Frisco Highline Trail

We are two months late, but we finally got the garden done. We are trying to downsize, so all the beds has to be moved and rebuilt. We were able to get most of the weeding done this weekend, put clean straw in the isles and wood chips along the front. We also planted carrots this weekend. String beans are coming on. We will have to can or freeze them next weekend.There was a thunderstorm Friday morning. I heard water dripping inside the wall in the dining room. I slogged out to the garage in the rain and brought the ladder in the house. The attic access in in the bathroom. There was rain water running down the sewer vent pipe. Luckily, it was an easy fix to go up on the roof and put sealer around the pipe. Our roof covering is 18 years old so we are walking a fine line with it.

I missed the past two weeks with my writing group, but did make the monthly meeting. I am usually a zombie in the summer because I work outside shoeing horses and the heat is wearing. I am planning to go this week. I have several nonfiction books I want to get outlined. I started carrying a digital voice recorder with me in the car. I drive a lot between barns and always think of things to write. But when I get home my mind goes blank. There are a couple of writing courses I would like to attend next year. Both are in Texas. I think I would benefit from that more than a conference at the moment. I would rather wait until I have the novel done before I attend another conference so I can take advantage of the agent and editor meetings.

Yogurt and Coffee

Growing up in Lowell, Massachusetts you had occassion to eat Greek food. Lowell in the 1980's had the second largest Greek community in the United States. As a kid I found Greek yogurt to be too stout for my taste. As an adult I enjoyed Greek yogurt as part of Greek food. This summer I have been eating Greek yogurt as a subsitute for the other kind of yogurt. Regular yogurt has too much sugar in it. However, Greek yogurt is more expensive than the regular yogurt. In my neighborhood the 24 ounce container costs $3.99 to $5.99. I did some research and found this link to make my own Greek yogurt. It was amazingly easy to make and tastes just like store bought. Here is the link that includes the recipe and a video -

http://video.about.com/greekfood/Make-Yogurt-at-Home.htm

Anyone who spends time with me knows I am addicted to Starbucks. Or any other coffee shop. But iced lattes can be expensive. I bought a cold coffee maker for $39.99. It comes with a glass carafe, a reusable filter,a cork and the toddy pot. You can buy a one pound can of the cheapest ground coffee in the grocery store. If you buy whole bean coffee, use a coarse grind. Place the cork in the bottom of the toddy container. Saturate the filter and place it inside the container, at the bottom just above the cork. Then put the pound of coarse ground coffee in the toddy pot. Fill the toddy with cold water and place on top of the glass carafe. Let sit for 8-12 hours. Lift the toddy enough to pull out the cork and replace on the glass carafe. Let the toddy sit for about an hour until all the liquid runs into the glass carafe. Put the used grounds in the garden. Wash the toddy, the cork and the filter so they are ready for the next use.

This cold process method of brewing gives you about a half gallon of espresso strength coffee. Since the coffee is cold brewed, it tastes less acidic. Keep the carafe with the brewed coffee in the fridge. I can make an iced latte for pennies whenever I like at home. A carafe lasts 7 to 10 days. If you want a cup of coffee from the cold brew, just use a 1 to 3 ratio of the cold brewed coffee to water and heat it up in the microwave. One ounce is the same as a brewed shot of espresso. You can make any of your favorite coffee house drinks with this cold brew.

50 and up

I am officially 50 now. Hubby organized a birthday party where good friends met over Italian food. I have to admit this was a tough birthday. It is the birthday where you realize that your biggest dreams have to go away because there isn't the time or money anymore to accomplish them. At the moment, I am stuck between two worlds and neither one pays a salary. My 50 year old body can't do what it could ten years ago. My knees and one hip hurt all the time and no matter how hard I work physically or how much better I eat, the extra weight won't go away.
I also had no idea how physically and emotionally difficult going through menopause is. I am tired and REALLY cranky all the time. I will probably be arrested for public lewdness any day now because I can't even stand to have clothing touching my skin when a hot flash consumes me! I Immediately start tearing layers of clothing off. That was OK when it was winter. But you run out of clothes a lot faster in the summer!

