Howdy and TGIF! Okay time to share five random things about our week. Here are mine:

1. I finally got my new dishwasher! It took almost two weeks to get it installed. But because life has been on the bullet train lately, we haven’t had a chance to run it a full cycle yet, so fingers crossed that nothing leaks and it works as advertised.
2. My brother is home from the hospital, and my sister may be coming home today. Both of them have been amazing, getting up at the first opportunity after surgery. My brother is probably pushing the boundaries a little bit. His theory is that if a nurse tells him to try to walk three times in a twelve-hour period, he’ll do  it six times. Not sure where he gets that need to push so hard And Biker Witch? Well she’s a superstar! Her surgery was so much more involved than we’d hoped, and she’s surprising everyone by getting up and walking anyway. They both have a way to go in recovery, but they’re very determined.
3. Maggie got a special trip to Petco today to pick out a couple treats. She’s been a really good girl, plus it breaks up the long hot days for her since I walk her early in the morning. I gave her one chew while I was cleaning, and normally I only let her eat half of it at a time by taking it away after about a half hour. But when I came back downstairs after dusting, the whole thing was gone. I have no idea if she ate it all, or she hid it for later. I guess time will tell.
4. I went to the gym twice this week. Last week I didn’t go at all, so that’s a check in the improvement column.
5. There was a surprise sale on one of my books, HER TEMPORARY HERO. I found out when I opened my Bookbub Newsletter, and saw it listed. It’s entirely possible the publisher had notified me and I missed it in my email. It was fun to see it hit #8 e-book bestseller overall on B&N, #2 in e-book contemporary romance on Amazon, and #1 in e-book romance on iTunes. I think I remembered all those right–I’m too lazy to go look through my screenshots.

That’s my five things, now I’d really like to hear yours! Hope everyone has a great weekend.

Hey guys,  Maggie wanted to post, but I’m too tired to set it up for her So I’ll just update you all.

So my brother had surgery Monday, and it went very well. They believe they got all the cancer, and he’ll recover fine. I’ve talked to my sister-in-law a few times, and he seems to be doing doing great. I’ll call him today just to harass him. But the last thing I told him before surgery was to listen to his doctors and his wife or I’d arrive on his doorstep to make his life miserable.

Nobody wants that, LOL!

Then Biker Witch had surgery yesterday, and that surgery turned into a marathon. I think close 7 hours! Although some of that time is prep, closing and cleanup too.  Anyhow, as I’m typing this, she’s out of surgery, awake and able to talk, so everything is good so far. Her Biker Hubby has been with her, and I’ll go back to see her today. (I was there during her surgery, but I didn’t go see her in recovery as she needs rest and her husband).  She’ll be in the hospital a few days, and we’ll take it all a day at a time.

So it’s been a long two days, and poor Maggie will just have to wait to share her next story. But she wanted you all to know she’s looking forward to her chance at blogger-talkin’ with you all

How’s everyone else’s week going?

The weekend raced on by. The highlight was going to CPA Boy and Special K’s house for a small family BBQ. Middle Son and his wife came and they have big news–they have adopted a second dog! She’s a mixed breed sweetheart name Hazel, I can’t wait to get to know her. When I do, I’ll get a picture. I’m very happy for them!  They have two big, power breed dogs, but they are great dog-parents who make sure the dogs have exercise, structure and training, along with lots of love. I love power breeds, but ONLY with the right owners.

Youngest son was there for a while, and doing great! Wedding plans are moving along, and so is his news I can’t share yet. But soon. Let’s just say I’m so proud of him!

The peanut butter chocolate chip cookies I made went over well at the BBQ. First off, CPA Boy was happy his mom still loves him by fulfilling his special request, LOL! Then Turbo’s aunt and uncle fed him pieces of cookie in order to score best aunt and uncle points. I watched and laughed. Turbo was totally wired from what probably amounted to a quarter to a third of a cookie. His mom was distracted or she would have limited that sooner. Anyhow this little 16 month old boy ran circles around us after that!! He’s super fast for his age, so I’m not exaggerating. Then his dad got all stern about no more cookies.

Turbo’s dad is a meanie sometimes.

We had a great time, and so did Maggie. She loved being invited to the family BBQ, plus she and Turbo are buddies. Turbo is really good at petting dogs and giving them treats (always with supervision).

So this week will be a little crazy.

