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It was a wild weekend in Dallas/Fort Worth with all the in-laws, kids, grandkids–the whole horde. We were celebrating the fella’s parents’ 60th anniversary. The nephews were back from Australia–the one in grad school down there has finished his Master’s degree in oenology biochemistry, and brought back wines he’d made. (Very tasty.) His brother just went down to visit. The daughter also came with her family from the “frozen Northland” (aka Pennsylvania), including the escape artist (aka her son).

That kid is really fast! The in-laws’ house, where we were staying, backs up to a big park, with baseball fields visible from the house and a playground beyond them. Several times during the visit, Mowgli (he has autism, and occasionally behaves as if he were raised by wolves) would take it into his head that it was time to go to the park, and zip! He’d be out the door and dashing for the gap in the fence. And he was often faster than the adult chasing him, so his Mom would have to go out and yell at him and make him come back. I foresee a track star. If the coach can convince him to actually run on the track, and wait for the starting gun/bell to start running. Honestly, he was very good during the whole visit, except for one or two escape attempts. That’s not bad for a week’s visit not even at his own Gigi & Granddaddy’s house.

We celebrated Thanksgiving, then we celebrated the anniversary. The daughter got everyone to tell a family story. (“Dad–we need a broom, and a bandaid.” and “New constitutional amendment about green beans.”) We took all the grandboys to the zoo where everyone had a great time. We took the little boys to see “Tangled.” It went over well, once the action started. (The opening was a little talky.) We raked up a century-old pecan tree’s-worth of leaves (plus I saw a few oak tree leaves in there) and let the boys jump in them. One tree made a ginormous pile of leaves. We even did a little Christmas shopping.

Now the older son has come to the island for a conference. We’re going to Dickens on The Strand tomorrow. It’s basically a street festival to celebrate Galveston’s historic Victorian-era downtown, where people dress up in Victorian era costumes, pirate costumes, and even costumes from Dickens stories (like Jacob Marley from “A Christmas Carol”) and hang out downtown. They’re having steampunk stuff this year, along with the usual parades, street urchins, bed races, mummers, etc. I don’t have a costume, but hey–it’s fun. (I have stuff to make a costume, but… Good intentions and all that.)

Can’t get into my office right now, with guests in town. I’ll start revisions on… Sunday? Sounds good to me.

Emergency and banks don’t really seem like things that go in the same sentence–unless your accounts have been pillaged. Or unless your parents both have Alzheimer’s. My mom’s is progressing relatively slowly, but Daddy’s seems to be going downhill more quickly these days.

One evening last week, Mama was paying a bill when she realized she didn’t know what the bill was for. Or rather, it was for a line-of-credit loan she didn’t know had been taken out. Because Daddy was asleep, she took it next door to my sister, who called me, and we got online to see what was going on. And nobody knew, except that nearly $10 grand had been used from their line of credit, and who knew what the money was used for. When I called the parents to tell them I was coming down the next day, I asked Daddy if he knew anything about it, and he thought somebody must have got into his banking and messed with it. Mama had a morning doctor appointment, so I got up in the way-too-early hours of the morning and made the trek through Houston and beyond to their little town, only to learn that Mama had gone to the emergency room with chest pains only that Monday, and yet again had failed to tell the sister–who lives Next Door–and yet again had allowed Daddy to drive her there, when he’s not supposed to be driving at all. (This is now the perennial fight when I go visit. He has to bring it up at least once while I’m there.) Sigh.

So. Baby Sister got a substitute for her high school English classes and we all trekked to the county seat, where the bank is, and we discovered that the money had just been transferred into their savings account. Of course, this was still a problem, since the loan was at 10% interest, and savings is at–what? 0.25%? Terrible interest. So we paid back the loan–at a cost of $150 or so–got Baby Sister and me added to the accounts, and changed the password on the online banking to keep it from happening again.

