**Note that I’m putting the blog on hiatus until Monday January 1st. 

To all my friends and fans!

Wishing you all the Love and Magic of the Holiday Season, and a Very Happy New Year!

For myself, my biggest joys of the year are:

1. A grand child on the way
2. Middle Son and his girlfriend becoming engaged.
3. Adopting our sweet shelter girl, Maggie May
4. Wizard, our three sons and their girls (who are daughters to us!)
5. And all of you for understanding, maybe at times better than I did, that this year I simply hit a wall both physically and emotionally on my books. And believing that I will be back next year with the final book in the Savaged Illusions series, and I’ll write more books in the Wing Slayer Hunter series. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Please take care, be safe and come back here on Monday January 1st!

Happy Wednesday. First let’s take care of business: The digital version of The Baby Bargain is on sale for 99¢! If you like hot tortured Marine heroes, and have a weakness for secret baby and second chance romances, I think you’ll enjoy The Baby Bargain! You can grab your copy here:

Amazon Kindle /  B&N /  iBooks /  Kobo / Google Play

Now here’s our Wednesday Worthy Candidate (taken from https://www.crowdrise.com/o/en/campaign/the-little-red-dog/alexandramason,)

So what do you think? Is he worthy?

P.S. My soon to be daughter-in-law is raising money for the rescue she works with, Little Red Dog Rescue, and they are trying to win Newman’s Own Foundation $500,000 Holiday Challenge to help even more animals! If you can help, even a $10.00 donation makes a difference. Or you can help by spreading the word on social media. Thank you! Here is the link  https://www.crowdrise.com/o/en/campaign/the-little-red-dog/alexandramason

Every year, my sister-in-law hosts an amazing Apodaca Holiday Party. It’s always a blast! But I was feeling a bit off, which I attributed to the usual holiday stress most of us are feeling and the dry windy weather. By the time we got home Saturday night, I had an ugly sore throat. Yesterday it hung around, trying to decide if it wants to stay or go. Who knows, it could just be allergies.  (Let me live in Denial City, I like it here!)

In other news, Maggie did her first over-nighter at her doggie daycare/boarding. She seemed fine, happy to come home but not anxious or stressed. She’s come a long ways in a few short months. But the interesting part, is the woman who runs the facility, Emily is a true dog and animal lover. So much so that she has three PET SQUIRRELS. Like totally domesticated pet squirrels. She brought one of them out of their cage (which kept out the reach of the dogs) to meet me. She put him on the desk and he came right over to me and nuzzled my hand like a cat or bunny might do. He was a sweetheart!

And on the holiday front, I only have a handful of gifts left to buy, and may even pull off Christmas! Even if I get sick, I think I can do it.

Once I’m done, come hell or high water, I’m going to get back to SAVAGED DEVOTION. Maggie has promised to help

So how was your weekend?

It’s been pretty danged busy trying to pull off Christmas. I’ve been either shopping, doing other errands, baking or washing endless dishes from baking. I also missed answering comments on Wednesday’s blog, but I read them all :- ) Okay here’s my random five from my week.

1. I’ve made 12 loaves each of of pumpkin & zucchini bread.  I’ve also made one batch of tea cakes, and a quadruple batch of Mocha Cookies (recipe link here).
2. I couldn’t have done any of this without getting the shots in my neck and shoulders from the pain doctor last week. (These were local type shots, not the epidural shot in January that will be done in a surgery center.) They reduced my pain enough to keep going. Nights still stuck, but it would be a lot worse without those trigger point injections so I’m grateful.
3. I had set aside 1 loaf of each kind of bread as our “tester” loaf to make sure the bread is decent tasting. Unfortunately, I accidently cut into 2 zucchini loaves, instead of 1 zucchini and 1 pumpkin.  That means I screwed up labeling somewhere. I’ll straighten that out tomorrow. It’s not critical, but so annoying. Wizard volunteered to “eat my mistake” because he’s awesome like that.
4.  I’m about 2/3s or a bit more finished shopping, but it’s not enough! A couple people I’m unsure what to get them but we’ll get it figured out. Thankfully Wizard helps a lot, and we always manage to get it all done.
5. Tomorrow is the big Apodaca Family Christmas and that will be fun! But it’ll be a miracle if I can find anything in my closet to wear…that still fits. However if that’s the biggest problem I have to worry about, then I don’t have much to complain about

That’s my Friday Five. Now it’s your turn to share yours! Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Here’s our candidate who is obviously in the holiday spirit!

So what do you think, is he worthy?