Where Did The Summer Go? Getting Back to Books

It's been too long since I set fingers to keys on this blog. Sorry to have kept you waiting.  The fingers have been busy excavating weeds, following routes on maps, tracing family tree branches and searching on line for a wedding dress. I think two more days will complete the rehab of the driveway. I've been digging weeds from between paving stones with a steak knife and sweeping loc-tite sand in to every crack to prevent more weeds from becoming entrenched. This is the price I pay for taking the low bid on the paved driveway! But it looks like it's going to work. At least I have listened to Black Arrow, by Robert Louis Stevenson, My Antonia, by Willa Cather, The Mozart Conspiracy by Scott Mariani and a lot of my iPod tunes. It's kind of a Zen activity. Not liking to use chemicals in our yard, I seem to always find projects that require an inordinate amount of time as the trade-off for an almost chamical-free landscape.

New World Trade Center

We also spent five weeks hosting and traveling with a cousin from Mexico who visited with us to improve her English. We visited the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the 9/11 Memorial and the new World trade Center site. We sailed on Lake Champlain, walked The High Line in NY, shopped at L.L. Bean in Freeport, Maine and Zara in the Big Apple, and introduced the young lady to 46 of her other U.S. cousins in five different states. I was thrilled to discover that I have made a reader of her. Before visiting with us, she had only read required books for school. I introduced her to the YA section in our local library. She picked out a few books. She found two that she really enjoyed and these seem to have set her on the path to reading. That she read them in English makes the accomplishment even more exciting.

Over the summer, our young rabbit, the main character in my children's book, has grown from a tiny bunny to a near adult. It is becoming difficult to distinguish between the baby bunny and its parents. Family seems to have been a focus this summer.  I spent many hours expanding my family tree on
Ancestry.com. I added my future daughter-in-law's family back four generations and explored my own family roots in Germany. A great nephew will be spending his junior year abroad in Germany, and I wanted him to have the tree and the information about his Vonweisensee ancestors. Perhaps he can help me follow that trail further into the past.

As for the future... It is time to regroup and re-engage. I need to contact the current holder of my manuscript and then apply some of what I learned in the recent Webinar by Mira Reisberg from Childrens Book Academy and what I hope to learn from Jennifer Tzivia MacLeod in her new book, The Seven Day Manuscript Machine.

A comment from you will add to my motivation, so please leave me a note, even if it is only to say "You go girl!"  I must say, my heart was warmed by the recent sidebar exchanges during Mira's webinar where I discovered how many of us late bloomers are out here, working on our dreams. 

More soon. I promise!