July 2017

Archive for July, 2017

Happiness

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged good wishes, happiness, hope, life and death, spiritual things on July 14, 2017| 11 Comments »

I’ve been thinking a lot about happiness lately. What makes us happy? What makes us sad? How can we change sad to happy? So many questions.

Here’s what I’ve come up with for me, personally:

1. No one else can make me happy. No one else is responsible for my happiness. I have to find that myself.

2. There are things that can help make me happy. I’ve realized that being more fit has definitely elevated my mood, but it also seems to help long-term, too.

3. There are some things I can’t change. I can choose how I deal with them.

4. Bad things happen to good people. I have to accept that fact and move on. My husband has had many health problems. Some of them are very serious. I’ve had a few of my own. Sometimes it feels like we can’t take one more thing going wrong. We both choose not to dwell on it and to live life as well as possible.

5. There are people who are much worse off than me. There was a lady who had been bed-ridden for a few years. My husband used to visit her nearly every week. She was very sick and could do almost nothing. But my husband loved visiting her and loved her attitude. She always said there were people worse off than she was. She passed away recently, and the world lost a shining light.

6. Death is a part of life. It’s sad when I lose someone I love. But it’s a cycle that’s been going on since day one of the world. I choose not to dwell on it.

7. This may not pertain to everyone who is reading this, but I pray. I read the Bible. I try to focus on spiritual things as much as I can. I have a very loving and supportive church family. But, again, although sometimes I might need their support, it’s ultimately up to me to be happy.

I know many of you are depressed or lonely. So many of you have troubles that are probably worse than mine. And I know it’s hard to stay positive when you feel like your world is crashing down around you. But if you can reach inside you and find that little bit of happiness, that small kernel of hope, maybe things will look better. Life is a cycle, and it goes on.

Love and good wishes to you all!

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Back to Blogging

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged editing, fitbit, fitness, fitness tracking, food tracking, ruth ann nordin, writing on July 11, 2017| 16 Comments »

I think it’s time for me to get back to blogging. One reason I haven’t is that I haven’t had that many likes or comments lately, and everyone is saying they just want to communicate on ~~Dramabook~~ Facebook. But I miss the days of blogging where this is my space where you come and visit. Or that’s your space where I come and visit. And you can say so much more. So I’m going to try to get back to it. I have a couple of people who regularly comment on my posts, and I appreciate that so much. So maybe, if I start doing this more often, I can get my following back.

So what’s going on in my life?

1. I’m writing again. It’s going slowly as I get back into it, but it’s going.

2. I’m editing for clients quite a bit, but it still seems to be feast or famine. Since I haven’t had too much editing work for the last month, I’ll probably suddenly have four people wanting an edit RIGHT NOW. LOL. I want to thank Ruth Ann Nordin for always giving me plenty of time. She always plans ahead. 🙂

3. This is third on my list, but certainly number one in my heart…I have a brand new granddaughter! This makes two for the oldest son and one for the youngest son. *eyeing my baby boy*

4. I’m trying to get fit again. I think I might have mentioned, at least on Facebook, that I fried my Fitbit fitness tracker in the ocean when I was on vacation in May/June. Fitbit offered me 25% off a new one, which they didn’t have to do since I was going to buy one anyway. Great customer service! Anyway, the new one does a few more things, including telling me to get up and walk if I haven’t done at least 250 steps in that hour. And I’m doing it almost every time. You can’t argue with your Fitbit! 🙂 I’ve been tracking my food faithfully with the Fitbit app. I’ve been getting on the treadmill at home, and I finally bit the bullet and joined the gym again. My insurance will pay for it if I go at least 12 times per month. I have more energy, at least on the days I get enough sleep. That’s something else I need to work on. The Fitbit tracks my sleep; it even tracks what sleep stages I’m in and for how long. One thing I’ve noticed is that I wake up several times during the night. I usually average about 45-55 minutes awake per night. I don’t know what’s up with that, but I think I’ll try to start going to bed earlier.

Anyway, that’s my life right now.

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Dragon Naturally Speaking Software

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dictating software, dragon naturally speaking, ruth ann nordin on July 1, 2017| 5 Comments »

I’ve been playing around with Dragon software. It’s been really strange trying to dictate my books instead of typing them out. I’ve tried this several times, and in the past, it really hasn’t worked for me very well. But my friend, Ruth Ann Nordin, has been using this. I figured I would give it another try. After all, I did buy the software, and I hate having something I paid money for and not be able to use it. So, as we speak, I’m actually using the Dragon software to write this blog post. And I did write about 900 words today on my current WIP using Dragon software. One of the things I noticed was that when I dictate instead of type, it seems like my dialogue sounds more natural in the story. This kind of makes sense when you think about the difference between typing and speaking something because we speak naturally, and that’s what dialogue is. I’m going to continue using this for a while to see if this really helps.

One of the things that I do differently than Ruth is that I speak my punctuation. It’s kind of a learning curve because it can take you out of your story, but I found that if I don’t do the punctuation then when I go back to edit it, it really takes more time than if I had just typed it in the first place. I really don’t want to spend that much time editing. So I’m just practicing doing the punctuation such as speaking periods, commas, question marks, etc. and seeing how that’s working for me. I think I will be able to do okay with that, but I’m still having a little trouble with saying “open quote” and “close quote”. (I actually had to type those words because, when I said them, it actually put quote marks instead of the actual words I said. LOL)

Do you use Dragon Naturally Speaking software? If so, how do you use it? Do you like it? What do you feel like the pros and cons of this are? I would love to hear from you.

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