My Backyard Farm

I love living in the country. If I move back to the city I'm still going grocery shopping only once a month.

Well, maybe not.

Since I live so far from the usual modern day shopping resources, I decided I'd better start up some home food production. When in the country, do as the country do!

Last Saturday I built this garden box. It's up on stilts to cleverly evade the giant slugs roaming my back yard. So far, the lettuce and spinach are safe in their beds.

We also have a chicken. One chicken. My daughter rescued her as a tiny chick from the neighbor's dog. We were pretty sure the soggy, chewed-up thing was going to die, BUT IT DIDN'T. This chicken has some pluck. And just to prove it, she gave us two eggs on her first day of laying.

To celebrate the advent of eggs, we remodeled the chicken's coop from this:

to this:

Now she's got a rain-proof feed box and twice the yard. Maybe next time we'll put in a swimming pool.

The New Cove

In my last house I had an office all to myself for writing. I dubbed it "The Scribblers Cove" and named my group blog after it. But in my new house I've had to commandeer a corner of the master bedroom.

I like this arrangement better than what I had before. There's a lock on the door, lots of sunny windows, and if I need to I can spread reference materials all over the bed.

What I Would Like to be 20 Years from Now

My mom has been going through a lot of old school papers she saved from when I was a kid. She found an assignment I wrote in 6th grade called What I Would Like to be 20 Years from Now.

Twenty years from now I would like to be a mother of three girls and a baby boy living in Salt Lake City. I would like to have taught school before I had children.

I would also like to be an author of children's fiction books. I'd like to sew in my spare time and raise fish like my mother. I want my children to have a perfect childhood like I did.

I want my house to have three small bedrooms, a master bedroom, and a guest room, livingroom, and kitchen. I would use the guestroom for plants, fish, and a piano. I want to have written a few songs and be a piano teacher.

That was a little over twenty years ago. Since then I've had five children (one girl and four boys), I've written a few songs, I've been a piano teacher, taught college algebra, and that last paragraph just about describes my house except there's one less bedroom, the fish are in the kitchen, and instead of being in Salt Lake City, it's in Laie, Hawaii.

What gets me is that middle paragraph. It's one thing to claim I've always wanted to be a children's author, another thing to see the evidence. That's one big dream I'm still chasing. So here's my long-overdue What I Would Like to be 20 MORE Years from Now:

Twenty years from now I would like to be living in Laie, Hawaii with ten grandchildren, at least that many published books to my name, and more on the way (both books and grandchildren). I would like to be teaching school, playing the harp, going to the beach, and writing life histories for my family in my spare time. I hope to be a perfect grandma, just like my mom.

Pretty Colors

In a recent video conference, author Kathleen Duey told the Hawaii chapter of SCBWI that revision is to re-envision. To see the story in a whole new way.

With that in mind, I'm trying to take a fresh look at my current project with a new outlining method. Okay, yes, I know, outlining is boring. But this method uses pretty colors. Ooooo!

First, I wrote a short synopsis of each chapter. Then I went through and colored the following things:

Problems

Plans

Decisions/Actions

Solutions


And one more thing- I only colored the main character's problems, plans, decisions, and solutions. In looking over my outline, I found out that a lot of the things I thought were important to the overall story were not important to the main character's personal story. I wasn't letting him make enough plans and decisions. Too often someone else took action or solved problems. Dread! I had a passive character.

Can't allow that sort of thing! I'll be sure and put him to work in the next draft.

Thunderstorm for Breakfast

We had a thunderstorm for breakfast this morning. Rain roared down from a dark sky. I was glad I'd been able to get the hot cereal to boil before the power went out.

"My brain isn't scared, but my body's overreacting," my eleven-year-old said as I served him some cocoa.

"Really?" I leaned across the table. Poor kid has a writer for a mom. "Tell me about it. How does it feel?"

"Well, my heart is pounding insanely. And my fingers are shaking insanely."

Lightning. Thunder. The lights flickered.

"And my stomach feels cold."

"That's great!" I said. "Beautiful! Thank-you!"

I guess I should be more sympathetic.

Disaster Plan

My nine-year-old son asked me, "So what if we knew the world was going to end in only three or four days, and we only had that long to pack up all our stuff?"

Not sure what use it would be to pack up, I asked, "Where would we go if the whole world was going to end?" 

"Mars!" he said, as if it was obvious.

"Oh."

"And we'd need to bring some fires with us so we could melt the ice, so we'd have something to drink. We'd also bring some seeds so we could grow food."

I guess he has his disaster plan all worked out.

An Evening of Irish Music

Some things happen like magic.

The first time I played my harp in church here in our new home in Hawaii, a member of the congregation came up and introduced himself as a Celtic guitar player. He said he knew someone who played whistle, and we agreed it would be fun to put together a group. Turns out he knew a violinist too, and so a few months later we started rehearsing for our first gig at the Kahuku Public Library.

When I moved to Hawaii, I had no idea that I would find my own Irish folk band all living in my new neighborhood.

Hope you enjoyed this sample of music from our first performance last night.

One of the people who came last night was a visitor from New York, of Irish decent. He laughed when he told us he never expected to hear Irish music played on the north shore. Me neither! That's the magic.