IMPORTANT NOTICE

Please note that my blog has moved to here ——> http://judegarrison.com/
Thanks to all who are following me. I hope to see you over at my new home.
Drop me a line if you wish me to include your link at my new site.

A GENTLE REMINDER TO SELF

A professional editor is not the same as a proofreader. A professional editor helps bring out things you didn’t think were possible. A proofreader picks up errors that Auto Correct or a dictionary or a professional editor miss.

Florida’s Forgotten Coast

TATE’S HELL

“Oh, listen! Good people, a story I’ll tell
Of a great swamp in Florida, a place called ‘Tate’s Hell’…
One hundred and forty square watery miles
With millions of ‘skeeters and big yellow flies,
And where all about the moccasins lie
With glittering death in their beady eye,
Where bull-gators beller and panthers squall.
Now this is a place to be shunned by all.

No man can dispute
This legend of yore…
How Tate lived a full week
And then five days more,
And somehow crawled out
Close to Carrabelle,
From the deep-ghostly swamp
That we know as Tate’s Hell.”
……By Will McLean

Reprinted with permission from the National Estaurine Research Reserve
http://www.dep.state.fl.us/coastal/sites/apalachicola/

THIS IS A PLACE FOR YOUR BUCKET LIST. VERY EDUCATIONAL AND CHILDREN-FRIENDLY.
Directions: From US Hwy. 98 in Eastpoint, Florida turn south on SR 300 (Island Dr.) towards St. George Island. After 1/4 mile, turn left into gravel driveway by Reserve sign (before the bridge).

My husband, sister-in-law and I never made it to Tate’s Hell. We were vying for St. George Island, and it did not disappoint us. The sunset in the sound is amazing.

A Garden Epiphany

It’s been a beautiful weekend here in the Alabama Wiregrass.
I took advantage of the climate and started spring planting.

Burpee Baby Red Mix Lettuce, Burpee Clemson Spineless Okra,
The Cook’s Garden Saffron Prolific Squash in the raised bed.

I have to compete with these beauties, but well worth it.

So, Container Gardening it is. I call it the Easy Chair Method.

Burpee’s Tenderpod Garden Beans and Early Golden Bantam Sweet Corn.
More Yellow Sqash.
Jet Star Tomatoes.

I will post updates as it progresses.

See How My Garden Grows

Remember how I started a Lasagna Garden last spring? For more details, click on the above link to See How My Garden Grows. Yielded lots of tomatoes (mostly cherry), but also squash, cucumbers and okra as well. Hated to see them go. Everything was so tasty.

Pulled out and discarded plants in the fall to the compost bin out back.

Didn’t get much work in on the garden this summer. Except to pick baskets full of cherry tomatoes borne from volunteer plants. My kind of gardening! To my surprise, when I went out to do spring cleanup there were scads of them popping up. Decided to leave most of them. Transplanted a few. Discarded the rest. It’s been an amazing summer. Yields were the best harvested so far.

Sweet succulent cherry tomatoes. Some of them huge. Nothing like you will ever find in a super market. No GMO (genetically modified organisms) in this batch.  Too bad I didn’t get pictures. Been busy this summer working on a new book.

Unfortunately, tomatoes were about the only thing I harvested this year. One small mess from two okra plants. (Mess…that’s southern talk, y’all…we all know what a mess is). The plat was too small to put anything else in. So I thought!

The end of the season is once more upon us.

Still have some stragglers trying to hang on (even in the transplanted ones), but the aphids have taken over, and the fruit is bitter.

Time to go for this year.

Massive clean-up! A perfect habitat for black widow spiders. Ewe! (Reminder to self…always wear thick gloves.) And aphids. Away, I say. Away you must go!

Another surprise in the clean-up. A beautiful squash plant (I think) is trying to push its way to the surface. I didn’t plant it, so it must a volunteer from last year. There actually was a fruit already formed (small), but I accidentally clipped it off when I took out the tomato plant. Think I will leave the mama and see what comes forth next.

Can hardly wait to see what new surprises are in store. I see lots of dropped tomatoes on the ground. Pumpkins anyone? It will be interesting to see what happens if I throw a few seeds into the mix.

My Heart Bleeds

For memories not forgotten.

Not even a lifestyle that once was.

God held me in his hands and directed me on a different path.

Almost seven years ago to the day, August 29, 2005, my life irreversibly changed. For the better I think.

I hadn’t given much thought to the warnings of a hurricane headed my way…Biloxi. All the indications of the National Weather Service said so.

But wait!

Previous storms that summer had all hit inland in Florida. I, like many others in the area, assumed Katrina would do the same. Little did we know!

 What I remember:

Walking along an isolated beach at midnight on about August 26, 2005, thinking…these weather  people are crazy. It’s beautiful here. The waves aren’t even that high. And I can’t evacuate. I need to work. I need the money.

 Money?

Pshaw!

Who can earn a living when Mother Nature shuts down all available means to do so?

