Tricia Mingerink

I realized it has been too long since I posted. Not since November. *sigh* But that’s December for you. Always way too busy. It doesn’t help I’m bad at blogging. I struggle to figure out something worthy of being blogged about. I don’t want to bore my readers with mundane stuff.

But you’re getting mundane today. Because that’s all I can think to write about, and it might help to share how my life has been going since 2018 started 4 days ago.

New Year’s Day started off with me being gone on a vacation with my family about 5 hours away from home. Which, was a really good vacation despite the cold weather…until the morning of our last day when my cousin called to let us know he’d stopped by my parents’ house and my horse had gotten out.

Not a good feeling. At all. When horses get out of their pasture, they tend to go all wild horse and run all over the place. They can run for miles, get hit by a car, take hours to be rounded up again. It isn’t a good thing when a horse gets loose. It’s even worse when you’re 5 hours away and can do nothing about it but listen to your dad’s end of the conversation and try to think of something that would help. We were all out of horse grain, but thankfully I had left plenty of the horse’s favorite apple-flavored treats.

Apparently my horse and my brother’s dog (who has a dog run next to the horse pasture) got a little bored sometime in the middle of the night or early morning and between the two of them they managed to tear down a section of fence large enough for the horse to get through.

Thankfully Shadow, my horse, hadn’t gone far, and it appeared he spent most of his time outside the pasture trying to get back into it, but was too scared to go past the dog’s run.

And now my cousin, a virtual stranger to the horse, had to try to get the horse back into the pasture with only a bucket of horse treats.

But this is where it is a good thing I have the laziest, fattest, most homebody of a horse ever. A virtual stranger opens his gate and offers him treats and what does my horse do? Trot right in the pasture to eat the offered treats, that’s what. Getting back into his nice, safe pasture was all he really wanted anyway.

All in all, I only had to panic a few minutes about my horse being out without me being there to make sure he got safely in the pasture.

The next day on my way to my first day back to work after my vacation my truck blew a tire and left me temporarily stranded along side of a busy freeway in 10 degree temperatures and several inches of slush. And when I say blew a tire, I mean the entire side wall was gone and parts of the tire were literally down to the rim. It looked like something out of NASCAR. Thankfully, I kept control of my truck and didn’t spin out into a wall like they tend to do after blown tires in racing.

I wish I could say I remember the feeling of the tire blowing more clearly than I do. If I got the life experience out of it, I should be able to call it book research, except that I mostly write fantasy set in more medieval times and the feeling of a blown tire wouldn’t be all that helpful in that sort of book. Not that blowing a tire and getting stranded along the freeway is necessarily a life experience I wanted to check off my bucket list, but I guess I did anyway.

Note to all of those dealing with cold temperatures: if you’ve been gone for a week of vacation and you have a tire that already is leaking air and then the temperatures drop 40 degrees while you are gone, it can cause issues like really low tire pressure which cause further issues like blown tires. Little life lesson: make sure you check the tire pressures.

Another Little Life Lesson: the jack included in a car is junk. I can change a tire by myself with a proper jack and air wrench in my dad’s barn, but alongside the road with a worthless jack was a bit more challenging. My dad and uncle helped me out at different points throughout the day to get the wrecked tire off, bring the rim to the tire place at the next exit, get to work, leave work once the new tire was ready, go back to my stranded car, and get the new tire on (my spare tire is one of those under the truck sort of spares that are completely worthless on an older vehicle like mine because they become rusted in place and impossible to get off when you are stuck alongside the road).

So that was the first two days of the year for me. Hopefully the rest of this year isn’t so stressful and crazy.

On another note, my vacation gave me time to do some mild editing, and I think I’m finally getting sort of excited about sharing this next book with you. I keep wanting to share snippets and titles and blurbs with you guys, but I’m not letting myself yet. I want to put together the cover and a cover reveal to really make those things have an impact.

But I guess I will share this. One of the pictures I’m using as an inspiration for this current book:

How has your 2018 been so far?