Daddy was dying. The bone cancer, now complicated by pneumonia, had sent him to the hospital again. I stayed in a hotel nearby for three days. When the doctor said he had stabilized, I returned home to work on some writing deadlines.
A day later, my brother Tom called. Daddy had taken a turn for the worse. You’d better hurry, he said, if you want to see him. Bob cancelled his meetings in Seattle so he could pick me up at the dock after the ferry delivered me to the mainland.
As I rode across the waters of Puget Sound, the irony of taking a boat to get to Daddy’s bedside was not lost on me. He loved the water and the ferry represented for him the fun of rivers and oceans and his greatly anticipated summer vacations.
Except for a brief stint at the Grays Harbor Chair Factory, Daddy spent his whole working life at the Graystone Company. Sometimes, when he got home from the day shift, the plant boss would call, asking if he could fill in for someone that evening, and he would go back to work the graveyard shift. I never heard him say, “No.”
As I write this post, our dear Mr. Puffer has been gone from our lives for two days. A special needs cat with a unique personality, Mr. Puffer kept bobWP and I busy in the last three months of his life.
Once, in kindergarten, I drew a crayon picture of me with my parents. I was small, as I should be at 5. In the drawing, Daddy was a little taller than me. He looked like he could be my brother. Mama towered over both of us, hands on hips, like a stick-figure Amazon woman.
This line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet first squirreled its way into my brain in 10th grade English class.
My friend Gini Dietrich over at 
I threw out a question on Facebook this week that brought some very interesting responses. I asked, “ Do your values come into play as a blogger? As an entrepreneur, biz owner or author?”
The Surprises of Guest Posting
There are a bazillion bloggers who have talked about benefits of making guest appearances on other blogs. One of the best reasons to write guest posts is to reach new audiences and grow your own blog.
But sometimes when you write a guest post for another blog, things happen that weren’t even in your brain. You see, the thing is, you never know who is reading your post. And that makes guest blogging unpredictably fun.
For instance, just this week, my guest post for Write to Done showed up on the Holy Caw! All the topics that interest us page of Guy Kawasaki’s mega-popular site alltop.com. (If you didn’t know, alltop.com is now the authority in sorting through the flood of blog posts and articles that are published daily. Their goal is to filter through all the stuff and aggregate the best for you.) Because of the Holy Caw appearance, my guest post was shared on Twitter a whole bunch of times and got tons of traffic.
The next day, I got requests for an interview from a national magazine for writers and for quotes for an e-book. So what’s my point?
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