Pat knows it’s good to be the Queen, even when she can’t stop laughing during our amateur theatrics. The picture is from a small-ship tour to the Dalmatian Coast three years ago.

Just a quick note to let you all know that a couple days ago, Pat had a long anticipated knee replacement. The surgery went splendidly, without problems or pain, and good meds have kept her very comfortable. She’s doing great, but there’s physical therapy scheduled for a couple of weeks, and we’re not sure when she’ll be back home and at the computer.

She sends you all her best, and yes, Kate and Allie are being well cared for. Pat and the pooches will be in the pool together very soon.

Sometimes what you don’t know CAN hurt you.  Tim and I took a quick trip back to Ohio last week.  We drove.  So we could bring things back with us…

The four days we had there were a whirlwind.  Fully booked.  We’d get up, blink, and it was five o’clock.  We accomplished everything we’d planned, and then some.  It was a great four days.  And when, at just before six am Monday morning we set out to drive back across the United States – needing to be home by Tuesday night due to work that had to be completed on Wednesday.  That meant over twenty-four hours of driving in about thirty-six hours.

We were good with that.  The time we’d spent in Ohio was worth the drive.  More than worth it.  So we set out in push mode.  We were going to make it to Oklahoma City by Monday night.  We’d sleep a few hours and make it to Phoenix by Tuesday evening.  We listened to movies to help pass the time.  (I watched what I could see of them on the little DVD player.)  We talked and we ate a bit.  I drank a lot of Diet Coke.  We were passing through the world, and yet nothing existed outside of our truck.  One stop to the next, one state to the next, we were in different cultures, different temperatures, different time zones.  And yet, our world, inside the truck, was the same.  And all that was real.

Until, just north of Tulsa, after twelve hours on the road with another two and a half to go, we stopped at a travel plaza for a bathroom break.  On our way back out to the car, we passed an employee who was just arriving.  She told us to be safe.  Tim didn’t hear her.  I didn’t pay attention, until several steps later.  I heard her words repeated in my mind.  And a third time.  I stopped.  Grabbed Tim’s arm.  Told him what I’d heard.

Thank God.  If we’d continued on our way in our isolated world, we’d have driven straight into the numerous tornadoes that desecrated Oklahoma that day.  There was the massive destruction in Moore that hit all the news stations across the country.  And there were many more that touched down from north Tulsa to south Oklahoma City.

You are getting the facts and video from the tragedy in the news.  I won’t take time here to share what we saw.  I do offer a huge prayer of thanks that the death toll was much less than had been released from the coroner’s office to local Tulsa TV Monday night.

The photo up above is one of many we took from our phones as we drove to the nearest exit.  We were on a toll road so the exits were not numerous.  My job was to watch for funnel clouds.  And to keep myself calm.  After eighteen miles, we found a little town a couple of miles off from the storm’s path and got a room for the night. We had to go to more than one place to find a room still available on the ground floor.

Tuesday morning we woke up to continued storms, but no tornado warnings.  We drove half a mile down the road to get diet and coke and coffee for breakfast, but the place was closed due to overnight flooding.  At that point I downloaded a weather radar and alert ap for my phone, and stayed glued to it until we were out of the storm.  We pulled into home at two-thirty-two this morning.

And from now on, I am paying more attention to what’s going on around me.

1. Heal myself!  I finally found the time to start physical therapy for the back sprain that happened nearly two months ago and it seems to be helping, but the recovery process has been very slow.  I may have put off the therapy for too long, and of course, now I’m worried it won’t work and I’ll always have this nagging lower back pain.  But I’m hanging in there.  I just want to get back to normal.
2. Skateboard.  I have skateboarding envy.  It looks like so much fun.  However, with this back injury and my trick knee, it’s not likely I’ll be wooshing down the sidewalk any time soon, but maybe I’ll compromise with a push scooter:

        They look like fun too, right?

3. Speak Spanish.  They tell you when you really really want something to visualize it.  Well, I’ve been visualizing a trip to Spain for the last twenty years, at least.  I put the trip on my Bucket List last year—and now, it looks as if a vacacionnes en Espana may finally be possible.  The Forster family is actually making plans to go to the land of sun and fun.  The gyrations of trying to figure out how to maximize frequent flier and hotel points occupy most of our waking hours.  If we ever get the travel plans to come together, the next goal will be to learn the language, or at least enough to order Valencian paella, since we will be visiting the Spanish town for which the trademark dish was named.  Can’t wait!
4. Use chop sticks.  Not to eat the paella.  Several months ago, when I was out getting supplies to restock our empty pantry, I saw a woman eating orange chicken at an Asian takeout restaurant .  I was awed—and a bit envious—at the way she wielded her chopsticks.  They could have been tongs!  She had captured a large piece of orange chicken and was bringing it to her mouth when I walked by and distracted her.  The chicken escaped, but as it was falling to the table, she snatched it out of thin air—with the chopsticks!  A non-chopstick user like me found that pretty amazing. I’ve tried chopsticks a few times but near starvation discouraged me, and dare I say it, I “chickened” out.  I think I may try it again.  I’m sure Asian food must taste better with chopsticks, if you could just get the food to your mouth.
5. Build a website.  I actually have a good shot at this wish.  I already blog here on Storybroads, which is a WordPress site, and I’m part of a team that’s designing and building a WordPress web site for a very worthy environmental nonprofit.  As it turns out, WordPress is shockingly user friendly, not just for visitors to the site, but for building sites.  Wish me luck!  It’s exciting and challenging—and when it’s done and I’ve used all my new technical knowledge to design my own gorgeous site, I’m having a tee-shirt made:  I survived building [insert website URL here].

