As I mentioned a little while ago, I have gotten into audiobooks. As of late, I have been listening to many shifter books. The most well known of these shifters are wolf shifters aka werewolves, but some of these "romance"books based on shifters have different kinds. They all seem to have a few things in common: great strength, sensitive smell, the ability to see in the dark, and because there would probably not be any "romance shifter books" if not for the ability to recognize their "mate" on site.
This most recent series is labeled in the category: Alpha Claimed. n There are 4 books in this series. Some have over lapping characters, and one does not. They are all well written books, that have a lot of violence, and even more sex ion them, so i would not recommend these books for children. The first one was about 2 werewolves and their mate. The second one was about a tiger and his mate, the third one was about a lion and his mate, but the one that resonated with me most was the 4th book in the series CHOSEN BY THE BEAR by Milly Taiden. I found this one to be less violent than the others. I actually saw much of myself in the lead female. She was a writer, who went away to the mountains to try to clear a case of writer's block. It was there that she met a small girl crying in the woods. She tried to help the girl find her parents, and just a short ways to where the girl lived, a huge bear appeared and he was not happy. As the bear ran at them, the writer pushed the little girl behind him, and a bigger bear tackled him. The 2 bears fought till the little girl screamed for them to stop. She yelled "Daddy stop, stop fighting". To the shock of the writer, the smaller bear changed into a naked man (animals do not wear clothes in the wild). Then the bigger bear changed into a big good-looking mountain man ( also nude). The smaller bear demanded to have his daughter. He thought the woman was kidnapping her. We find out much later in the book that thread been an older sister that was kidnapped, tortured and killed. That is why the father was so protective of his younger daughter. The larger bear turned out to not only be the writer's landlord but also the alpha of a bear clan, and a mentor for many of the clan's teens. They do the usual amount of love making you would normally find in a romance book. The little girl keeps hanging round the writer. The writer finds out the little girl is living in very poor, unsanitary, malnourished conditions. When the alpha ( her mate) comes to her house for a date, his mate has given the little girl a bath and washed her clothes. She was furious and told her mate he had to help them, she would call child protective services. They got the little girl some newish clothes, and he took her home. The little girl did not want to go. They were living in a cave. After a lot of drama and talking, they got through to the father. The little girl in her bear form killed a woman that was trying to kill the alpha's mate because the woman was obsessed with the alpha. There was a mud slide from too much rain, and the house slid down the hill toward the river. The alpha , the little girl's dad, and the teens from the alphas club got the alphas mate and the little girl to safety just in time. It was after that the father started coming to his senses. The mud slide had washed away nearly the whole little town. The little girl's daddy moved his family back to town after the houses were rebuilt. The alpha and his mate lived happily ever after.
They were all good books, but if you can only see or listen to 1 this year, I recommend CHOSEN BY THE BEAR.

I recently explained to my Grandmother that WTF in the text message meant "WOW, THAT'S FANTASTIC". Her messages are much more entertaining now.

