Hard Fought

Words were a struggle today. I sat down here after I got home from the grocery and had lunch and... nothing. I had no clue what to write or where to go in the story. Where I ended yesterday felt like an end and I had no idea where to go from there. So I sent Rose on a scuba dive. It was all I could think of to do. My mind was such a blank that I went online trying to find the names and locations of shipwrecks around the island of Anguilla and the search took me down any number of rabbit holes. I even cleaned out the bottom drawer of my nightstand looking for an Anguilla map or something to help me get some words down on paper/screen. I found an Eastern Caribbean guidebook on Amazon for $17 but it didn't sound like it had much Anguilla info in it. Finally somehow I came upon a site that let me download a chapter of a guidebook for $4 that tells me exactly what I wanted to know. It has the names and descriptions of the wrecks and some of the dive sites around the island. Thank heavens. I can always write about a scuba dive so I managed to eke out 1819 words today. I was astonished that I got that high when I was almost ready to pack it in when I got to just over 700 words. Oh and my grand total so far is 16,643 on my way to 50k in just 30 days.

When I was grubbing around the house looking anywhere for Anguilla diving information I went downstairs to see if I had a diving guidebook rattling around down there. I didn't. But I did find a short stack of the kids' old drawing books that I brought upstairs and delved into once I had my words nailed down. The book that I looked in was all about drawing people and he had you start with stick people so I have a page with nothing but stick people doing things.

Then I treated myself to another Seuss-ian creature. I have no earthly clue what this is supposed to be but it's big and it's purple and it's happy. I like it.

When I was drawing I looked out to see that the world had turned pink so I got my camera and went out onto the front stoop to snap a picture of the sunset--at 4:49pm. For some reason this week seeing the dark arriving so early is almost painful. Why can't they just leave the clocks alone?

And that's it. I shopped for the next bout of Investment Cooking today. It cost a little bit more than it has in the past but I figure that's because I added a couple recipes to the list so I needed more food and more meat. I'll start tomorrow. While I was clearing out the nightstand drawer I found an old journal from the late 90s and I am sad to say that I have not evolved much from that time. I think I'm a little less depressed than I was then but mostly the things I wrote about are the same things I would write about today if I journaled, which I don't because I don't ever seem to change.

--Barbara