This Journey Called Life

I have just finished reading "A Discovery of Witches" by Deborah Harkness. It was an interesting read. The reviews were really mixed on Goodreads. It was the first book of the All Souls Trilogy. I took out all 3 books from my local library. A pen pal I have wants to have kind of like a book club, over snail mail. I liked the idea and he suggested the first book so I got all three. I am glad I did. The first book ended pretty abruptly. The book was full of magic, witches, daemons, and vampires. You know how I love magic! The two main characters are Diana, a witch who doesn't know how powerful she is, and Matthew, an old and powerful vampire. Matthew is over a century old, but looks to be in his late 30s. I am not sure how old Diana is, late 20s or early 30s. She is an athlete, runs and rows daily. She has an affliction of excess adrenaline her doctors since she was 7.  "It begins with absence and desire. It begins with blood and fear. It begins with a discovery of wit...

School was supposed to open up April 15th, well as you know we haven't gone back to school yet. They recently announced that we may may be able to go back on May 15th. I asked my cards if we are going back to school on May 15th . . . 1) The Magician 2) 10 of Cups 3) The Empress 4) Judgement 5) Shadow Card - Knight of Wands So not exactly clear to me. I am still a beginner to Tarot. I still just have my first deck, The Robin Wood deck. I have gotten a lot closer and more comfortable with the deck. The Magician, getting all your ducks in a row, getting prepared. 10 of Cups and Empress - family, strong family ties. Judgement - rise from the ashes. Knight of Wands - blazing trails, moving forward. So it does seem that the cards thinks that school will open up. Though I am doubtful. OK, so still single girl here! Of course I asked them a romantic question. I have recently started the whole online dating thing. No expectations whatsoever. I just really did it because I am g...

Chapter 1 “Rory!” Yelled Lucy as she was pouring her coffee into her mug. Lucy was already 15 minutes behind schedule due to her alarm clock not going off this morning. She didn’t remember if she set it correctly the night before. Three glasses of wine will do that to a person, Lucy thought to herself shaking her head. “You have 15 minutes before we are leaving this house!” Lucy again yelled as she went up the stairs to get dressed for work. 17 minutes later they were both in her four door sedan driving towards Rory’s school and the veterinary clinic where Lucy worked. She has worked at the Blue Hills Veterinary Clinic for almost 10 years. She loved her job, the animals, and the people she worked with. As they pulled up to the curb, Lucy leaned over to Rory who was taking off his seat belt.  “Have a great day kiddo! I hope you do well on the math quiz!” She kissed his cheek quickly before he could scoot out the door. “Bye Mom, love you,” he said quietly as his fr...

I have always loved to read. I go to the local library every other week to get 3 or 4 books. I like a lot of different genres. I have always been interested in writing. Honestly though the fear of rejection and the sheer amount of work has held me back. Yesterday I started to look up online writing courses. There are free ones too. I guess I have never thought this far into it. I took a couple writing courses yesterday. They were very inspiring. The first one I took was on Udemy.com, the course was named "Secret Sauce of Writing" by Shani Raja. The four crucial ingredients per Mr. Raja are simplicity, clarity, elegance, and evocativeness. He recommends to use familiar language, use as few words as possible, and uncomplicate your ideas. "When you cut away unnecessary words from your sentences, you give them more power, they become punchy." He is an excellent speaker and makes everything very easy to understand. The second course I didn't finish yet. It was a...

I still have the Robin Wood deck, it's currently the only tarot deck I have. I still love them and am getting to "know them" better and better. I haven't really worked with them at all over these last 3 weeks of quarantine. I asked the cards are we going to go back to school on the 15th like we are supposed to?          9 of Pentacles - a wealthy woman, I did apply for unemployment last week, I am not sure I will get it.          Knight of Wands - ready and willing to move forward.          Magician - has everything all together.          Shadow Card - 8 of Swords - feeling unable, or unwilling to make a decision. I feel like the answer is no. Magician looks like a teacher (me), Dalton is like the Knight, ready to go back, but the overall theme is not being able to make a decision, or forced to make a decision they don't want to.  So we will see, we both want to go back to sc...

