A FB post came around the other day showing little girls’ feet in white patent shoes in what was obviously a 1960s photo. It was one of those “Do You Remember This” things and my yes, didn’t it bring back memories? The white patent shoes were part of the Easter outfit although “bonnets” had become less popular. Lots of women still had their lovely Easter hats, but not so much girls anymore. And of course it was the general time frame to wear white, another of those fashion “rules” that I think have gone by the wayside. The dresses in the deep south tended toward dotted Swiss and I don’t know about the cooler parts of the country. Ham was the meat of choice since no one we knew had, or would have thought of, lamb. The whole wonderfully messy Easter egg coloring occurred a few days prior and I suppose we held onto the Easter Bunny idea for as long as we did Santa Claus.

When my son was a little tyke, I don’t think I ever actually tried to bother with real eggs as I had discovered how much easier it was to use plastic ones. For the longest time I did faithfully watch “Ten Commandments” as much because of Charlton Heston as for any other tradition. Our granddaughter is just about old enough this year to sort of grasp the concept so it will be interesting to hear how it all goes.

We got into the rhythm of Easter brunch for several years, but it so happens Easter morning is a very popular time for people to dive the Christ of the Abyss statue in Key Largo and therefore, Hubby often works that day. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for weather (which has been terribly windy) and boat situation so I can finally get back into the water as well. If so, maybe we’ll see an Easter turtle instead of a bunny.

Between working on the two co-authored books (Mystery of the Last Olympian and the Benito Santiago memoirs) and my very different novel, To Play on Grass Fields, my scuba-themed mysteries and quilting cozy had to wait for a bit.

In spinning off the character of Chris Green featured in Deadly Doubloons, False Front, and Georgina’s Grief, I left Police Detective Bev Henderson in Verde Key for a while. That will be rectified in about a month with Shades of Deception. Things have been fairly quiet in Verde Key without me leaving a string of bodies around, but what’s a murder mystery without them? Deception has an element of Shades of Truth in that the reader knows what is going on. The question is, how is Bev going to figure out where they have made a mistake? It also has a bit of a slower start from the aspect of the first murder, but the build-up is important as you get deeper into the story. And with Deception headed off to the publisher (a new one I have to try for reasons I’ll explain in a future post), I can now turn my attention back to Helen Crowder and her quilting circle.

Small Town Quilting Treasures takes up not long after Small Town Quilting Blues ended. A new quilter will be introduced and I haven’t decided yet if one of them needs to leave to keep the group at 12 or if I can just squeeze another one in. As with the others in the series, there’s plenty of quilting and I take a little trip into the doll world as well. Those aren’t really my thing, but one of my cousins has a nice collection and if they weren’t all lost in the flood, my niece was very much into the American Girl dolls.

Anyway, I’ll provide more information as publication draws closer.

This is as much a “musing” post as anything. For those who have read Orchids in the Snow (my first novel), the ending of the book was not the original ending. The absolute silly, but incredibly un movie Wayne’s World that pretty much launched Michael Myers into movie stardom used the expression, “Mega happy ending” in the movie as they were mapping out different endings “that could have happened”. It really is a funny part of the film. Anyway, the original ending to Orchids was in fact, the Mega Happy version and the editor made a comment like, “It’s okay if you want to do this, but I think it would be more consistent with the dual protagonists if you did xyz.” I balanced it out and decided to make the change.

One of the reasons I like romantic comedies and Disney-type movies is the Mega Happy ending is usually consistent. When you shift into drama, it becomes less plausible. I’m okay with satisfactory endings and can accept the idea of the bittersweet or the hero/good guys dying as long as it’s for a good cause. (You get a lot of that in war movies obviously.) There is a particular book and movie from a few years ago that while I appreciated the intricacies of the plot, I truly hate it when the bad guy/girl gets away. Enough of that happens in the real world and I don’t need it for entertainment. I also don’t like it when there are no heroes, although I’m okay with complicated characters who are a mix, but at least one or two have to be more good than bad.

Anyway, what brought this about was reading a book the other day with one of those, “Really, you chose this for the ending?” moments. The story had taken a couple of unexpected turns and quite honestly, both protagonists had some flaws I wasn’t fond of. Now, I realize a “mega happy” wouldn’t have worked well. The final twist though was definitely a stretch. Ah well, to each his own, as they say.

We had another multi-day network outage. More accurately, most of Wed, all of Thurs, and until mid-afternoon Friday. With my work so closely tied to network access, it wreaked havoc with my schedule and my poor husband was only marginally better off. What made it worse for him was my multi-day angry outbursts each time we were told the problem wasn’t fixed yet. I was accepting of 24 hours worth. Past that, not so much. Yes, we have smart phones, but unlike the younger generation, I have extreme difficulty in using my smart phone to work emails and I am not set up to handle attachments. I was able to clear out mail I didn’t need and send short responses to others explaining I would do more later. That of course meant yesterday and today have been a lot of catch-up with a few tasks yet to do.

Okay, enough complaining. I’ll take the time to post something cheery and upbeat tomorrow.

I don’t know how familiar everyone is with neural linguistic programming. It’s a sub-field of a couple of major fields and has to do with the method in which individuals process information. It’s frequently referred to in the more common terms of “learning visually” or otherwise. Most people learn visually, but others are better at audio – hearing instruction – and some by hands-on touch (kinesthetic). Some combination of all three is often the ideal method, then of course there are unorthodox means for some.

Anyway, I am not a visual learner which is a bit of a drawback when quilting. I can’t simply look at a pattern and figure everything out. I often ask Hubby to give me a hand when I first lay at the quilt kit. I use a lot of kits because I don’t have a stash of fabric built up yet. It’s not that Hubby is one of the male quilters, but quilt projects and woodworking projects are similar. I inadvertently ordered a kit with a marine theme to discover it came with fusible appliques. I set my concern aside and decided it would be a good thing for me to try and if I didn’t care for it (as many don’t), then I would know. I managed the cutting and fusing and truly thought I could do a blanket stitch around the edges to secure them. It sounded simple enough and then oops, not so much. I finally set it aside until I could get some help from the veteran quilters in my small group. It did take a bit as I worked through what I was doing wrong. However, I have now taken the step. Mine may not be the prettiest blanket stitches in the world, but that’s okay.