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From Greg Steckler, my log home designer:
Lesson learned (and a good story) Dept: When we were young (8th grade) we lived at Neah-Kah-Nie [Oregon] and altho’ we had a beach-front home, we were surprisingly poor. Dad was on the road for weeks at a time and money was non-existent sometimes. Mom was a beach comber and brought back glass floats, driftwood, even seaweed sometimes. She would have us go get a few strawberry crabs, starfish, shells...most anything and paint them turquoise, put rhinestone eyes and glitter on them and sell them out of the garage which she called "Restless Winds Studio ''. To get customers she would go down to the little state park 3 houses away, walk up to a car and say, "Are you the Joneses? I was supposed to meet the Jones's and show them my Driftwood Studio.” She would lure them back and sell them something (like dried seaweed, painted and mounted on a piece of driftwood and make enough money so we could eat that day.
Years later when she was in Real Estate in Lincoln City she'd do the same thing. Go down to the D River park and ask, " Are you the Joneses? I was supposed to meet the Jones here and show them this cute little beach cabin that just came on the market this week." She once sold 7 houses in a month and made $35k in commissions for that month (this was like 35 years ago). Some of those folks became lifelong friends and were multiple repeat clients. By then she could have all her teeth fixed, had a Cadillac, nice clothes, became a real estate radio personality and prided herself on creating relationships.
You never know, do you?
Isn’t it fun when you are looking for one thing and find another? I found Greg’s letter in my email file from 2023.
Although I was fishing for a sturgeon who lives at the bottom of the river, I found a salmon frolicking on the top.
Your life Just Got Better
Passing on wisdom from Gary V. (Instagram)
If you have ever left a NEGATIVE comment on social media ANYTHING, all the energy you have spent, all the judging, saying they are crap, all that, you are only dragging in negativity to you. DO NOT CONTRIBUTE TO THE NEGATIVITY.
Mind your own business and celebrate that YOUR LIFE JUST GOT BETTER.
That’s hard isn’t it, to stop the angry retorts when your blood is boiling?
"Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do that, because what the world needs is more people who have come alive." --Howard Thurman
This week I published a post especially for my other blog The Best Damn Writer’s Blog on the Block (psst, I’m the only one.)
I wrote to writers about writing, of course, anyone can tune in, I just wanted to address a post specifically to them. And then I had a heck of a time doing it. Good Lord, I mixed tenses, I kept changing the beginning, the middle, the end. It was a mess. I thought of my grandson writing a novel and how he has changed the beginning about ten times, and I understand that novelists can spend years on one book, but a blog ought to come out regularly, so it’s more like Get ‘er done. The trick is to make it something of value.
Sometimes simply letting the thoughts drop on a page works. Other times, you can’t push the river.
My husband reminded me this morning that we are removing cursive writing from our culture. I remember in Catholic School (second and third grade only) how we made circles on wide-lined rough paper that still had pieces of sticks in it, and with a yellow pencil, made circles and spiraling loops rather like repeatedly making infinity symbols. All that while trying to stay within the lines. The purpose was to teach our arms the motion of writing.
I didn’t know how to write cursive in the middle of the second grade. We didn’t learn it at my previous school, and my family relocated from Illinois to Oregon in the middle of my second grade.
Thank heavens, my artistic eye saved me. I copied the letters from the pages tacked up around the room. Each eight-by-twelve-inch page had a letter, an “a” in print, followed by an “a” in cursive. Letter by letter the alphabet was exhibited around the room.
Some say that writing by hand connects the brain and the hand. My aunt, a former schoolteacher, told me that writing by hand helps a child read. I didn’t know that, but maybe it better connects the brain somehow.
Anyway, I wonder what we are losing by dropping cursive from our school system.
I remember, before I learned to write, my mother gave me a book of old checks to play with, and I tried to sign my signature after writing a check for a few million dollars—see, I knew numbers but wondered why my signature was only a scribble. My parents signatures looked pretty.
Learning cursive wasn’t fun. It was hard to get little fingers wrapped around letters—something akin to patting your head while rubbing your stomach. But both are learnable. Years later, when I used to write fiction by hand, I resorted to scribbling, for I didn’t want the action of writing to interfere with the flow of thoughts. And it took some effort for me to adapt to composing on a keyboard.
Tell me, how does it work for you?
I vote to be like the writer who stood in his swimming pool and wrote on a tablet at his pool’s edge.
But then turning into a prune isn’t a pretty sight.
