Back To What Passes For Normal Around Here

This morning, just before I left for my session with T the Trainer at the Y, DD and family drove off toward home. (They're home now, a nice fast trip.)  I spent most of the afternoon getting things back to where they'd been, un-childproofing the place.  Unhappily they brought a cold with them that decided it wanted to stick around.  I started the Zicam last night and am throwing everything I have at the virus.  I hoped that my stuffy head and postnasal drip was due to the two days of thick fog, damp, and oddly mild weather but I don't think so.  Dang it.



We met DS at the brewery on Christmas afternoon for a tour.  It's a real place!  I've been driving by for months watching it go up but being able to go inside and see that the finishing is happening was amazing.  Pretty soon it'll be open for business.  Can't wait.






This afternoon I worked on getting the last batch of line edits tucked into the manuscript of The Seaview so now I put it away for a while to get a little distance from it.  That left me stuck for what to work on tomorrow when I meet ACJ but then I remembered that I found a hole in Horizon so I scrolled through and found the bold, all caps note I'd made and printed the pages so I have something to do tomorrow.  Whew.





Tonight I worked on the felted hat.  I need about four more inches of crown before the decreases.  It's going slowly but I'll keep working on it.




26 December--Barbara Malcolm, Spies Don't Retire. 

Irina stood in front of the closet she shared with Dimitri, the invitation to Billie’s luncheon party in her hand.  The stricture of “garden party formal” had her stumped.  All of her clothes were dark colors, jewel tones that complimented her dramatic Slavic bone structure and coloring.  She did not own one pastel garment, one frothy frock for playing lady.  Knowing that to refuse the invitation was social suicide and that despite her disdain for most of the people here, she needed to have some social contacts and these women, these shallow, uninteresting women were it.  She wracked her brain, there was no one she felt close enough to on the island to call, until she came up with a brilliant idea.

She would take the Katherine Hepburn route.  She was tall and slender and leggy like Miss Hepburn, so she would wear cream trousers and a cream silk shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, as if she had just come off the tennis court.  She had a pair of gold sandals that would add just the right touch of glitz and she could unearth some more traditional jewelry to wear with it.  Relieved that she would be able to blend into the party but still make her own statement, she gathered up a notebook and pen, and went to sit in her garden and write.

Most of the amaryllis leaves flopped over the other day.  I looked online and think I may have overwatered it a bit.  I'll let it dry out for a while to see what happens.  Still no flower stalk.

I'll be glad to be back in my own bed tonight.  I slept in the guest room while DD was here (because the crib fits in the corner of this room) and had dreams of Durwood every night.  Not sad dreams or unhappy ones but I don't dream about him a lot so it was a big change.  I didn't hate it but was kind of unsettled by it.  Not that I ever forget Durwood, I don't, it just seemed to bring his absence closer again. *sigh* This being a widow isn't for sissies.
--Barbara