Carol Preflatish

It seems that I get burned out with things I do a lot of very quickly. I love doing the NaNoWriMo project every November, but when December rolls around I don't even want to look at my manuscript, finished or not. It's usually January before I feel like writing again. The same thing happened last month with the April A to Z Blog Challenge where I blogged every day of that month. I got burned out. I even stopped reading some of my favorite blogs, didn't even want to look at them.So, my friends, it will be a slow come back for me to start posting often again. To update on me, the last eight days have been busy ones. A camping trip over the weekend, a trip to the ER with my mom, my writers group meeting, driving all over southeastern Indiana on one day for my day job, and well, just work itself. That's another thing I'm burned out on.This week, I even calculated how many months it will be before I can retire from my job - 81 months. Of course, I doubt if I will be a...

Last fall during a weekend vacation, my husband and made a trip to central Indiana to try something new, panning for gold. Yes, there is gold in Indiana. A glacier, just one glacier we learned, brought gold down during the ice age and it stopped in the middle of Indiana. We were too late in the season last year and didn't do any panning, but did purchase a pan and scoped out a spot to come back to. Last month, we went back and today, I'm going to tell you about my experience. Let me say that we don't plan on getting rich doing this, but we found it to be a fun way to spend an afternoon. Above, you can see me doing some panning. I was totally unprepared for what I would be doing and wore long jeans and hiking boots. What I didn't know is that I really needed to be in the water to be able to do it correctly, as my husband is doing on the right. He had a much easier time panning in the middle of the creek that I did from the edge. This was again, more of a r econna...