A Satisfying Day

I had a vendor fair event today and it went well. It was my first sale using my lighted palm tree and flamingo head sunglasses rest. I like the way it looked. I sold seven books which is a good amount and the profit covers my booth fee. That's my measure of success, whether it pays for me to be there. Today it did. We'll see about tomorrow.

 

I started drawing this Blue Thistle last night but didn't get it finished in time to blog about it then. So I finished up today. I like it. Those aren't leaves around it but the book called them sepals. That doesn't seem right but who am I to argue?

 

A House Finch landed on the crook and then swooped down onto the square green feeder for just long enough to have his picture taken before flying away. I was just glad to see a bird on the feeder.

 

My virtual assistant was playing around on ChatGPT the other day and sent me a slew of graphics she made for me. I think this one is my favorite. Now I have to figure out what to use them for and where.

 

 

LJ came down to show me how to run my new Ariens Deluxe Snow King snowblower. (Pretty fancy name, huh?) He turned it on and ran it around but I'm still not sure I'd be comfortable with it. One day that I don't have an author event, I'll go out there and play with it, operator's manual in hand. 

Tomorrow I have to get up at 6 A.M. so I can eat breakfast, dress, and be out the door by 7:35 to get to Pulaski in time to set up at 8, before the fair starts at 9. I can guarantee I'll be tired when I get home. It's work to be "on" for five hours.

--Barbara 

They're Back

When I went out to put a birthday card for my brother-in-law into the mailbox, I looked down to see the happy sight of green daffodil sprouts uncovered by melting snow. They're nestled up to the edge of one of the mouse bait boxes and I hope that there aren't any sprouts under it.

 

More Christmas cactus flowers have bloomed. This is the one that grew sideways from the end of the leaf stem thingy.

 

Then I noticed the stamens of another flower hanging out from the center. You can see the dark, reddish purple of the pistil and the white stamens. At least I think that's what they're called. I like the delicacy of them.

 

For the first time in 2 weeks, I drew a gratitude journal page. I've been diligent about doing yoga every morning and can really feel the difference in my balance. And the sunshine and melting snow are welcome.

 

I almost wasn't able to blog tonight. I was at Friday Night Knitting and my internet went out. Nothing I did would make it come back so I had to call Spectrum to send a signal to restart it. It took about 5 minutes, five loooong minutes, but it's back. I confess I had a moment of panic when it wasn't coming back. Silly really, to be so dependent on it but I confess I am.

It got up to 55 degrees today and it's supposed to hit 60 tomorrow but only 38 on Sunday. I can't figure out the weather. Gotta finish this up. I have to be up really early to be in DePere for 8 o'clock to set up for the craft fair. Wish me luck.

--Barbara

Melting

It got up to 42 degrees today with sunshine so there was a lot of melting. The drips from the snow valance across the front of the house were almost like a rain curtain and soon enough the valances fell. I went out to shovel the snow off the driveway and got dripped on quite thoroughly. Of course I wasn't wearing a coat because it was so warm and sunny so my sweater got damp and I spent an hour smelling like wet wool. Better than smelling like wet dog, I guess.

 

When I drove down Fisk St. toward Mason St. to go to the east side on an afternoon errand, I had to follow a pair of snowplows that were knocking down the snowdrifts that extended out from the curbs. I'm going to hope they don't come down our street for a few days because the snow extends about 5 feet out from the curb at the end of the driveway and I don't know how to run the snowblower yet. I suppose there's always the owner's manual. If the snowblower can even move the slushy stuff.

 

I saw one wildlife today. This squirrel must have thought it smelled something under the snow on top of this can because it was enthusiastically digging under the snow but coming up empty. A Sparrow landed on top of the patio chair but flew away before I could take a picture. Two days ago the birdbath wore an impressive mound of snow. Today it's all water. Melting.

 

Here's the other blooming Christmas cactus flower. Now a third one is opening and the other two that were tiny nubbins are swelling up and looking promising.

 

Today's flower is Orange Blossom. It was easy to draw although I don't think I got the centers of the flowers right. It amuses me that coloring the flowers faintly blue makes them look whiter than leaving the petals uncolored on the white paper. 

 

I got a gift this afternoon from OJ. He said he'd made this little dog sculpture in class and didn't know what to do with it so he gave it to me. It's a very cute little dachshund looking thing. It kept me company when I had supper tonight.

 

Today was not a writing day. I'm frustrated by the whole ISBN/Amazon Extended Distribution snafu and it turned out that the first four PDF covers that I ordered are not in the format accepted by IngramSpark so I had to ask them to redo them--at an additional cost. Good thing I overpaid last week and had them put it on account, isn't it? I read through cda's pages for Monday's critique session and ordered new bookmarks with all 8 of my book covers on them. So that's my writer-y stuff for today.

