It's Great Being Retired

Wanna know why? Because I can spend all day doing one thing, ignoring everything else on my "to-do" list, and enjoying it. Last week when I told the facilitator of my Novel critique group that I'd discovered an age discrepancy in a character from The Seaview who has a much bigger role in The Seaview: Open For Business she recommended that I make a document with names, ages, hair & eye color, and a few other facts. So that's what I've been doing the last few days. Today I also finished going through the sequel taking out a lot of dialogue tags and then I realized that I should have a character list for The Seaview because that might help the audiobook producer. So I took this list, eliminated the characters not in the first book and then skimmed the old manuscript for characters not in the sequel and added them in. Whew.

I saw that some of the tiny bulbs have bloomed out front. This grape hyacinth was standing there looking perfect and I managed to get down to its level and take its picture. It's barely 4" high.

The big hyacinths are blooming too. They're spread out across the front of the house. I could smell their fragrance when I went out to take their picture. Mm, heavenly. No wonder they were one of Dad's favorite flowers.

This regular old daffodil that's yellow with a yellow trumpet is one of the bulbs that I planted nearly 46 years ago the first autumn we lived here when I was enormously pregnant with DS. I'm astounded that a few of those original daffodils are still blooming.

A Mourning Dove took a bath this afternoon. Naturally it had its back turned so all I got was a picture of its back end but I was glad to see a bird taking advantage of the newly clean birdbath even if it was just a goofball of a Mourning Dove. They're so awkward and silly looking.

I did a little drawing once my eyes got tired from staring at a computer screen all day. They're out of Things With Wings. I like the beetle the best, I think.

Today's Gratitude Journal was a pretty easy one. Granted, I spent most of the day sitting in one place so my choices were limited but I managed.

I've been in communication with my audiobook narrator and she can't get the Caribbean accent to her satisfaction so I'm going to have to look for another narrator for The Seaview and Island Dreams. One good thing, she posted about it in her social media and just emailed me that four of her narrator friends are interested in auditioning. I'm disappointed that she can't do it because I've been so happy working with her and loved the way the first two turned out but I appreciate her being honest about it. I hope the other narrators are as easy to work with as she is.

--Barbara

Wow!

What a day we had! It was mostly sunny and got up to 75 degrees. SEVENTY FIVE! You'd better bet I had the patio door and a bunch of windows open to air out the house. I went out to fill the birdfeeders and also removed the heater from and cleaned out the birdbath. Now it looks like someplace that a self-respecting bird can get a drink or take a bath instead of a swamp.

I haven't been paying attention so I missed the "little pink fists" stage of the growth of the rhubarb. I was bowled over when I glanced at it today and saw all these green leaves. Not too long before I can make a batch of rhubarb sauce to put over my Greek yogurt. Yum.

First thing this morning before I did anything else (even before I got dressed) I made a batch of Egg Drop Soup. I was happy to find baby bok choy in the grocery on Friday so that went in along with a can of chopped portobello mushrooms and a can of white meat chicken. I know it's a lazy way to do it but it's so easy to chop up the bok choy and then drain the two cans and just chuck them into the pot. I can make a cauldron of soup in less than 30 minutes and that's with having to go downstairs to get cornstarch when the upstairs can runs out. I had some for supper. It's delish. The batch makes two big containers like this so I'm set for supper for about 10 days. Yay!

I took another stab at the watercolor pattern painting. This one's better, I think, except for that one motif on the right edge that was too wet when I painted other parts and it all smooshed together.

I heard a raucous bird call and looked out to see a couple courting pairs of Brown-headed Cowbirds. The males were calling trying to impress the females. They didn't seem all that interested. Cowbirds are the ones that lay their eggs in other birds' nests and then let them raise the Cowbird babies. Terrible.

And I finally caught a Chickadee standing still. I had to take the picture through two layers of double-pane glass so it's not the clearest photo but it's a Chickadee and it was holding still.

