Illiterations: Laughing At My Own Expense

2018 is in it's last 12 hours of life.  In only ten more hours, the entire year will be but a memory.  This was a hard year for me in some ways.  It was a year of growth, and a year of personal loss.  It was a successful year of business, and it was a year of closure on some difficult involvements with people that arose out of business. I still, 18 months later, am working and fighting to return to the athletic, physically strong person I was before my hips developed osteoarthritis in my late 40's.  Only replacing both hips ultimately offered relief, but the toll those ten years took on my body still shows in my weight, and my energy level, but I am better and better every month. Not only did the extreme and relentless pain take a toll on my physical self, it was a constant struggle emotionally not to be impatient with those closest to me who didn't understand what I was going through.  My husband, who has his own challenges, found it humorous to make sport of me mo

To know about the story behind this painting, click this LINK There is a safe side, and a side where you are "on your own."  Be your own support system, your own boss, your own insurer, your own safety net, in all things. Live by the rules, or write your own.  Even when there are boundaries, the freedom of being your own boss is heady.  And, there are always boundaries, of course. I'm on the second half of year sixteen of doing just that.  And, what a year. It's been a strange, and painful, firey, year, and I have had to rise to the challenges of people in places I would never have expected to have done.  I feel like I'm trudging home, to my safest place, even though it's a place I've never lived.  It's a place where the home fires burn, and they guide me there, where people know me and who I am at my core.  I am neither scorned nor neglected there.  It just feels right, and I plan to return from there healed, or, at the very least, healing

An original (if conceptually similar) work by Nicola Holmes, ©2018 A Christmas Daryl Daryl woke up Sunday morning with a headache.  "Probably too much late night Fox News," he thought.  "Damned carolers were out late.  So distracting!" He punched the snooze button on his phone, gritting his teeth at the sound of Suicide Solution, his usually-favorite Ozzy Osborn song that he nearly always used as his alarm in the morning.  He found it titillatingly ironic, as he wasn't a drinker. His forever-perky wife, Anna, was already up, and he could hear the blender whining in the kitchen as she whipped up her morning smoothie.  Grrr.  Wives.  You can't live with 'em; you can't kill 'em.   He smiled at this.  It gave him a little giggle every time, in spite of Anna's hundreds of pleas not to say such things. This morning was a really good example of why he would just as soon be done with her.  He had plenty of things he'd love to be d