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.

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.

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.