Welcome to my blog Upstate Girl, (a.k.a Follow Your Bliss Part II), I am an independently published author. This blog is all about writing and the stuff that inspires me to write, the joys and obstacles that come along with the writer's life, and my fascination with the psychology of people and what makes them tick...the human condition, as is...and my love for words, playing with them and making sense of them...and I throw in a few photos from my acre of the world just to make things pretty...sometimes there are things I have no words for, only pictures will do.

*Copyright notice* All photos, writing, and artwork are mine (
© Laura J. Wellner), unless otherwise noted, please be a peach, if you'd like to use my work for a project or you just love it and must have it, message me and we'll work out the details...it's simple...JUST ASK, please.

Saturday, January 3, 2015

Out with the old year, in with the new year

The Christmas Reboot...after the flu...
 
This year has got to be better...but it could be worse...who knows, I'll take it as it comes...

Christmas was put "on hold" while I was sick with the flu...I came down with it on Monday before Christmas, battled the up and down fever, Sunday was the first morning I woke up without a fever. New Year's Day, I had the family over for the Reboot, dinner and presents...thankfully, everyone was well, another year older...it was a minor miracle that my Fred and our son did not catch the bug from me. I'm still hacking and blowing my nose, but every day is a little bit better, tho' I'm extremely fatigued (this too shall pass.) Too much time spent on the couch. It was suspicious that I got sick less than a week after receiving the flu shot. I've been assured that you can't get it from the shot, it was just a coincidence that I got sick, who knows where I picked it up...(anyone else have a fairy tale?) My immune system has taken a beating, I had the flu last March, then a bad case of the Shingles in April, which dragged on and is still causing me grief, tho' much less since I stopped taking the pain medication (if that makes any sense.) I've had a cold here and there, now the flu again. I'm hoping for a healthier new year...

The Little Monster

Through it all, this little black cat that nobody wanted has been my comfort kitty...he's with me right now as I write this, napping. He's been a puzzle since he arrived almost two years ago...we still wonder about his past, a broken kitty with a chip out of his left ear. He's such a happy little fellow now, a first class cuddle bug, and we adore him.

The Crows, 12/22/2014
My work on Drinking from the Fishbowl is moving along...I'm on the last three chapters, shuttling back and forth between them these last two weeks, making everything tidy...reading backwards, forwards, skipping through, landing in random places or seeking out the paragraphs that bother me, cutting, pasting, deleting, adding (two more pages), tinkering with the timeline, making sure everything is as it should be, that the milestones are firmly in place. I do enjoy the puttering around, and there's a part of me feeling anxious to finish this stage so I can move on to the next, yet I'm not ready to end it just yet...I have to go with my gut on this and linger over it until I feel it...the words are as unsettled as the flock of crows I photographed one morning before going to work...some have landed while others are still taking wing...sometimes I'm amazed by what I've done, sometimes I'm terribly uncertain...it's a complicated book...the human condition is complicated. One minute I think "You must be crazy" and then the next minute "You did all right, this is a good thing...you wouldn't be doing it at all if you didn't think so..." And so it goes...


A Donkey Nose
Elizabeth is not complicated...she's a sweet little donkey who loves people, loves attention, loves to be brushed, loves to have her ears rubbed, loves to eat, and especially loves carrots...a bucket of sunshine...when I missed seeing her one day because of the flu, she was very clingy the next day, that soft, curious nose knows more than you can imagine...

Thank you for noticing me...
 I do not need Pope Francis to say that animals have souls, I knew about this already...they have feelings, they love, they mourn, and they can express an opinion...sweet things...


The Cornfield Tree
I remember when I was in First Grade, back when I was learning the simple task of writing the day's date at the top of my papers along with my name...and the fuss being made about "The New Year." and when we came back from Christmas, we'd have to remember to write 1969. (Do little kids still learn this basic skill? I wonder.)  For some reason, I got it into my head that things would be different with the changing of the year. That morning, I was afraid to open my eyes because I didn't know what to expect, would the sky be a different color or something? When I finally did open my eyes and looked around, everything was the same, nothing changed. Just the number. 1969. I was disappointed. Same old shit, different day. Already, at a tender age, I was cynical.

The passing of time.
Milestones...

Happy New Year!

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