Pick Up Your Socks

I've been contemplating a lot of things lately. How life throws us curveballs when we aren't looking. How things are constantly changing. How problems can become all-consuming, interrupting our lives and making the important suddenly seem trivial.

Last week, on Friday, Jim and I were talking about the things we need to get done around the house and yard before we can head south for the winter. We have quite a list. And then the phone rang. And life, and priorities changed in an instant. Our son-in-law, Gary, learned that he had a tumor in his bladder and a non-invasive surgical procedure was scheduled for Monday. Monday, we spent the morning praying and texting to follow Gary's progress. He went in to surgery around noon. At 2:17 pm we got the text from our granddaughter. Cancer. We knew we needed to be there, so we threw a change of clothes in a bag and were on the road in a half hour. Several texts came in as we drove the 375 miles to be with our family. The tumor was large and blocking one kidney. A second procedure the next day put a stent into the kidney and bladder. Gary is a trooper. We walked with him, pushing along his wheeled stand with IV and carrying other paraphernalia ten loops of the halls, twice a day. On Wednesday, we took him home. On Thursday he talked to the doctor. The news wasn't good. The cancer was deeper than they'd hoped and there were numerous small tumors. They would have to remove his bladder and prostate and lymph nodes. Then probably chemotherapy and possibly radiation treatments.

Gary is healthy, and he'll get the best of care in Seattle through UW. With God's help, and a million prayers from family and friends and friends of friends, he will beat this thing.

A devotion shared by a friend at a writers retreat this summer made an impact on me. I was reminded of it again today. She was talking about grief. The grief of losing her husband. But this fits any tough situation that we face. *See Sandy's entire post here: http://graceforagrievingheart.com/pick-up-your-socks/

Years ago, Sandy heard Gloria Gaither tell this story.

“When I was a little girl,” Gloria said, “I used to ask my mom, ‘what is God’s will for my life?’” She wanted a lofty answer, full of wisdom.

Her mother would invari­ably reply, “Pick up your socks.” Not expecting such a mundane answer, she would restate the question. “No, mom, what is God’s will for my future?”

“If you don’t know His will for your future, you need to find His will for your life a day at a time. Pick up your socks.”

That's great advice. Jesus told us not to worry about the future. Take care of the present. Put one foot in front of the other and do what needs doing. Pick up your socks.

Adventurous? Maybe so.

I've never thought of myself as adventurous. I'd never have the nerve to descend into the Grand Canyon or climb a pyramid. I hate swinging bridges. Have found excuses not to go parasailing every summer. Refuse to watch horror movies or read horror stories. I'm just not adventurous. Or am I?

I have hunted rattlesnakes in Montana, gone white-water river rafting in Colorado, and traveled over the Top of the World Highway, the Dempster Highway, and the Dalton Highway in Alaska and The Yukon. I'm sure those all qualify as adventures. But most of my adventures are more sedentary. In the kitchen, I'm willing to try anything - well, almost anything. Pickled pigs feet are fine, but I'm not interested in eating bugs or chicken heads.

This year I've had great fun finding recipes for a bounty of vegetables from my friend's garden. Thanks, Merry Ann! After canning pickled beets and dining on roast beets with orange butter and tarragon this week, I had left-over roasted beets. I wanted something different. Something gluten free, as I've discovered gluten makes the aches of my aging joints worse these days. I found a Chocolate Beet Coconut Cake online at The Whole Foods Kosher Kitchen. Sounded interesting. I used the leftover roasted beets and pureed them in my Magic Mill.

Just in case it flopped, I balanced it with a fresh Peaches and Cream Pie - a favorite at our house.

The cake turned out rich and moist. I expected it to be more red, like a red velvet cake, but it's the color of dark fudge. Best served with a dab of hot fudge sauce, a handful of raspberries and a generous dollop of whipped cream. It was such a hit, we had it for breakfast this morning.

Here is a link to the recipe. I made the gluten free option, but left out the coconut. My hubby can't stand coconut. Silly man. http://www.levanacooks.com/chocolate-beet-coconut-cake/ I will definitely make it again. The peaches and cream pie is my dessert choice for my birthday, in place of cake. The original recipe came from a Colorado Cache cookbook, but we've tweaked it a bit.

