Hello everyone! I took this photo on a hike up in Port Orchard last month. I love little things, and this grouping of nature stuff was tiny! I could have fit all of it in my palm.
I’ve been out of the blogging loop for quite awhile, but I’m back now. Good things to come!
“Do your own thing on your own terms and get what you came here for.” -Oliver James
I loved this book. A Well written,discriptive,honest journey into the mind of an alcoholic.Anyone who has someone in their life that struggles with Alcoholism will get a wealth of information from this book. Now This is the type of book they should give out at Al-non.
Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat. ~ Mother Teresa(From my blog, Word Vagabond: Supporting Independent and Small Press Authors.)
When Jennifer Place entered a substance abuse treatment center for the first time, she was fresh out of jail and drinking four bottles of wine a day. She had given away custody of her two children, married a man she didn’t love, and moved several states away, all in a haze of alcohol. This book describes her journey through five treatment programs, struggling to free herself from her toxic relationship with drinking.
The book begins just after Place’s husband has her hauled off to jail, which is definitely an attention-grabbing way to start. Unfortunately, this is immediately followed by a chapter that tries to sum up her entire history up until that point in just a few pages. The result is confusing and feels rushed.
Thankfully, the book gets much easier to read after that. Place’s descriptions of her time in jail and rehab are vivid and interesting. Her voice gets stronger and more confident chapter by chapter, which helps the reader feel the progress she is making underneath her continuing addiction.
Watching her enter each new treatment center and then relapse time and again is frustrating, but that’s what makes this an authentic story: there are no easy answers, no quick fixes. It would be nice to see more of the internal work she was doing while in treatment, though. She talks about doing constant journaling and introspection, but never shares the results of that work. She also doesn’t discuss why she started drinking in the first place, which I think would be a crucial detail for this kind of memoir.
Even as a person who has never struggled with addiction, I found a lot of empathize with in her story. Place’s severe anxiety attacks were all too familiar, and I actually found those parts emotionally difficult to read because they described perfectly experiences I have gone through. It was easy for me to understand how difficult it was to recover from alcohol abuse and try to manage severe anxiety at the same time.
Apart from the story, Saturation would have benefitted from more thorough copy-editing. While there weren’t a crippling number of typos and style errors, they were a bit distracting.
I think this is a valuable memoir for anyone who wants a better understanding of alcohol addiction, or even the possible effects of severe anxiety.
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Thanks A!
Wow, I’d love to walk through there!
I absolutely LOVED this book. I got it for my Kindle and I just couldn’t put it down. For a first book this was well-written and brutally honest, which I really appreciated. I did not want this book to end, but after all the author had gone through, I couldn’t imagine one more bad event in her life. For someone who is struggling with sobriety this is an excellent account because, for me at least, there is so much I could relate to. I found myself cheering for the author every time she entered another treatment center, but even when she relapsed I sympathized with her because I know what it’s like. Yes, she had quite an attitude, but look at the reasons: she arrived to treatment nearly every time extremely intoxicated and not very happy about being there. Too add more to it, I really think that she was feeling very beaten down and deeply disappointed in herself and was afraid of another failure. I loved the fact that she never gave up on herself in the end.
I highly recommend this to anyone going through recovery or any friends or family of an addict!
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Thanks, Black Belt Mom!
Quote of the day: Between two evils, I generally like to pick the one I never tried before. ~ Mae West
Seattle snow – looks awesome!
A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others. -William Faulkner, novelist (1897-1962)
Panorama of the Southern Sky ~ The Milky Way arches across this 360-degree panorama of the night sky above the Paranal platform, home of ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The Moon is just rising and the zodiacal light shines above it, while the Milky Way stretches across the sky opposite the observatory. To the right in the image and below the arc of the Milky Way, two of our galactic neighbours, the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, can be seen. The open telescope domes of the world’s most advanced ground-based astronomical observatory are all visible in the image: the four smaller 1.8-metre Auxiliary Telescopes that can be used together in the interferometric mode, and the four giant 8.2-metre Unit Telescopes. The image was made from 37 individual frames with a total exposure time of about 30 minutes, taken in the early morning hours. ~ Wikipedia. Full resolution is 15,204 x 4,620. Check out the full resolution pic on Wikipedia – the size here doesn’t do it justice.