Today my brother is having surgery. I’d appreciate any thoughts and prayers that he comes out of surgery clean and healthy. We all know cancer sucks, but the doctors have predicted they will get it all with this surgery. He wouldn’t let me come to his state and “assist” the doctors since he swears I’m not as qualified as his surgeons. I know, I know, I’m as surprised as you My brother has the same control freak tendencies as I do, so I think I’m amusing him. Or he’s tolerating me. Either way, he convinced me to stay home and let the medical staff do their thing. Okay, teasing aside, my brother has been on his A game here, catching a  problem, listening to advice and aggressively doing what needs to be done. I’m proud of him!

Not to be out done, my sister is having major back surgery tomorrow. She’s always been a bit dramatic. I’m kidding! She’s been having serious pain and other symptoms for a long time now, and done everything she could to alleviate them with non-surgical options. Now it needs to be addressed. However, Biker Witch is not a control freak like me, and this always leaves me mildly confused. While I research like a madwoman, she gets just enough information to make her feel comfortable and then makes a decision. That’s probably why she’ll live longer and healthier than me! While I wish she didn’t have to go this route, I admire her determination to get it done, and live her best life. Go Biker Witch! I appreciate any good thoughts and healing energy you can send her way, so she can get back to her main job of harassing me. Who else is going to tell me I worry too much?

There’s more going on, but that’s the highlights for now. Maggie is asking if she can post on Wednesday, but her stories are kind of one-sided. First she tells the world I locked her in the closet, then that I was digging through the trash…maybe I should banish her from the blog?

So how was your weekend?

And here we go! My five random things about my week:

1. Doing one little thing like buying a new TV stand for the house is a slippery slope. After repurposing the doors to the TV stand into picture frames, I’ve gone onto to buy two more pictures for other walls in the family room, and I’m on the hunt for more decorating items to complete the look I’m going for.
2. My brother and sister are both having surgery next week on Monday and Tuesday. They aren’t twins, but they obviously like doing things together, LOL! Life is just weird sometimes. I feel for them both going through surgery and recovery.
3. So…remember I said two sad things happened a couple of weeks ago and I was waiting for the third? The third thing arrived this week. I wish I had the magic to restore all our loved ones to good health. But all I can do is be there for them to the best of my ability.
4. I’m seeing Biker Witch today. We’ll have lunch and do what sisters do Anyone have bail money just in case? Just asking….
5. Tomorrow we’re going to CPA boy’s house for a barbecue.  Shhh…Wizard doesn’t know this yet but I ordered a special shirt with a dog on it, hoping the Turbo (my almost 16 month old grandson) likes it! Turbo is always interested in Wizard’s car shirts, but he also loves dogs. Not that we’re competitive or anything, LOLOL! It’s all in fun guys, and right now, Wizard and I need to have fun to keep our mind off our worry for our loved ones. I’m also making peanut butter chocolate chip cookies because CPA Boy might be a high-powered executive by day and super dad by night, but in my world, he’s still my little boy and when he asks for peanut butter chocolate chip cookies from his mom, he will get them :-).

So that’s my five, and now I’d love to hear five random things about your week. I hope everyone has a great weekend!

Hi, it’s me, Maggie! I’m here blogger-talking to you all cause my mom is sulking.

She’s kind of mean when she’s sulking. You all see that picture of me? I think my mom photo-magiced it cuz I’m not that gray. Honest-face, I’m not!

What mom? Photo-magiced is too a word. I’m google-pawed it, so there. Can I get back to blogger-taking?

Anyhow, so I have this story about my mom and me. See I’m super friendly like, and I try to make friends with all the lizards. We play chase, and it’s like super fun.  Then the lizards love to play hide and seek. One of their favorite hiding places is outside under the big trashcans. They wait and wait for me to find them.

When I find them, we play chase again. It’s the best game ever! Except mom is always yelling at me, “Maggie don’t eat your friends!”

Mom just doesn’t understand that I tag the lizards with my mouth. Sigh…she’s a good mom but sometimes, I wonder what she does all day when she doesn’t even understand the easy stuff, you know?

But back to the story. I can’t move the trashcans by myself. So I get my mom to do it. I go to the door, I wait for her to open it then I run to the trashcans.  That’s how we’re supposed to do it. But last Saturday, I didn’t even have to tell mom, she went out to the trashcans all by herself. Cool! It was hide and seek time! She must have known the lizards were hiding, and wanted to play. So I went with my mom, and at the trashcans, I went into my Seek Pose. I was all poised and ready to pounce and as soon as mom moved the trashcan.

Only she doesn’t move it. Instead she opens the lid, which is weird cause she wasn’t carrying anything to put inside.

Then she pulled a bag out of the can.

Even weirder. Mom never plays in the trash, and she won’t let me do it either. That’s the rule.