Peaches and Cream Deep Dish Pie           

(Laura Merrill and Sunni Jeffers, adapted from Colorado Cache Cookbook) 

¾ cup sugar plus 2 tsp sugar (I use half sugar, half xylitol for low sugar recipe)

¼ cup flour (or 1 TBSP arrowroot powder or corn starch for Gluten Free)

1 cup heavy cream (I use half and half)

¼ tsp. salt

2 TBSP tapioca (increase to 3 TBSP for Gluten Free)

2 quarts peaches, peeled and sliced (fresh, 6-7 peaches and 2 tsp lemon juice, or home canned are best. If canned in heavy syrup, decrease sugar to ½ cup) 

2 TBSP butter 

2 tsp. cinnamon

Pastry for a 9” two crust pie

Reserve small amount of peach juice from fruit drippings. Add 2 tsp milk to the drippings and brush over top crust. Sprinkle with cinnamon sugar before baking.

Prepare pie crust and form bottom of crust in a 9 inch deep dish pie pan. Sprinkle 2 tsp sugar evenly over bottom crust. This prevents it from getting soggy.

Mix together sugar, flour, cream, tapioca and salt. 

Slice peaches and place in unbaked (or *slightly prebaked) pie shell.  Pour other ingredients over peaches, dot with butter and sprinkle with cinnamon.  Cover and seal with top crust. 

Bake at 425 degrees for 15 minutes, then lower oven to 300 degrees and bake 40-45 minutes longer. Cover edges of crust with pie shield or foil last 15-20 minutes to keep from getting too browned.

For Gluten Free crust, I used Mama’s Pie Crust mix. It makes a two crust pie. I altered the recipe, using 1 whole egg, instead of 1 egg white and increased the water by 1-2 TBSP. I roll out the dough between large square pieces cut from a kitchen trash bag. It’s large enough to do the whole crust. I lightly greased the pie pan, then put my crust in, trimming the edges. Then I *sprinkled about a tsp of sugar on the bottom crust and prebaked for 10 minutes, then let cool and added the peaches, filling and top crust. That way the bottom crust doesn’t get soggy. It was much more manageable and came out beautiful.

*For any unbaked pie crust, before filling, sprinkle 1-2 tsp sugar on bottom crust before filling to keep crust from getting soggy.

Bon Appetite!
~Sunni

On Pend Oreille Lake

A perfect Sunday. Great time at church. The weather was perfect, so we took a little trip over to Sandpoint, Idaho with my hubby Jim, brother Dave, sister-in-law Joan and granddaughter Madie, for a lake cruise aboard the Shawnodese -   http://www.lakependoreillecruises.com/schedule.html -

 The water was calm. A few puffy clouds drifted in the bright summer sky. 

The temperature hit about 90, but a slight breeze kept us cool. 

Jim, Dave, Madie and Joan enjoyed themselves, as did I. Dave and Joan will soon leave us to spend winter with their daughter Chanelle and granddaughter in Hawaii. Madie is heading off to the coast to join her family and attend college. We'll be alone again. <sigh> But for now, we're cherishing our time together. 

After an hour and a half, viewing the lake, the river, osprey families still nesting, a model plane buzzing around the river, skiers, tubers, kayakers, boarders and fishermen, empty coal trains headed north and full coal trains headed south, a float plane coming in - a typical Sunday afternoon at the lake - we headed back into port at Sandpoint Beach.

And stopped at Dub's on the way home, for a cheeseburger, fries, and a SMALL ice cream cone. Life doesn't get any better than this.

Fun in the Rain

Eventful day. That’s not always true. And that’s probably a good thing. So here we are in South Florida. We stayed in Homestead, Florida for two weeks. It was lovely. Great weather. And oh, the Mango Milkshakes with key lime or passion fruit! Toured Key West and Everglades National Park. And I worked.