That day, Daddy accepted that he had probably done it. Next morning? He had decided that I had gone into his bank accounts and messed them up, because he certainly hadn’t done it. We’d convinced him to take the bills next door to Baby Sis so she could make sure everything got paid, but the next day, he was all gritchy again, because he’d paid the bills all his life and didn’t see why he couldn’t keep on doing it. So I just took care of it without telling him.

By the time I headed home, he’d accepted again that he’d done it himself, and had decided that he would be in the “nuthouse” before I came back, because when I said I’d see him when I came back again, he said “Probably not.”

It’s time to get a guardianship set up, though. We need to protect them from themselves, but that’s going to take a little while. Pray for us. We need all we can get.

Yes, at long last, I have finished this book I’ve been working on.

Well, mostly. Except for a necessary epilogue. But that will be easy, once I decide what, exactly, happens. All the emotional turmoil is done, the angst is de-angsted, the decisions are made. (The characters’ decisions, I mean. Mine aren’t quite finished.) The last little bit is just the happy ending part. And yes, it has a happy ending. I’m a romance reader, and a romance writer. I insist upon the happy ending. Happy. Not perfection. ‘Cause, you know, you don’t get perfection this side of glory. But you do get happy.

I also still have to type the rest of the book into the computer in the first edit. And then I have to print the sucker out and go through for revisions. I already know some stuff I’m going to cut out. And there’s more I probably need to punch up. But I like it. And it’s done. Mostly.

Go Me.

Yes, for the very first time ever in my whole life, I got to go to Niagara Falls. You will notice that there are no pictures of the falls, or of the beautifal fall leaves in Canada (we stayed on the Canadian side of the river, because after 3 days in Niagara Falls, we went to Toronto for 4 more days). This is because I left the camera in the rental car when we got back to Buffalo to fly back home. We took lots and lots of pictures, but… I am sick about it, but what can you do?

Anyway, we had a wonderful experience. You can see Niagara Falls in movies and on TV, and it looks really amazing and impressive, but honey, believe me when I say that it still doesn’t prepare you for how much MORE impressive and amazing and everything it looks when you see it in person. We went on the Maid of the Mist boat ride. We went in the tunnels behind the falls (not much to see, really, but white water & mist). We drove up the river to Fort Erie, Ont. to look at the fort, but it was closed. Still, it was a really nice drive down the river. When we left Niagara Falls, we drove north, down the river (it really felt weird to be going downriver, and north at the same time), to Niagara-on-the-Lake and stopped at one of the ice wine wineries, then on around Lake Ontario to Toronto.

At Toronto, I wrote a little bit, but it’s a very interesting city, and we were right in the middle of it–across the street from city hall. I did not realize that Hudson’s Bay Company was still in existence. It is now the largest department store in Canada. I went. Didn’t buy anything, except breakfast one morning. I went to the Bata Shoe Museum, and while it did have some gorgeous and glamorous designer shoes, I found the “history of shoes” exhibit and the rotating exhibit on native American moccasins the most fascinating. Flip-flops have a Loooooooong history. 😉 (Egyptians wore flipflops)

We did Chinatown, and rode across to Toronto Island, which creates the harborfront in Toronto. Their seawall, along the island, was a LOT chillier than our seawall… We just had a good time, and ate at a lot of good places. I had rabbit pasta–first time I ever ate rabbit… I just hate that I lost the dadgum camera. Sigh. (I also lost an earring. One of my new black ones. Grr.)

Okay, I can’t do it. I have to put at least one picture in. Yes, the water really is that green. And there’s a lot more city around the falls than I thought. I had this mental image of the falls being isolated way out in the country, somewhere you had to drive to for hours and hours, but it’s not. You fly into the Buffalo, NY, airport, and 20 minutes later, you’re there. Niagara Falls. With city on both sides of the river. Though the US side has a state park. We stayed in a hotel next to a casino with a fabulous view of the falls. I just loved it.

