Life continues to trot along quietly and uneventfully. It's raining today which always makes me more productive. Not making it easy to start cleaning up the garden before winter. If it stays wet, I won't get any bulbs planted. What would spring be without daffodils?
I'm working on my book - editing the proposal and trying to believe that those first five chapters are as good as they get and good enough to get an agent - but it's come to the time to start querying agents again. Nerves! For the first time I'm going to focus on Canadian agents initially and see if I get lucky.
Good quote about luck (but I don't remember who spoke it - it's in a notebook somewhere): Luck is where persistence meets opportunity. Well, I feel I have the persistence part covered.
Once I get the querying started, I hope to have time for pitching stories to magazines. That list of ideas is getting longer every week.
Remember, I wished for this: to be writing full-time. Now I'm just trying to make it more specifically about books!

Because Mum and I were in Toronto for my Uncle Harry and Aunt Pat's 50th wedding anniversary celebration (just a 24 hour trip but SO glad we went), Dwayne was in charge of preparing Thanksgiving dinner. We arrived home in time to do the dressing and the gravy.
Plus the most essential part: the centrepiece! This is my favourite part of Thanksgiving: sure, we serve our own carrots and a locally-raised turkey but I love that the centrepiece is homegrown and homemade, too.

The Wannamakers didn't come from Ontario this year, after showing up two years in a row, so we had a small crowd at the table with Dwayne's parents and brother and sister-in-law. As always, it was my job to the say grace but I hadn't had time to plan out what I wanted to say. I knew when I got onto "the bounty of the county" that I was in danger of losing control of the blessing! It was a bounty, though; even the cranberry sauce was made with fresh (never frozen), Cumberland county cranberries. The sauce was lighter in colour but sweeter, too.

Even the dogs get a Thanksgiving dinner! Abby's first.

We do our chickens and turkeys in an electric roaster now -- 3 hours to cook while freeing up the oven for dressing, and warm/hold -- so the dogs look forward to helping Papa clean up.

After all the hard work of cleaning the house and cooking the food and carving the turkey and eating a big meal and cleaning up, it's time for a well-deserved rest.

What? You were expecting a picture of Dwayne asleep in his recliner??

Final update on my right arm:
The doctor at the "collaborative emergency centre" -- which every rural hospial in NS is now called but I have yet to figure out how it works any better other than the emergency won't ever be closed "due to a lack of doctor coverage" -- took one look at my arm and called a dermatologist at a hospital in Moncton.
Well, that's getting somewhere. She prescribed a topical steroid cream which, after only two applications, is doing the trick.
I'm not sure if Dr. No. 1 got the diagnosis wrong -- two nurses before him said it was shingles, too -- but I saw three different doctors so there was no continuity in terms of seeing the progression of this virus/bacterial infection/dermatitis on my arm. Maybe the dermatologist can explain it. Although Tuesday afternoon, my arm will be healed right up -- no idea if it will scar or not -- I'm still keeping the appointment because I'd like to know for sure what it was and what it became. Was it shingles? Or was it contact dermatitis from the start?
When I went to the drug store with my third prescription in two weeks, I said, "It's me again. Now they think it's -- " I was starting to feel like a patient of Dr. House.
I'm always saying, "I got a scratch while working in the garden this afternoon. If I end up with some horrible outbreak on my arm, it'll be necrotizing fascitis caused by that scratch." Seriously. That's all it can take to bring on n.f. But the flesh-eating disease didn't even occur to me when this whole thing started. What's wrong with me?

THIS JUST IN!
My article on the ospreys nesting next to the house, "Circle of Life," that was published in Saltscapes last fall and was a Silver Finalist at the AJAs in May...received an Award of Merit in the category of General Feature at the International Regional Magazines Association (IRMA) awards in Arizona.
(Award of Merit is the equivalent to an Honourable Mention.)
You know, I'm with Taylor Swift, who apparently is criticized for her "shocked face", the look on her face when her name is announced at an awards show: She says she can't help but be excited and surprised when she wins an award. Every time.
Blase is so blah.


****
The article was highlighted in this month's e-newsletter from Saltscapes so I can provide the link for you to read it again:

http://www.saltscapes.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1575&catid=22&Itemid=63&utm_source=Saltscapes.com+Viewsletter&utm_campaign=0f8d442f13-Saltscapes_Viewsletter_Vol_3_Number_19&utm_medium=email

Maybe I should get an osprey tattoo...

