Are We There Yet?

It’s dark. Mum and Dad have created little nests in the car for my sister and me, with lots of room in the middle of the back seat in a preemptive strike against the “her foot’s toughing me” sure to happen otherwise. We’ve been bathed and dressed in our jammies. We snuggle into our nests, too excited to actually sleep as planned. We pull out of the driveway, make the turn out of the cul-de-sac, stop at the STOP sign a block from our street, and…

“Are we there yet,” my little sister asks.

I’ve been feeling a lot like that this Round.

Yes, there’s been a lot on my plate with looking for work, interviewing for positions, landing a position, and learning a boat — no, ship of QE2 proportions — load of stuff for that newly landed job. I’m loving it, don’t get me wrong. The people are amazing. The work is challenging without being overwhelming.

However, there’s also the fact this is the first truly full-time position I’ve held since having the wee beasties. That’s been a huge adjustment for all of us.

I’ve been waiting for that golden moment. The moment when everything falls into place. I know it’s there, just out of reach…

Sigh.

On with the ROW80 part of the program.

Writing/Editing:

• Morning Pages for a minimum of 250 words or half hour, whichever comes first, every day. Sadly, not a word.
• Fiction, either 250 new words (new or existing WIP) or 1 hour of editing each week. Not a word, yet I stubbornly refuse to take this goal down. It’s become my elephant in the room though.
• Post three times a week here on the blog. Yep. We had Sunday’s Mother’s Day, Tuesdays were put on Hiatus, and the first of the Court Cards when we met the Child (Page) of Water on Thursday.

Reading:

• A minimum of 8 books to stay on track for 100 books this year. Cornerstone (Souls Of The Stones) by Kelly Walker, Delicate Freakn’ Flower (Freakn’ Shifters (MFM)) by Eve Langlais, and Warrior’s Bride (Stone of Destiny Series) by Garri Russell. Wheee — that makes this COMPLETE + 1, with 9 books read this Round.
• Update Goodreads at least every other week. Yep. I even updated the Reading Challenge widget.
  

Support/Social Media:

• Visit and comment on 5 blogs, at least three times per week, for a total of 15 blogs each week. A whomping 6
  
• One non-blog related post per week on Facebook and Twitter. Nope.
• One share, re-tweet, whatnot per week on Facebook and Twitter. Nope.
  

Non-Writery Stuff:

• Exercise three times per week. I got out with Beastie Girl FOUR times.
  
• Complete The 30-day Diabetes Cure in April. COMPLETE.
• Family day, no working and time with family, one day per week. Yep.

How was your week?

You can find and support other ROWers HERE.

Meet the Cards: Child of Water

Generally, all Pages:

• Learning, Wondering, Beginning.
• Express the Earth aspect of their suit, or element.
• Correspond to the Tens.
• Symbolize the student, apprentice, or servant.
• Serve as a catalyst of change.
• For additional info on the Children check out Tarot Elements’ post: Pages and Princesses.

What I See:

I love the sense of wonder I get looking at this image. I remember being that little girl standing in the cold water seeing my first starfish. Light is dancing on the water making the rocks and shells almost look like jewels. I can hear the waves rippling around her. I can smell the musty scent you only encounter by the ocean. I can taste the salt in the air.

Who am I kidding? I’m ready to run away to the beach, LOL.

General Water element/Cups suit:

Please refer back to the Ace of Water

Light (upright) Reading:

Embrace your emotions and imagination/dreams.

• Keywords: Sympathetic, Tender, Intuitive, Aesthetic, or Affectionate.

Shadow (upside down or reverse) Reading:

Beware of being oversensitive.

• Keywords: Naive, Indolent, Promiscuous, Fluffy-Bunny, or Daydreaming.

Plots:

Perhaps a family vacation. A first trip to the ocean. Or maybe, weave your story around an ocean biologist. An Eco-terrorist? What about a beach clean-up group?

How about a retelling of Atlantis, or some other underwater society? Perhaps your MC can talk to the marine animals.

