In searching for a font (fonts are my secret passion now!), I came across the following quote, author unknown:

"It's not happy people who are thankful; it's thankful people who are happy."

"A Revolutionary Idea to Care for People with Alzheimer's and Dementia"

Check it out.

Dwayne is learning my family's way of coping with stress: You laugh.
To that end, the new daily question in this house is, "How's your bird?"

There is no way to nutshell what happened here in July. Because it began in 1978 when Dwayne married a woman who has made his life miserable ever since. You can imagine how full-blown her Narcissistic Personality Disorder has become more than 30 years later. It's been ten years since she left with her latest lover after not ever being faithful to Dwayne and yet she can't move on, can't let him go.
Add two children who are now grown and easily brain-washed by a woman described by a lawyer as "smooth but an ice cube wouldn't melt in her mouth."
Add a new marriage to a younger, prettier and smarter woman plus an article that exposed one of her biggest lies (although it doesn't top the perennial favourite, that Dwayne beat her throughout their marriage). 
Add a renovation to a house plus endless attempts to ruin our happy times (my surprise birthday party, our weekend at the AJAs, the anniversary party).
Add a 30-year-old daughter who wasn't leaving here until she had goaded her father into smacking her.
Add a counter charge of assault when it turns out she struck first plus a days-long Facebook spree that declared her father a liar, bully and woman beater. 
Add one letter from a lawyer to the ex-wife telling her to stay away from Dwayne, his wife and his mother-in-law plus letters to each of his two children.
And it all equals one pissed off woman who is furious that the man she has always manipulated and controlled through his devotion to his children now has the upper hand.
He is no longer that man.
I am the outside observer to all this. For five years, I watched his daughter grow increasingly rude and bitchy, taking more and more from her father but giving only abuse in return. She treats him the way she watched her mother treat him; she's knows no other way of treating men. I have said nothing because I vowed never to make Dwayne choose between his kids and me but it's not been easy. Even his son turned out to be a loser, borrowing money from his grandfather that has yet to be repaid and selling land his grandfather gave him but not telling anyone he did so. After his son stopped talking to him 18 months ago because Dwayne demanded he come clean to his grandfather, Dwayne remained determined he wasn't going to lose his daughter, too.
But as things escalated, what he stood to lose was far greater than two children who caused him nothing but grief and sleepless nights.
So a few weeks ago, after the anniversary party that the ex-wife did not stop or even ruin, I suggested Dwayne get a tattoo to remind him of what is important to him, some symbol of what he has now and where his life is going.

Dwayne spent three hours yesterday afternoon getting one of our osprey tattooed on his arm, where he can see it always. And it is one of our birds; it's the photo from the magazine article that was nominated for an AJA. Dwayne put that nesting pole up early in his first marriage but it wasn't until he and I were married that the osprey came. There is no better symbol to him of the positive direction his life is going now than that bird.
Let me tell you -- it's weird to see such a big tattoo on my husband! It will lighten a bit as the blood drains away and the white pops out more. I love that it has such meaning for us.
"Every time you think of doing something that could jeopardize what we've gained as a couple and the integrity you've shown through this whole ordeal, look at your arm," I told him.
It's hard to change.I compare breaking free of that ex-wife and thirty years of emotional abuse to quitting smoking: it's a very hard habit to break when so many things push your buttons -- and when those things know the buttons to push. I'm very proud of my husband for taking on the challenge of becoming the man he's meant to be. And for spending three hours getting pricked by a needle.

Do you know what I just did?
DO YOU KNOW WHAT I JUST DID???
I emailed an agent to ask her to delete the query and sample pages that I sent two weeks ago in order that I may email her my new and improved query.
Do you know how unorthodox, how possibly wrong that could be? How many rules I broke?
And do you know...
...I don't give a shit.
You don't get anywhere in life without breaking some rules. It matters so much to me that I finally discovered what makes my book truly unique out there in that market where the best selling books right now are a fiction trilogy about bondage that it is worth the possibility of pissing off an agent so much that she may not only delete my original query but tell me to screw off forever.
Except that even when breaking rules, I remain polite and professional. I don't flatter, I don't beg. I figured she'd understand that when inspiration hits a writer, you can't control the timing.
What do I have to lose? I just finished editing my book again (Is anyone keeping track of what draft this is? It might be 12) and made so many improvements, including removing an entire chapter -- painfully, it was about Diana but it breaks up the flow and has lost its relevancy in this scaled-down version -- that I'm not just hopeful about this book again, I'm excited.I'm excited at finding something unique, something that adds to the information out there about this growing epidemic. I'm excited that even if this agent isn't interested in my book no matter what query I send, I had the guts to email her anyway.
Now, if you will excuse me, I'm going to throw up.

