So, today while I was taking a break from writing to flip through my
Twitter account and re-tweet things of interest, I ran across a couple of different articles from Best-Selling Author and Marketing Guru
Jonathon Gunson.
He's talking about what to do with your social media accounts, what not to do and so on and he's a very informative gentlemen. His articles are well-written, well-researched and well-presented in ways that are easy for people to understand.
A good one is, and another,
Seven Easy Ways To Completely Sabotage Your Book Sales Just to give the man some love.
But that's not what spurred this blog into action. No, it was a comment he sent to
@SamanthaDighton
Jonathon said: Thanks for the RT @SamanthaDighton The Pixar story rules went far and wide. PS. Have you seen 'Wreck it Ralph'?
To which I replied:
In the end, Thad convinced Dane to
give his consent and by noon on May 14th, she was back under the
knife. It had taken some doing, but after
all the arguments were said and done, he had to agree that this was her best
hope. It was her only hope actually. Leaving the bone piece in her chest would
kill her, more quickly than not doing something about it.
Still, he’d never known time could move
so slowly. He, Thad, Madie, Simon and
half-a-dozen of the cowboys milled about the waiting room and every time he
checked the clock, it seemed to have only moved a minute.
Max had stayed at the Ranch to keep
everyone working and Tara would have liked that. The place was her pride and joy after all.
“I can just hear her now,” Madie
whispered tearfully, as if she’d read his thoughts. “This place doesn’t quit just because I get
shot…”
The tension broke with those
not-so-simple words and they shared had a chuckle.
One of the cowboys said, “You guys
remember that time she broke her leg?”
Simon rolled his eyes and muttered
under his breath. “Don’t remind me!”
The group laughed and he looked at
the one who’d spoken. “What happened?”
Jones sat forward, elbows on his
knees and twirled his hat in his long fingers.
“It was what, guys, ten, eleven years ago?”
Another of them, Blake he thought,
answered the question and picked up the tale.
“Twelve,” he said. “She’d just
come back from college. She strutted
around for all of a day, I think, all proud of her degree, trying to be a
little lady and what not…until she climbed up in the hay loft.” He chuckled, shaking his head. “Someone,” he shot Simon a look. “Forgot to tell her one of the boards was
loose up there. Next thing you know we
hear a screech and the most god-awful string of curses you’ve ever heard
echoing out of the barn.”
Richard leaned back in his chair, a
wide smile on his weathered face. “We
all go running in, thinking the place was on fire or something and can’t find
her. You could only hear her, shrieking
and cussing for all she’s worth.
Eventually we made our way into the loft and there she is, mad as a
wet-hen with one leg danglin’ through the floor.”
“She wasn’t to be outdone though,”
Simon chimed in. “She came back from
Doc’s place and the next day she appears crutches and all, with her cast
painted up like a cowboy boot…”
The group laughed heartily and he
couldn’t help but join in.
“Or how about that time Duke threw
her?” someone said.
He lifted an eyebrow in
surprise. “He did what?”
Blake was quick to defend the
horse. “Oh, it was purely
accidental. Not much scares that big
galoot but he is absolutely terrified of prairie dogs. We’ve never known why, but he will bolt sure
as shit, if one gets close enough.”
He waved a hand. “Anyway, she’s out for a ride one day, I
think she was runnin’ fence line, wasn’t she?”
After a nod from a few of the others, he went on. “We all knew where she was and thought
nothing of it when she wasn’t back by evening.
She likes sunsets and sometimes will stay in the far pasture to watch
them.”
He shrugged a bit. “So on this day, we didn’t worry when she
wasn’t back by dinner. About an hour
after we eat, here comes Duke up to the house, without her. We checked him over but didn’t find anything
wrong. But big baby tears off into the
barn, opens his stall and goes in, all but cowerin’ in the corner. We thought that was odd and were saddlin’ up
to go look for her when here she comes, soakin’ wet, muddy from head to toe
with one boot missing. She walks right
past us into the barn, fuming so hard I swear there was steam comin’ out of her
ears.”