--Barbara 

My New Toy

I had to set my alarm this morning so my neighbor could come over early to claim the old snowblower. Then not even an hour later a truck pulled up and I heard another snowblower and it was my new one being delivered. It looks very fancy and it's going to take me a lesson or two to learn how to run it. But I told the guy that the main reason I bought it was to keep it from snowing big again this winter. He laughed and agreed that was a good plan. My only disappointment is that it isn't red. It's orange but that's the color of this company. My neighbor, LJ, called me within five minutes to say he'd seen "your new baby" delivered. LJ will come over on Saturday afternoon to help me learn the ins and outs of the new machine.

 

Two more Christmas cactus buds flowered today. Naturally they're on opposite sides of the plant so they can't be in the same photo. I'll show one tonight and the other one tomorrow.

 

I spent a very frustrating time trying to upload The Seaview to IngramSpark only to discover that Amazon Extended Distribution made it available to them already. Which means I can't use the ISBN I've assigned to it again. Luckily I bought a 100-pack of them because it was cheaper than more than two 10-packs and with 8 books already published, another one in the hopper, and one in waiting I'm going to need plenty of them. So then I pulled up the next Seaview Series manuscript and went through it with ProWritingAid to see all of the suggestions for punctuation and grammar, and decide which ones I'll take and which I'll ignore. That's the manuscript I'll submit 25 pages at a time to the Novel Intensive group I've signed up for in April so I wanted to tidy it up before then.

 

This afternoon I painted. I fired up the iPad to the next flower in the 31 days course and it was a Chrysanthemum. I added the background. I like they way they turned out. Maybe I'll cut it up and make two cards.

 

After supper I watched a little TV and knitted a couple rows on the Vienne cardigan. Slowly but surely I'm adding a couple rows a night because a sweater is a big thing to knit and I don't want to be working on it for a year. But it's possible I might be. It just depends on my endurance and dedication.

 

Haven't seen any birds or squirrels since the big snowstorm which, by the way, is the heaviest in Green Bay since 1888 at 26.6 inches, 17.7 inches fell on Sunday alone. It beat the previous record by at least a couple of inches. The last record snowfall was in April of 2018 which was just under 24 inches. I talked to DS this morning and he said that he had to shovel out the furnace on the roof of the brewery yesterday. It was snow covered and wasn't running because it was being suffocated. Luckily once he had it cleared the furnace started working. He said it took him hours and he got so hot that he was down to his t-shirt.

 --Barbara

Being Careful

I had to drive maybe five miles to the store I'm buying the snowblower from to pay for it this morning. The streets were snow covered and slippery. The snow is the wet, packy kind of snow that's good for snowballs and snowmen but not so great for driving on. The plows worked all day yesterday and probably most of the night to clear all the streets but they couldn't clear them down to the pavement so there were a few places where I felt the car sliding instead of driving. And I had to back into the street and take another run at the driveway in low gear to get over the slick snow and into the nice dry garage. Whew. This is the view from my front door. A nice deep snow pile.

 

This Christmas cactus bud decided to shoot off to the side of the leaf it's growing out of. I wish all of the buds and flowers were closer together so I could take a picture of all of them at once but I'll have to be content with pictures of them one at a time.

 

Once I got home from the hardware store and got off the phone with my credit card company so they didn't think someone stole my credit card and charged a big-ticket item, I settled down to working on Atticus. I got the rest of the parts of each one into the file, made sure that the right words were on some of the pages, and generally worked to get them ready to be downloaded and then uploaded. I was tempted to upload one of the ones I have the correct format cover for but then I chickened out. I've got to read the how-tos on IngramSpark to make sure I have all the info they want before I start. 

 

Then I decided to schedule three more short stories on Substack. The most challenging was finding a stock photo to use with each story but I managed to find adequate ones. I'm so glad I realized that I can schedule posts ahead so I'm not scrambling each week to find and post a story. 

 

I got so caught up with writing I didn't leave time in my day for drawing. I thought about painting but then I got distracted by Substack so I didn't. Maybe I'll paint tomorrow while I'm waiting for the snowblower to be delivered.

--Barbara 

The Snow Stopped

But not the wind. It spent a few extra hours whipping skeins of snow around. I went out and cleared the driveways before the snow stopped when the wind sent snow in my face no matter which direction I looked. My snowblower seemed to be running poorly so I called my neighbor who came down and pronounced it old but still functional. I made an executive decision to get a new, slightly smaller machine without the mechanical excentricities. I'm too old to worry about whether it'll work when I need it to. I informed my neighbor/tenant that I was getting a new snowblower and he offered to buy the old one, even knowing its flaws. Of course, I said yes. Once again, I did the driveways and he did the plow drift and the final cleanup. That is not me, that's my neighbor with my snowblower. See how tall the snowdrift is behind him?