Water is the emotional element, perhaps your MC is experiencing first love. Or maybe they’ve been disappointed by love? Perhaps that child is your MC’s inner child.

• Child Themes: Curiosity, Hope, Innocence, Opening, Trust, Beginnings, Novelty, Growth, Study, or Apprenticeship

Characters:

“I imagine a life filled with love, art, and spirituality.” ~Joanna Powell Colbert

• Suit Archetype/Feudal Class: Clergy and Priestly class.

MBTI:  INFP (Introverted Intuitive Feeling Perceiving)

The nine-point personality enneagram can also be useful for character building.

Children/Pages/Princesses are E9: Mediator, Peacemaker, and/or Preservationist

• Self Image — I am content
• Passion — Indolence, Laziness, or Accidia
• Virtue — Diligence
• Narcissistic Trap — Self-abasement
• Avoids — Conflict
• Speaking Style — Monotonous or Rambling

E9 people are instinctive, spontaneous, and intuitive. Their “gut” feeling is the center of their awareness. They are often direct or territorial. They are concerned with power, ruled by aggression, and may be troubled by self-doubt or self-blame.

Additionally, look up one of the Water signs (Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces) for personality traits.

• Careers: Student of the Arts and Humanities, Social Work, Healer, Psychic, Puppetry, Writing and Poetry, Acting, Non-Profit Organizations, Volunteer Services, and Design Student.
• Recreation: Surfing, Scuba-Diving, Swimming, Yoga, Gymnastics, and Anything fun which enables them to find emotional release.

Image: Gaian Tarot by Joanna Powell Colbert from Llewellyn Worldwide

Tuesday Hiatus

I have a bunch of blog ideas sitting in various degrees of brainstorming or drafting. However, none are ready to post or even ready to edit. And, quite frankly, I’m rather brain dead.

Even the Ten on Tuesday prompt failed to inspire a post today. So, I’m going to skip Tuesday posts for a week or two and, hopefully, build my completed post queue back up.

If my brain starts firing on all cylinders this week, well, perhaps I can have something for you next week.

Thank you for your understanding!

This hiatus applies to the Tuesday posts only. Thursday Tarot posts are scheduled and the Sunday Summary posts are formatted.

A Happy Mother’s Day Summary

First off, I wish all you mothers — whether your babies have two legs, or more — a very, very happy Mother’s Day surrounded by the ones you love.

Writing/Editing:

• Morning Pages for a minimum of 250 words or half hour, whichever comes first, every day. Sadly, not a word.
• Fiction, either 250 new words (new or existing WIP) or 1 hour of editing each week. Not yet.
• Post three times a week here on the blog. Yep. We had some progress on Sunday with Plugging Along, a Readers Open Thread on Tuesday, and a wee research ramble with Holding Court in Tarot on Thursday. I actually need to get on the ball here because the queue is empty! Yikes.
  

Reading:

• A minimum of 8 books to stay on track for 100 books this year. I’ve been reading a bit during my lunch hour but didn’t wrap up anything this week.
• Update Goodreads at least every other week. Not this week.

Support/Social Media:

• Visit and comment on 5 blogs, at least three times per week, for a total of 15 blogs each week. I made it to 10 this week.
• One non-blog related post per week on Facebook and Twitter. Nope.
• One share, re-tweet, whatnot per week on Facebook and Twitter. I did retweet a post yesterday. Facebook, nope.

Non-Writery Stuff:

• Exercise three times per week. I got out with Beastie Girl FOUR times, wow, and got in one mini-yoga session.
• Complete The 30-day Diabetes Cure in April. COMPLETE.
• Family day, no working and time with family, one day per week. Yep.

How was your week?

You can find and support other ROWers HERE.

Holding Court in Tarot

Last week, in the Meet the Cards series, we concluded the numbered portion of Minor Arcana (pips) of the Gaian deck. Next week, we will begin to explore the Court cards.

