Routine - Question of the Day

The question today is: Do you have a morning routine?

Today, I spoke with my brother who lives in Japan. During the pandemic, he started following a morning routine of self-care. I have noticed that he has become proactive about the pressures in his life. I wonder how much that morning routine has contributed to his improved mood.

I have another friend who has developed a morning routine. His health has improved and he feels more productive and less anxious.

Do you do something every morning - or most mornings - that helps you start your day?

I started my own morning routine. It gets interrupted by obligations but I try to finish each of the components as early in the day as possible. I have found that the routine improves my mood. (I HATE getting out of my comfy bed many mornings.) It gives me a feeling of control - a feeling that is missing in our lives these days. My routine also makes me feel cared for and valued. And everyone needs to feel valued.

Here is my morning routine:

Sun salutation - yoga; followed by tai chi. This usually takes 30 to 40 minutes.

Make my bed! After years of not taking the time to make my bed, I have become a crusader for this simple chore.  Call me crazy but I do like a neatly made bed.

Journal - I sit in the sun or in a sunny window. This journal is NOT about things I did or have to do or worries or gripes.  My morning journal is about what I see and hear and smell and feel. If an insight comes from observing, I write about that. If a question arises, I consider it.  I celebrate life and living, trains and crickets, birds and rabbits, squirrels, passers-by, barking dogs and snow, rain and wind. I chronicle trees and mist, shadows and clouds. It's awesome!

I'd love to hear about your morning routine.

Question of the day - Onion Snow

 The snow today reminded me of all the snows that we have lived through in March. Snow around the middle of March is sometimes called onion snow. It will take a better gardener than I to explain why.

Some gardeners want their peas planted by St. Patrick's Day, too. That's way too early for me.

The question of the day is:

What is your favorite snow memory?

I have a lot of favorite snow memories. When I was around 11, it snowed so heavily on Christmas Eve, that the Bishop announced that Catholics did not have to go to Mass that day. We went anyway! We walked up the hill from our house  (about half a mile) and a bakery truck picked us up and drove us the rest of the way to church (another half a mile at least). My Mom stayed home with the youngest children and Dad walked with us to Church. What an adventure! We have a picture of my four-year-old brother standing against a four foot snowdrift.

Thanks for sharing your memories!

Question of the day, #2

 What was your favorite hiding place?

Hmm. This is a hard one. We played hide and seek a lot. But I don't remember a particular spot. I sometimes hid in the closet, like a lot of kids.

When I worked with teens, we sometimes held after hours events. They were usually "meetings" but they always ended with a fun activity. Hide and seek in the library was a favorite. The rules were never under a desk with a computer. Never in the tech closet. After the second game, we added Never on top of the shelves. Yeah. Sigh. 

Now, I am not a little person and I am not agile. The teens asked me to hide and they found me right away. Once, though, I simply slipped behind the curtain in the corner and they were stymied. My partner in adult-ing and crime kept her mouth shut. They eventually found me but I had a few moments of quiet hiding.

Now I go upstairs to my sewing room to hide. Everyone needs a secret or not so secret spot.

The Question of the Day

 First question, have you considered contributing to the effort to help the people in the Ukraine? It takes a minute or two to contact charitable organizations that provide aid to refugees. 

This article from Forbes magazine lists the top 100 charities for dependability. The second column tells you which charities deal with international concerns.

The charity that is linked to your worship community has already started to offer support to war torn families. So ask your minister, rabbi, priest or imam for contact information. 

We are lucky that only two minutes of our time can send help to people around the world.

Question of the day Project!!!

Yesterday, my Mom could not remember when she talked to her brother. Was it last night or yesterday morning? She remembered what they said but the time of the call slipped her mind.

 Since then, I have been thinking about memory.  And I have been thinking about stories.  When I was a young mother, it was inconceivable to me that anyone could forget every single detail of their child's life. Silly me. Our memories fill up so quickly and it's hard to find those small significant details that we treasured. We don't have a database that helps us find those details.

So, for the next week or month - or until I forget - I will post a Question of the day to send you down memory lane.

Today's question is:

What did you see and hear on your way to school?

