Another Month

Today is November 1.  Another month is upon us, another month of sticking close to home, wearing a mask, social distancing, and washing my hands like I'm headed to do surgery.  The good thing about November 1 is it's the first day of National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo.  I played along five times about ten years ago and thought I'd take another stab at it.  After I got over my shock at how long it's been since I did it, I fired up my laptop and started looking for a story I started a loooooong time ago that I thought maybe I could pick up the thread of the story and continue it.  I spent most of the afternoon trying to find the story start, looking in all the wrong places, before finding it and printing it off.  While it was printing I read through the 27 pages of it and I'm not sure I can pick up where I left off.  So I called up a blank page and started typing.  I whined and complained, explained and excused myself for 1,685 words which is 18 more words than required to hit 50,000 words in 30 days.  A good start.  I'll sit down again tomorrow and maybe I'll have more luck in the story department.  If not, I'm sure I can dredge up another 1,667 words of complaint, whining, and excuses.

It was cold and windy today, really windy.  All of the leaves that I raked the other day and a whole lot more spread themselves over the lawn today.  *sigh*  I hate raking leaves, it's such a repetitive and thankless task.  I charged up the batteries of the leaf blower and will go out with the blower and see about gathering up the leaves once it isn't so windy.  Tomorrow or Tuesday.  Maybe it'll warm up enough that the lawnmower will start again and I can mow the leaves into mulch, but probably not.

No birds today but this squirrel ate the last bit of suet cake and then leaped up onto the suet pellets for more.  Like I said the other night, I can't figure out how it gets any satisfaction out of gnawing on the pellet feeder.  The holes are too small for it to get much of a bite.

You're going to think I've slipped a cog but I'm really not into knitting these days.  I have to have something simple to knit because I'm the host of the knitting guild Zoom social knit on Thursday evening.  So I cast on another Kyna's Washcloth using two colors of cotton and linen yarn.  It's the simplest of knits which fits my needs perfectly.

01 November--Barbara Malcolm, The Seaview. 

It took Silas and Edward all that day and part of the next to clean up the mess and carefully check all of the floor and ceiling boards to make sure that the late-night fire hadn’t damaged anything.

I went back to my stool in the back garden, back to prying out nails and hearing them clatter into the can with all the others.  I was very angry that someone I had met, someone who had been polite to me, nice to me had broken into my new hotel and nearly burned it down with their drunken partying.  It didn’t escape my notice that neither Bo nor Shaggy showed up for work again.  I didn’t want to accuse them but after lunch that first day when I asked Edward about them not being there he looked off to one side and slid his shoe across the sandy floor.

“Well, Mrs. Rose, see Bo and Shaggy they like to party and I think last night they partied very hard.  You might not see them for a few days.”  He peeped out at me from under luxurious lashes, gauging my reaction to that bit of news.

“Oh, they like to party, do they?”  I dipped my eyes to catch his gaze and straightened up.  He reluctantly followed my eyes until he was standing upright.  “Do you think they like to make a bonfire when they party?”  I could see the answer in his eyes.  I knew that asking a young man to betray his friends was asking a lot but I needed to know who I could trust on the island.

Today's toss was a couple more long-sleeved tee shirts that are just too big.  It's a nice problem to have.

Last night I got up to go to the bathroom and my right leg was asleep.  I stumbled along and finally turned my ankle before I got control of myself.  I don't think I broke anything but it aches a bit and I'm sure it'll take a while to heal.  It sucks to get older and it sucks to have to get up to pee every night.  Just once I'd like to sleep through the night again.  Is that too much to ask?

--Barbara