Virtual Blog Tour

I have reviewed Sleight of Hand by Deanne Blackhurst. To read this review and others go to Views From Hobbit Hole.

                                          Sleight of Hand by Deanne Blackhurst Review

Contests and blog tour

Alberta writer Stephanie Humphreys is having a blog tour and contests. Check her out at http://shumphreys.blogspot.com/

From the Annamaniacs Files 2005: Blowout

In keeping with this vacation theme I have going because I can't go on vacation and everyone I know is, I'm posting this from my files. I wrote this back when I had a career, or the beginnings of one. A weekly humor column, a novel about to be published, the money to go further than my back yard. Hope you enjoy and please leave comments. I'm trying to break the World Guiness Record for most comments posted to a blog. I only have about two billion more to go.

*****

Warning: Shameless plug ahead!
I was heading south through Montana, on my way to a booksellers convention in Salt Lake City to promote my first novel, “Roses and Daisies”.

Not that I actually had a book to sign. It’s not due out until October, but I was kind of like a trailer in a movie theater — “coming soon to a bookstore near you. The sorrow, the hilarity, the romance, the mystery – don’t miss it.”

Shameless plug over, now on to the rest of the story. Hey, by the way, does anyone else remember that guy on the radio who would tell “the rest of the story?” No? Never mind. Hey, does anyone else remember Rosanna Danna saying “never mind?”

Montana, for those who have never been there, is lots of rolling hills, some mountainous roads, and a few small cities, which are like hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of miles apart.

The speed limit in the US is 75 miles an hour. That translates to about 200K to you and me.

Warning: do not go through the Chief Mountain Bear Buffalo Something border. You will spend three days just driving through mountains until you finally reach the I-15 and realize that you’re only fifteen minutes from the border. You might as well be one of the Israelites wandering in the wilderness for forty years.

So after I reach the I-15, I’m happily speeding down the road, singing at the top of my voice when I suddenly smell burning.

Not like Smokey the Bear burning. No, this was the kind of burning you smell just before your car explodes.

I look at my gauges, remembering last year and being stranded in the middle of nowhere in Ontario with an overheated car, and then suddenly I feel something and I see a hubcap rolling merrily down the road ahead of me.

When I pull over I discover that my left front tire looks like licorice strings.

So I go to my trunk, unpack everything, find my jack and pull out my spare. I bring them to the front of my car, and I look at my jack, and I look at my car, and I realize:



I don’t have a clue what I’m doing.

I do not have a cell phone, and I do not have AMA this time around.

On to plan B.

Stand by my car and look as helpless as possible.

I think it must be hard to see helpless on the side of the road when you’re pretending you’re Mario Andretti. That must be why so many cars whizzed by me so fast all I could see were colored streaks. They could envision themselves getting past the checkered flag somewhere in the distance.

Eventually a man and his teenage son stopped across the road and came over to help me. And a few moments later another man stopped. He had managed to see me but he had been Mario Andretii-ing too fast to stop, so he had dropped out of the race and managed to turn around.

He parked his car a little down the road to warn other motorists that we were there.

I have always, in my travels, found people who were willing to help me whenever I’ve had car trouble.

I seem to have car trouble a lot.

Which means I get to meet a lot of nice men. None of them single and looking like Brad Pitt — I wouldn’t be that fortunate.

It turns out my spare was flat.

It had to be flat because life can’t be easy and I’m involved in this.

Fortunately I was only five miles from Great Falls. A miracle when you think that the towns are all hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of miles from each other.

So I drove at 25 miles and hour (as I promised my rescuers) and made it to the city where I found a place that put air in my tire although that task wasn’t quite as easy as it sounds. You would think that places that service trucks would have air hoses.


Yes this is me with my red car and the flat
driver side tire. Only I didn't get the jack on
and my hair was longer, and I'm a girl.



They don’t.

After a trip to the junkyard to get a replacement tire put on my rim and two hours later I’m back in the race.

What’s that? I think I smell something burning.



From the Annamaniacs Files: Merrily We Roll Along - 2001

This post was first published in 2001. Children's ages have changed since then. They tend to do that.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We went on vacation this summer.

And I see your eyebrows raise. “So?” You might ask.

Let me explain. We went on vacation this summer, and we have seven kids.

Okay, now that you’ve picked up your eyeballs and put them back in your head, I can tell you more.

Two vehicles, seven kids (plus a couple of extras on the trip there) and two drivers.

I learned some things from this experience.

Make sure the sliding van door is completely closed before you allow someone to lean against it while you go 100 kilometers down a highway.

The trip from Kelowna to Golden is twice as long as the trip from Golden to Kelowna. I don’t know why this is. It’s the same road.

If I start to feel sleepy and headachey while speeding down the highway, stopping for a nutritious lunch for long term energy, is not going to fix the problem. I need a coke, a chocolate bar and aspirin. With that combination I can leap tall buildings in a single bound.