The road that led to our house was bordered by a stone wall, that was about 3 and a half feet high until we got to the the end. The wall turned the corner and continued up the road that met our road.

But near the entrance of our road, one of the stone masons (WPA circa 1932) had pressed a small medallion into the cement that held the stones together. It was a picture of a child riding the back of a dolphin. We looked for it, and touched it, as we walked to and from school.

Several years ago, someone pried the medallion out of the wall. I still look for where it may have been. Old habits...

SIX ingredients for a "cozy" mystery

Even "Cozy" mysteries include evil. Although Aunt Dimity manages to avoid murder, blackmail, theft, missing persons, mean rumors, loud and obstreperous new neighbors, sinister strangers, missing or lost items of great value, ancient documents that tell of treasure and/or heartache, (I know that's an odd combination. Read Aunt Dimity for any explanations.), can offer a LOT of coziness.

Most cozy mysteries do deal with murder, (sigh).  I have spent a lot of time with Patricia Wentworth, Ngaio Marsh and their ilk lately. Alan Bradley and his preteen sleuth, Flavia de Luce, are favorites as well.

Picking up a new writer - Donna Andrews - I think I have found a series I can follow.  

I also believe I have deciphered the ingredients for a popular "cozy" mystery series:

SIX INGREDIENTS FOR A COZY MYSTERY

1. Quaint, charming, odd or intriguing setting.  A large family compound with forests nearby, a houseboat, a moldering family estate, a cottage in a secluded and eccentric village, a library, a museum, a farmer's market, hobby shop or shopping mall. If your mystery happens in a subdivision, make the neighborhood just a little unusual. You get the picture. Hint: Pick your favorite vacation spot.

1.a Historic Time Period.  Setting includes the time period. Perhaps, the sleuth is an ordinary housewife or laborer but lives in the Great Depression, or between the World Wars. That ups the interest but also the research needed to make the story credible. Of course, if your sleuth is Queen Victoria's great-granddaughter (Rhys Bowen's Her Royal Spyness series) you have to investigate royal protocol as well.

2. Recurring characters. LOTS of them. A large family to go with the compound. Village residents who fit certain "types" - gossip, busybody, disorganized professor, teacher or minister, playboy, shopkeeper, etc. Neighbors with unusual hobbies or habits. Best friends, old folks who depend on the main character. Old folks who ARE the main characters. Fill up that setting and then you have fodder for a LOT of murders or suspects at least. Hint: Look around. You know these people.

3. Specific occupations or hobbies. The main character can't just be the sleuth, he/she/they must also create murals for cities, or build sculptures from recycled material, or have a lot of kids or take in rescue dogs or... It's  convenient if they are law enforcement but a food writer or a pet groomer is probably more fun. Someone retired from academia or a profession that deals with people and their quirks will work as well. Use your imagination.  OR use your passion.

4.TEACH! A book that teaches me something is a winner. This includes recipes, jargon specific to a craft or profession, the inner workings of a newspaper or the workroom of a library. Instructions on how to throw a pot or thread - is that the right word? - a loom, all add a touch of truth to your fiction.

5.Victim! It never hurts if the victim is either highly unpopular OR very rich with scads of possible heirs. This makes for LOTS of suspects. If the crime is NOT MURDER, (see my first paragraph), the victim can be sympathetic because that adds urgency to finding the lost object or missing person or blackmailer or the identity of the person in the mysterious photograph.

6. Humor. It can be hokey. Some series writers love using puns in their titles to set a light tone. Check out Donna Andrews' titles for an incredible list of bird-oriented puns. Earlier writers, like the venerable Wentworth and Marsh, added humor by emphasizing their characters' personality traits or habits. (Roderick Alleyn's sidekick, Inspector Fox, mangles the French language in almost every outing.) Joan Hess, in her Arly Hanks and Claire Malloy series, included characters with predictable traits and penchants for nosiness to up the laughs.

There you have it. I want to read what you concoct from these ingredients.

WHAT??!! I did not add "a mystery" to my ingredients? DUH! That goes without saying.

