The Wisconsin State Flower

Is alive and well in my backyard. I know that the traditional color for violets is purple but my backyard is a drift of white violets today. They're so pretty and every time I look at them I think that if I sprayed weed killer on the lawn they'd die. I don't want that.

 

When I opened the drapes this morning a chipmunk was perched on the patio step peering in at me as if to say, it's about time you got up. They have such cute and worried faces. Too bad they're such birdseed hogs. I saw one had climbed up the cob corn feeder crook and made short work of the corn on one whole cob. I don't know how it even got up there.

I spent most of the morning sitting here making a character list for Island Dreams to send to my new audiobook narrator. She was thrilled when I sent the one for The Seaview yesterday so I buckled down and got the other one done today. I feel bad that I didn't have one for Horizon or Better Than Mom's although they weren't filled with different accents like these other two are. I thought that Island Dreams had fewer Caribbean accented people. Wrong! I ended up with over 2 pages of characters and most of them have accents of some sort. I hope TH can deal with them. I'm sure she can.

The watercolor lesson today was a landscape. *sigh* I tried my best but it's not great. I like parts of it like the sky and the trees on the horizon on the left, but the other trees and bushes look out of place to me. I'm going back to painting flowers tomorrow or maybe the next day. I've got a bunch of errands to run tomorrow.

The House Finches' feathers have brightened considerably over the last week or so. They used to be a pale raspberry but today I noticed that their feathers are a deep reddish pink and the males are throwing their weight around with each other. They're fun to watch.

I finally broke down and folded the basket of clean laundry that's been languishing in the guest room for a week or more (definitely more!). I hauled the basket into the living room and folded while I watched TV. I haven't done that in years. I was so proud of myself I put it on my Gratitude Journal page along with raking the patio leaves in a gale. (They flew away very nicely once I got them out of the shelter of the house. Now the neighbors down the block can deal with them. It's very windy.)

And that's it for my day. I spent a while going through some of the comments from my last critique submission. One of the members gave excellent suggestions, I used almost all of them. Then I started working through the next chapter that I'll submit for session 4. That chapter's too long so I had to find a place to stop because we only submit 10 pages. It's a lot of critiquing when you consider that 6 other people send you 10 pages too. Good thing I'm retired!

--Barbara