From now on I will not trust my sixteen-year-old daughter with the map. She found a bug on it. So instead of picking the bug off like any normal human being would do, in an effort to get the bug off, she rolled down her window, took the map, hung it out the window, shook it, and watched it fly into the windshield of the car behind us. My first thought? We’re going to be fined several thousand dollars for littering. And if someone finds an Alberta/BC map on the highway, it is not mine. I know nothing

Even I, who loves heights (been parasailing) and has never suffered from sea or air sickness, can get slightly nauseous in a six seater recreational plane. By the way, it was so cool when the pilot played chicken with the mountains. I can’t wait to go up again.

Teenagers think that a great way to spend a day with the aunt who has a beach house, is to rent movies and watch them all day.

No matter how I try, I cannot hide from people who want to take pictures.

While renting a condo, young children are required to repeatedly jump on the floor above other residents’ heads. Once you are in a cabin with no one beneath you, jumping is no longer required.

When going to the Enchanted Forest, beware of cute little houses that two-year-olds can get into but anyone much bigger can’t. She decided that she liked living in the three bears’ house. She liked eating baby bear’s porridge. She sat in baby bear’s chair. She wanted to sleep in baby bear’s bed. She was not coming out. No matter how much we huffed and puffed.

Kelowna is scarier to drive in than Calgary.

Even though slower speeds are posted on mountain roads, you still must drive prairie speeds. You just have to learn how to take the turns on two tires.

Under no circumstances can the bag holding my 8 year old daughter’s coloring supplies and books, be buried under 300 suitcases. I will not be able to survive unless she has her coloring supplies while riding in the car. It doesn’t matter how much my husband complains about unpacking the van and repacking it. He is not the one driving the vehicle she is in.

If you send three teenagers up a mountain so that they can ride mountain bikes on the way down, one of them will require rescue services.

At one point we rented a two bedroom cabin. It was charming. It was darling. I spent time furnishing it in my head. For myself. No one else. Not one child. Not even a husband. Just me, me, me. I dreamed about where my computer, stereo and TV would go. I imagined my collections throughout my little home, undamaged, unbroken, safe from harm. I pictured myself snuggled peacefully in front of the fireplace, reading a book, or happily engaged in my sewing room, or at my computer working on my 100th best seller.

And then someone would scream.

I kept telling myself “this is the last vacation with all of us. From now on they start moving out. That 17 year old is out the door next summer. The 16 year old is not far behind her. I only have 16 more years of family vacations.”

I will survive.

Charity, Oprah, Donald Trump and Anything Else I Can Think of for the Search Engines

I have a confession to make.

I read an unauthorized Kitty Kelly book on Oprah Winfrey.

I couldn't help myself. It was staring at me on the library bookshelf and my daughter recommended it and I just had to find out all the backstage stuff that Oprah didn't want me to know.

I won't review the book here. But I would like to comment on something I find interesting and perplexing.

Charity among the elite.

Celebrities are all about charity. Okay, they're not all about it, but they would like you to think that they are, and Oprah is probably Queen of "I am the most charitible person on the earth" club - she fights this out with Donald Trump.  They have constant battles in their club house about who is more generous and who gets to wear the crown. She wants us to know about all the charities she supports and all the charities she creates. She has devoted many of her shows to her "angel network" and done specials on her South African school for girls, and had those tremendous giveaway shows where every audience member walks away with a car, a trip, pajamas and a date with Stedman.

Donald Trump is the same. He likes to toot his horn about all the charities he supports and what a great guy he is and even has "Celebrity Apprentice" where all the celebrities appear not for themselves but for a charity.

I am not against giving to charity by any means. But doesn't it say in the bible something about giving and not letting the left hand know what the right hand is doing? In other words we're not supposed to tell everyone when we do charitable work or how much money we give away. It's supposed to be a secret between you, God and the IRS.

I think an exception can be made if a celebrity represents a charity and by their representation is able to raise more money and awareness for a charity. I'm not against this and a lot of good can happen with this. Marie Osmond and John Schneider come to mind with "The Children's Miracle Network". They've raised over a billion dollars - a sum that they couldn't have done without advertising it.

But I couldn't help but wonder while I watched the "Celebrity Apprentice" why these stars even bothered to appear on the show. It's not a simple game show where they show up for twenty minutes, plug their latest project, answer some questions and get a check for their charity. (Note, I am not against celebrites plugging their latest project - it's part of the job description) Celebrity Apprentice is hard work that takes a while to do, (it's deja vu for some of them when they find they are back to selling pizza's like they did as starving artists)  time taken away from regular work, and the money they raise, I suspect, is well within reach of these celebrities being able to reach into their pocket and write a check for. Why not just do that, make a public service announcement to get the word out there, do a couple of talk shows to promote the charity and move on. Why go through the whole apprentice thing where they are criticized, overworked and ultimately fired? I suspect it's not just the charitiy they're promoting here.