 

It's important to make sure that the furnace intake doesn't have snow piled over it so I stepped out the patio door to check. I'd forgotten how far down the first step is and the snow was so deep I was glad I held onto the door handle so I didn't lose my balance. It was deeper than my boots. And the intake was clear.

 

Here's the living room windows this morning. There was so much snow stuck to the screens that it was hard to see out. And if you look carefully you can see the snow hanging off the eaves like a valance. It's hanging over the driveway too and I hope it doesn't fall overnight because I have to go pay for the new snowblower in the morning so they'll deliver it this week. I also figure if I get a new machine that will stop it from snowing big again this winter/spring.

 

Today's flower is Double Flowering Plum. It's another tree. This one I've heard of. It was pretty simple to draw and color. I wish I had another shade of pink to use to color these blooms. Pink seems to be a dominant color lately.

 

This is the smallest Christmas cactus bud that's showing color. It posed very nicely for me when I was taking pictures of the rest of the buds. They're all bigger and showier so I thought this demure one should get the exposure today. It's about the size of a pencil eraser.

 

I spent most of the afternoon, once the high-powered snowblower negotiations were complete, on Atticus getting Better Than Mom's and Christmas at Seaview formatted and ready to be uploaded once I get the covers back from the designers. Things are going so smoothly that I fear I'm missing something or doing something wrong. I'll find out when it's time to get them on IngramSpark.

 

I'm so glad the storm is over and we can go back to real life. It's supposed to be in the 40s Thursday, Friday, and Saturday so a lot of what fell will melt. I'm good with that.

--Barbara 

Enough Already

It evidently started snowing last night around 11 o'clock. It took a break about an hour ago. So far we've gotten 19.5 inches of snow. And they say it's not done. Not only has it snowed a crap ton but it's been windy all day too which made snowblowing a real adventure and made pretty drifts on front of the garage door and hanging off the roof. I went out twice during the storm to try to stay ahead of it and then the third time after the snowplow went by and pushed up a 3 foot by 3 foot drift across the end of the driveway. My neighbor/tenant, bless his soul, came out when I was just starting to try to clear the drift and asked if he could do it. You bet! I took this picture after the first snowblowing when there was a mere 10" or so on the ground. Ooh, I almost forgot to mention that in the middle of the day we had thunder, lightning, and snow! Freaky!

 

This one was taken after the second snowblowing a few hours later. I didn't take a picture after that because the camera only focused on the snow stuck to the window and not the snow outside. I took it to send to a California friend so she'd know what she's missing by having moved away. Oh, and at one point there was a female House Finch on the crook. It didn't stay long but, holy cow, what was that tiny bird doing out in the storm?

 

Today's flower is the "Star Wars" Magnolia. I have absolutely no idea what this tree flower has to do with Star Wars but that's the name in the book so I'm going with it. It was pretty fun and easy to draw. I'm especially happy with the stem.

 

Speaking of flowers, the Christmas cactus is still showing off. The first flower is fully open now and the second one is hot on its heels. There are two others behind that one and a couple little nubbins with potential. This whole thing is rather thrilling. Who knew that a bigger pot and fresh soil and better light would make all this happen? 

 

When I wasn't battling snowmageddon today I was exchanging emails with GetCovers. For some reason their understanding of what I wanted done to change the covers from JPGs with no text on the back to PDFs with text on the back got lost between the first four and the last four. Whoever sent me the second invoice charged me four times as much for the simple cover changes so I asked what changed. I had to reiterate what I wanted done and they came back with the correct charges. Of course I've already paid too much so now I have money "on account." That's okay. The next Seaview book will be ready by autumn so that'll take care of one. Then I've got the first book manuscript I ever wrote when I was just getting started on this novel quest. It's a cozy mystery and getting it tidied up for publication should be a lot of fun. And quite a challenging learning experience.

It's actually a good thing this storm came this weekend because next weekend I have an event on both Saturday and Sunday. A snowstorm wouldn't be a good thing at all. One is in DePere, about 5 miles south, and the other is in Pulaski, about 18 miles west. Naturally they both start at 9 instead of 10 like the ones we did last fall, so I'll be setting my alarm and dragging myself out early. I have to keep reminding myself that I want to do this. That I need to do this. It's fun. (Keep telling yourself that, Barbara.) 

I spent time, between bouts of snowblowing, working my way through the rest of the latest Seaview manuscript and seeing if I couldn't figure out where to put a little bit about the police arresting a guy who murdered a departing guest. But the murder's not "on camera." The police come to interrogate another guest and end up arresting her on very flimsy grounds. I have got to quit adding scenes, the book's getting long.

--Barbara