Yesterday was a day eagerly anticipated each year in the Ashbury family: It was Groundhog Day. On the way to work yesterday morning, my beloved chanted his Groundhog Day mantra, “cloudy, cloudy, cloudy” in his attempt to influence the weather and thereby the prognosticating rodent. I know my eldest also had his fingers crossed for a positive outcome. Knowing him, he didn’t utter a mantra, but likely spent some time looking up recipes for groundhog stew—so the critter could know the price of failure. And truly, we awoke to overcast skies and great hope.

Too bad those overcast skies didn’t appear over Wiarton, Ontario or Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. Sadly, and in a rare show of solidarity, both groundhogs saw their shadows, which means six more weeks of winter, instead of an early spring.

“Not too bad,” the man on the radio said, “it’s been a good winter so far, so it’s not like we really needed the break of an early spring this year.”

I’m a writer, well acquainted with literary devices, and that radio deejay demonstrated one in his pronouncement. “Good winter” is an oxymoron if ever I heard one.

Now, that is just my personal opinion, of course. I hate winter. I loved it when I was a child, but then when I was a child, winter had fun things to do. There was mostly skating for me, as I rarely went tobogganing, and I don’t really recall if I ever actually owned a toboggan. Yes, later when I lived in the same house I grew up in, raising my own family, husband and kids would go to the Quarry property behind us and slide down the big hill. But as a child, I was forbidden to go near the place.

No matter, there had always been skating on the pond across the road from our house. Often, coming in out of the cold on days my mother had off from the hospital (she was a nurse) meant coming in to wonderful homemade soups and hot cocoa. So I do have fond memories of winter.

And as an adult living in Canada, I appreciate that there are many people whose livelihoods depend on our having a proper helping of cold temperatures and lots of snow every year. But that doesn’t mean that personally I have to like it.

Just when I was grumbling into my coffee cup about rotten rodents and winter doldrums, my spirits got an unexpected boost. While surfing the Web I learned of a third groundhog! It seems that the great State of New York also has a weather predicting rodent. His name is Chuck – Staten Island Chuck – and he has an accuracy record that blows old Phil right out of the...um....burrow. It seems that Chuck has been on the job for 29 years and has been right 22 of those years – that’s 76%! Phil, on the other hand, doesn’t even have a passing grade, being right only 39% of the time.

Staten Island Chuck predicts an early spring! Yes!

Here, now, is proof that what I’ve always said is true. Everything is a choice. You can look at the glass as half empty, or half full. You can choose to believe one groundhog, or you can choose to believe the other.

I’m the sort of person who, when it comes to winter, hedges her bets. For example, I consider winter to run from October 1 to March 31 inclusive. Six months. Yes, I know the calendar says three. But what does it know, really? It says that in Las Vegas, Indianapolis, and Key West, too. Now, maybe in those places, the three-months-per-season average works.

Take my word on it; it doesn’t work where I live.

The advantage of my approach is that sometimes we don’t get real cold winter weather until the middle of December and then I can say to myself, “When this month is over, winter is half done already!” Thus, we are now four-sixths of the way through this dreaded season. And it was Groundhog Day yesterday.

Surely, that has to be a sign of something?

That is, something other than an indication that those of us who await anxiously the so-called predictions of a furry critter really need to get a life.

Love,

Morgan

Coming Soon from Morgan Ashbury and Ménage Amour

A novel so bold, so daring, it could only be called...

Brazen Seduction

http://www.bookstrand.com/user/277084

I suppose it was inevitable, and it finally happened. I have been lured over to the dark side.

And I would lay the blame at the feet of my daughter, but I’m an adult, and I assume responsibility for my own actions.

It began just two weeks ago yesterday. There I was, minding my own business, fingers on the keyboard, butt in the chair, working fastidiously away at my current work-in-progress. I heard her car drive up. When she came in I said, “Well, hello. How are you?”

She replied, “Just give me a sec. I have to get my dishes off the stove.”

Now, I knew my kitchen was spotless, nary a dish on the stove, let alone any of her dishes. I thought she would reach for the phone, call someone at her place. But no, she went right over to her father’s computer and logged on.

I asked her to repeat what she’d said, thinking perhaps, what with middle-age being the way it is, I might not have heard her correctly.

But she said those words again.

Little did I know those words would pull me into a world of virtually feeding…virtual people.