Back to Oprah and those cars. She did not give the cars to the audience. The car dealership did but she claimed she did. Whatsmore, there was a seven thousand dollar tax that recipients had to pay. She refused to help them out with that. These people were people who couldn't afford cars in the first place. If they had seven thousand bucks to pay for taxes they could have bought a decent used car for less than that. So people had a choice. Pay the taxes, sell the car and pay the taxes, or forfeit the car. Certainly the most logical would be to sell the car, pay the taxes and then buy something cheaper, but the point is that Oprah giving them cars - an act that got her a lot of attention and helped to crown her as Queen of Everything - is like saying that Bob Barker gave away cars, vacations and boats while he hosted the Price is Right. None of those things came out of his pocket and he didn't pretend they did. In fact on those giveaway days where Oprah appears so generous, it is not her generosity. She calls up the companies and they donate the goods. If they don't donate then its not her "favorite thing" which means that her "favorite things" aren't necessarily her favorite things, just the ones where she could convince someone to give her 300 of.

So I have no problem with her giving things away, but why not be honest about the giveaway and admit that not one cent comes out of her pocket. Other hosts of other shows do giveaways but they don't add the mantra "isn't Oprah the most generous person on the earth". This must be said twenty times while you wear your satin pajamas and your diamond encrusted "O" necklace, and before you crawl into your Oprah bed with the t-shirt sheets with your latest Oprah approved book club  book.

According to this book (I don't know how accurate Kitty Kelly is) in spite of all the big money that Oprah donates it still comes to less than 10 percent of her income. So really is she that generous? Isn't 10 percent a base that a person begins with for charitable donations? If I'm bringing home a hundred million dollars a year, couldn't I still have a really luxurious life and still be contribuiting generously to the economy by giving half of that away? I could still have the multi-million dollar mansion, the maid, the gardener, the 200 pairs of designer shoes and purses and maybe get by on one private jet and one yacht and still give away 50 percent of my income? And if I'm making all that money and have all that attention is it really necessary to tell everybody about what a great person I am?

The African school is another conundrum. On one hand she appears to have done good to provide an exclusive school for poverty stricken girls, but the money she spent on one school was far more lavish than any girl needs. Girls don't have to have cloth napkins, crystal, china and chandeliers to get an education. I get that she didn't want an ugly school and she wanted them to have nice things, but what she offered the girls was so far beyond anything that most of these girls would ever be able to provide for themselves one day even with success. Showing them "this is what you can have" is one thing. Showing them "this is what you can't have on your own" is another. She could have built a beautiful, functional school with far less money and used the remainder to build other beautiful, functional schools for more poverty stricken girls. Instead she most likely will create girls who will feel unsatisfied no matter how much success they achieve.

I've often been mystified by the need to put on extravagant parties to raise money. Couldn't they charge the same amount, have a less extravagant party and use the money saved for the charity? Now an argument can be made that extravagant parties put money back into the economy by the purchase of goods and services needed for the party - and I'm all about spending money to go back into the economy, but is that really what people are thinking? Aren't they all just looking for an excuse to party lavishly and they can feel good about it because they had to spend a thousand dollars on a seat.

If you notice that I put Oprah's and Trump's names in the title. That is unabashed promotion on my part to get noticed in the search engines.

But at least I'm not asking for money. However if anyone wants to donate to the Anna Maria Junus fund then I'm all for it.

Lessons in a Calgary Park on Canada Day

I was in a park in Calgary on a beautiful sunny Canada Day when a man passed by with a couple of dogs. I watched one of the dogs as it seemed slower than the other one. Not just physically but mentally as well. Noticing that I was watching his dog the man explained,  "He's blind," and then called the dogs name. The dog followed his voice.

The man threw the dog a ball. I watched as this dog crashed into trees and bushes yet still managed to find his ball. When he dropped his ball he would nose around to find it. Part of me felt bad for the dog and another part couldn't help but laugh (yes, I know it's cruel but imagine a dog that walks into trees) and another part admired his spirit. His master would allow him to muddle around a bit, then he would call him and the dog would follow the voice until they reached a big open field where the ball was thrown and discovered. Instead of resenting his master, the dog enjoyed the exercise and the game, a game that kept the dog young and alert.

I should have been thinking about how we are all blind and we need to listen to our Master's voice to know where we should go. I should have thought about how we all crash into trees and bushes, skinning our knees and hurting our pride and how our Master allows us to muddle around. I should have thought about the balls we drop and nose about to find them and pick them up again. I should have thought how with persistence we can overcome obstacles and enjoy the sunny days and the challenges that keep our hearts and minds young and alert. I should have thought of that. But I thought of something else instead.

Can a blind dog get a seeing eye dog?

Contest: Debbie West Coon CD's

Part of the contest requirements is to blog about and enter a link to the win the CD's. So here it is. Anne Bradshaw tells more.

Anne Bradshaw - Debbie Coon CD's