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“A positive attitude causes a chain reaction of positive thoughts, events and outcomes. It is a catalyst and it sparks extraordinary results.”
Wade Boggs
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New! Nymtoc reviewed Saturation
 Extraordinary November 15, 2011Jennifer Place tells her own story and holds nothing back. “Saturation” is a hard look at a hard life. Through sheer determination, she made her way down long, ugly roads most of us never travel, and came out safe and sane at the end. The tough broads and eccentric jailbirds she meets belong in a movie. Many of the prison scenes are disturbing, but they show how much this gritty young woman went through before finding her way back to a more or less normal world.
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Thanks Nym!
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Goats in a tree…I’m beginning to feel like I can do anything – anything – a n y t h i n ggggg.
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Off the eastern coast of Australia. ISS pic.
All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and
holding on. ~ Henry Ellis
A night view of the Nile River winding up through the Egyptian desert toward the Mediterranean Sea, and Cairo in the river delta. From the ISS.
Sweeeeeet.
I dream of painting and then I paint my dream. ~ Van Gogh
The master is himself an animal, and needs a master. Let him begin it as he will, it is not to be seen how he can procure a magistracy which can maintain public justice and which is itself just, whether it be a single person or a group of several elected persons. For each of them will always abuse his freedom if he has none above him to exercise force in accord with the laws. The highest master should be just in himself, and yet a man. This task is therefore the hardest of all; indeed, its complete solution is impossible, for from such crooked wood as man is made of, nothing perfectly straight can be built. That it is the last problem to be solved follows also from this: it requires that there be a correct conception of a possible constitution, great experience gained in many paths of life, and — far beyond these — a good will ready to accept such a constitution. Three such things are very hard, and if they are ever to be found together, it will be very late and after many vain attempts. ~ Kant
America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life’s sacred spontaneity. They can’t trust life until they can control it. ~ D.H. Lawrence
A friendly reminder ~ the paperback version of my memoir, Saturation, is on sale. I’ve got a box of ’em here at the house. Email nefarioustwinkle@yahoo.com or leave a comment here. Also – for those of you who have purchased a copy of either version – would you mind terribly leaving a review either here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11241161-saturation or on the site where you purchased the book? You can also leave a review at the Amazon Kindle Store.
Thanks much ~ Jennifer
Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives. ~ William James
Explanation: Are stars better appreciated for their art after they die? Actually, stars usually create their most artistic displays as they die. In the case of low-mass stars like our Sun and M2-9 pictured above, the stars transform themselves from normal stars to white dwarfs by casting off their outer gaseous envelopes. The expended gas frequently forms an impressive display called a planetary nebula that fades gradually over thousand of years. M2-9, a butterfly planetary nebula 2100 light-years away shown in epresentative colors, has wings that tell a strange but incomplete tale. In the center, two stars orbit inside a gaseous disk 10 times the orbit of Pluto. The expelled envelope of the dying star breaks out from the disk creating the bipolar appearance. Much remains unknown about the physical processes that cause planetary nebulae.
From APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day)
From Astronaut Douglas Wheelock: “Italy, on a clear summer night, stretching out into the Mediterranean Sea. You can see many of the beautiful islands lit up and adorning the coastline including Capri, Sicily, and Malta. The city of Naples and Mt. Vesuvius stand out along the coast.”
Rome is just out of the picture in the lower right corner.
If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally
pure. ~ Marcel Proust
Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. It
Look at that guy – can you even imagine being dressed in that suit about to go on a freakin’ space walk? Did you know that according to astronaut Ron Garan (I follow him on twitter and he’s hanging out at the ISS right now) space smells like metal and awake hours on the ISS are 0600 – 2130GMT? This is valuable information people. :)
Sigh. I’m envious. I really am. I want to go into space!
Just an amazing pic. :)
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Trifid Nebula – also known as M20 is about 40 light years across. It doesn’t even look real – does it…It’s about 5,000 light years (light travels at 186,000 miles per second – do the math) away in the constellation Sagittarius. APOD. Pretty sweet, eh? It looks like a flower. I love flowers!
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Jennifer Place 