There are numerous “applications” on that social networking behemoth, Facebook. You can own a farm, or a zoo. You can go to petville or fishville, indulge in mafia wars or vampire wars.

Or you can own your own café in café world.

There are at least 64 levels of achievement in this game that allow you to select dishes, “pay” coins to buy them, then cook them, then sell them for, of course, more coins than you paid to buy them.

It’s free, but there is a catch (isn’t there always a catch?). After you get playing, and get to see other people’s cafés, how big and nice they look, and become competitive—or some might say addicted—you discover that you can buy nicer furnishings for your café by using your credit card to acquire “café cash” (as opposed to the café coins you get for free).

Is that not an ingenious example of the American entrepreneurial spirit? And it’s not the only one I’ve seen.

Club Pogo, somehow connected to AOL, charges a membership too, the benefit of paid club membership over the free is access to “exclusive” games, and the opportunity to win “badges” and to spend even more real money to buy “gems” that allow you to buy clothes and pets and backgrounds for your “mini” (a graphic that represents you).

Hello? Can we just think about this for a moment? They charge you real money to allow you to buy things that don’t really exist.

If you think of it all as entertainment, and if you have a budget for same, and it fits in your budget, I guess it’s OK. I do belong to Club Pogo (Morgan hangs her head in shame), but I certainly will not be investing real cash into a make-believe café.

There are how many thousands of people playing World Of Warcraft (best known by its acronym, WOW)? It costs about twenty dollars a month to do so. I know a few people who play WOW, and I can tell you the game all but takes over every second of their spare time, and nearly every bit of their social life, too. I hear people talking and I realize their entire conversation revolves around that game, and they act as if it’s real.

What happened to real life, real people, real relationships?

In the meantime, I must confess that despite my knowing better, I have indulged more than I should, time-wise, in the virtual café business. Two weeks, and I have already achieved level 27. It’s pretty bad when you decide whether or not you can sleep late based on what’s cooking on your virtual stove (if you don’t get the food off in time, it rots and draws flies).

Just do me a favor, please. If you ever see me traversing the realms of WOW…give me a smack upside the head.

Love,

Morgan

Feed the flames of your passion…with a novel by Morgan Ashbury

How do we, living here in our comfortable lives in North America, even wrap our heads around the extent of the devastation that has stricken Haiti in the last week?

We try to process the information in terms of ourselves; that is a normal human reaction. And we get stuck, because the way things have happened in that beleaguered country couldn’t happen here in quite the same way.

We take for granted our strict building codes, our interwoven social services that are provided by the different levels of our governments (local, state/provincial, and national). We know, because we’ve seen it, that for the most part when earthquakes or disasters strike in our part of the world, rescue and recovery efforts are massive, non-stop, and almost instantaneous. More than one week post-event, all who could be rescued would be, bodies would have been recovered, and only building debris would be left.

In the meantime, any persons made homeless would be temporarily housed in whatever large facility was available, and while there would be discomfort and restlessness, for the most part, people would be fed and their medical and other basic needs seen to.

In cases where relief hasn’t been immediate and organized—as happened with Hurricane Katrina—there’s such an outcry of outrage, that changes are made immediately. It’s not so much that we expect a high degree of efficiency as we demand it.

This past week, we stare at our television screens at images of the elderly languishing in the streets outside their demolished nursing homes, and we can’t quite get it. We see children, little more than babies, really, finally extricated from the rubble, and then watch them die, just when we thought they might live. We see rejoicing, and heartbreak, hourly.

We ask ourselves, because we can’t not, how is it that this is happening in the advanced year of 2010? How is it that an island within spitting distance of our nations can hold a country so ill-equipped to deal with the sometimes harsh realities of life?

The answers are as varied and complicated as are the minds who conjure them. Certainly, the lack of a well-structured, ethical society is one cause. If everyone is out for themselves, only interested in what they can stuff into their own pockets, then no one is seeing to the common good, and it only is logical that eventually things fall apart.

Another contributing factor, and a large one in my estimation, is the lack of education in that country—hell, on the entire island of Hispaniola. Free learning is another precious possession we often take for granted here. We don’t fully appreciate what a difference it makes in the quality of life for all the people when a certain level of education is mandatory, and a higher level is encouraged and rewarded.