Today's Gratitude Journal was an easy one. Sunny and warm and a clean birdbath. What's not to love?

Instead of chasing after "so" in the manuscript this afternoon, I started at the beginning and eliminated a whole raft of dialogue tags. It amazes me how many of them I can get rid of because it's obvious who's talking. Now if it's obvious to readers is another story. I get to send 200 pages to the Novel group facilitator so I'm sure she'll let me know if I've cut out too much.

--Barbara

It Was Sunny All Day

Sunny and warm, but the best part of the day was LC's piano recital. She played her song beautifully for someone in her first year of piano. I'm sure her knees were knocking but she went up there and played like a champ. I'm so proud of her. In fact, she's the first item on my Gratitude Journal page today. Everything else pales in comparison.

The watercolor today was patterns. I'm sure that I did this wrong if you can make paint strokes wrong. My arrangement isn't the best, crowded on the left and spread out on the right, and I didn't use the whole sheet of paper so I could have put this all in the middle. Instead I crammed it all in on the left. Maybe I'll take another stab at it tomorrow. I don't hate it and it was kind of fun just making paint marks.

There are hardly any suet pellets left in the feeder as you can see, but this Downy Woodpecker managed to cling to the feeder so that he could peck away at what was left.

And the male Cardinal hopped around on the ground for a while looking for things to eat. I need to fill all the feeders tomorrow so that there's food for all.

I had an online writing workshop this morning that gave me a lot to think about. She mostly focused on mystery and crime writing but a lot of what she said pertains to my kind of writing too, like putting trouble and worry on every page. ON EVERY PAGE. I'm having trouble putting trouble in every scene or chapter, how am I ever going to put it on every page. I think I could do worry on pages too. Rose worries about how she's going to pay for everything if she doesn't get more paying guests. She worries about Calvin getting in and fiddling with the plumbing thinking that she'd have to call him to fix it. (She doesn't.) She has to worry about the rumors that Mrs. Whiting spreads about her looking down on the people of Anguilla and how she's only there to make money. Oh, and she's only interested in Iggy for the sex. Sorry to bore you with this but sometimes it helps to talk it out.

Another thing she said was to cut down or eliminate most of the instances of "but," "so," "some," and "that." I spent two hours after the recital going through the manuscript with the Find function to make decisions on the over 350 instances of the word "but." Some of them were butter or button but the large majority of them were just plain old "but." I cut out about 100 of them. Tomorrow I'll tackle "so."

And she said to eliminate most dialogue tags, the "he said" and "she said" in the story. I don't know how I feel about that. I'll eliminate some of them but if I feel like it's hard to tell who's talking I'll leave them in.

So that was my day. I hope you had a good Saturday. We went for custard after the recital. I had chocolate with hot fudge. It was yummy.

--Barbara

A Much Smaller Bird

Sadly there was no Turkey today. One interesting bird was a male Goldfinch that flew away just as I pressed the shutter button but then the female Goldfinch flew down and took his place so I took her picture instead.

 

And a Downy Woodpecker landed on the nearly empty suet pellets feeder. I managed to get a halfway decent photo considering that he's on the backside of the feeder so all I got was his head, his tail, and part of his belly.

I decided to try my hand at another watercolor landscape this morning. It didn't turn out too badly, if I do say so myself. I wasn't going to add the bushes and trees but it needed something so I dabbed them in. Looks okay.

 

Today's Gratitude Journal was an easy one. We had a partly sunny day (I refuse to say partly cloudy) and I found baby bok choy at the grocery. I like chopping it up to put in Egg Drop Soup which I plan to make tomorrow or Sunday. They haven't had the baby kind in months but they were out of scallions, even the organic ones, so you win some, you lose some. I'll just use an onion.

I looked out while having my soup for supper to see this rabbit looking in at me. It didn't even twitch when I slowly reached for the camera to take its picture. I don't know if it's a boy or a girl, they all look the same to me.

