Good news

Well my life has taken a nice turn for the better. My doctor did an endoscopy and took a look at my stomach, seems I have gastritis and have inflammed the stomach lining. An easy fix. I'm already feeling better since starting on Protonix a month or so ago. I'll just continue on that for a couple of months and it will repair the damage. I'd already begun to change my eating habits so am half-way home. (grin) I asked the specialist what might cause this and one of the things he mentioned twigged my memory, food allergies.

The irony is, as a kid I had a huge allergy to citrus and thought I'd overcome it. Apparently not. We'd moved from the Snowy Mountains when I was about twelve years old, to the Hunter Valley. When in the Snowy we never had totally fresh fruits and veges because they had to be trucked in, the Hunter is good farming country, everything grow's like crazy. Being a little piglet, I apparently overdid it on fresh citrus and got sick. I'd swell up in the lips, feet, hands and my whole body would be covered in hives. They'd send me home from school and Mum would cover my poor little body in Calamine lotion, in a few days I'd be fine again. It took quite a bit of investigation to find the culprit.

Anyway, last year I moved from Los Angeles to my new home in the California desert and acquired a nice little citrus grove. The grapefruit are pink and absolutely delicious. The lemons are huge and sweet. The limes perfect. The oranges and tangeolas are to die for. In January my New Year's resolution was to lose 25 lbs. And how was I doing that? By eating two grapefruit a day, putting lemon slices in my water jug, eating oranges, heh heh. The things we do to our bodies thinking we're doing the healthy thing ....

So, I'm good to go now and trying to figure out the best time to visit Australia and research that romantic adventure story I've been hankering to write. I've fine tuned the other two manuscripts and I'll submit those over the next couple of weeks, then I'll begin outlining this new one. I'm really excited that my energy level is back and I'm sleeping better, not in pain anymore AND my enthusiasm for writing has returned. For everyone who has told me not to write an Australian story, I say, "I don't care. I'm doing it anyway. It's what makes me happy. If it doesn't sell I really don't care. I'm writing it because that's where my heart lies."