I understand my mother a lot better now than when I was a kid. In this picture, taken in Leavenworth, Washingon, she is in the middle. My sister MeMe is on the left and I am on the right. I was an accident, or late baby, when mom was older. My parents owned a Mobil gas station with service bays, gasoline pumps and tow trucks. Personally, I think every one of us girls was conceived while mom and dad were at an annual Mobil dealers convention. I was born a month early and mom told me that I have been in a hurry ever since. Most of my awareness of mom was when she was older. I always found her to be an angry and rather cold person. She yelled a lot, drank too much and was curt with people. I have a picture of her from a Las Vegas convention. It is one of the few times I saw her look happy. She is dressed in a blue sequin gown that she made. Her hair is a vibrant red and her shoes were silver. The picture is in a gimmicky box viewer that you squint into with one eye, so I can't have it enlarged or copied.

As I turn 50 I feel the impatience and anger I saw in mom. I had so little patience before, but now I have none. I started walking away from situations and people who waste my time. Almost all of my customer service skills have gone away. In an odd way, that is working. I just spent 50 years trying to make everyone happy and worrying about everything. I am exhausted from it. I now spend a lot of time alone. I say 'no' frequently. So far, nothing bad has happened. It is very liberating. Now, I need to figure out how to make money with it!

Last winter I began to realize that I am considered a highly sensitive person. I don't handle loud noises or stressful situations well. My body is always in flight or fight mode. I mirror the emotions of those around me. I form what is called 'inappropriate attachments' to people. I get too emotionally involved in work. Movies, music and books stir up emotions in a highly sensitive person. We are the folks others lean on when they are down because our responses are so genuine. That also means we need a lot of time alone to decompress. We also need regular sleep and we have to control the amount of stimuli in our lives. Star Trek New Generation had an officer from a planet other than earth who could feel what others were feeling. I think someone who is highly sensitive is like that character. I also think mom was a highly sensitive person. I also think that when I was growing up was when she retreated from the world because it had hurt her so much.

The garden is starting to produce. We are using fresh herbs daily now and have been eating spinach, radishes and lettuce for awhile. The tomato plants are blooming like crazy. Last year, we put in about 100 strawberry plants. We faithfully pulled all the flowers off the plants all summer long. That paid dividends this year. Tom is getting a half a gallon of berries a day out of the patch.The next garden emergency is getting the trellis up for the tomatoes. We had some nice warm days so the plants are starting to get some height to them. We also need to make sure all the plants I moved around this spring have access to water.

I am writing an article about the new car, Two Bit, for Subaru magazine. I use the car to shoe horses out of. I felt that might interest them to see a unique use for their vehicle line. Why call the car Two Bit? Because when you push on the door open button twice to get all the doors to open, it sounds like the jingle 'Shave and a haircut, two bits.' The Smokey Westford novel storyboard is coming along. It really helps to lay everything out in the form of a storyboard so you have a road map. I also finished outlining four horseshoeing books that I will publish as online books as soon as I can afford to purchase the block of required ISBN numbers. The books cover an exercise program for farriers, what someone should know if they want to be a farrier, tips to start up the business and tips for safety. As with most Ebooks, they will have a lot of links to helpful websites. I am working on a horseshoeing business brochure for myself. I am still new enough to publishing as well as short on time, so I will do the writing and let a printer do the desktop publishing.

A truly venomous day

One of my horseshoeing customers found out she had diabetes about six months ago. She tried to take care of it through diet and nutrition, but it looks like she will have to start insulin. She said something that struck a chord on my heart. She told me how angry she was at herself for almost a year. She was tired, out of breath and found even daily repetitive tasks difficult.

As a side bar, most of the women I know have daily repetitive tasks that include cleaning barns, training and riding horses, moving 70 pound bales of hay and fifty pound bags of grain. They also run farm equipment, operate their own businesses, maintain a home and take care of an extended family. Not feeling up to par becomes a serious issue with a cascading effects on their family, income, livestock and pets.

She thought it was her fault and just tried harder. Hmm. Sounds just like the story I just told on www.thereisnocryinginhorseshoeing.blogspot.com. I was bitten by a spider at a barn and did not feel the bite. I was alone at the barn working on four horses. I got angry at myself because I had to sit down and rest several times. My arm hurt for what seemed like no reason since none of the horses pulled that much. I was nauseous but assumed it was because it was so humid and I was getting dehydrated. For the rest of the day I was cursing at myself because I was too weak to keep up. I pushed harder.

