We received some unwelcome news yesterday.
Dwayne's shoulder surgery has been postponed another month.
He hurt his shoulder at the end of plow season last March and has been going through the process with WCB of getting it fixed. After months of physio which I think made it worse, he finally saw the surgeon in mid-August and at the beginning of October, heard his surgery would be November 17.
All good. Couldn't come soon enough, in fact. I went and booked our New Year's trip to Atlanta.
Yesterday, the WCB booking nurse at the surgeon's office phoned and said they had to rebook a bunch of surgeries and now, ho, ho, ho, Dwayne's operation is December 15. In New Glasgow.
Prior to that, he has to go to their lab in Halifax for blood work and at another date, to be fitted with an entire-arm splint that he will wear for ten weeks.
And we leave for Atlanta on December 27! Ho, ho, ho!
Granted, it's better than waiting 2 years for surgery like non-WCB patients do but when I see that his right shoulder is three inches lower than his left and he tells me that his right hand keeps going numb, having the surgery postponed another month is hard.
My husband, however deflated he was by that bad news, did have the grace to admit after watching the day-after news reports about Sandy's devastation: "I suppose postponed shoulder surgery isn't quite as terrible, is it?"
I'm not going to tell him, either, that this could be my "Be careful what you wish for" vibe coming true: as the years go by, I kvetch more and more about Christmas and how commercial and overdone and expensive it is. Well, I guess I'm getting my very simple Christmas this year.
As long as he can kiss me on New Year's Eve and lift a glass of champagne with his left arm, I'm fine with a twig tree and a ceramic Santa from the hospital gift shop in my stocking.

For once, and only once, am I very grateful that the family we have in the States doesn't live north of Washington!
For as many times as I've begged my sister to move her family a few states north so they can be less than a three-days' drive away, I'm glad she never listens to me. Especially since my mother is visiting in Georgia right now!

What I'm also grateful for are the wonderful friends and relatives who bless me with their love and support. Put out a call for help and they respond. The acknowledgements in just expanded like, well, like Hurricane Sandy travelling over warm water.

So I've created a FB "fan" page - a public page to promote myself as a writer and show prospective agents that I'm creating a platform from which to launch my book.  Since I can link my work blog through the FB profile, I decided against a website.
I've managed to put up a few photos and posts but I'll be damned if I can figure out anything else beyond the profile!
There are two essential parts to this promote-myself project: 1) Content. That I have no problem providing, and 2) Likes. This page needs as many likes as it can get
To build an audience, I can import emails from my personal account but should I? Do you want to be contacted like that? Since I don't have an existing personal FB page, I can't use my existing FB contacts.
The weird thing is that I can't find a Search option. I feel like I'm stuck with my Admin page with no way of getting beyond it. Frustrates me to not be able to figure this out. I know what the login for a personal account looks like and how to search for friends that way but it doesn't seem possible from a fan page. I want to feature the FB pages of some of my fave writers but I don't know how to find them.
And I don't know how to tell you how to find me! If you can search for me, use my first and both my last names; since I write under both, I'm FBing as both.
I'm keen to use this FB page as a writer but at the moment, I seem limited to posting -- and no one reading.

The signs are piling up.
I've learned that even when I feel at my lowest, my clumsiest, my doubtiest, the trick is just to wait. It's like the weather in the Maritimes: Wait ten minutes and it will change. Rain then sun. Sun then rain. (A gross under-generalization. More like wait ten days whoch is more realistic about how life unfolds.)
So, the first sign this week: the arrival of the cardinal. Although it's not the male, it suggeststhat he is not far behind. Cardinals are a symbol of power and pride, both in a positive sense (confidence, not ego; belief in self, not arrogance). They are a symbol of hope and brilliance.
The second sign reminds me of the greater value of doong work that I maynot want to do but have to right now. While cleaning one of my houses on Thursday, the structure of the novel I'm thinking about writing, a novel inspired by the events of the past summer (as Mum keeps saying, "Don't they remember that you're a writer?"), burbled up from those murky depths of my creative mind and made itself known. It's a sign because that new idea - from a few notes I made in my notebook - means my memoir is done. It's ready.
(Yes, but am I? Brilliance! Confidence!)
Finally, the third sign: When I logged onto my blog this afternoon, the first thing I saw was a
post by an agent that I follow: "I love reading memoirs," she wrote. She started agenting for the Christian book market but has been representing mainstream writers for awhile. Perhaps this lover of memoir will be interested in one about the spirituality of Alzheimers.

I certainly know how to piss away an afternoon but I really have to be on deadline to make good use of Wednesday afternoon. After two and a half intense days at the paper -- it's non-stop work unlike at home where I take a two dozen tea breaks, a dozen bathroom breaks and walk the dogs six times a day -- so by Wednesday at noon, I need a break from sitting at a computer.
Since it was a sunny afternoon with a cold wind blowing, we went for a drive. Once in the car, once on the bike. The first two pictures are blueberry fields just outside of town; the light on them caught my eye on the way home from work so we went back to take some pictures.
The rest of the photos are from our bike ride through the woods to the duck pond and home again.

A doe and her fawn at the far left and right sides of the photo.

A Ducks Unlimited pond so close to home!

That sky looked like snow.

Here's some really big news: a female cardinal landed this afternoon on the bird feeding station that is Mum's balcony!
"I knew they'd come eventually," Dwayne said. "I knew it."
Traditionally, cardinals aren't found in Nova Scotia but in recent years, as the winters become milder, there have been spottings on the island and in the valley. Now in Riverview!
She's a little skittish so I had to sneak up to get these photos.
Mum promptly made a few phone calls to find out who sells safflower seeds around here -- the cardinals' preferred food -- and off she and Stella went to Truro. She is very dedicated to feeding the birds.
"I knew they'd come," Dwayne said again.

Just because they are easier to photograph, here are some of Mum's blue jays:

I like reading the obituaries. Some people's lives are very interesting. Most are long-lived, others are not.
A nine-year-old girl was in today's obits in the provincial paper. She died of a brain tumour. But that's not the only thing that defined her. She was in Grade 4 French Immersion and she was a Girl Guide. She liked to make sculptures out of clay and she liked to draw.
I like reading the obituaries because sometimes they remind me of how fortunate we are.