Last night I made Jim pancakes for Valentine's Day dinner. Batter was ready. I tried to light the stove. Nothing happened. Out of propane. We’d packed up the barbecue, getting ready to pull out. It was dark. Jim got the BBQ out and I cooked pancakes and eggs on the griddle, on the portable barbecue - in the rain.

Fast forward to this morning. Ready to go. Hooked up the Jeep to the back of the motor home. Drove to a U-Haul Store that carries propane. No luck. Our propane tank is permanently attached, so they couldn’t fill it. Reconnect Jeep. Drive to next U-haul Store. Disconnect Jeep to back into lot. Got propane, then reconnected Jeep. Now it’s POURING rain as we take the toll road around Miami. A lady passes us and waves and points. Something is wrong. Oops. A door is open on a cubby under the motor home. Pulled off toll road and found a side road to stop and shut the cubby door. Then Jim made a U-turn and we pulled up to a stoplight. All of a sudden, we are stuck behind a dead Penske truck and we’re blocked. And we can’t pull around him. No room. Jim tries to turn on our flashers. The handle comes off in his hand.

Ever try to back up with a tow vehicle behind you? You can’t steer it. And there was a car right behind us and a big semi trying to get behind and around us all. I jumped out of the motor home, in the rain, ran back and waved the car around us. The truck started coming at me. I stuck out my hand and motioned for him to stop, then I start waving for Jim to back up, while I’m holding my hand up for the truck to stop. He’s gesturing at me, but he stopped when he saw this motor home with a Jeep coming back at him. Then I run up and jump into the motor home and away we go. It’s funny now. I’m thinking that trucker was calculating how many points I was worth and decided against running me down. He’s looking at this lady, probably old enough to be his mother, standing in the middle of the road, waving her hands around like a crazy woman. I wish I had a picture. But unfortunately, I broke Jim's camera, and it happened too fast to get out my iPhone. I think he would have run me down if I'd done that.

Things got better after that. The park we’re in is lovely. http://sunnshade.com/photos-of-the-park/ The sun came out and we took a walk before I fixed spaghetti with meat sauce and salad for dinner.

Finished one deadline for my next book – Coast to Coast, for Guideposts series, Miracles of Marble Cove. Revisions are in. Yay! Now I’m working on the expanded outline for my next book, All Sewn Up, from a brand new Guideposts cozy mystery series, Secrets of Blue Hill Library. And I’m making great progress.

Now it’s time to get back to work.

The Next Big Thing

Last week author Jill Eileen Smith http://www.jilleileensmith.com/blog/ was kind enough to tag me in a blog hop, called The Next Big Thing. As part of the “hop” I am supposed to answer ten questions about my current book project. So here goes.

1. What is the working title of your book?

My current book, due out soon, is With Grateful Hearts, from Guideposts Books’  Miracles of Marble Cove. That is the final title.

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

My editors.

3. What genre does your book fall under?

With Grateful Hearts is part of a cozy mystery series centered on coincidences too amazing to be anything but God in the lives of four friends, and their quests to solve secrets from the past in a small Maine seaside town steeped in history.

The series features the daily dilemmas and relationships of four women—neighbors drawn together by the shared experiences of life-saving miracles—whose ages span five decades.

4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

That took some thought. If this book were made into a movie, I would cast the four main characters as:

Novelist Diane Spencer would be played by Jamie Lee Curtis.

Artist and gallery owner Margaret Hoskins would be played by Kathy Bates.

Mayor, entrepreneur Beverly Wheeland would be played by Rachel Weisz.

Professional baker, SAHM would be played by Jennifer Lawrence.

5. What is a one sentence synopsis of your book?

When four friends set out to discover what happened to the Railway Station Master who disappeared 61 years ago, and save the historic, abandoned train station, life throws each of them a curve that they must overcome before they can solve their mystery and accomplish their goal.

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

This book and the Miracles of Marble Cove series are available through Guideposts Books.

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I wrote With Grateful Hearts in three months, while on the road, traveling in an RV from Washington State to Alaska and back along the ALCAN Highway.

8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

This book is like a cross between the Mitford books and Murder She Wrote, without the murder.