It was the next morning that I found the two bite marks in my arm and realized that I was having a reaction to the venom. So, why is it that women feel like they need to beat themselves up so bad? Why, when we don’t feel well, do we just assume it is because we are wimps or not good enough? What is it that makes us ignore our bodies and just push back or try harder? Maybe that is what keeps us strong enough to survive. I wish I had an answer.

I am turning 50 in two weeks. All my adult life I have worked in male dominated professions. It really hits home with me if I can’t keep up. The past two weeks I overbooked and my body is exhausted. On one side of the coin, I am so thankful that I am physically capable and strong. Even though I am complaining, I still know I can outwork most men. On the other side of the coin, I just want to pronounce that I am a girl with a Masters degree and that I am ready to be a princess now. Some days, I would like to wear a damn dress and watch other people work!



Sunday was one of those rare perfect days. It was sunny, almost windless and not too warm. Tom and I went to Lawrence to ride the bikes along the river. It felt like we were only out about 45 minutes and I was surprised that we were out for two hours.




I am still working on my novel and am up to about 60,000 words. With horseshoeing this busy I am too tired for a lot of creative work, so I am writing some nonfiction books about horshoeing that I will post on Smashwords by the end of the summer. I have also written about a dozen articles that I will pitch to magazines. I have a person in Topeka who is going to develop a logo for my business that will be adaptable as Smokey Westford. I can't wait to see it. I am developing a brochure for the horseshoeing business that I will have printed at the local newspaper office.

Healthy for twenty minutes

Here are the new garden beds and the new greenhouse. There is still work to be done on the inside of the greenhouse, but we were able to use it in time for gardening season. We purchased two yards of composted soil from a greenhouse, but they delivered top soil. We seem to be stuck with that, but we started with worse soil fifteen years ago and we know how to fix it.


The Shawnee County Master Gardeners had their first annual plant sale. We bought petunias, portulaca, and marigolds. This will their annual fundraiser.

A couple of weeks ago, I had my annual physical. The doctor pronounced me healthy as a horse. Yes, he knows I am a farrier. At least he doesn't sing 'The Old Grey Mare' when he sees me. It takes about twenty minutes to drive back home from his office. When I got home, I walked from the car to the garden and promptly stepped in a mole hole that I didn't know we had. I fell down, twisted my ankle, wrenched my back, landed on my knee and jarred my shoulder when I put my hand out to stop the fall.

The next week, while at a barn shoeing, I went to the car for a cold bottle of water. I turned away from the car to walk back to the barn while I was closing the car door. I didn't time this right and closed the car door on my face. My left jaw line to be more precise. I now have a wonderful black and blue and swollen cheek. Tom keeps checking to see if I have two left feet or if I am just putting my shoes on the wrong feet. He is also glad that he has plausible deniability and was out of the county working each time that I injured myself! And you thought horseshoeing was dangerous.

Oklahoma Writers Conference

I followed the Kansas Writers, Inc annual retreat with the Oklahoma Writers Federation annual conference. This was my first conference. There was a TON of information to learn.

I think the cats feel abandoned. We have traveled three of the past five weekends.

I spent most of the time in classes that teach technique for novel writing. My favorite workshop was on editing, by Robyn Conley, the owner of The Book Doctor. She also taught a class the next day on point of view. The other classes were on women’s fiction, finding your voice, characters, settings and novel structure.

Like most conferences, there was a book room. Part of the room was for published authors. They could sell their books and were available to sign them. There were also books about the craft of writing. I purchased a book called Write History Right by M.H. Collins; American Slang, by Kipfer and Chapman; and Be Your Own Book Doctor, by Robyn Conley.

What is the next step? I need to find wall space in the house to put up an outline of the book. While I know what my plot is, I need to sharpen it. I also need to clarify what it is that my character wants so I know how to stress her. We had fun re-writing Jack and Jill. It was interesting to see how many versions people could come up with.

Years ago, I read an article in Training and Development magazine called The Ground Crew. It was written by a man who stayed home with the kids while his wife worked. She was in the training profession and traveled extensively. He picked her up at the airport one night and she immediately started going through a list of questions about whether this got done or that got done. That upset him and he was trying to figure out a way to talk to her about it when he noticed a plane lit up on the ground being serviced by the ground crew. He watched how everyone had a job to do to get the plane ready to take off. Each job was important and necessary. So he explained to her that even though she has lists of things that need to get done while she is gone, her ground crew consisted of one husband, a 6 month old, two twin 3 year old boys and a 6 year old girl.

