Book review: Healer & Witch

 I just finished reading Nancy Werlin's excellent new middle grade fantasy = 

Healer & Witch.  

Highly recommend.

Ask a Librarian -- you know they can help

An older gentleman came into the library where I worked and asked for directions. He was trying to find his niece's place. From his vague description, I finally found it on a map, but when I tried to show him how to get there, his conversation kept wandering so much that I asked him if he had his son's phone number so that his son could help him get to his niece's place. The old man searched his pockets and came up with a piece of paper with his son's phone number, so I called it. The son was shocked that his dad, who has Alzheimers, actually was able to drive so far away by himself and had actually had the sense that librarians could help and had stopped at a library. 

The first year of school is important

 My child's kindergarten teacher told her kids that she was 100 years old. And therefore since she's older than their parents, she knows more than their parents. (she was younger than me by far) Oh, and she also told them she was a witch and if they misbehaved she'd turn them into a flowerpot - pointing at the flowerpots with flowers in them at her windows. 

Of course the children believed every word. 

(they also behaved, loved her, and learned a lot from her.)

Writer's brain takes a Left Turn

Today I gave up on the book I had been trying to piece together. Put it aside and went back to revising my will - which I should have been doing months ago.  

Completed my will revisions and turned back to my writing... and decided I actually didn't want to work on it anymore. My brain took a complete left turn and began shoving ideas for a similar but quite different book.

Ho-Kay. Off I go on a new bit of writing, one that needs a lot MORE research than the one I've abandoned. But it tickles my interest more, which means my readers will enjoy it more - when it's finally done.

The futile Act of saving things digitally

 The problem with digital is that things change.

 I wrote my first book and many magazine and newspaper articles on a typewriter. Had paper copies done with carbon paper. (If I had kept them, they'd be all smeary today.) Then I wrote on a Commodore 64. There was no digital record saved. Wrote more on various Apple computers, but nothing can read those 5-inch floppy disks anymore, so I tossed them. The next books were recorded on 3-inch disks. Also now in the trash.

 In the late 1990s and early 2000s, my husband told me to stop printing out copies of what I wrote because they were all saved on the computer. Yeah - Right. (not) They were saved , but no way can my 2022 computer read those old versions of AppleWorks and ClarisWorks. 

Now, my latest Apple iMac grabs everything to save on the 'cloud.' Which means I can't access them if I have no internet service. (which is why I now save writing stuff on Dropbox, because I can work on those files even without internet as long as I save them to Dropbox once I reach Internet service again.)

 I imagine that saving digital files of photographs may have gone through the same history -- and that everything saved today will be unreadable in the future.  🙁

Attacks on schools - too many attacks on schools

 Every time there's a mass shooting, parents worry about their own children in school. Many of us have had similar, if not quite the same thing happen.  Too many of us. 

A few years ago I was sitting in my car in the school parking lot along with other parents of high schoolers who lived too far away to be able to walk (and California has no free bus service for schools) when no kids showed up. We waited and waited. 

One of the parents was able to overhear police reports and discovered that several schools, including this one had received bomb threats. So the school was locked down while police searched for the possible bomb. The teens had not been told. At this point, every teen had a cell phone, so we parents were able to text messages to them to keep them from panicking. Eventually the kids were being let go, building by building, so we parents let the kids know. My kid was in building 4, so it was a while before that building was released. 

Did they not tell the kids to keep them from panicking and running? Even though they were sitting quietly, they still were frantic and it was only the ability to text to their parents that kept them relatively calm. 

Why families need two cars

I worked for a few years after college, then retired to have a baby.

Therefore, we gave one of our cars to my newly graduated sister. I did a lot of walking to the (over a mile away) grocery store with her in a baby carriage, using the carriage to get bags of groceries home. 

But when she was one-year-old and got sick, I had to wait until my husband got home (at 9:30 in the evening) before we could take her to the hospital. (had called the Doctor and he order us to the hospital - she had croup and had gotten worse while I waited for my husband to get home) Believe you me - we got a second car after that, so that I could handle emergencies, and eventually went back to work part time. 

Our doctor happened to be the head of pediatrics at the hospital, so we got immediate care. They were going to cut her throat open (a tracheotomy) so she could breathe, but our doctor held them back from doing that and tried other remedies first, which did work. 

Oh the tales I have about that hospital stay. I brought board books for her to look at in her oxygen tent thinking they would be sturdier in that damp environment, but -- she kept thinking the pages were just stuck together, so she kept trying to tear them apart. (All our books at home were regular picture books, not board books.) 

I told the nurses to NOT let her see how her IV tube was attached when they changed the tubing but of course they didn't listen (all children are dumb, don't cha know), so she immediately unattached the tubing and was gleefully spray painting the plastic sheeting of her oxygen tent with the liquid spurting out from the tubing.  🙂 They attached it more securely after that. 

They warned me, but I was still shocked that, when we brought her home after a week's stay at the hospital, she didn't want to associate with us at all.  She was mad at us for abandoning her at that strange place.  (news note, we were there with her most of the time)