Suzanne

Last week I got the good news that my new carriage is finally finished. The wonderful folks from the group that runs carriages in downtown Memphis are driving up this week to Indiana and will bring it home to me. Now, of course, I have to sell the old one. However, since I ordered this one more than a year ago, I am overjoyed to have it at last.

That’s the good news. I may decide once it gets here to turn totally Luddite and drive it exclusively.

In the last week I have been faced with the following technological problems:

I got in my car to go to my Malice writers meeting last Saturday and had a dead battery. So, once I got it jumped, I took it to town and replaced it. Missed the meeting.

My icemaker quit for the umpty-umph time. The man came out to fix it, replaced the front gasket, which has been leaking for a couple of months, and swore it was fixed. Nunh-unh. Another hour on the phone setting up another appointment.

Then I had the spring cleanup done on the heating and air conditioning. Other than the fact that the filter was completely impacted, that went well.

Then my dentist says I need another laser surgery on a tooth. You do not want to know what that will cost.

One the plus side, Mr. Mouse did get my pastures cut—they look like a golf course. Zoe and Frieda were delighted.

Then the man came to replace my Wildblue.Net dish spent four hours here on Friday afternoon, and swore I was fine. Nunh-unh.  I have spent hours with those lovely (and they are) technies at Wildblue. They can’t solve the problem. They suggested I carry my big IMac down the hall into George’s office to plug it in directly because they can’t service wireless equipment. Question: If you sell a wireless network, shouldn’t you be able to troubleshoot a wireless problem?

Then I’m having the security system replaced with a wireless system so we won’t lose it during thunderstorms and tornadoes. They have rescheduled three times, and may get here the day after Memorial day.

I may get rid of my landline completely. It went out last Wednesday afternoon. They came out to fix it late Tuesday. A week, guys?

My huge Minolta copier is telling me it needs a repairman, but no one in this area repairs Minolta. Haven’t solved that one yet.

Mr. Mouse swears he’ll help me reconstruct the stalls Zoe destroyed in the barn, but has no idea when he’ll get around to it. Meantime, the front of my house looks like the jungles of Yucatan with a broken concrete path in the middle. Can’t find anyone to redo that either. Oh, and my step-son from California, Kendall, is sending someone to take George’s Corvette back to California so he can fix it and sell it since George will never be able to drive it again. But he hasn’t showed up yet.

You can’t walk in my house, I have gained four pounds, and I dream of chocolate.

I suppose I’m too old to sit in a corner and suck my thumb, but I’m almost past caring. Anybody know a good Milolta repairman?

Carolyn McSparren and I spoke to a library group recently, and the first question asked by the pariticpants was where do we get our story ideas.   It’s almost always the first question whenever I speak to a non-writers group.

It’s question I love to answer.   There’s a simple answer: curiosity.

I was born with a healthy curiosity.    I always wanted to know everything about everyone.  In other words, I’ve always been nosy, and I found a way to make that trait socially acceptable.

I took after my uncle, a famous newsman who was eyewitness to many of the great events of the 20th Century.    It took him to war, to the end of war when Japan surrendered on the battleship Missouri.  It took him to China and India and England.   My career as a journalist wasn’t nearly as grand as his but it did provide many story ideas over the years.   I always wanted to go beyond the who, what, where and when.   I wanted to know the why..

My historicals often came from a paragraph in a  history book or magazine.   One paragraph would intrigue me and send me running for more information.   One example came from a  Military History article about the Boxer Rebelllion in China.    Five hunrdred soldiers from eight nations, all recently enemies, had to stand together for 55 days in Peking, China, during a seige by nearly one hundred thousand angry Boxers.   “What if” went into spasms of possibilities.     My ‘what if’  created a well born English widow who had adopted several Chinese children.   Her soldier husband had been killed in battle and she holds a resentment against all things military.  The hero was a rough American who just arrived to assume command of a small American contingent.   Dragonfire wrote itself.

My contemprary suspense ideas came from newspapers.   One resulted from an artricle about a close connection between the Mafia and an FBI agent in Boston.  Writers read a snippett here or a snippet there, and their minds automatically whirl to “what if” mode.   What if this happened instead of that?  My latest book came from an article in the New York Times about military dogs with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.   All the “what if” bells rang when I read the article. .

The “what if” mechanism is inherent in most novelists.   Curiosity  sparks an idea and the “what if” factor takes over from there.

And then you hope for the best.

I’ll be absent for at least two weeks and possibly longer with a knee replacement.   I’m having the surgery next week.

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It’s when you do something that you realize you can.

I’ve learned something very clearly.  If you think you can’t do something that you must do – or even just want to do – stop thinking about it and start.  Just start.  And leave the getting it done to fate.

Tim and I have both just come off the completion of several mammoth work projects.  They seemed impossible to complete, let alone complete well.  We buckled down.  He started his projects.   I started mine.  We got out of bed at five thirty every morning. Worked until six-thirty or seven every night.  Sixteen days straight. And here we are.  Done.  And done well.

It got me to  thinking about other things that I didn’t think I could do.  But I had no choice and I every day I got up and just started them.  Or continued them.

Saturday saw the end of the most impossible task of my life.  It’s done.  I am alive so I lived through it. It took a year.  It was horrible.  But I got up every day and did it for only that day.  Each day.  I knew I couldn’t do a year. Some days I didn’t even think I could do a day.  So I would think about something else.

Because sometimes that is all you can do.  And in the end all you can do is all it takes.