugs me is because sometimes I have no clue what they are saying. There’s a phrase in the book I’m listening to that’s been bugging me for days. I’ve tried and tried to figure out what it means. I don’t know if I’m just dense or if no one knows what it means. Anyway, here’s the phrase, and if ANYONE knows what this means, please tell me. It’s driving me CRAZY.

“It looked like he was going to pull a meaning of life and thin mint it all over the place.”

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Fitness Friday – A Disappointing Week

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged disappointing weight gain, fitness, getting back into clothes, losing weight, weight gain, weight gain with exercise on March 29, 2013| 8 Comments »

Okay, first the bad news. I knew this would eventually have to happen. A large weight gain. I got on the scale this morning and was up 2.5 lbs. That’s a lot. And the thing is…I didn’t really eat any differently than usual this week. The only thing I did was start back with my exercise. I hadn’t exercised in about two weeks because of my work schedule, but I got in a couple of days this week. That can be kind of discouraging when you actually do something good and you end up getting not so great results. However, I do know that the weight gain COULD be water weight. Also, I can remember when I was working for Weight Watchers, many of the members had a weight gain the first week or two after starting exercise. Me, too. So I did a little research on this, and I found out that when you start exercising, your muscle cells will hold water. I won’t go into the specifics, but here’s one article on the Weight Watchers website concerning that. Weight Gain With Exercise? So it could be that or just plain old water retention. The main thing to remember is this is an ongoing lifestyle change, not something that can make or break me because of one week or even one month. It’s a lifetime commitment.

Now the fun stuff. When I got home yesterday evening, my husband was cleaning out closets. He had started with the closet in my son’s room, the one who just moved out recently. I had some old clothes in there and my husband wanted to know what to do with them. I told him they were clothes I still loved and just couldn’t wear yet. Then we started in our bedroom closet. I ended up finding about three pairs of jeans in there that I could wear, along with a couple pairs of capris. So we sorted them into clothes I could wear now, clothes that I could probably wear about five lbs. from now. And clothes that I’ll be able to wear sometime down the road. It was really fun because I used to have some really cute clothes. One type of clothing I’m going to be so glad to get rid of is going to be the long, full, “hide-the-fat” skirts. LOL. Some of them are pretty, but not really my style anymore. I used to never wear stuff like that, but as I gained weight, I found myself buying more and more of those big skirts. No more. 🙂

Anyway, that’s my story. I’m disappointed, but not discouraged. And going through the closets showed me I had really made progress. I don’t feel those 2.5 lbs. My clothes didn’t get tighter. So I’m not worried. But I’m not going to post stats this week, because I don’t want to actually SEE the gain and the change in total weight loss. I’ll get back to that next week when I lose weight again. Not if. When. 🙂

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When A Book Makes You Mad

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged angry with author, excerpts longer than story, rant about book, too many excerpts on March 28, 2013| 13 Comments »

I really wanted to post this yesterday, but I had already done a post. I was so upset, I just went ahead and wrote the post and scheduled it for today. You guys know me. I’m such an easy going person. Very forgiving, very calm. Most of the time. But there are some things that just get under my skin, and the author of a book I just read really ticked me off.

Here’s what happened. I was reading a historical romance. (I won’t call the author out in public, because I don’t think that’s cool.) I’ve been reading this romance on my iPad while walking on the treadmill. It was really a nice little book. I always check my percentages and locations, and this was a fairly long book. I thought. It was getting close to the point where some things were going to be resolved, and I was far less than halfway through the book, so I was wondering what intriguing things were going to happen to prolong the story. I couldn’t figure out what the author had planned, but I figured it must be good to last through more than half the book. Was the heroine going to be kidnapped? Was someone going to get hurt and have to fight for their life? Were the heroine and hero going to have another conflict (there were many already) and was she going to leave and he have to find her? Oh, the possibilities! Then I got to 39% and suddenly they loved each other and lived happily ever after. What? Something was going on here! I had 61% more book to read, so what happened? Then I started skimming through the next pages. Excerpts! Reviews! Book covers! Oh my! First I was bewildered, then I was mad. This author had basically fooled readers into thinking the book was longer than it was. Now I’m perfectly fine with a few pages of this But 61%? Really? Needless to say, I’ll never read another word this author writes. Never. I don’t care if her books end up on the best seller lists and people rave about them (which I doubt will happen). I’m done. Authors…please don’t do this. Maybe do an excerpt of one or two of your books. List the rest as links on one page. Don’t take half the book to advertise your other stuff. Don’t lie to me. Don’t make me think you’re giving me more than you are. It’s very deceiving. You could lose a lot of readers this way. /End of rant