9. Who or What inspired you to write this book?

I am one of a team of authors writing for this series. The series and mysteries are a collaborative effort with Guideposts Books and our wonderful editors and a team of great authors, each writing individual books. The stories are fun, but the characters face real life challenges. It may sound crazy, but as I write about them, they inspire me.

10. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? 

With Grateful Hearts and all of the Miracles of Marble Cove books are perfect for curling up in a comfy chair and taking a mini-vacation to visit this charming seaside town. The friends experience challenges most of us face, fear or dream about in our lives. Their heartwarming stories and relationships hold insights and inspiration for all of us.

With Grateful Hearts finds the four friends supporting each other through their individual challenges. Young mother Shelley is building a bakery business out of her home and has an opportunity to take over management of the town’s coffee shop. Can she balance business and a young family? Diane is battling breast cancer and realizes how much she needs her friends. Beverly is elected mayor of Marble Cove and planning a wedding, but her fiancé lives in the city and they must decide where they will live after the wedding. And Margaret, a retired accountant who has started a second career in art, discovers her bucket list from college and is dismayed by the dreams she never accomplished.

Next week, hop to three great authors and read about their Next Big Thing.

Robin Lee Hatcher: http://blog.robinleehatcher.com/i_was_just_thinking_/

Christa Allen: http://www.christaallan.com/

Patricia Hickman: http://villagewriter.blogspot.com

A Flippancy Floppancy

It’s a commonly held dictum amongst my peers that a writer should write. I’m a writer, a novelist by trade. Today that means more than stories. It means blogs, tweets and Facebook chatter, among other social media venues. I’ve resisted for years. Email and Facebook have been my only forays into the world of cyber communication, but perhaps it’s time for me to jump in. So here I am, at A Flippancy Floppancy, for anyone who might be perusing the blogosphere and happen upon my humble offerings, which shall be eclectic and erratic. I have no theme, except the random thoughts and memories that drift across my mind.

Why Flippancy Floppancy? What does that mean? Indulge me while I share a bit of my childhood.

My maternal grandfather was a dapper little Englishman. He stood five feet four inches tall, had a short, gray flattop haircut and a gray bristle-brush mustache. He chuckled a lot, which reminded me of cooing pigeons. Most days he dressed in properly creased slacks, a collared, button down shirt and a sweater vest and he sported a pocket watch, which he consulted often.

Born in 1886, Grandpa was a product of the Victorian era. Manners and gentility were important. When dining with friends, excellent manners included proper speech. And my grandfather was always proper, though with a twinkle in his snappy, dark eyes.

In the article, Among the Old Words, http://www.jstor.org/stable/454570, Frederic G. Cassidy of the University of Wisconsin noted: “Proper speech being an appurtenance of good manners, they composed, and taught their children, certain formulas of polite expression fitting to such social situations as they were liable to encounter. They knew well that informality is notoriously untrustworthy, that the spur of the moment can urge a speaker to disastrous infelicities. Far better to be prepared, to have an appropriate formula fall trippingly off the tongue. Imagine, for example, the dinner guest who, having partaken of everything in sight, is being plied by his hostess to stuff himself further. Smiling assuredly, he replies, “No thank you. I have had a genteel sufficiency—any more would be superfluity.” The occasion is met, the temptation resisted, and the formula has attested to the propriety of the guest’s upbringing.”

Perhaps due, in part, to my grandparents’ genteel manners and delightful quirks, I have become a lover of language, of manners and of history.

Grandfather Fox was a Renaissance Man: a Quaker preacher, a scholar, theologian, a man of letters—primarily to the San Diego Union Letters to the Editor column and to politicians, and a philanthropist who was instrumental in fundraising for the Humane Society and the Good Will in San Diego. He was born to medical missionaries in Madagascar, raised in Scotland, then immigrated to America by working his way across Canada as a cowboy, then coming into the United States through Washington State.

