Burned out

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 able to afford to retire at that point, but at least its a goal I can look forward to. Oh, and I was interviewed on Haven's Realm blog.

Thankfully, I was able to squeeze in some writing this week and finished chapter 7 of my current book. I'm guessing it will be about twelve chapters long, but I haven't plotted them on paper yet. I'll be on vacation from my day job next week and will just be staying home. Hopefully, I'll get a little more writing done.

Carol

Panning for Gold

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 reconnaissance mission to see if we had the equipment that we needed and to see if we really knew what we were doing. The good thing is that we were alone in our part of the creek, so if we weren't doing something right, no one saw us. Although, there was a guy downstream from us that was from Nashville, Tennessee and he was taking the search for gold a little more seriously that we were. My husband told me to keep looking for black sand. "Black sand, huh?" I really felt like I was wasting my time. Then, as I panned away the sand, I saw a dark shadow appearing in my pan. So, I washed away more of the sediment. "Well, I'll be damned," I said. There in in the bottom of my pan was a little conglomeration of black sand, just like he said. "That's where the gold will be," he told me. Black sand is heavier than brown sand and gold is heavier that black sand. Hence, the panning away of the the sediment until you get to the black sand.


Since this was just a day trip and we had a long drive home, we panned for about two hours and then headed out. I'd like to say we hit the mother lode, but we didn't. We did find some really small pieces of gold and I wish I could show you a picture of what we found, but gold in this area is as small as the sand we were washing away. The photo below is not mine, but from someone else's gold find so you can get an idea of the size. The gold that we found was about the size of the smallest flakes in upper right corner this picture.  


We aren't giving up. We had so much fun on our trip that we're going again in a few weeks. What could be better than spending the day out in the fresh air, getting a little exercise and maybe finding a little gold?


Carol

Z: Zombies

My final A-Z Blog challenge post is about zombies. Believe me, I never thought I would ever be writing about zombies, but they seem to be all the rage now. I decided that I needed to see what all the fuss was about so I read Pay Me In Flesh by K. Bennent (aka James Scott Bell).

Until I read this book, my only knowledge of zombies was from watching the movie,  Shaun of the Dead and I laughed through the whole thing.

What I didn't do was laugh through this book. Pay Me In Flesh is about a lawyer in Los Angeles who finds, after being shot, that she was brought back from the dead and is now a zombie, or undead. While defending a vampire on a murder charge, she searches for the person who turned her into a zombie.

The end of the book left a lot of unresolved issues, enough that I assume there will be a sequel. The story was very well written, but I would expect no less from Mr. Scott, who is an excellent writer. I did find a few typos in the text, but not so many that it distracted my reading.

I asked myself if I would read another zombie book and my answer is maybe. If there is a sequel, I will likely read it, but I doubt I would add another zombie book to my library.

How about you? Do you like to read zombie books?

Carol

A-Z Blog Challenge

Y: Yippee, it's almost over

I suppose I really shouldn't say yippee, but I needed a Y word today and it seemed to fit. This was the first time I participated in the A to Z April Challenge and found it to be exactly that, a challenge.

Don't get me wrong, it was fun, but for me it was difficult to blog daily and coming up with the topics for a few of the letters was demanding. For the most part, the first thing that popped in my head is what I wrote about.

The toughest letters for me were P, T, W, and X. For the letter P, I came up with so many ideas, it was hard for me to choose just one. The letter that caused me the most difficulty was X and the one that caused me the most work was Z. Obviously, I haven't posted that one yet and I don't want to give it away. All I'll say is that I had to read a whole book for that letter.

Will I participate again next year? My answer right now is no, but I'm sure that when time rolls around, I'll suck it up and o it again. Hopefully, I've picked up some new followers. If you're one of them, please don't expect me to keep up with the daily posting. With a full time job and trying to write another book, there's just not time for me to do this daily and congratulations to my fellow bloggers who will complete the whole month.

Carol

A to Z Blog Challenge

X: Xenolith

I love collecting cool looking rocks, but I have never found a Xenolith rock. A Xenolith is a fragment of foreign rock within a host rock. To be considered a xenolith, the inclusion must be different in composition from the rock surrounding it.

Xenoliths most often occur in igneous rocks. For those of you who are a little rusty on Geology 101, igneous rocks are rocks which form by the cooling and solidification of molten material, either magma or lava.

That my friends, concludes the geology lesson for today. I'm going to start looking for one of these.

Carol

A - Z Blog Challenge

W: Waltz

I don't dance, well actually I don't dance because my husband doesn't dance. I think the waltz is my favorite dance to watch. It's so elegant. I love watching old movies with large crowds waltzing around a ballroom. I just watched the movie, Holiday with Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn last weekend and it included a scene of people waltzing.

In the 1800's, California banned the waltz because of ho close the two partners danced together. Did you see The Legend of Zorro with Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones? In one scene, they danced a very risque version of the waltz. If you haven't seen the movie I highly recommend it.

There are many versions of the waltz, mostly based on the country of their origin. I've linked a couple videos below to see.

Video from Dancing with The Stars

Video from The Legend of Zorro



A - Z Blog Challenge

V: Vacation

Everyone has a favorite vacation spot and my husband and I are no exception. Our favorite vacation destination is the mountains of Tennessee. We love the area so much that it has always been our plan to retire there some day. The closer we get to retirement and the worse the economy gets, the more that dream seems to be fading.

The cabin that we usually rent sits on a small stream that flows by. My favorite thing in the morning is to sit out on the back porch and enjoy my first cup of coffee. My husband would have already left to go fly fishing, so its a calm way to start the day. The afternoons are for sightseeing, shopping, or just relaxing. We usually vacation in the spring, but have visited in every season.

One vacation that I never got to take was going to Florida to see a space shuttle launch. As a big fan and follower of the NASA space program, it had always been on my bucket list to see a launch, but since the shuttle program has been scrubbed, it looks like I'll never see one.

Just last week, the Space Shuttle Discovery was retired and delivered to the Smithsonian's Air & Space Museum as a permanent display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center located in Chantilly, Virginia. Since I can't see a launch, I'm hoping to make this our next vacation so I can at least see the shuttle in person.

A - Z Blog Challenge