I spent most of the afternoon doing critiques for next Wednesday's Novel critique group. Everyone waited until yesterday to submit their pages which makes for a lot of critiquing in a short time.

Tomorrow I've signed up for an online writing workshop at 11 and I just learned that LC has her first piano recital tomorrow afternoon at 1. I'll make it if I have to skip out of the workshop early.

--Barbara

She Came Back

I looked out when I was having lunch and the Turkey hen came back. She really likes the fallen birdseed. She spent some time grazing on it then and came back later in the day for some more concentrated pecking time. Her feathers are so pretty. Look at her back and tail. I like that rusty gold color with the black markings. She doesn't have a pretty face but her back end is nice looking.

Then I saw this gray bird walking around in the grass pecking at things I couldn't see. It turned so that I saw its breast and realized that it was a Flicker. They're a ground-feeding woodpecker variety and show up here every once in a while. The picture is kinda blurry because the bird was so far away that the camera didn't focus on it. I have to be so quick that I can't futz around with focus or shifting to manual to get a better picture. I just have to point and shoot.

And the Cardinal paid a visit today too. He pecked around in the platform feeder and then swooped down onto the ground to see what there was to see and then flew away almost immediately.

I have the first wildflower of the season blooming in my backyard. It's the first dandelion of the spring! I know people don't like them but the bees do so I'm keeping them. I can't bring myself to spray weed killer or pesticide on my lawn. I just can't do it. I'm happy to be the host for the neighborhood's quota of dandelions.

Watercolor didn't go so well today. This is supposed to be a landscape of a butte or mesa (I don't know the difference) and a lake or some kind of water. I tried painting this twice and am not thrilled with either one. This one is the first one I painted and it's simpler and therefore a little better in my estimation. It also slightly resembles the example in the book. I'm better with carrots.

Then I did some sketching with watercolor pencils. In the lower right is another landscape. That one I like. Maybe I'll try doing something like that with watercolor tomorrow.

Drawing went better. These are from 20 Ways to Draw a Jellyfish. I especially like the squid. I think the walrus looks a little inquisitive, the starfish is a bit wonky, and the whale looks upside down. I still like them.

I took this picture to show you the pit that the birds, squirrels, and rabbits have dug off the edge of the patio. That's where the seed falls so they've spent the winter (what there was of it) burrowing down to get the fallen seed and making the pit deeper every day. The chipmunk enjoys it too.

I went to the dentist this morning to have a cavity filled. Instead of freezing half of my face he used a new technique where he injected anesthetic in the root of the tooth so only that tooth was frozen. He drilled and filled and all I felt was a little pressure. And I didn't look like I'd had a stroke or end up biting my lip when I tried to eat.

I complained to the facilitator of the Novel critique group about catching the booboo of having a character be one age in the first novel and a different age in the second one. I fixed it but LL suggested that I make a document with short descriptions of my characters so that if I make this into a series I have a fighting chance of not making the same mistake again. I'm sure I'll make others but I spent the afternoon skimming the manuscript and marking down the characters as I came to them with age, small physical description, and their role in the story. It'll help me keep things straighter.

--Barbara

One Big Bird

This morning I was having my yogurt and granola breakfast and happened to look outside and couldn't get to the camera fast enough. There was a hen Turkey casually grazing on the fallen birdseed. A Turkey! Someone told me on Monday that there was a flock of them in the neighborhood but I hadn't seen any. Now I've seen one. I left the birdbath in the picture so you had some idea of how big she is. She's like a couple hundred times bigger than the usual visitors to the birdfeeders. She very casually paced across the backyard and up into the neighbor's yard where I lost sight of her. Pretty cool.

On the other end of bird size scale was this Goldfinch that spent some time on the round feeder. The little female waited up on top of the crook while the male ate his fill. I didn't see what they did after that. It was so nice this afternoon that I had the patio door open and the window in my bedroom open so that real, un-furnace air could come in the house. Bliss.

