Trapped In Your Home? Time Travel to 1946 Hollywood & New Orleans

In the mood for mystery, suspense,

 and Spirits of the Night?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B084P819CQ

For a little music from the period

 And what I think of as the book's love theme

 

HAVE YOU BEEN SELLING MORE KINDLE BOOKS THESE COOPED-UP DAYS?

I have been selling twice as much as usual 

of my books this past month.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B084P819CQ

My DARK HOLLYWOOD series

and 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005NCUTAG

My VICTOR STANDISH series mostly.

Are any of your books selling more 

than usual during this time of isolation?

Me, I've taken to listening to all of Mercy Thompson's audio books on my blood runs. 

I stay away from any of Stephen King's audio books on my night runs after listening to his DUMA KEY!

  

Let me know if you've sold more

and what you are reading now!

EASTER in the Time of Plague

I have just returned from 
a night-time rural blood run
and 
will soon go out on another.

The road ahead of me all the way was
dark, deserted, and uncertain.

  
Just like the days ahead of all of us are
dark, deserted, and uncertain.

Now, in my worldview.
I know that though my days ahead 
are uncertain,
they are in sure hands.

The sun will rise tomorrow as sure
as the Son rose 
two thousands years ago.

And if I do not rise with tomorrow's sun,
it just means that I have merely started 
a new and wondrous adventure.

Yet, there is still meaning to Easter morning
if you do not share my worldview.

Remember the women going to the tomb,
worrying how they would
move the boulder
 blocking the tomb?

only to discover
that it had already been moved
and the tomb was empty.

Many of our feared problems never come 
as we imagine.

And those that do are made easier by 
sharing them with friends.

This Easter,
though socially distanced,
share your heart with a friend.

You'll both be better for it.

Oh,

and

HAPPY EASTER, EVERYONE

BLACK AS NIGHT, SWEET AS SIN

Missing your favorite coffee at Starbuck's?

 

At Meilori's, Sam serves the best coffee -- black as night, sweet as sin.

 

Thomas Jefferson called coffee the favorite drink of the civilized world. 

 

But McCord's coffee is the favorite drink of the supernatural world ... 

 

except for those who sip O- blood.

 

A double dose of dark roast taken from the fields of pre-Aztec Columbia .  For each cup, two heaping tablespoons, smelling like midnight should smell. 

 

A dash of the original chicory root from the moist soil of Ancient Egypt for bite and body. 

 

Two more heaping tablespoons for the rune-carved pot, old when Eve was young.  

 

A phoenix egg cracked over the pot.  The yolk cupped out and white and shells thrown into the pot, filled with the distilled tears of laughter.

 

Sam says he knows nothing that polishes coffee and makes it shine like that. 

 

Only when the moon hides her face in winter is this coffee made over coals still burning from the first lightning strike in Eden. 

 

The air to such an evening is very cold, so that the brew, rising from coldness to a rolling boil, breathes into the darkness such a heady aroma that you almost taste the smell caressing your nostrils.

 

 Your mouth waters.  Your tongue grows dry.  

 

And a hungry yearning to taste such a coffee fills you and never quite leaves.

 

The first sip of that coffee will haunt you every morning afterwards when you rise to the ditch water that criminally calls itself coffee.

 

I can walk through my hall-end mirror into Meilori's.  I wish you could join me.

VALUE of DREAMS in this TIME OF PLAGUE

“The only way to keep your health 
is to eat what you don’t want, 
drink what you don’t like, 
and do what you’d rather not.”

- Mark Twain

Ghost of Mark Twain rambling by 
in this Time of Plague.

I have always believed, 

and I still believe, 

that whatever good or bad fortune 

may come our way,

 we can always give it meaning 

and transform it 

into something of value.

Old Thoreau keeps telling me 

“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life 

which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” 

Now as much as it galls me, I reckon I believe that.

Which means the cost of a lot of folks' dreams are darn high.  

I wonder if those dreams' value turns out to be worth it.

It galls me even more that I agreed with that scoundrel, Freud, when he wrote:

 “It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement 

that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, 

and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.” 

Personally, I believe ...

it is in the heart that true value lies ...

 a loving heart is riches, and riches enough, ... 

without it, intellect is poverty and wealth but rags.

 One values a thing when one can’t attain it ...

which could explain I suppose why folks value their dreams so.