Most of the group was already
laughing and Blake was barely able to finish.
“She slams into the stall and for a good thirty minutes, cusses that
horse out in at least nine different languages I think…” he finally managed,
holding his sides.
Simon, wiping tears of mirth from
his eyes, added his two cents. “It was
ten,” he said between guffaws. “Remember?
She’d just finished learnin’ Russian…”
The laughter echoed across the
waiting room.
When it had died a bit someone else
said, “Or how about the great parade incident of 2004?”
A few of them groaned, quite loudly
and Simon hung his head. “She will never
live that one down…”
He couldn’t help himself. “What happened?”
It was Madie that told this one,
her face crinkling with a smile. “Used
to be a time that Jackson’s Run had a Founder’s Day parade; every year round
about June the whole town would come together.
They’d build floats, the High School Band would march, the mayor would
ride threw and so on. It was a week-long
celebration that was really more of an excuse to party than anything else. But, this particular year, Duke had
discovered…kittens.”
The group groaned again and he had
no idea what that meant.
“The big numskull had taken it upon
himself to protect anything smaller than he was,” Madie mused. “It started with one of the barn cats givin’
birth in his stall a couple of months before.
As the babies had grown, he’d taken to lying down and letting them crawl
all over him.” She shook her head. “It was quite the sight, trust me. Anyway, Duke was set to be the lead horse
that year and start the parade and Tara was so proud! She talked about it, non-stop for days.”
Again, the group was already
beginning to laugh and he wanted her to hurry up and finish so he could get the
joke too.
Which she did…
“So, they’re lining things up,
getting ready to head down Main Street.
Only there’s one problem, nobody can find Duke! Tara’s runnin’ all over, looking for him and
suddenly there he is…” She burst into
laughter but managed to add, “with a nice, cute, fluffy black kitten hangin’
from his mouth. He puts his head up,
walks to the front of the parade and heads out.”
Everyone burst into laughter but he
didn’t quite get it…yet.
Simon picked up the tale because
Madie had fallen into helpless giggles.
“Just about everyone in town knows how smart he is, so they thought
nothin’ of Tara not being with him and fell into line. It wasn’t until they were about half-way down
Main that someone noticed the kitten Duke had a hold of, had two, bright white
stripes down its back…and it wasn’t amused at being rescued.”
Jones, seeing his confused look,
explained between chuckles. “It was a
skunk, Dane, a baby skunk and the mamma skunk wasn’t happy about her missin’
baby…” He made a face. “Mamma came tearin’ around the corner of
Crawley’s liquor store and smack into the middle of the High Schoolers,
spraying for all she’s worth…”
Another of the Cowboy’s continued
the story when Jones couldn’t. “They
scream and scatter and Mamma goes barrelin’ through the rest of the parade,
under floats, over them, sprayin’ anything and everything in her path…”
“It was pandemonium!” Simon added,
leaning back in the chair because he couldn’t sit up straight any longer. “She even got the Mayor, who’d gotten out of
his car to see what the ruckus was about.”
He finally got it and once his
laughter started, he simply couldn’t stop…
When he could though sometime
later, he also understood why she hadn’t been all that mad after the
ring-around-the-barn incident on their wedding day. From their stories, it was apparently the
norm for something like that to happen.
She probably would have been more upset if it hadn’t and thought
something was wrong.
He leaned back in the chair,
chuckling now and again as they waited for word from the Doctor. His wife was quite the character, just like
her horse and their stories only served to reinforce what he’d figured out in
the days before.
She
was a fighter, a scrapper and wouldn’t just give up without one hell of a
knock-down, drag-out brawl…
And he was, without a doubt, 100% head over heels in love with her…
If she lived through this, no
correct that, when she lived through
it, he would make sure she never forgot it either!
He pulled the ring out of his jeans
pocket, where it had been since she’d thrown it at him and sighed softly. Despite its lack of flash and pomp, it
belonged on her finger. He should have
put it there before she went in and the thought that she might leave this world
without knowing how he felt made his heart jerk, hard…
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