I read this book in January 2020. I gave it 5 out of 5 stars on Goodreads. 'On Midsummer's Eve put seven different kinds of flowers under the pillow tonight and you'll dream of the one you'll marry.' I have always been drawn to old traditions and practices involving nature. Mom said someone at her work told her I was a witch. I feel I was one in a past life. I want to be one, I just don't know enough now. I love nature, and plants, animals,  and rocks/crystals. I do believe they hold a certain power. 'Birds carry the souls of the unborn and the dead.' 'Sometimes when you had a thought, it refused to leave. You rejected it, disowned it, sent it away, to find, moments later, that you were still spending time with it. It might have  a different shape or use different words, but there was no mistaking: it was the same one.' 'You know the meaning of seeing bear, don't you? Ancestor, coming with a warning.' 'A being was eithe...

I read this book in December 2019. I rated the book 5 of 5 stars on Goodreads. 'It was easy to doubt it all, the lake so flat and calm, a thing whose secrets would never surface.' 'There was Solomon's seal, which grew like a spine in the ground, with a perfectly circular vertebra for every year of age.'         -soothe the stomach         -clear the lungs         -slacken excessive bleeding during woman's time of the month' 'Sassafras tree, whose leaves were often mitten shaped'         - chewed into a poultice for poison ivy         - roots dried and steeped for teas to purify the blood and warm the spirit Water Hemlock         - causes the most violent of death - seizures and convulsions         - "unlike poison hemlock of Europe which shuttled philosophers so gently into the dark" Rabbit's foot or Spikeweed       ...

The title seems familiar. I read this book in November 2019. I rated the book 4 of 5 stars on Goodreads. " There is a girl, a girl who does not fear death Because she has her father and her mother and her twelve hunter brothers, A home of three floors and a barnyard farmhouse, In the middle of the farm, an apple tree that gives love apples in the winter and summer. In the farm there are seven grottoes, Each and every grotto secured . . . Death was light and slipped in through the lock. " Death and the Girl, Sephardic ballad " We are the shepherds, we walked 'cross the mountains. We left our flocks when the new star appeared."  Johnny Cash 'The crazier the victima, the closer to God.' 'It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed.' 'Love is a shared delusion Two people reciting the same spell.' 'People who can't be bothered by manners pretend to be amused by them.' 'Have power on th...

I read this book in November 2019. I rated the book 5 of 5 stars on Goodreads. I wrote in my book, the book was good! The reviews were all great! 'I remember being pestered by a sense of dread as I walked to my car that day, pressed down by a wave of foreboding that swirled around my head and broke against the evening in small ripples. There are people in this world who would call that kind of feeling a premonition, a warning from some internal third eye that can see around the curve of time.' Those were the first two sentences of the book. 'Like any town, Austin had it's good points too, although most people don't see the skin besides the pimples.' 'It was easy to lie to Jeremy, his trusting temperament being incapable of understanding deceit.' 'We never had been apart for more than a single night or two in all our lives until a month ago, when i moved to campus, leaving him behind with a woman who swam in chaos.' "only two people...

Since the medium visit I have been thinking of becoming more involved it the community. Fair Haven is an amazing little small town community. There is a little box library and a food pantry. I always go to the little box library and exchange books. I go there after I read books friends and family pass me books that they don't want back. The food pantry is something I have yet to donate to. I will do for sure. I read a blog by Alicia Sparks, she had a list of things to do to become more involved. 1. Look for Local Events 2. Volunteer Your Time 3. Donate Your Resources 4. Shop Locally 5. Join a Class or Group 6. Support Your Local Sports Teams 7. Organize Your Own Event All great ideas and easy to do in Fair Haven. In the summer especially it is easy to attend local events. There are lots of little great stores to shop at locally. There is a community center in Red Creek. There are art centers that hold classes all the time. As of today, there is a virus (corona) going arou...