WHAT DO YOU THINK, 

PILGRIMS?

No "Shelther" in This Place

By unattributed - Photograph in the Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, and Museum, Boston., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11539695

Should we survive this unusual time, each of us will have our own unique tale of this national lockdown.

Ernest, Hadley, and Bumby Hemingway in their apartment in Paris in 1924.

John F. Kennedy Presidential Library

But Hemingway, being Hemingway, 

has most of us beat.

 Though not in a way that I would brag about, 

but Hemingway, being Hemingway, had no problem with it.

In the summer of 1926, Hemingway was on the cusp of fame.  

Still married to Hadley, he acquired the trappings of a celebrity author he felt was necessary ...

including a fashionable mistress, Pauline Pfeiffer.

 By Not specified, owned by John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston - John F. Kennedy Library, Ernest Hemingway Collection, direct link to photo here, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7743479

 .

Hadley was church-mouse–poor, Pauline was an heiress. 

Hadley was plain and meek; 

Pauline was a sleek Vogue editor with a commanding personality.

Getting disgusted yet?  

It gets better ... ah, worse.

When confronted by Hadley about it, Hemingway grew furious saying she was the true offender.  

It would have been perfect if she had not dragged it out in the open.

Hemingway refused to give up his mistress. 

In fact, 

Pauline became a permanent fixture in the bruised marriage.

Hemingway chose to go to Madrid for the bullfights, leaving Hadley with an ill Bumby 

o go to friends, the Murphys, in their beach estate, Villa America.

They promptly exiled Hadley and Bumby out of their estate to protect their own children 

when their doctor found the boy to have whooping cough.

F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, heard of this, having a lease on a small house nearby, 

and offered it as a quarantine shelter to them.

The Murphys and Fitzgeralds kept “a grand distance from us poisonous ones,” 

Hadley reported to Hemingway, although both families sent them provisions.

It only gets worse from here.

 You guessed, right?  

Pauline dropped by.  

She'd had whooping cough as a child 

and so was immune.

Soon Hemingway joined them, 

setting the stage for what must have been one of the odder and more claustrophobic households in literary history. 

The idea of sharing a two-bedroom house with his mistress, an angry wife, 

a contagious, sick toddler, and a hovering nanny might have brought a lesser man to his knees, 

ut Hemingway later described the setting as “a splendid place to write.”

  

At the end of each evening, the group mounted their empty bottles upside down on the fence spikes. 

By the time the Hemingways and Pfeiffer left a few weeks later, these trophies ran the entire length of the fence.

No wonder the ghost of Mark Twain detests the man.  

Midnight, on the mantle behind him, is none too fond of him either.

What do you think?

Be the Eye of the Hurricane_IWSG POST

The storm of COVID-19 is all around us.  

We must strive to be eye of that hurricane. 

Easier said than done, right?

I don't know where you are in this storm.  I have no crystal ball.  

And the only gypsy I know is a ghost cat ... and you know cats ... ghost cats are even worse in telling you anything.

They just roll their eyes at the dumb things we humans do.

Anna has an interesting title to her IWSG post: Don't Drink the Kool-Aid:

https://emaginette.wordpress.com/2020/04/01/iwsg-71-dont-drink-the-kool-aid/

In Florida, the college students are still packing the sands for spring break ... nary a mask on any of them.

The Mardi Gras parades were a virus bomb which is now making New Orleans the new epicenter for the coronavirus.

As of last week, masks were not worn by the donor techs where ... don't want to frighten the donors. Sigh.

I am looked at strangely because of my mask ... but not at the hospitals I deliver blood to.  They all wear masks.

Besides, I have a co-worker who coughs her congested cough with her mouth open ... every other minute.

I'm in the wrong age bracket to not wear a mask.

We should learn the Lessons of 

the Spanish Flu of 1918

But enough about me.  

What do you think about me?

No. Just joking.

 How are you doing?

Try to boost your immune system by taking:

Getting enough sleep.

Zinc

Vitamin D3

Vitamin K2

Vitamin C

Echinacea & Golden Seal

Elderberry  Syrup

And

A good Probiotic

Every Storm passes.

Panic is your worst enemy.

Use your mind,

Take refuge in the Father.

Know you are not alone.

My heart is with you all.