Note: I went to the Amazon page of this book, and there were a bunch of upset readers. I noticed there was now a note at the end of the description stating “Please note this ebook also contains several multi-chapter previews of medieval romance novels written by (author’s name)”.

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Wednesday Update 3/27/13

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cleaning house, flylady, flylady.net, getting organized, ROW80, working hard, writing on March 27, 2013| 12 Comments »

Well, work is still hopping at my full-time job, but it’s slowing down a LITTLE. Except on Mondays and Tuesdays. So here’s my plan for awhile. Instead of fretting about not getting writing done, I’m going to change my goals to only include three writing days per week. Those days will be Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. They seem to be my slowest days at work (and no work on Saturday), so there will be less stress. I’ve been coming home with headaches the past two days and feeling just awful. Then I feel bad for not writing. As soon as things slow down a little more, I’ll add Tuesday back. Then we’ll see how that goes. I want to focus more on my house since I’ve started working on FlyLady’s routines. I really want to have a house that is company ready at all times, with no scrambling to hide stuff in the bedroom. If anyone is interested in her way of getting our houses looking great, here is the website: FlyLady. I think it’s a great way to get organized, and when our houses are organized, other things in our lives follow right behind. 🙂

Have any of you tried FlyLady’s methods?

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Sunday Update-A Day of Reflection

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged best friend, coffee cups, exercise, health, reflecting, reflections, ROW80, writing on March 24, 2013| 10 Comments »

When my best friend died two years ago, her husband gave me her set of coffee cups. These cups have faces on them, and the noses stick out. There are four, all of different colors. I was so glad to have them because these were the cups we always drank out of when I was in Indiana visiting her. So as I’m sitting here this morning drinking my coffee, my mind is on my friend and how much I miss her. And how proud she would have been of me for getting the 20 lbs. off. And how proud she would have been that I’ve written so many books. And she would be so glad that I’m still good friends with her husband, author Jonathan Eli. I miss her so darn MUCH. I miss her sarcastic sense of humor and her kindness. But she would have wanted life to go on for me, her husband, and the rest of her family and friends. So even though I miss her with sadness, I miss her fondly.

Looking back at some of the things I’ve accomplished, I realize I shouldn’t be so frustrated about my writing right now. Don’t we all have periods where we slow down for awhile? I used to be able to release at least three novellas a year. Or two novels. Yet I’ve struggled lately. I know that part of the reason was because I was feeling so bad physically when my diabetes wasn’t diagnosed, therefore, not controlled. Am I just having trouble getting back into the routine? So many things have happened to hinder me, especially my husband breaking his ankle. And at my full-time job, work has been overwhelming. Not the best of conditions for writing. The past couple of weeks, I’ve really been trying to focus on getting my house in order. I’m really seeing how much work my husband actually was doing before hurting his ankle. I haven’t been exercising because I’ve been only taking 10-20 minutes for lunch every day. That’s going to stop. I HAVE to make time for exercise. I haven’t done anything for about two weeks. Next week, I’m going to make a point of taking my full lunch hour so I can go exercise. Then I’ll feel better when I come home in the evenings, and I can get back on the writing. It’s time to take charge. I can call those customers when I get back. Those sales tax reports can wait just a little longer. I NEED to exercise.

Those are my thoughts for today. Now it’s off to get ready for church, a place where I can forget about everything for a little while and focus on the most important things. 🙂

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