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This Year’s Retreat

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This year's creative retreat is in Green Bay, Wisconsin. One of many beautiful sunsets:     Our second day a neighbor warned about a storm coming. So did the sky and lake. I've been working on The Charming Man (Q.C. Davis Series No. 2). Hoping this bug did not die from reading it. But maybe that's good. Like The Worried Man (Q.C. Davis Series No. 1), it's suspense/mystery.     We're using many different spaces. Here's a mini-office m...
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Rediscovering Bliss–At The Library

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The other day I rode an escalator to the seventh floor, literature and fiction, at the Harold Washington Public Library in Chicago and felt bliss. It was the second time in as many weeks I'd visited there. This made me happier than I can say because that's more visits to a public library in two weeks than I've made in the entire last decade.For as long as I can remember, I've loved libraries. At five years old, I got my pinkish orange children's card at the Brookfield Public Library. I was so ex...
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5 Ways to Be More Productive — And More Relaxed — In The New Year

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Relax -- unlike some articles on productivity, the suggestions below are not meant to help you do more than you’re doing now. Instead, I hope they will help you enjoy your work more, relax more, and open up a little extra free time in the new year.1.  Know your best times of day for different tasksOur brains work differently at different times of the day. Figuring out the ideal time to perform a task can make it more enjoyable and lessen the amount of time you spend on it. Most people are m...
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The Military, Make Up, and Rereading Katniss (Favorite Books Post No. 1)

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Recently I reread the Hunger Games trilogy. It was great fun, and the themes seemed particularly timely. (I'll do my best not to spoil any of the plot for those who haven't read the whole trilogy.)(1) Women in Combat: In the Hunger Games, each combatant (known as a tribute) competes to become the sole survivor. The arena for the games changes from year to year and even within each game. A combatant might face mountains, drought, fire, floods, or all of the above. Author Suzanne Collins...
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In Which I Realize I Don’t Need To Use The Health Insurance Marketplace (Post No. 6 of Adventures in Health Insurance)

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In my continued journey to obtain the private health insurance now available due to The Affordable Care Act/Obamacare, I've been checking the status of my application at https://www.healthcare.gov/. After two weeks, it's still "in progress." I called and easily reached a real person at 1-800-318-2596. Unfortunately, he said there was no way to provide potential plan information until the application finished processing. At the very least, I'd hoped for an overview of the differences between...
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In Which I Probably Applied For Health Insurance (Post No. 5 of Adventures in Health Insurance)

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Since my first attempt, I've been periodically checking the Illinois insurance exchange to apply for health insurance coverage under Obamacare (The Affordable Care Act). I'm self-employed and have coverage now through an Illinois program that allowed me to purchase what is basically an extension of COBRA coverage. COBRA, for those not familiar with it, is a law allowing someone covered under a group employer health plan to extend that coverage for 18 months after leaving employmen...
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First Day Trying To Get On The Health Insurance Exchange (Post No. 4 of Adventures in Health Insurance)

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This morning I tried to get on the Illinois Health Insurance Exchange. As I talked about in previous posts, I am self-employed as an author and attorney.  I bought health insurance through an Illinois program that allows people to continue their COBRA coverage. I was turned down for individual health insurance, so I'm hoping that through the Exchange I'll have some more options for coverage.First, I needed to find the exchange. I googled "Illinois Get Covered" because I'd heard on the ...
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Virtual Camping Out in Line for the Health Insurance Exchange (Post No. 3 of Adventures in Health Insurance)

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Being both a writer and a lawyer, I have hard time turning off my brain (or maybe that's why I became a writer and a lawyer). As I wrote in my two previous posts, I'm self-employed, so I have no group insurance option, and I was turned down for individual health insurance. So I did some preliminary research on the exchanges. Below is what I learned.Differences in types of plans:  The main difference I found between the Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum plans that will be offered is the est...
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Once I Became Self-Employed (Post 2 of Adventures in Health Insurance)

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On a sunny day about about a month and a half before I planned to leave the large law firm where I worked, I played tennis for the first time in years.  I felt great.  I'd arranged for office space for my own practice, FindLaw had finished my firm website, and I'd set up my landline and bought a Blackberry.  As noted in the last post, I'd been very healthy, didn't smoke, and was the appropriate height and weight (see photo -- that's me).  But I'd had an exclusion a decad...
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