And now I am back home in sunny Galveston, where the cold front takes the temperatures down to a balmy 72F/22C instead of the 50F/10C it was while we were in Toronto (which was the coldest it got–really, it was lovely most of the time. They still had roses blooming at the botanical gardens!). I admit it–I have lost all my antifreeze. I am a wimp when it comes to cold weather. But really–we had a great time in Canada.

Those are the flip-flops I wear when I go to walk on the beach. I only wear them while I’m walking on the seawall before I climb down the stairs to the sand, or sometimes when I cross the rock groins built out from the seawall for wave control during storms. I carry them most of the time. But when I come back from my walks, they’re all sandy, and I don’t want to wear them in the house, so they tend to live on the front porch, waiting for me to come back and put them on again for another walk.

I usually walk in the morning, after breakfast, before I start working on whatever I’m working on that day. It’s a nice way to clear the head/commune with nature before having to focus and use the brain.

The seagulls have been sitting actually IN the water the past several days, I assume because the water is still warm. If you look, you can see the seagulls, and someone who’s taken the challenge of walking out on the rocks. People like to walk to the end to fish, but it’s not easy to get all the way out there, because there can be big gaps between the rocks, and they aren’t always level.

I’ve been dealing with parents earlier this week, and really needed a beach walk or two.

My parents both have Alzheimer’s, but it manifests differently in each of them, and is progressing at different rates. Because of some worrisome things that happened recently–Daddy losing his temper abruptly in inappropriate places, and having trouble remembering people–I made him a doctor appointment so I could go with them and talk to the doctor about these worries. I couldn’t figure out how to talk to the doctor without Mama and Daddy present, until I realized I could write a letter, which I did. The doctor had the nurse call me out, and we discussed the things I’d written, then I went back into the exam room first, and he came in after a minute. It’s nice that people with Alzheimer’s are as easy to distract as toddlers, because when Daddy started to get upset that I’d “snitched on him,” I was able to shift the conversation to how skinny they were, and whether Mama really weighed 112 lbs. (She didn’t–weighed in at abt. 126, but Mama is 5’9″ or 10″ even after “shrinking” so she really needs to weigh around 145.)

Anyway, the doctor really hammered in that Daddy needed to stop driving, No Matter What. We’ll have to take his keys, and maybe even disable the car to get him to stop, though. He’s got it in his head that he HAS to drive, and that he’s just fine doing it. He can’t remember who his granddaughter is, and gets ideas that people are beating on him, but he can drive. (ARGGHH) And, the doc wrote an order for a home health nurse to come by and check that they’re taking their meds.

The nurse came yesterday, and although Daddy was pretty crotchety the whole time she was there, it sounds like she’s going to get them all organized. Transportation when they need it, meals once a week at the rec center, check-ins about their meds, blood pressure checks–all kinds of things. I’m just tickled.

It’s still likely they’ll have to go to some kind of assisted living sometime in the new year, so we’re starting to talk that up, but we can keep them at home a little longer now.

The fella and I went to the Epicurean Evening event at Moody Gardens in Galveston last night.  We’ve gone to it the past three years and always enjoy it a lot. Last night was no exception.

See that picture? That’s only a quarter of the room. Or less. Now imagine that stretching in all those directions. With food and drink booths all the way around. And in the middle. There were only a few booths in the middle, but there was still plenty of room for silent auction tables, and tables for people to sit down for a minute or two to catch their breath, talk a little with friends or digest for a minute.

All the hotels had beautiful presentations. Moody Gardens has some wonderful watermelon carvers, who also make parrots out of squash and sweet potatoes. They also had fish carved out of sweet potatoes and some other things I couldn’t figure out what they’d used. But I didn’t post the picture of the carved vegetable fish. (The coral was carved out of potatoes. Just regular old potatoes that turned brown creatively to make them look more like coral and sponges.) When I took the picture of the fish, the waiters who were standing there ducked out of the way and made my picture look all blurry. Oh well.  (I can’t figure out how to get rid of the big gap here, so you’re just going to have to live with it.)