 Yeah. That was the aftermath. The reality sets in. And you ask God for help. Even though, undeniably, you may not feel you deserve it. God is the one constant that doesn’t let you down…if you listen.

 Prayers out to all those affected in the path of Hurricane Isaac. Money and material things are nothing compared to human life. Things are replaceable. Human life is not.  Take advantage of the past. Accept that offer of a helping hand in protection and going forward.

God be with all my family and friends on the Gulf Coast.

The He/SheThing

Wow. I’ve recently discovered what a difficult task it is to write from a character’s perspective without using gender pronouns. One can use the name of the character only so many times before it becomes redundant.. But what if the name were unisex? Say for instance, Sam. Could be a male. Could be the female derivative of Samantha. And you don’t want to give up which it is. No he/she’s allowed! A tough one.

This should be an interesting project to see if I can actually pull it off.

Amber Alert

Growing up in the small farming community of Alpine, Mississippi, I never expected to one day see it make the headline news.  And for such a sad reason.  The bodies of Jo Ann Bain and her daughter Adrienne, missing since April 27, were found buried in a shallow grave behind a house less than 3 miles from my old home place.  There are two other daughters of the Bain family still missing, along with alleged kidnapper, Adam Mayes.  Everyone in Alpine and surrounding towns are, with good reason, alarmed that Mayes might still be in the area.  Although it is a viable concern (there are places one could hide for weeks without being found), my thoughts are that he is long gone.  The FBI should have snagged him when they first investigated and had the chance.  No doubt, there must have been some reason why they didn’t; but they’re not saying what it was.  Just watched Nancy Grace’s take on the story. She basically mirrored my speculation.  This story gets more bizarre as new developments unfold.  Now, Mayes’ mother and wife are in custody.  My, my!  Please keep the two remaining children in your thoughts and prayers that they are found unharmed.

OFF-TOPIC—BURNING THE BRA OR FINDING THE EQUIVALENT

As a teenager…you know that dreamy state where the horizon is never-ending and the grass always looks greener on the other side…I vowed to never become like many of the housewife fras I observed in my neighborhood: frumpy, bedraggled and well, oftentimes (the horror of it all) BRALESS. It seemed so obscene.

In all fairness to those frumpy, bedraggled and braless women, I grew up in a rural area, a farming community, where the women:
* Worked as hard as the men, putting in long hours in the fields beside their husbands;
* Tended to their children;
* Kept the house as clean as possible (remember here, I’m talking about farmers’ wives who couldn’t afford the modern technology of dishwashers, vacuum cleaners or servants);
* Made, repaired, cleaned and ironed the family’s clothing;
* Dished up food they cooked for their rowdy bunch (usually from staples they had harvested and preserved through either canning or freezing).

In retrospect, it makes me tired just thinking about it—or the ideology that housewives had a life of leisure, to sit and watch soap operas all day. Back then, taking a break to sit down and watch a soap was indeed a luxury.

Moving on down the line:

In the 70s I burned my bras in recognition of womens’ newfound-freedom. Was it really? Well, yes…to a degree. At least women were finally able to wear trousers in an office (and we were hired there). That was a definite plus. Alas, braless was not one of the advantages (though not one of those companies I worked for included the expenses of purchasing such, much less finding a comfortable one).

The moral of my story?

I think perhaps those women back in the day knew the secret long before I ever discovered it. Going braless was not a statement of freedom, it was more an act of trying to be comfortable.

Who really designs these things? Men…that’s my first thought, who obviously have no clue. Victoria or Olga? Yes, they’re better than most…if you’re a model. But what about the millions of ordinary women who go through life seeking a comfortable fit? Braless, at the moment, seems a very understandable choice…not a statement…just a sign of relief!

CURSES TO HACKERS AND VIRUSES

It’s been a while since I blogged. My personal computer got hacked and embedded with a bad virus (even though I had virus protection) that virtually wiped out everything in my operating system. I suppose in all respects, nothing was actually wiped out, but rendered unusable. The thing even prevented me from going into the Task Manager and changing what services were running, and of course it obstructed the Administrative Management panel from view in order to see and/or change the services that way. It’s a good thing I decided not to do the NaNoWriMo contest, since this virus thing took over on November 4th. I would have been a loser before even starting.

I’ve since replaced my computer with Windows 7, and wouldn’t you know—the thing doesn’t come with Microsoft Word software already installed, just the Word Starter program. If you want the real thing, that’s an additional $120, if you please. On top of which, there is no 2003 version to be had, just the 2010 one. You can change the files to manually store as the 2003 version, but it is all in compatible mode and some features will not work that way. Everything, and I do mean everything, I know revolved around that old 2003 version, and from what I’ve heard from different users the newer model is much harder to learn. What a setback! I’m devastated, to say the least.

I’m on a mission, trying out different things to compensate: OpenOffice (which is free) versus Microsoft Word/Scrivener/IWrite4. So far, it appears that Microsoft Word has it hands down with the features. Woe is me. I can only hope I’ve been a good little girl this year and Santa is kind to me.