Two more things:

I smell like oatmeal. Three oatmeal baths, so far (and I'm supposed to do three a day), and I smell like a cookie (without cinnamon and raisins). Jane, MFJ, said to me this morning, "Watch yourself around a Scottish man. You'll get licked."

And don't tell me that dogs live in the damn moment. I kicked Abby off the bed last night shortly after she hopped up and snuggling up behind Dwayne's bent legs. Sometimes she lies in between us in such a way that neither of us even knows she's there but lately, she's been rolling around a lot and snuggling up and that wakes me; trying to roll over with a 50-pound dog on my legs wakes me!
So I told her to get off and sleep with her big sister on the couch. I covered the two dogs up with their afghan and slept fine until the cat wanted out at 4:30 am.
When I got up an hour later to make my tea and do some yoga (prior to oatmeal bath #1), Abby was giving me the pissed-off face. She wasn't happy to see me (Stella has adopted a constant "Whatever." attitude unless what you want her to do involves a drive to Tim Horton's for a Timbit.
So even though "experts" say dogs don't hang onto the past and don't hold grudges, Abby appeared to be mad at me.
She can be mad all she wants; I'm still the boss and I'm the one that feeds her. Funny how the hairy-eyeball disappeared when the dog dish appeared on the counter.

Two things: I figured out how type for this blog on my tablet - it's hunt-and-peck and now I know why no one capitalizes anything! - and I don't have shingles.
Or maybe I did but now it's a rather nasty bacterial infection PLUS a rash all over my upper chest, neck and shoulders. So for the next few days, you'll find me in the bathtub soaking in oatmeal;I think it's for the itchiness, which is rather extreme. And now that I think about it, the doc in emerg asked me if I'd been gardening so he thinks it could be poison ivy.
I told him that I'm from Ontario and I know what poison ivy looks like. Kids in Ontario learn that early.
Hopefully when I return to emerg for a check-up on Thursday - yes, it was a "real" doctor who I saw today so there's actually follow-up - I'll be much improved.
And bloody hell, typing like this doesn't inspire great eloquence!

In anticipation of a move, my sister has been going through boxes (and boxes and boxes) of, well, her life’s history that has been stored in her basement for years. 

(In her defense, every time my parents drove to  Georgia for a visit, they took more of A’s stuff to her, not wanting the responsibility of deciding what to keep and what to toss.)

Last week she called to say that she and her four kids were having a grand time going through a box of her clothes from when she was a little girl. 

The biggest hit? The Holly Hobby dress.

What I remember of this dress is that my mother had them made up for a special evening at Barnum House near Cobourg. The dresses were long, with poufy sleeves. Mum crocheted shawls for us using colours in the dress (other than brown): peach for my sister, purple for me. We also had matching handbags made as well. 

Weren’t we the stylin’ girls? We might have been 4 and 6, around those ages. 

“I doubt Sara has her dress,” my sister said to Mum on the phone. Was she boasting because she never throws anything out? Or because her youngest son desperately wanted to wear his mother's Holly Hobby dress? 

“I’ve moved across the country three times,” I answered. “You can’t keep everything.”

Except that I was wrong. I have one plastic box labelled “Childhood  Mementos” and in that box, along with cards and toys and a few stuffed animals, I knew I had some clothes, like the dress I wore to my sixth birthday party and a towel with my name on it. 

But I had forgotten that my Holly Hobby dress and shawl were in there as well. 

The dress I wore to 6th birthday party. You can see the cake crumbs on the front!

The title for my next book is "The Girl in the Red Wool Dress". This is all that's left of that outfit.

This is the outfit I wore for my Grade 2 school picture.

But the one you really want to see...

THE HOLLY HOBBY DRESS! Vintage clothing.

Except for the elastic in the sleeves, neckline and empire waist, this dress is in perfect condition; so is the shawl. For the record, the girl on the dress is not Holly Hobby. She just reminded us of her, I suppose. We've always, even then, referred to it as the HH dress so that's what it is.

Funny, out of all the clothes I had and can remember, these are the ones that meant the most to me. How do we decide what to keep and what to let go? There is only one shirt I wish I'd kept; I remember at the age of 7 feeling ambiguous about the colours of my "Cool as a cucumber" long-sleeved shirt -- as a child, I wasn't drawn to yellow and green -- but now I wish I had that shirt in my collection. 

Wait...I'll bet my sister finds it in one of her boxes!