The article always sticks in my mind because I am like that woman. I have lists of things to do every day and won’t rest until the list is done. Since the list is always there, it is never done. My husband is the opposite of me. He enjoys every bit of his weekend. At 9pm on Sunday night, he decides what part of the list he wants to tackle that can be done in 30 minutes and that is all he will do. This is my ground crew. He is the best ground crew any woman could ever want or need.

Tom has the most beautiful blue eyes. I could and do stare into them for hours. He has salt and pepper hair and either a beard or goatee depending on the season. He treats me like a princess every minute of every day. Tom worked on dairy farm and an agricultural farm as a kid and still has the strong looking hands and forearms to show for it. He is a patient teacher and has shown me how to fish, drive all types of boats, and paddle a canoe. When we hike, he is always pointing out wildlife or animal tracks. When we first starting dating, he went out and bought a used rototiller and tilled my garden. He loves to can what we grow in the garden. It is March and we are still eating bean, carrots, tomatoes, peppers and onions we grew last season.

He built my greenhouse for $125. I watched him draw it on a piece of paper, and assemble it in a weekend. I never saw him measure anything and claimed it couldn’t be level. He showed me it was. I have no idea how he can visualize that and do it. He is just now finishing up my third greenhouse.


He is my support, my rock, and my friend. We laugh together. Sometimes, I swallow the metaphorical feather and I will start laughing and can’t stop. It gets him laughing too. It was a big sacrifice for him to agree to my becoming an apprentice horseshoer. He would have to support both of us. He has never complained about that, no matter how hard it gets. We get along very well together and usually chose to be with each other on the weekends instead of doing things alone or separately.

He loves me unconditionally. We have been married 13 years and he still holds my hand every car trip. He kisses me goodnight before going to sleep, even on the nights we have been grousing at each other. (Like the old joke, we never go to bed mad. We haven’t been to sleep for 3 years!). He cleans a kitchen better than me. (Something about cleaning deck plates on a Navy ship with a toothbrush every time he got in trouble!) He also cooks healthier foods than I do.

Tom is also my voice of wisdom. I will work myself to death. Over this past year, he makes sure I eat when I am too tired to. He makes me stop and rest on my days off. He makes sure I slow down when I work outside so I don’t get heat exhaustion.

He has the patience of a saint. He speaks softly and thoughtfully. He is rarely angry. Being raised by a mom that yelled every day and was unpredictable every day has a lasting effect on my life. Tom is quiet, consistent and dependable. I really need that in my life. When we met, we both just got jobs in boating safety. He has always called me his swab, even though I got promoted to mate when we got married. He always greets me with a pirates “yar matey.” That just makes life so much more fun. I was so lonely until I met Tom. He is truly my other half.

Like the woman in the Ground Crew story, I can get carried away about the list if I am not careful. I work every day at appreciating Tom so I don’t take him for granted. It is easy to complain that something didn’t get done on the list. But sometimes you just have to throw the list aside, lean on the door jam and watch him napping on the sofa with the kitten tucked into his arm. An unlimited supply of hugs is better than the list any day!

I Know The Wichita Lineman

When I move to a new state I look for clubs to join, so I can meet people with like interests. In Hutchinson, Kansas I joined a kennel club. I wanted a dog and I wanted to learn to train dogs. The president of the club at that time was a man who was recently retired from the phone company. He started working for them nearly forty years earlier as a lineman in Wichita.


After his retirement, he and his wife started raising Pomeranians. They are active people who love to hunt, fish, ride horses, boat and camp. Last year, they celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary with all their friends and extended family. When he and his wife took a six month trip, I stayed in their house and took care of their thirty dogs. This wonderful man stands six foot, five inches tall. He is lean and long, with a full head of silver hair and a smile that always sits comfortably on his mouth and in his eyes. He has a way about him that makes people feel comfortable. He is also a great story teller.


One of his stories takes place when the kids were small in the late 1960’s. His youngest child was mad that his older siblings would not let him ride the horse, so he decided to run away. Instead of trying to make the kid stay, his dad said “OK. But it is getting dark. You had better take a flashlight.” The kid went to the cupboard for a flashlight. Dad walked him to the door. “It is supposed to be cold tonight. Do you want a coat?” The child went to the closet and got a coat. Dad opened the door and looked outside. “It is almost your bedtime. Do you want to take a pillow and a blanket?” His son went to his bedroom for his pillow and blanket. They walked outside. His dad asked him about supper. “You are going to miss supper if you leave now. Do you want some food?” Back in the house he went for a box of crackers. Dad was waiting for him with a wagon. “Here you go. It will be tough walking with all that stuff in your arms.”


