Mama Diaries

Friday, December 20, 2019

A Strange Kind of Snow

Schultz seems to be feeling much better. His chemo treatments are done and he is back to his old self creating chaos and mayhem wherever he goes.

Here's the latest story:

When I walked into the mansion (the term I use for my former place of residence), I noticed white stuff all over the ground: Blobs of cotton-like material strewn in the hall, in the family room, and in the kitchen.

I picked one of these blobs up between my fingers and looked at it. "What the heck?"

Then I saw the remains of "Beavie," one of Schultz's favorite toys. The stuffed beaver wasn't so stuffed anymore. His head was sliced open and his cotton stuffing was strewn about. I found the perpetrator looking as innocent as could be.


A short while later, that lovely green bunny you see him pictured with met the same fate. Apparently, the dog has too much time on his paws. Or maybe he misses the snow we had in Ohio and wants to get into the Christmas spirit! 


On another topic, I'd like to let you know that I'm a guest over at Regan Macaulay's blog telling her why my friend, Dennis Higgins' book, Christmas in Pottersville, is my favorite Christmas book. Please visit if you'd like to know why. 

And finally, I'd like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!  Enjoy the holidays!

Wednesday, December 4, 2019

IWSG and the Dinosaur Experiment

It's time for the Insecure Writers' Support Group monthly post.


Today's question is, "If you were living the ideal author life, what would it look like?"

Probably a bit different than what it looks like today! I don't need to be a best-selling author. But I would like to see my Amazon ranking under the 100,000 mark regularly. And I would like to get more than $10.00 a month in royalties. Writing books is a lot of effort! It's not just writing. It's editing and marketing. A lot of time goes into it. And it would be really nice to see a paycheck that reflects that.

So, my ideal writer's life:  Have 4-10 author appearances (school visits, library visits, bookstore visits) a year, write a book a year, stay under the 100,000 mark on all of my books, and make about $10,000 a year. Is that asking for too much? 

Now for the story:

My daughter had an assignment for her statistics class:  To find out if people's responses to surveys are influenced by what they see. For this grand experiment, my daughter and her friends decided that they would dress in dinosaur costumes and visit the local mall. There they would ask people what their favorite dinosaur was. The hypothesis was that the person would respond with the dinosaur the interviewer was dressed as. Things were going as planned until the security officer showed up.

"You're violating dress code rules," she stated.

"But we're doing a school project," my daughter objected.

"Too bad. No dinosaurs allowed."

"Well, what's your favorite dinosaur?" my daughter pressed.

"The extinct kind."

And that was the end of the experiment.



Before I go, I had the awesome opportunity to go to Miami, Florida to receive the silver medal for my book, Bubba and Squirt's Big Dig to China. Here's a picture. (That's a little bit of living the ideal author life!)