The court cards represent family with the father (king), mother (queen), son (knight), and daughter (page). The Gaian deck focuses on this sense of family (or ‘it takes a village’) even more by changing the court cards to Elders, Guardians, Explorers, and Children.

Thus far in the series, I’ve pointed out the nine-point personality enneagram for each card/number to help with character building. Yet, the Court cards don’t neatly fall in to the enneagram chart.

However, each MBTI type seems to be represented within the Court cards. 16 MBTI = 16 Court cards. You’d think it would be easy to apply the MBTI types. Yet everyone appears to have a different way of assigning those MBTI types to the Court cards.

Tarot Personalities

Archetypes of Tarot

Enneagram in the Court

I realize this is somewhat confusing, and most writers won’t want or need to go into this detail, but I want to give you as complete a tool as I can.

Jungian is my fall back, right or wrong, breaking down as:

Wands — King — Fire — Intuition
Cups — Queen — Water — Feeling
Swords — Knight — Air — Thinking
Pentacles — Page — Earth — Judging

King and Knight — Extroversion — Male — Yang
Queen and Page — Introversion — Female — Yin

Using the above as a springboard, we end up with:

King of Wands — ENTJ
Queen of Wands — INTJ
Knight of Wands — ENTP
Page of Wands — INTP
King of Cups — ENFJ
Queen of Cups — INFJ
Knight of Cups — ENFP
Page of Cups — INFP
King of Swords — ESTJ
Queen of Swords — ISTJ
Knight of Swords — ESTP
Page of Swords — ISTP
King of Pentacles — ESFJ
Queen of Pentacles — ISFJ
Knight of Pentacles — ESFP
Page of Pentacles — ISFP

Fabulous, right?

If this helps with your character development, great, stop here.

But I’d started on a quest to match the enneagram to the Court cards.

A rule of thumb seems to be:

Wands (Fire) are E7 and E8
Cups (Water) are E2 and E4
Swords (Air) are E1 and E5
Pentacles (Earth) are E6 and E9

Again, if that’s enough for you. Great. Stop here.

That seemed too general for me. So then, how do we apply the MBTI we’ve assigned to the Court cards to the enneagram?

Again, an entire science.

I became somewhat obsessed with researching this, LOL. As the Court cards represent people, I really wanted to find out which enneagram fit each card. Heck, even my fall-back site Tarot, Enneagram and MBTI Correlations has conflicting assignments of MBTI types to the nine enneagram types.

In the end, I went purely by percentage.

Here’s the break down I came up with:

King of Wands — ENTJ — E1
Queen of Wands — INTJ — E4 & E5 (50/50 split)
Knight of Wands — ENTP — E7 & E8 (50/50 split)
Page of Wands — INTP — E5
King of Cups — ENFJ — E2
Queen of Cups — INFJ — E4
Knight of Cups — ENFP — E7
Page of Cups — INFP — E9
King of Swords — ESTJ — E1 & E8 (50/50 split)
Queen of Swords — ISTJ — E1
Knight of Swords — ESTP — E7
Page of Swords — ISTP — E5
King of Pentacles — ESFJ — E2
Queen of Pentacles — ISFJ — E6
Knight of Pentacles — ESFP — E7
Page of Pentacles — ISFP — E6 & E9 (50/50 split)

As you can see, my percentage breakdown does NOT fall under the rule of thumb I noted above. (I’ll supply this info on each of the Court card posts but this was my thought process. Thanks for sticking with me!)

Have you ever figured out your MBTI type?

I’d love it if you’d share! As for me, I am very much in my Fire sign with an INTP/INTJ range.

If you’d like to investigate this further, you might enjoy:

MBTI and Enneagram (Their Relationship and Complementary Use)

Personality Types: Enneagram and Myers-Briggs Type Correlations

Correlations for the Myers-Briggs/MBTI & Enneagram Types

MBTI Truths: Relations to Enneagram

Images: Gaian Tarot by Joanna Powell Colbert from Llewellyn Worldwide

Tuesday Book Talk

Open Thread for Readers:

• Got a book you want to talk about?
• Frustrated with a book or series?
• In love with a new one?
• Found a buried treasure?
• An issue that keeps popping up in the books you are reading?
• Just want to chat about stuff in general?
• Post away…

Plugging Along

Writing/Editing:

• Morning Pages for a minimum of 250 words or half hour, whichever comes first, every day. Ha! I got in 910 words over two days. Yay, writing.
  
