I hope everyone has a safe and happy Thanksgiving tomorrow.
A Novel Idea
The blog of Romance Author Robin Janney
Wednesday, November 23, 2022
Kiss and Tell?
Tuesday, November 15, 2022
Short and Sweet
Just a short post today.
I took my mom out this afternoon. Picked up the fudge I ordered from a friend through Facebook, then we picked up our Walmart orders. After fueling the car up, I swung into Dunkin's for hot coco and a donut (maybe 2). Then got us both home before it started snowing.
Now I have to go get back to laundry. Yay.
Monday, November 14, 2022
A Jump Turned into a Hop
Me last Monday: Ooh, an extra day off! I can get a jump on my blog posts!
Me last Thursday: What happened to this week? I have to do a post for Veterans Day and Monday and - oh bugger it, I'm tired.
I did have this nice post in mind for Friday, I even had a picture all picked out. But I lost track of time and it didn't get written. Maybe next year. For now, we'll just pick up here and keep on moving forward.
There are certain things in life I will always try to get a picture of if at all possible. Flowers. Pets. Deer. Moon. Husband. Mother. And as seen above, rainbows!
This particular photo is from July 15, 2019 near Shakopee, Minnesota which is just outside Minneapolis. That was in our first year of driving truck, and according to Google Photos we were coming from an Amazon center.
This particular day was one of the more interesting ones because it happened to be the day this warehouse had a strike. We decided not to cross the picket line and whichever one of us was in the sleeper bunk, I think it was me, had to call up the satellite image of Google maps for the area to see where the would be a safe place for us to get off the road and sit while we waited for the strike to end. We called our Dispatch to let them know what was going on and, well, there's not a whole lot that could have been done. We found a lot large enough for us to sit and just waited.
I'm not sure how long we waited, but the sky ended up opening. It poured buckets.
I don't remember if we decided to see if the strike had ended on our own, or if we talked to Dispatch first. But it was over by then, so we got in and got back out in time to see that amazing rainbow. In this second photo you can see better the faint double rainbow it was.
A little over a year later, coming up I65 in Kentucky, just outside Cave City there was this cool rainbow that pictures just don't do it justice because the fact that it wasn't a solid curve but a little bit wavy didn't come through very well. It was taken from the sleeper bunk by a somewhat cranky husband while the truck was still moving. In my defense, he was already awake as we were soon to be switching in just a couple exits. It's his picture posted above and to the right.
And one of the cons about driving truck locally is that I don't have someone in the sleeper bunk to take pictures when I can't just pull the truck over! This past weekend as I was coming north on I81, I was climbing the long hill after the I80 exits and even though it was noon, the angles were just right that there was a rainbow visible at the top of the hill! Given how miserable the weather was, it was a definite bright spot to driving that day. I think it was Sunday, but it could easily have been Saturday.
I can tell I had a cup of caffeinated coffee earlier today, I'm just running off at the keyboard! I've been trying to cut back on caffeine since July when the DOT doctor was giving me a hard time about my heart rate, rightfully so, but man oh man - life without caffeine is hard. Especially when your day begins at 3am. Earlier if you count the time the alarm goes off.
Okay, shutting up for now! Until next time!!
Thursday, November 10, 2022
A Picture's Worth
I absolutely love having a camera in my cellphone. Even before the digital age, I loved taking photos even though I had to take the film to a store to have someone develop them. With the cost of film, it was a hobby I had to take care not to spend too much on since at the time funds were limited. Still. I have more than a few old photos of animals and flowers. When I took off for college after high school, I even took a bunch of pictures of the mountains around home to help ward off homesickness. It didn't work, but that's another story.
But as technology advances, I can indulge myself in snapping a photo of whatever strikes my fancy. The photo I've posted first is an older one, taken with one of my first cellphones. I'm not sure if it was the flip-phone or my first iPhone, but it was one of them. Mr. Janney and I were walking along one of the trails on Round Top Mountain during one of my family picnics and here was this old stone wall covered in forest. I just liked how it looked, and the questions it sparked that I'll never have the answers for. How old is it? Why was it built on the side of a mountain? Who built it?
In the early days, device memory was an issue. I was always faced with the dillemma of not enough space. I usually emailed the photos to myself to save them before I deleted them from the device so I could take more pictures and repeat the process. Now though, there are different online 'clouds' we can store our digital photos. That, coupled with phones with larger memory capacities, I have a lot of photos stored. In more than one spot because for some reason I can't quite explain, I'm terrified of losing photos. I loathe deleting photos.
I don't even like deleting work related photos because 'what if' I need to call them up for some reason. I have year old photos of Bill's of Laden that I've only begun to weed out. But the fear that management will someday ask for the bills from back then persists. Irrational, I know.
One thing I just started doing in my Google Photos is to sort pictures into albums to make finding photos for blog posts easier. Photos help break up large chunks of text, something I try to avoid anyway. In a perfect world, I'd slap in photos that actually pertain to whatever I'm writing about. But that's not always possible, which is why there are a going to be alot of flower photos put in just because they're pretty. They probably won't have captions, because for some reason that throws off my formating and then I have to spend way too much time trying to get one paragraph match the others.
It's also easier these days to get the digital photos printed in physical form. If you have a good enough printer, you can do it yourself at home. If you don't there are bunches of online places you can order them, just the ones you want instead of the entire roll of film, and they can mail them to you. Although honestly I usually have them prepared at my local CVS because I go there at least once a month to pick of meds of one kind or another.
I may pick out older photos as I do this and write a post about them, just for something to write about and post for when life is absolutely boring. A boring day may be great for truck driving since it means nobody did anything out of the ordinary stupid for a change, but it doesn't make for good blogging!
Until next time!
Wednesday, November 9, 2022
A Lack of Oxygen?
Tuesday, November 8, 2022
Please Stand By
When we were kids, my siblings and I, we would get the biggest kick out of actually getting up and standing next to the television when that sign came up on the screen. What can I say, we were easily entertained and amused! We were goofy kids!