There is a symbolism in the fires we set; in the bridges we burn with intention, to the ground. We stand there, staring blankly at the rubble and debris. We take comfort in the fact, that we’re on the other side of it alone; that no one can harm us now. When the one person you trust most with your life is the one who slowly took it away day by day mark by mark it puts us on guard and every time we let someone get close enough, to feel the warmth of our light, it feels like all they want to do, is snuff it out. They don’t know what to do with our hurricane souls, so they try everything in their power, to water us down; to dismiss or to minimize our pain; to silence our thoughts somehow. Relationships always leave us feeling caged. We feel bent, and broken; we feel wounded and sometimes even afraid. And no matter how many times we try to explain it to them, this sadness inside us, still remains. We are left there in silence; the aftermath of such violence. We are left there all alone, to handle our rage. A pain born of fire; the object of horrific unwanted desire. A fierceness born, from forcibly living, inside of a cage. We didn’t ask for this to be our story. We’ve done everything in our power, to rewrite our history. But you cannot change the past; you can only change the future. And happiness just cant last, when your wounds are never sutured. They want us to heal, without feeling a thing; without hearing the story of what shattered our souls. They tell us it’s over now; that it’s all just in the past. They say to get over it; to move on with our lives; as if freedom is something we could ever truly grasp. We can barely breathe, most days of our life. We are fighting these demons, that the monsters left inside. They handed us their darkness, and we’re supposed to just instinctively know, how to turn it back into light. They murdered our soul; they shattered our innocence, and most of the world around us, doesn’t want us to put up a fight. They want us to be quiet. They want us to simmer down. They want us to handle this massacre inside us, without making a single sound; without speaking the depth of our pain, out loud. So you see, there is intention, in these bridges we burn down. We don’t just set them on fire with a match; we incinerate them, to the ground. We make sure that when we burn them, they can never be rebuilt; that we will never be able to cross them again. We keep ourselves safe. In our cage, we remain. It’s exactly where they wanted us, in the end. In our hollowed out shell, we are deathly silent. We are violently deconstructed. We keep burning these bridges to symbolically show, that our lives can only be reconstructed.in our own time and it takes years not weeks or months... We cannot heal, what we do not acknowledge; and they will not acknowledge our pain. So we stand here alone, on the other side of burning bridges, with the smell of burning ash, in our veins. We mutilate and burn our own flesh, in the flames. This is what abuse and mental and physical trauma does, to a domestic abuse survivor. This is the destruction, that it leaves in its wake. We are chaos, born of hellfire. We are the very definition, of debilitating pain. A pain that cant be seen by others only felt within ourselves.. And as long as no one allows us to speak our holy truth, we’ll be trapped all alone here, in our shame. And in the end, we’ll have nothing left to show for ourselves, but this burning flesh, and a cage.”

Ever notice how emotions, especially negative ones, can start out like a small drip and then grow into a trickle when it comes into touch with another. The emotion passes to the next person and then grows bigger. The two emotions roll together, widening the emotional stream and flows on to more people. Each contact, each transference of the emotions, makes the bad feeling keep flowing. If no one builds a dam to stop it, the bade emotion can take over everyone in its path. Like with a flash flood, with bad emotions people can get wet, only with the emotional river the water comes from tears shed from hurt feelings. The things washed away by the emotional flood can be rebuilt if the foundation was strong.

Copied from MrBallon Podcast, Jabar Sparco story

My wife was panicked. Her Maltese lil white dog was asleep on the back porch with a large rabbit in his mouth. Maltese dogs are bred to attack and retrieve burrowing animals like gophers and rabbits, but I never expected THIS. Both animals were covered with dirt. The rabbit was stiff, but some animals like to play dead when attacked.
I knew my neighbor raised award winning rabbits so I went to the kitchen sink and cleaned all the dirt off the rabbit, then I took him back next door and quietly, slid the rabbit back into its cage.

Not 30 minutes later, I hear my neighbor screaming so I went over to our fence and asked, "What's wrong?"
They tell me their rabbit died three days ago, and they buried it, and now it's back in the cage.

"The God-shaped hole in all of us is a voracious beast when stuffed full of the world. It'll take you to places you never wanted to go and keep you there longer than you ever wanted to stay."

https://youtu.be/b1_RKu-ESCY

     I got some good news today when I had the tee done.   Pending surgeon's review and ok:  I will not have to get the mitral valve replacement, AT LEAST NOT FOR NOW!  Also, they said the blood clot that was in my left atrial appendage is gone.   So if the cardiac surgeon agrees with my cardiologist, no surgery yayyyyyy   After months of bad news I finally get some good news.

    I got some good news today when i had the tee done.  Pending surgeon's review and ok: I will not have to get the mitral valve replacement, AT LEAST NOT FOR NOW! Also, they said the blood clot that was in my left atrial appendage is gone.  So if the cardiac surgeon agrees with my cardiologist, no surgery yayyyyyy  After months of bad news I finally get some good news.