• Fiction, either 250 new words (new or existing WIP) or 1 hour of editing each week. Not yet.
• Post three times a week here on the blog. Yep. We had a pretty basic ROW80 Update on Sunday, a Bucket List Party on Tuesday, and the final numbered Minor Arcana card Ten of Air (Swords) on Thursday.

Reading:

• A minimum of 8 books to stay on track for 100 books this year. I wrapped up Two Days of a Dream by Kathryn Gilmore. I’m still plugging away at Susan Kay’s Phantom. I have a paperback edition and am finding it easier to read on eReaders at work thus little progress here yet.
• Update Goodreads at least every other week. Yep.

Support/Social Media:

• Visit and comment on 5 blogs, at least three times per week, for a total of 15 blogs each week. Sadly, only got around to 4 this week.
• One non-blog related post per week on Facebook and Twitter. Ha! I actually did tweet last night. I commented on a couple Facebook posts but didn’t actually post anything myself.
• One share, re-tweet, whatnot per week on Facebook and Twitter. Facebook, yes. Twitter, no.

Non-Writery Stuff:

• Exercise three times per week. The knee is much better…wheee. I got out with Beastie Girl twice and got in two mini-yoga sessions.
• Complete The 30-day Diabetes Cure in April. COMPLETE. Some points:
  • Cutting the sugar out was easier than I expected it to be. Perhaps due to already cutting it back substantially.
  • Adding in the specific yoga moves/positions was quite easy on the days I actually DID yoga. (And I realized I haven’t reported my yoga days very accurately here thus far. I will aim to do better with reporting. I think it’s because I don’t look at yoga as exercise, LOL)
  • Eliminating the ‘fast carbs’ (breads, pasta, etc.) was impossible for me. I was able to reduce but not eliminate.
  • Eliminating HFCS (high fructose corn syrup). It is in EVERYTHING. I’d say I managed to cut out 80-85% from our diet though.
  • Hardest thing — not getting to have birthday cake on my birthday!

  Overall, I highly recommend doing this!

• Family day, no working and time with family, one day per week. Yep.

How was your week?

You can find and support other ROWers HERE.

Meet the Cards: Ten of Air

What I See:

Looking at this sets my feet moving. I think of traveling and vacations. I think of my bucket list. There is a sense of continuing cycle in that Canada geese fly south each winter and return each spring. Yet there is also a feeling of change, of starting a new chapter in the book of our life.

We have a sense of sunset here, too. A transitioning from the bright light of day to the dark of night.

Many beliefs speak of birds carrying the souls of the dead. In fact, this card reminds me of the Wild Hunt tales I grow up on.

General Air element/Sword suit:

Please refer back to the Ace of Air.

Light (upright) Reading:

It may be bittersweet but it is time to let go.

• Keywords: New Beginnings, Rebirth, Liberation, or Silver-Lining.

Shadow (upside down or reverse) Reading:

Beware of resisting progress.

• Keywords: Failure, Hitting Rock-Bottom, Affliction, or Back-Stabbing.

Plots:

A retelling of the Wild Hunt myths (and there are many). A hunter? A fire festival? A New Year (whether a calendar date or a seasonal one) celebration? A solstice? All Hollow’s Eve?

Perhaps your story is paranormal and that transition from day to night plays a key role. Is that a storm moving in? Perhaps the birds are fleeing.

How about travel? Or maybe, crossing things of one’s bucket list. Perhaps the seeing off of children, of becoming an empty nester. Perhaps moving on after divorce, or the death of a spouse?

• Ten Themes: Transition, Transformation, or Endings and Beginnings.