Ha!
There is nothing worse than a reformed whatever -- smoker, drinker, wheat-eater, reprobate -- and there is nothing better than when a reformer finally converts someone.
Like my husband.
I don't know how many people I've told about the trick to fix a bad back, if the problem is a slipped disc, or even over-stretched muscles. It's principle of the Mckenzie method: your back has a natural curve in it and it's not the curve forward. If a back is to stay healthy, it must arch. The simplest way to achieve relief from back pain is to lie on your stomach with your arms down at your sides and relax for 2 to 3 minutes. That's it; just relax. But it has to be a relaxation; those muscles must release tension and ease. And this is done every two hours.
So last week, my husband hurt his back while splitting wood out back. It was a bad one and I recognized the way he was walking: slipped disc. As always when he complains about a sore back, I tell him to lie on his stomach. As always, he refuses.
Until I finally said on Saturday night: "Since my back surgery three years ago, have I relapsed?"
That seemed to be the argument that got through to him because on Sunday morning, he asked me, rather sheepishly, "So I lie on my stomach, right? What do I do with my arms?"
Breakthrough!
It's such a simple thing to do - lie down and relax for two minutes - but it's amazing the resistance I get from people who complain of back pain. As if people like to be crippled and miserable.
"Oh, it hurts to lie on my stomach," one woman who I know has bulging discs told me immediately. It hurt Dwayne to get down on the floor but once he was there, he was fine. Every two hours, there he was, lying on a yoga mat in the living room, and by Monday, he was in the tractor tilling up a new pumpkin patch -- and coming inside every so often to lie on his stomach.
Three years ago, I fixed bulging discs with this technique (the herniated disc was too bad to be fully corrected this way, I think - but maybe I was hurting it doing physio) and I continue to use it when I recognize symptoms of strain in my back. While waiting for surgery, I promised my back I would never hurt it again and I intend on keeping that promise. That means the McKenzie Method (Google it) and lots of yoga back bends.
Believe me.

A month ago, Dwayne's father, who is 86, fell off a chair and cracked his hip. It doesn't require surgery but it pains him a lot and makes getting around difficult. He can't do stairs nor can he drive. So this means we haven't been able to have Donn and Mary here for supper. I got the bright idea, then, that for the last long weekend of summer, before the kids head back to school, we'd surprise them with a family BBQ.
We told them that we'd bring supper down on Sunday evening, that we'd be there around 4 o'clock. Then we told everyone else to arrive at the same time with a salad of some kind. So Donn and Mary were surprised and we ate chips and drank pop and BBQ'd hamburgers and hot dogs and ate potato salad and baked beans and coleslaw and broccoli salad then had ice cream cones for dessert.
The kids played washer toss, the adults played washer toss. Abby was there, running around, being remarkably good. The sun stayed out, the seagulls circled overhead, Mary wasn't mad even though she doesn't like surprises and Donn was kept grinning like a rat eatin' rhubarb.
And through it all, there wasn't a phone to be seen.
My mother pointed this out to me this morning. Because I don't have a smart phone, I only notice them when they are present. To me, the absence of phones doesn't register. Yet I would have noticed the girls playing washer toss while clutching a phone in one hand; I would have noticed M. keeping her head down as she texted; I would have noticed someone wandering off, talking into a phone pressed to his ear.
It is possible to interact with the world, even as small a world as our little family BBQ, without a phone in use. This is not an anti-phone rant (in fact, I'm getting a tablet in order to read magazines because I'm tired of the piles cluttering my living room) because I think smart phones are smart. But I think they also waste a lot of time and energy and focus. We're living a lot less now that more of our life is caught up in these phones.
We had four generations gathered together again last night. We do it a lot but you never know when that will change. It was far better for those four kids to play washer toss with each other and with their fathers and uncles than it was to sit for hours playing with silly apps.