The food was fabulous. The booths had little tiny servings, and I ate till I was filled to my eyeballs. I tried to keep up with the fella, who eats shockingly fast, which wasn’t smart. We had crab cakes and shrimp with watermelon gazpacho and salad (Fisherman’s Wharf had a salad with fresh lump crab, shrimp and…something else) and in all kinds of sauces.

We had shortribs with polenta and prime rib with a tiny scoop of garlic mashed potatoes. I ate a raspberry chipotle olive pizza, and a smoked chicken salad sandwich (out of this world) with a slice of pork tenderloin with a spicy apple barbecue sauce from Capital Q Barbecue.

I had an Asian chicken salad from the Mosquito Cafe, and a fruit skewer from Southern Produce. That was really good, and I should have gone back for another… The fella ate sushi from the Sky Bar, and I got gumbo from the Gumbo Bar (I think they’re owned by the same people). I also got some crawfish etouffee from… Hmm. Don’t remember. But it was good. And they also had red beans and rice.

There was a chicken-crawfish-shrimp in wine sauce thing from one of the Mexican restaurants, and a broccoli-rice casserole that had barbecued sausage in it from one of the barbecue places. That was really good too. We tried pretty much everything, unless the line was too long. Except all the wine. There were a LOT of wine and spirits booths, and two with beer/hard lemonade type things. I like the Smirnoff Cranberry Lime malt beverage. I also tried a taste of cherry rum. Yes, I was a two-fisted drinker (as you can see).  This was before I dropped the barbecued sausage down my shirt and got barbecue sauce on it.

They also had bibs, because it was really hard to hold a cup and a little plate, and try to eat off it. But I couldn’t get the bib to stay up, so I got barbecue sauce on me. Ah well. Oh–and desserts! There were biscotti and cupcakes and pumpkin bars and cookies and this mini-volcano thing from the Rainforest Cafe that was ice cream in the middle, brownies around it (as rocks) and caramel and chocolate sauce dribbled down the sides. DEElicious.

I tried to keep up with the fella, who eats lickety-split, and I hurt myself eating too fast. I did slow down after the first or second booth. There was plenty of food, and it was all good.

I AM writing. Or revising. That’s all good too. Also, I don’t have to run my genre-review column by the editor before putting it in the paper any more. It’s all good.

So, my friend Belinda came to town this week, and we did a workshop at the Houston Bay Area RWA chapter on storyboard plotting with Post-It Notes.

We do our plot brainstorming this way. It’s very visual, and some of the HBA members had heard about it, but couldn’t figure out how to do it. So we did a joint workshop and showed how we do it.

We probably don’t do it like anyone else. B is a little on the anal side (she has a whole Justin cowboy boot box full of different colors of Post-It Notes), and I’m a whole lot loosey-goosey about things, so when we’re doing our brainstorming, we get a lot of “You need some more internal conflict in there,” from B, and a lot of “I’ll just figure it out when I get there,” from me.

Don’t get me wrong. I DO plot before I write. I just don’t plot very deeply. I want a one-page skeleton/roadmap to hang my story on. B, on the other hand, would plot right down to the individual scenes if she could do it. (Not that she can’t, but she usually doesn’t, because I’m fussing at her to “Write the dang story already!”)

Anyway, we had a good time doing the workshop. We plotted a paranormal story, so we could have more plot threads to keep straight, and use more colors. But as one person said, it probably would have worked better if we’d done a plot from a movie–something well known.

It rained most of the time Belinda was here, but we did get to eat some nice shrimp, and went downtown to The Witchery on Postoffice Street so she could buy a crystal for meditating. The fellas–because B always comes down with hers (he doesn’t trust her driving in Houston traffic)–went fishing while we did our workshop. They caught fish too, but gave them all away. I’m glad they had fun too.

And yeah, the visit with my folks went fine. The Alzheimer’s is getting worse, so I’ll be talking with their doctor in the near future to see what needs to be done. But this weekend, I’m being sorta lazy.