One thing that is plain, and a source of encouragement is the trend I think began with the Tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004: the great willingness on the part of the human consciousness to help. I credit the Internet and social networking to a good degree; you can’t navigate anywhere on the Internet without seeing ways to donate to help with earthquake relief.

Of course, and sadly, human nature also has a negative side, and at this time there will be con artists ready and willing to help those of guilty conscience and who will then gladly pocket your well intended donations. If I may advise, keep your donations to agencies that have a history of selfless service, such as The American Red Cross, The Salvation Army, and Unicef.

2004 showed us that if each of us gave but a little bit, together we can have a massive impact to the good.

We can give money, and we can all pray. And as we watch the daily developments of miracles and tragedies, we can hope that in this great moment in history, we somehow move just a little bit closer to understanding that we are only as rich as the poorest of us.

Love,

Morgan

We finally have a couple of inches of snow on the ground. I know this only because I looked out the window just a while ago. Since I do a lot of driving all year round, I’ve been taking advantage of my beloved’s vacation and leaving the car keys on the hall table. There’s no reason for me to go outside if I’m not going to be driving somewhere.

I’m content to just look, because it looks very cold out there.

The holiday season is beginning to wind down, which means my beloved and I can enjoy a few days of peace and quiet, just the two of us. If you had a crystal ball and could look in on us, you’d wonder what the big deal is, since I spend most of my time in my office and he is well settled in his recliner, watching television, in the room behind me.

We don’t have to occupy the same room, or the same mental space, even, to enjoy the quiet of our togetherness. As I write this, David is watching a comedy of some sort. I can’t hear the television as he is thoughtfully wearing his wireless headphones. I can only hear his chuckles.

It makes me smile.

In a while I’m going to go in there, sit in my chair, and ask for a foot rub. It’s been a hard day of doing up all the dishes from the night before (there were eight of us) and trying to get my mind back to work on my latest novel.

I’m afraid my mind wants a little bit more time off.

One of the things I love about this time of year is there is always leftover food in the fridge, so I don’t have to cook every night. Although I love cooking, I appreciate the time off. We have ham and turkey, veggies and seafood salad. I didn’t go overboard on the sweets; I made my mother’s steamed carrot pudding, and this year just one batch of cookies.

I never told you what I bought my beloved for Christmas, but now that he’s opened the gifts, I can do so.

First, a bit of background. We used to love to go to special events in our area, most notably the Canadian National Exhibition held every August, and the Royal Winter Fair (both events are usually held at the same place, on the C.N.E. grounds on the Lakeshore in Toronto). Of course, in those days it was a matter of going and looking only at all the neat things various vendors had on display. There was never any money to buy the different things we’d see and, inevitably, wish we could have. We were content, for the most part, to admire the different items or, in the case of some pieces of clothing, "try them on" and dream of “someday.”

Well, we happen to have in our area a saddlery, which I planned to visit ever since I found it. I have wanted for the last couple of years to buy my beloved two items from that long ago “someday” list. For Christmas, I did so. I warned him before he opened the boxes that I had given him not something he needed, but something he wanted (at least I hoped he still did).

I’m so glad he loved my gifts. He is very happy to finally be the proud owner of a genuine Stetson (fashioned from buffalo fur) and a Western Duster coat. They look really good on him, too.

If you’re wondering, I can tell you that his main gift to me was spa time. I love pedicures – oh, I could go without the polish on the toenails, it’s the massage and the paraffin treatments I love.

I did receive an item of modern technology, and this from my second daughter. I am now in possession of a Bluetooth.

Here in Ontario, there is a new law forbidding operation of a cellphone while driving except using a hands-free device. That is what this Bluetooth is (even though mine is pink). I’ve been wearing it here at my keyboard. It’s so comfortable I nearly forget I have it on. Sometimes I have had my headset on while chatting on the cellphone so my hands are free to type. This Bluetooth is way more comfortable and the sound much clearer.

I did get a few laughs when I admired myself in the mirror wearing this device. Yes, I know it’s supposed to be for when I’m driving. But I have to tell you, I feel all Star-Trekkie wearing it. And it does have one other benefit.

Wearing it, I can talk to myself and no one will look at me twice.

I hope you all have a wonderful New Year. We’re not going out. If you do, please keep safe!

Love,

Morgan

Feed the flames of your passion…with a novel by Morgan Ashbury

www.bookstrand.com/authors/morganashbury