Okay, typically, this card has a rather gruesome image. Definitely one for you horror folks. All ten swords have landed in a man, pinning him to the ground under a dark sky. (Think of the final scene in 300.) Murder, crimes of passion, or war plots come to mind. Maybe a theme of pain or grief yet with the promise of the sun rising again on a new day?

Characters:

Embrace change.

• Suit Archetype/Feudal Class: Nobility, Warrior, and Political class.

Additionally, look up one of the Air signs (Gemini, Libra, Aquarius) for personality traits.

For more information on the Tens in general, please refer back to the Ten of Fire.

Image: Gaian Tarot by Joanna Powell Colbert from Llewellyn Worldwide

Ten Things on My Bucket List

Have you ever been to a Bucket List party?

One of my co-workers went to a Bucket List party recently and we’ve been talking about our bucket lists around the water cooler (yeah, we actually have one). I thought it was a rather cool idea.

So, let’s have a virtual one!

The buffet is to your left. The beer and pop are in the cooler by the patio door. Wine is on the counter. Help yourself. Pull up a seat. Who knows, we might find something to add to our lists

In no particular order, my top ten bucket list items:

1. Go on a honeymoon with That Man. Believe it or not, we never got around to it.
2. Extensively travel Scotland, Wales, and England. I want to trace my family trees.
3. Learn Scots Gaelic.
4. Cruise across the Atlantic and come into New York. I want to see the Statue of Liberty from the deck of a ship.
5. Actually learn Belly Dancing. Not the thing I call belly dancing, LOL
6. Become a published author.
7. Write a letter to each of the wee beasties telling them about my life and the lessons learned.
8. Create and maintain a Happiness project.
9. Get all of the wee beasties’ scrapbook albums done before they graduate high school. (I better get on this one! Oldest only has four more years.)
10. Actually meet, in real life, all the amazing people I’ve met online!

What’s on your bucket list?

Sunday Summary & #ROW80

Not a lot to report this week. It’s been one of adjusting to me leaving before, and getting home after, the wee beasties. It’s been one of coordinating progress meetings for 2 of the 4 boys as we near the end of school. It’s been one where Beastie Girl is rather put out with me for taking her to that nasty place for her Bordetella boaster. She’s weighing in at 71 pounds! The little pig. Yet she’s far from being overweight. And it’s been one of me catching up on my DVR recordings

On to the ROW80 part of this program.

Writing/Editing:

• Morning Pages for a minimum of 250 words or half hour, whichever comes first, every day. Yeah, not a word.
• Fiction, either 250 new words (new or existing WIP) or 1 hour of editing each week. Not yet.
• Post three times a week here on the blog. Yep. We had Whew…What a Week on Sunday, our mouths drooled a bit on Tuesday with Staging For the Day Job, and we meet the Ten of Earth (Pentacles) on Thursday.
• Finish Margie Lawson’s Deep EDITS lesson packets. Not yet. In fact, I’m going to remove this for the balance of the Round. I just don’t see it happening with all my brain power focused elsewhere.

Reading:

• A minimum of 8 books to stay on track for 100 books this year. I actually got Bloodfire (Blood Destiny 1) by Helen Harper and Irish Eyes by Annie Jones in this week. Hey, I’ve got a lunch hour…
• Update Goodreads at least every other week. Yep.

Support/Social Media:

• Visit and comment on 5 blogs, at least three times per week, for a total of 15 blogs each week. 12 this week.
• One non-blog related post per week on Facebook and Twitter. Nope.
• One share, re-tweet, whatnot per week on Facebook and Twitter. Nope.

Non-Writery Stuff:

• Exercise three times per week. Nope. I over extended or irritated an old knee injury last weekend and spent most of the week hoping my knee wouldn’t give out from under me.
• Complete The 30-day Diabetes Cure in April. I’m feeling really good about my progress with this. I’m calling it a win for the month even though I’ll be wrapping it up next week.
• Family day, no working and time with family, one day per week. Yep.

How was your week?

You can find and support other ROWers HERE.