Since it was so nice out I moved the car out of the garage and swept up all of the winter crud and salt and leaves that had collected in there over the year since the last time I swept. I couldn't believe the size of the pile of dirt and leaves that I brushed into a dustpan and dumped into a plastic bag that I then deposited very carefully into the trash bin. I didn't want to drop it for fear that the bag would break and all of the dirt would be all over the bin.

While I was out there I got very brave (and potentially foolhardy) and climbed up the ladder hauling the dolly up with me so that I could very carefully wriggle it into place on the shelf. It took some finagling but I managed not to fall and to get the dolly back where it was. It's only taken me about 4 years to get up the guts to do that.

I really like today's watercolor. It's out of Free-Spirited Watercolor and it's carrots. Two bunches of them. I think I like the left one which was the first bunch described in the book. The right bunch is one that she guided us to embellish with extra marks. Eh, I'm not convinced that was a good idea.

Today's drawing was from 20 Ways to Draw a Butterfly or as I like to call it Things With Wings. I especially like the bee but am happy with all of today's figures--the pterosaur, the bat, the flying fish, the dove, the bee, and the moth.

And the Gratitude Journal of the day was short and sweet. It was sunny with a few clouds today and that's always something I'm grateful for, then there was the big bird, and cleaning up the garage floor. Done!

I spent a little time adding some physical descriptions to the manuscript today and in the process realized a big booboo. I went back into the final manuscript of the first novel to see if I'd put in any physical description of Janet, the first guest and discovered that in The Seaview I made Janet about the same age as Rose, the owner, who is sixty-five-ish. In the sequel I had made her in her thirties. Oops. So I went back in and made her in her fifties and her soon-to-be ex-husband the same age. I'm so very glad that I caught that today when I have the time and ability to make the change. That's the second time I've had to save the sequel from a big screw up. Whew. I hope there aren't any more lurking around.

 --Barbara

I'm Normal!

I went for a GI follow-up appointment today with the Nurse Practitioner and didn't find out much more than I already knew but I did have a hemoglobin test and it's 12.4, which is in the Normal range. Hallelujah! Nobody knows the cause of this disease and the only sure cure is surgery to remove the seeping capillaries in severe cases, which I don't have. I'll have another endoscopy in 3 months, the doc said. And I suspect that I'll be having a couple three of them every year forever. *sigh* I can't have anything normal. Oh, and I got a call from the nurse after I'd left the clinic that one of the blood samples they took coagulated so they couldn't run the test so would I please come back for another blood draw? Sure. My veins rarely cooperate and today was no exception. I got poked three times and only the last one was really successful.

I caught sight of a Bluejay on the remains of the peanuts pile this morning but was way too late to get a picture. I was happy to see it anyway even though I watched and it didn't come back.

Today's watercolor is not much of a success. It's supposed to be hollyhocks but I don't think it looks like them. I tried to follow the notes I made last May in watercolor class at The Clearing but it didn't turn out so well. The line of blue and green dots on the right side of the paper is supposed to be delphiniums.

This evening I finished knitting the sixth ball of cashmere yarn on the Cashmere Sophie scarf and added on ball number seven which is a sort of pewter gray. I only knitted a couple rows of the new color because my wrists hurt so I quit knitting for the night.

I was grateful that I got to do the after school run this afternoon and I had a credit at the used book store so I took LC and OJ along to help me spend it. They found some good stuff--LC found a Harry Potter cookbook and OJ found a book of 1000 science facts and a graphic novel. They're reading the Harry Potter books as bedtime stories as a family so everything is all Harry all the time over at their house. DIL1 had never read them so she's enjoying the stories as much as the kids are. Such a great family. LC wanted to see my books on the shelf and I noticed that she'd sold another book or two! Yay!

The doctor's appointment took up way more time than I expected today and then I go way early to wait for school dismissal to get a close parking place (I listen to an audiobook while I wait) so my day really flew by. I'm including more daffodil pictures just because they're pretty and I want to.

--Barbara