But then…PLOT TWIST!! Really, guys, you’re gonna be so surprised. Mom opened the bag of trash and pulling out all these ripe, wet, smelly things. It was like awesome gross, and mom was making all these shrill human noises. Totally hi-lar-i-ous!! I laughed and laughed! Finally mom got a small bag out of the bigger bag of trash, then she put the rest of the yucky-good smelling pieces back in, tied it up and put it back in the big trashcan.

Then she ran in the house and washed her hands like seven or thirteen times. I’m not sure exactly how many, I’m not as good at math as I am at playing chase, and hide and seek.

As it turns out, Mom had bought some gold chain and shiny stones for her jewelry making, then after showing Wizard, she accidentally threw them in the trash and didn’t remember until the next day!

How funny is that? Guys, when mom buys me something, like a new bone or toy, I never, ever accidentally throw it away and have to dig in the trash a day later to find it.

Do you?

P.S. Mom says she’s letting me play on the Wednesday blog for now until she works out what she wants to do for sure.

This weekend, we worked on a project with Youngest Son (BLB) and his fiance. I’m excited for them, but until that’s all finalized, I can’t say more

We also bought a new dishwasher. Not really exciting, just necessary. My old dishwasher has been great, it’s just wearing out from a lot of use. We should find out today when the new one will be installed. Fingers crossed nothing goes wrong installing it.

On Saturday, Wizard decided to clean the downstairs windows while I was gone doing errands. He soon realized our screens are old, so he rescreened all the windows. We have a lot of windows, so that was a ton of work. But Wizard being Wizard, kept going over two days until he got them all finished. I sure appreciate it! We’ll wash the upstairs windows together, probably today, and that project will be checked off as done.

As for me, I got an non-writing related idea. Remember the TV stand I was excited about? Well we didn’t put the doors on, because the satellite receiver and other equipment tends to get hot. But the doors are pretty–a distressed gray wood with glass inserts. So I decided to repurpose those into frames, and that set off a round of going to stores to figure out how I wanted to hang them. I decided to use pictures from our Hawaii trip, which meant I had to search through 100 pictures in our digital files and get them printed. That turned out to be a comedy of stupid errors (mostly mine) that resulted in me having to have some of the pictures reprinted twice. But that’s done, and here’s how it turned out (this is a small wall, and you can see part of my office on the right of it):

Anyhow, this little idea somehow turned in to A Project. Or possibly a way to avoid writing, LOL

We also had the 7.1 earthquake roughly 100 miles away, and we definitely felt it here. This far out from the epicenter felt like a slow roll similar to being on a boat. While there’s significant damage to area around the epicenter, the injuries are minor and no known deaths. We were incredibly fortunate. Were that size and intensity of an earthquake to happen in one of the more densely populated areas of Southern California, we likely would have had severe injuries and fatalities.

So that was most of my weekend, how was yours?

TGIF! Now let’s get to sharing five random things about our week.

1. I expect the blog to be quiet today, but for anyone who heard about the earthquake in Southern California, we’re fine. The epicenter of the quake was something like 100 miles from us. We felt the quake for sure, but we’re fine. My concern is for those close to the center, and we’re all aware that another, bigger one could come. Fun Fact: A part of the San Andreas fault line runs right through my city
2. Wizard and I had a great 4th of July day with drinks in the jacuzzi, ribs for dinner and peach pie for dessert.
3. 4th of July night, however, was like living too close to war zone. I have never actually been in a war zone, but this is what I imagine it sounds like. I was on the couch with my trembling dog, and the massive booms were coming from out the front of my house in a half circle to the back. It looked like lightning flashing. Those were the ones that had my flinching, and clearly these are not the legally sold fireworks, but the dangerous ones. Maggie wouldn’t leave my side until I told her it was time for bed and she ran in her kennel. She was a very brave girl throughout the rest of the night. She stayed in her kennel with no crying, whining or barking, and she even ate her treat. I’m proud of her.
4. We saw Turbo this week. He was a blast as always. Wizard and I were playing with him outside, and when we went for a little walk, the boy reached for both our hands. We both looked up at one another, feeling the love that transcends time: There were all the moments that our sons reached for our hands, and now in this moment, our grandson reached for out hands. That kind of love and trust is a priceless gift.
5. I have a new TV stand! After two years of searching, I finally found one that we like and that fits into the awkward corner! We put it together and it’s all done. It’s not expensive or anything, it just makes us happy.

So that’s my five. I know it’s kind of a holiday weekend for most, but it you’re here and have time, I’d live to hear five random things about your week. Have a great weekend!