I forgot until was looking in my book that I never posted about my first visit to a medium! I went on 11/18/19 with my cousins Emily and Olivia to The Purple Door in Rochester. It was a very good experience. It gave me chills and made me feel good. The medium's name was Kathy. We all had separate readings with the same person. Emily and Olivia has seen her before and recommended her. I highly recommend her and will go see her again. She wrote things down on a piece of paper while she was doing the reading. I kept it and wrote in down in my book. That is what I am reading now to put it down in here. Almost the whole reading was about Todd. I had expected that and was a little nervous. I didn't want him to come across to her angry. He didn't, not at all. The opposite actually. He told her he wants me to see him. I am thinking about the dreams. I haven't had any dreams of him in awhile. He also said he was sorry and he knew he messed up. Hmmmm He said he could never ...

For book club this month we are going to read "The Last Letter from Your Lover" by Jojo Moyes. I really like this author, I have read quite of few books from her. I follow her on Twitter too. I read "The Giver of Stars" in November 2019. I gave it 5 out of 5 stars on Goodreads. 'And there is the bare truth of it, for her and all the woman around here. Doesn't matter how smart you are, how clever, how self - reliant - you can always be battered by a stupid man with a gun.' " . . . and best of all, the wilderness of books, in which she could wander where she liked, made the library a region of bliss to her. " Louisa May Alcott, Little Woman " This is what people don't see, wrapped up in their cities, with the noise and the smoke, and their tiny boxes for houses. Up there you can breathe. You can't hear the town talking and talking. No eyes on you, 'cept the Gods. It's just you and the trees and the birds and the river ...

'Every little trifle, for some reason, does seem incalculably important today, and when you say of a thing "nothing hangs on it" it sounds like blasphemy. There's never any knowing - how am I to put it? - which of our actions, which of our idleness won't have things hanging on it forever.' This post will mostly be quotes from the book that I put in my commonplace book. I started reading this book in October of 2019 and rated it 3 of 5 stars on Goodreads. Chapter 1 'This is what divorce is: taking things you don't want from people you no longer love.' 'He had decided instead to mortify his own flesh, to take his own life, to free himself from a path that had taken him down numerous wrong turns, led him deep into the wilderness and finally petered out completely, its breadcrumb course gobbled up by the birds.' 'A dull childhood, a bad marriage, a dead-end job - the classic triumvirate - they all flicked by quickly, silently, with...

I have been keeping a commonplace book for a few years now. It is something I seen on Pintrest and it really caught my eye. Something I wanted to do! It is basically a collection of anything you want. I mainly put in quotes from books that I find interesting and want to remember. Some people put in recipes or song lyrics, really it can be anything you want. I like a composition like notebook. I love to read but I have a hard time with retention. I have an awful memory and I forget a lot of what I read. I even forget what books I have read. I am thinking of reviewing books on here. Making a blog post per book. I would really be posting a lot of material and not sure how many people would actually read it. I will try though, why not? I have always actually wanted to be a writer. I read enough books, however I am not delusional, I know how hard actually writing a book would be! I will post a review of the last book I read.

So I have been working at the school since April, 2019 as a substitute teacher. i really like the job and the kids. i wasn't sure I would as I didn't have a lot of experience with working with kids before. I am so glad I like the job and it is so much easier with Dalton and I being on the same schedule. The pay is not the best however, which I obviously knew going into this. I have started the process of getting certified as a teacher assistant. It isn't very complicated to get certified through New York State. You have to complete 3 workshops. Two of which are online. There is also a state test to complete and pass. I am not sure about requirements of keeping up the certification. I will have to look into that. I also believe I get paid more working as a substitute teacher if I am also certified. I did my taxes today and I am getting way less than I did last year because I made so much less working at the school most of the year. We will see how it goes. I have done t...