As his son started down the driveway, he asked his son if he wanted to take one of the dogs with him for company.

So, he watched his boy walk down the dirt road with his wagon and the dog. His oldest son walked up to him. “Dad, you can’t let him run away from home!” His dad said “He won’t go far. He is not allowed to cross the road. So he either has to walk a circle around the section of farm ground, or go to the school bus shelter at the end of the road. Besides, the dog is with him and that dog won’t let anyone near any of you kids.”


He watched the child through binoculars until he saw him go into the bus shelter. After supper, when it was just dark, he walked to the bus shelter. His son was cold, tired and trying not to be scared. Dad told him that he was just checking up on him, that he didn’t need to come home. “But if you want to come home, I will walk with you.” I think the boy and the dog rode home in the wagon pulled by his dad.

Read to learn how to write

Books are woven through all parts of my life. I was a latch key child long before there was a term for it. I spent hours reading. As a kid I read every Louis L’Amour western and every Walter Farley black stallion book I could get my hands on.

Our public library was an old three story Victorian mansion in the center of town that was donated to the town years earlier. It was dark with lots of small rooms and too many stairs. There was no security at a library back then, so I would go into the back rooms where the old books were kept and sit on the floor in the corner looking through them.

From that library I read Congo by Michael Crichton; Johnny Tremain, by Esther Forbes; Savage Sam by Fred Gipson; and A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle.

I remember reading a great book with twin sisters, one of whom went on a space journey where she was frozen in time so she would survive the journey. When she finally got back to earth, her sister was fifty years old than she was. I don’t remember the name of the book or I would read it again.

During the summer of 1981 I was recuperating from some unexpected surgery. My neighbor started taking me to her Friends of the Library group. People donated books to the library all year long to be sold at an annual sale. This annual sale also gives the library a place to put books they have weeded out of their system. I had a lot of fun sorting the books and stayed for three years, until I moved to Texas. Each state I move to, the first place I go is the library to sign up as a volunteer. I am now in my 27th year volunteering.

I volunteer a couple of hours a week sorting the Hobbies and How To section books. As a rule, the maintenance staff keeps a constant four pallets of donated books to sort through year round. There are sorters who go through those books and sort them into categories. They roll their carts of sorted books down the isles where there are tall bookshelves defined by individual categories. Each person assigned to sort a category sorts the books into sub-headings. Those books are boxed and stored until the annual sale.

At the same time, some of the sorted books are sent upstairs to a used book store located inside the library. Books that are deemed to have a potential larger value are stored separately to be sold on an Internet store front. I enjoy my volunteer time though out the year. It is quiet. We are in the basement, so my cell phone won’t work. You can visit with people or just lose yourself in books. The person who sorts audio ‘stuff’ has a record player and he plays music on vinyl throughout the morning. There is a dining room in the library if you need coffee or a muffin. And, of course, there is the library upstairs. The photo below is the where the main sort takes place.

Writers Retreat

I am going to Norman, Oklahoma to a writer’s conference at the end of April. I am curious to see what a writer’s conference is like. I had hoped to go to one last year at Ball University last year, but it didn’t work out.

The writers group I belong to just got back from a retreat at the Elms Hotel in Excelsior Springs, Missouri. We wrote a lot and ate too much junk food. The meeting room we worked from had windows along the entire wall that looked out over the grounds. It snowed most of the day, making it the perfect day to sit indoors and tap away on the laptop. It helped that the bottom floor of the hotel has a heated mineral spring water lap pool and a full service spa!

I am back in the shoeing season groove. I left the bookstore because my supervisor was a bully and I just didn’t want to be that miserable everyday. It did pay the heat bills this winter. It also paid for a new fridge, carpeting in the living room, two new recliner chairs and a big repair bill on the Subaru. Everyday at that job was like being in the movie Gaslight. Life is too short.

The past month was spent getting caught up on my novel writing. The location and setting within the novel have been tightened. That also meant I had to change some characters around. The ones I don’t need can be used in another novel.