Welcome back to the Redwood and Talon packs and the Christmas season.

What do you get when you mix rogue wolves, party planning, and two stubborn wolves?

Conner Jamenson is an enforcer within the Redwood pack, trying to track down a rogue pack member—while harboring the fear that one day his family will be tracking him.

Romy Temple keeps to the shadows of Talon pack, even as she offers to help track rogue wolves.

They’re tasked with planning a large Yule party, and that’s when they stumble upon the biggest ‘secret’ of all…

What is the secret? Will they manage to pull off planning a ‘surprise’ party? Can they find and save their rogue pack mate?

The answers lie within the pages of ‘Fated in Winter’, a novella set within the Redwood and Talon packs world.

I loved this story, and catching up with the packs. While it is a stand-alone novella—it probably wouldn’t hurt for one to binge read the Talon pack series to get all the details on the hierarchy of the packs.

I give ‘Fated in Winter’ five out of five stars and highly recommend it to anyone who loves paranormal romance and wolves.

So, we’re going to be entering the first full moon of 2022 tomorrow (or possibly even today, depending on where you are in the world). This means that the month is halfway over, and my fingers are still crossed that 2022 is going to go a little more smoothly than 2021 did—but before looking ahead to Cancer full moon, I need to reflect on the Gemini full moon goals.

So what were some of the goals that I set for the Gemini full moon? They included:

1. Finish setting up my master 2022 habit tracking journal. I’d decided to buy a larger bullet/dot journal and place all (or almost all) habit trackers that I’d been trying to use during 2021 into a single journal. This way, it should save me time overall during 2022, when I don’t have to copy them back in for the next month.
2. Start a non-fiction book. I’d been lax on my reading (even fiction) for a couple of weeks, so I’m trying to get back into a reading habit (may have to ‘remove’ the games from the kindle).
3. Continue to work on improving my evening/afternoon meditations.
4. Figure out an schedule/calendar for the blog/website heading into 2022 and beyond. Since I’m really leaning in the direction of writing—I need to become a little more consistent in posting, as I realized the past few months I haven’t posted as much as I had earlier in the year).

So how did I do with each of them?

1. I have my master 2022 habit-tracking journal more-or-less done—the pages are labeled, I just need to finish drawing in the boxes from about April through December.
2. I’ve slowly gotten back into bouncing between fiction and non-fiction books. So far, I’ve managed to finish: Work Quilting by Vicki Walton (hopefully will have a mini-book review written in a week or so). I’m also currently reading ‘The Slight Edge’ by Jeff Olson, and ‘Girl Take Back Your Career’ by Solange Lope.
3. Slowly working on improving my evening meditation—I think that I need to get back into the habit of candlelight meditation and/or meditating in the dark. I’ve been doing my oracle card drawing and then trying to meditate on the message of at least one of the cards…the ‘quiet’ reflection period doesn’t last that long…
4. Still working on the figuring out the schedule/calendar for the blog. After allowing myself to quit setting up weekly to-do lists in September—my productivity fell, not totally but enough that my inner critic grabbed the ‘wheel’ again. I have plenty of ideas for topics to research and write on—I just have to constantly remind myself that this is a continuous journey of learning, exploring, creating, and sharing. Therefore, I will try to set a minimum goal in terms of blog posts and pages added—if I surpass the minimum number of posts, great; if I fall short, I’ll evaluate what possible went wrong and try to ‘adjust’ my course.

So I managed to get basically three-fourths of the goals I set out to accomplish for the end of December/beginning of January completed.

2021 continued the roller-coaster events of 2020 (namely in terms of the ongoing pandemic), but I slowly started to improve in different areas: namely in setting goals for each new and full moon period (sometimes a day or two late—but they were set), actually getting several mini-book reviews written and posted to the blog and other sites, but also saw me getting ‘stuck’ in other areas (namely trying to curb the impulsive purchases).

But—progress is what I’m aiming for, not perfection. ‘Perfection’ is what the inner critic wants, that way she can keep me ‘stuck’ in my comfort zone. 2022, is going to be the year that I keep trying stretch the comfort and bounce zones, and slowly shrink the ‘die’ zone (namely possibly move those tasks/items into the ‘risk’ zone, as the ‘risk’ zone becomes the new ‘stretch’ zone).

Each day is a blank slate—my goal is to make the most of each of those slates, to where by the end of 2022 I’ve managed to accomplish several large goals: transition to the remote writing position, rework/rebrand the blog to start landing small freelance jobs, and slowly but surely find my online tribe.

With tomorrow marking the first full moon of 2022—I’m sending out happy thoughts and vibes to everyone, with hopes that this year goes more smoothly than the past two years.

Namaste.

Well we got above freezing today, and we’ll be above freezing for awhile tomorrow before the next winter storm comes through. So while I was out in the yard filling up the bird feeders for the birds, squirrels, raccoons, and any other animal that wants to eat some sun flower seeds I’d noticed that there was still ice around parts of the pond.

What I find so cool about the ice, is that I’m pretty sure in the middle of those two ice cones are just little twigs, or possibly the stems of a some weeds that were growing at the edge of the pond last fall.

It’s been an yo-yo winter in terms of the temperature differences (we’ve had some nice days, followed by some really cold days), but luckily all the winter weather that has hit usually disappears within a couple of days. It will be interesting with next storm coming through to see how quickly it moves through, how much precipitation falls, and how long it stays around.

So it does seem that the universe is giving me the hint that it will soon be time to close the door on this chapter of my life (at least professionally for now). My current position is up in about three and a half months (give or take a few days)–it’s scary to realize that Thanksgiving is that close; and no one can give me a solid answer on whether or not it will be extended. One song that has been going through my mind almost on constant replay has been “Maybe” by Sick Puppies. I first heard this song (and of the group) when I was out in Boston; and right now it seems to almost be becoming my theme song. So here’s their video via youtube.

Well most of the afternoon was again spent sitting outside in the backyard enjoying the slight breeze that coming through the yard and noticing that numerous butterflies were starting to come through the yard. Then someone noticed that there was a duck on the side of the house by the bird feeder. It turns out that the female mallard came by for some of the bird seed that was on the ground.

It was slightly unusual in that the male wasn’t with the female, but he could have been back at the nest guarding the eggs (or chicks if they’ve hatched), giving momma mallard some time away from the nest (since it is mothers day you know).

Considering our close proximity to Boomer Lake, it isn’t all that surprising that when there is water in the creek, at least one pair of mallards come by for grazing on the bird seeds.

Well it’s looking like today’s photography challenge is going to be getting posted tomorrow. The pictures were rather larger and my phone isn’t happy trying to email them to myself (I know that I could plug the phone into the computer & download them–but that becomes even a bigger pain of trying to locate them in iPhotos library for uploading).

The weekend is going to be spent trying to get a lot of personal & professional development things taken care of, plus the usual yard and house work. I’m hoping that I can get back on track with certain things and get the anxiety under control and start moving forward with the transition plan. It has been helping to see the vision board every time that I turn on my computer, and that has been helping me move (even in baby steps) forward, when I would really like to curl up in a ball at times and forget that the world exists.