Month: December 2025

Fighting Chaos While Working #MondayMusings #OpenBookBlogHop #Inspiration

Welcome to another Open Book Blog Hop. Here’s this week’s prompt.

 

Name a distraction that drives you mad when trying to work.

 

My Phone

 

My iPhone can be the most distracting thing on the planet. I’m visually impaired and use Voiceover, a text-to-speech program built into the phone. When I get a notification, it immediately reads it to me. This, combined with chimes from applications indicating a new notification, is almost too much.

Of course, I can set focus modes or just turn on Do Not Disturb altogether. I already have Do Not Disturb set to come on when I’m in a location such as the senior center where my choir practices.

But if I turn on Do Not Disturb, I often forget to turn it off, then wonder why no one is calling, texting, or liking my recent blog post. When I look at my notifications, I realize I forgot to turn Do Not Disturb off. I now only turn it on when I’m in a meeting or social situation where an interruption would be rude.

I recently figured out how to configure Voiceover so that it says nothing when I get a notification. I still hear the application chimes, and I could turn those off, but they don’t bother me as much as Voiceover’s constant yammering. Besides, it’s good to know when friends and family, for whom I have certain text tone alerts set, are trying to reach me. If I lay my phone face down, I rarely hear anything.

 

What About You?

 

What distracts you the most when you’re trying to work? You can answer in the comments or click here to join the conversation and see what others say. Thank you for reading.

 


Abbie wears a blue and white V-neck top with different shades of blue from sky to navy that swirl together with the white. She has short, brown hair and rosy cheeks and smiles at the camera against a black background.

Photo Courtesy of Tess Anderson Photography

Photo Resize and Description

by Two Pentacles Publishing

 

New! Living Vicariously in Wyoming: Stories

Copyright 2025 by Abbie Johnson Taylor

Published independently with the help of DLD Books.

 

The scene shows an isolated barn off to the right in a snowy field, probably shortly after sunset. The foreground is a mixture of white, blue, and brown shades. Behind the barn is a line of dense, dark trees, many of them evergreens. The sky is the pink one sometimes sees at sunset, and a full moon hangs above the treetops to the left. The title is in plain black letters against the sky with a white glow behind them. The author’s name is in white letters near the bottom of the cover.

Image Description written by Leonore Dvorkin of DLD Books.

 

As defined in the first story, living vicariously means living your life through someone else’s. You’re invited to live vicariously through the lives of the people in these stories. There’s the lawyer who catches his wife in the act with a nun. A college student identifies with a character in a play. A young woman loses her mother and finds her father. And a high school student’s prudish English teacher strenuously objects to a single word in her paper.

In Wyoming, as in any other state, people fall in love, and sometimes relationships are shattered. Accidents, domestic violence, prejudice, and crimes all occur. Lives are torn apart, and people are reunited. Ordinary people deal with everyday and not–so–everyday situations.

The 25 stories in this collection, most of which are set in Wyoming, are about how the various characters resolve their conflicts—or not.

 

Click here for more information and ordering links.

 

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