There should be confusion as to how and who and you should add clues, of course. But if you distract your reader with setting and recipes and wonky characters and a sweet little romance as a subplot, you might get away with something not too taxing.

What are you waiting for? Good luck! Get Writing!

In Bookstores Next Week - Witchlings by Caribel A. Ortega

 

I did not expect this package, an advance reader's copy of Witchlings by Claribel A. Ortega. I approached it warily. Would I like it? Would I not? Was it about an elderly or quirky sleuth? NO! Is it about bookstores, booksellers, authors or librarians? Not really.

Welll????? 

The pandemic has made me ultra fussy about trying new things. It takes me so much longer to dive into a book these days. I read a few pages and then, sigh, I put the book down. During the next read I go further, and then further into the plot. On my third attempt, I have to force myself to put the book down - IF the book is good enough.

Witchlings IS good enough!  YAY!

Seven Salazar enters the Black Moon Ceremony to find what coven will be hers. The one thing she does not want - or expect - is to become a Spare, one of three 12-year-old witches who are NOT chosen for a coven.

Right there, you know what is going to happen, right? That Seven's fate is shared by her worst enemy, Valley Pepperhorn and the new girl, Thorn LaRoux, does not make this terrible fate any better. Spares never become witches. If they are lucky, they get jobs that don't require magic. If they are NOT lucky, they are little better than slaves. Oof!

UNLESS!!! There is always an "unless". If I tell you what the "unless" is, I may be telling you too much. The book checks off a lot of boxes; transforming friendships; suspending judgment; accepting differences; learning to trust. Then, there are the adventures, the forays into extreme danger, the endangered family members and the unfair treatment of Spares. Plus a seriously creepy mystery derails the Spare coven's attempts at earning their witchdom. Just when you think you see the light at the end of the tunnel, everything changes.  Make NO assumptions, readers. This is a kaleidoscope ride.

But the story is NOT finished. Seven, Valley, and Thorn may have prevailed but evil is still out there...waiting. 

                                                                (Mwahahahahaha!)

(On sale on February 1, 2022.)

Packages

There might be holiday wreaths and garlands on some houses in your neighborhood but the HOLIDAYS are truly over.  We have turned the corner. 

There are lingering side effects. My desire to buy the "perfect" holiday gifts and my reluctance to go into crowded stores this Fall resulted in a new addiction - online buying and PACKAGES! "Brown paper packages tied up with string"...  except these packages come in padded envelopes with reinforced packing tape.  That doesn't have the same lyricism though. "Packages in envelopes with reinforced packing tape" does not scan.

The ease and allure of online shopping ate a hole in my credit card spending. I have a small self-imposed "cap" on my spending and every month, for the past four months, my credit card company warned me that I exceeded my cap. Don't worry. My credit line is much larger than my cap. Still, what happened to the Old Frugal Me? The Use Cash Whenever Possible Me? The I Don't Need That Me? Where did I go?

Well, the news gives me an answer to that. I turned into an homebody because it's Sickness Season and I hate being sick. I never much liked shopping in stores anyway. Too many choices and never the right one - shopping takes too much time.

Online shopping takes time, too. Why is looking at things on a screen so much better than fingering the same things in a store? Choosing online takes time and effort. But it also offers the joy of anticipation! 

Looking for packages has become the bright part of my day. A day without a package is a day without sunshine to steal a saying from an old ad. I don't even care if the package is for my husband. We open them with an eagerness unrivaled by any of our other activities. Do Not Judge!

Last night - our mail comes very late - I got a BOOK in the mail. The Paris Bookseller is completely outside my usual reading. I lean toward fiction for young readers and cozy mysteries with elderly or quirky sleuths.  It is time for me to BREAK OUT and try a new book about ... books. (You did not expect me to stray too far, did you?)

Back to packages...I like sending them, too.  And here's the best thing. I can send a package from HOME!! I have a postal scale and I can "Click'n'Ship". The postal worker picks the package up from my porch. It is truly awesome. 

OH HO! With packages and and shipping from home, I can complete my transformation into a cave dwelling hermit! Mwahahahaha! 

Next, I will give up showers. 

(not really!) 

I wonder what's in the package I hope to get today.