When we would eat a meal with grandpa, he had interesting habits, like lining peas up on his knife, and drinking his tea out of a saucer. He would tuck his cloth napkin into his shirt collar, and when he finished, he would remove the napkin, dab at his mouth and mustache, sit back and declare the meal was a flippancy floppancy, or a sufficiency floppancy (he used the two interchangeably). That was his proper speech to indicate he was full, and he couldn’t eat another bite, thank you very much.

My life has been a satisfying flippancy floppancy. Always filled with plentitude to the point of overflowing. That is not to say always easy or pleasant. Hunger can be assuaged with liver and onions or gruel, as well as turkey and gravy and pumpkin pie. But I’m a glass-half-full sort of person. I tend to ac-centuate the positives and e-liminate the negatives.

So, welcome. I hope today brings you a flippancy floppancy. And I hope my musings bring some pleasure, some nostalgia, some food for thought and some inspiration to those who stop by from time to time.  Blessings, ~ Sunni

Perspective from a Small Business Owner

It occurred to me, listening to President Obama speak today about our country’s debt problem and the horribly scary coming-crisis, tagged “The Fiscal Cliff” that most people probably have no idea how a small business operates, financially. His plan calls for taking care of the middle class – a great idea – while socking it to the rich. Those making over $200,000 or couples making $250,000 combined. That doesn’t make sense. Why not make it double for a couple, to $400,000? But that’s not the point of my post.

We owned and operated a small business for 17 years in the Denver area. I did the bookkeeping. I watched government regulations come in and take over many areas of our business. Do you realize that as an employer, we could not give ourselves a benefit out of the business that was not offered to our employees? Remember, I’m talking about a small business. Perhaps 20-30 employees. For several years, starting in 1970, we paid all of our employees’ medical expenses: insurance, deductible and out of pocket, for their entire families. In 1978, the government first enacted the 125 Cafeteria Plan for employees. We started seeing big changes in our insurance. Costs went up. Preexisting conditions meant we had to pay for more expensive insurance for everyone. We could no longer pay the medical for our employees because it was considered taxable compensation for them. The government required businesses to institute the Cafeteria Plan system for employees. We were below the bottom number of employees, but it was our only option, so we began offering the government’s Cafeteria Plan. Such a great deal for employees. (Some people seem to think so.) They got to choose how much they thought they would spend for the following year. It was deducted from their pay before taxes. At the end of the year, if they didn’t guess right, and there was money left over, they lost it. Frankly, it increased my bookkeeping, and we didn’t want what was left-over, so we gave it back to the employees, in the form of a bonus, which was taxed. The government may not “raise” taxes, but they manage to collect more by approaching from a different direction. Over the years, insurance costs continued to rise, meaning more and more cuts to benefits, just to keep the business solvent.

We instituted a 401K plan with the company matching up to a certain level for all employees, but as employers, we were penalized in that we could not put into our 401K more than a percentage of what our employees contributed to theirs. One year we went over and had to pay a penalty.

About a small business’s big profits. That profit is after expenses. However, there are a lot of business expenses that are not considered expenses. Capital expenses. We had a fleet of service vehicles. They had to be replaced every 5-10 years. We had tools and machinery. None of those things can be expensed. They are purchased as assets with after-tax dollars. We had to have enough profit to pay our taxes and to keep our fleet on the road and any other capital expenses needed, including paying off debt. There are a lot of capital expenses that must be counted as assets and therefore, are not deductible as expenses. A company’s bottom line is truly not its bottom line. We purchased inventory to have merchandise to sell. We paid property taxes on that inventory.

A company that grosses one or ten or twenty million dollars is really a small business. The idea that businesses, and corporations – most small businesses have to be incorporated because of taxes and liability and insurance – are a bunch of greedy rich people just isn’t so. They are ordinary people, employers of ordinary people, trying to make a living for their own family and all the families that depend upon them. And the bottom line is a simple fact. They cannot grow under President Obama’s economic plan or health care plan. Government programs and regulations may sound good, but they are insidious. They creep in, and once in place, they are practically impossible to get rid of. All these programs and regulations and taxes strangle small businesses.

You’re welcome to disagree with me, but please don’t just throw stones. Be sure you can dispute my experiences because you have owned and operated a small business with employees, and had different experiences.