Category: ThrowbackThursday

I’ve only just come back from my conferences in the Boston area and Washington, D.C. and I’ll be off to Houston next week for the fabulous Book Lovers Con. I am so looking forward to all the fun events and getting to hang out with you guys! Look for me at the following events at Book Lovers Con:

Author Jamboree
Fri, Aug 12, 2022 10:00am – 11:30am, Founders I-IV

Biscuits & Books
Sat, Aug 13, 2022 8:30am – 9:30am, Discovery A

X’s & O’s
Sat, Aug 13, 2022 10:00am – 11:30am, Founders I-III

Book Bash
Sat, Aug 13, 2022 12:30pm – 2:30pm, Legends I-IV

If you can’t make the conference, I believe the book signing is open to the general public for a small fee. I’ll have copies of books from the At the Shore series as well as The Family She Never Met and Decoy Training.

I’m sharing a photo from one of my conferences where I got to hang out with this handsome cowboy! It was a hard job, but somebody had to do it. LOL!

We have a new baby in the family which is so exciting! It made me think of this baptism photo of the new baby’s grandma and I thought I’d share it with you. This is my sister’s baptism in Cuba. I’m the little girl just left of center, my brother is all the way to the right, and my dad is to the extreme left. The rest of the people are the godparents and some family friends, but not my mom which I always thought was weird.

I remembered my grandmother explaining that in Cuba the mother didn’t go to the baptism and this morning I did a little research and found an article that explained this practice which was known as “the churching of women.” Apparently, baptismal practices changed from having adult baptisms to baptizing infants because of infant mortality and sometimes mothers were still recuperating after birth. Somehow that became the reason for mothers not being at baptisms and that practice remained in place until the early 1970s. Wow!

P.S. – If you’re interested in learning more about the Cuban experience, especially after coming to the U.S., please check out my novel The Family She Never Met.

Since I have limited space in my garden, there is only one rule: You give me either flowers or food! LOL! Luckily I have some beautiful flowers as well as tomatoes, eggplants, zucchini, assorted peppers, and some fennel. Today I’m sharing some of my flowers with you on this Throwback Thursday. I was also lucky enough to get a photo of this beautiful Monarch butterfly that was visiting my garden.

On this Throwback Thursday, I’m sharing some video I took when hubby and I ran across a school of skates! Since the weather was so nice we were taking a long walk and on our return trip over the Shark River Bridge, we caught sight of a large school of bait fish jumping out of the water. We decided to watch the bait fish to see if anything big would come to chase after them, like a dolphin. Nothing came to eat the bait fish but then we spotted two small skates in the water. A few seconds later, however, we saw a school of over a dozen skates gliding through the water. I managed to get out my phone and capture some video of this amazing sight! I so love being this close to nature and being able to see things like this right on my doorstep. It’s one of the reasons I set the At the Shore series in this area.

I love Gloria Estefan and often played her music. So much at times that my daughter learned to count to Gloria’s 1-2-3 song! One of the first times we went to South Beach we even stayed at the Cardozo Hotel which the Estefans own. We had a fun time on that vacation and went back to Miami fairly often. It’s why I decided to set so many books there, including my upcoming South Beach Security series that begins in December. This photo is a picture of us all ready to head to a Gloria concert. We saw many of them over the years!

After a very restful night, we woke to a beautiful sunrise.

Not long after that, we found ourselves in a lock! We actually went through two of them as we made our trip upstream. This is speeded up quite a bit. It took at least half-an-hour to make it to the level necessary for us to continue our trip up the Danube.

Soon our ship was on the way to our next location: Bratislava, Slovakia!

Bratislava is a beautiful city and the capital of Slovakia. So many pristine buildings and quaint squares. We walked around for a few hours to see the church and many of the older buildings in town. We truly enjoyed this amazing city!

After a delightful lunch on the sky deck of the ship, we were off again to see the many sights along the Danube. So many towns, churches, and castles along the way. We even went by one town where I counted at least six churches. The name of the town: Göd. Not kidding you! As night fell, we found ourselves in another lock so we could continue our overnight cruise to our next location!