Moving Slow This Morning

It's overcast, I'm still kind of tired, and I'm not really moving very fast.  I need to because I get to go to work today but I suspect this'll be one of those days that I slide in just as the clock ticks over to 10 o'clock and, watch, this'll be the day that someone's waiting in the lot for me to open.  Usually if I'm late, there's someone there looking at their watch as I pull in and if I'm early, nobody comes in or calls until about 2 PM.  It's the law of the jungle.  Just like when I pulled into the bank drive-thru yesterday it was empty but two other cars pulled in, one on each side, immediately so the teller got confused as to who was first and in the hubbub forgot to give me the coins necessitating a second stop for my eighty-four cents.  Hey, those eighty-four cents-es add up, I can't be just saying "oh well" and leaving them at the bank.  Nope, can't do that.

As you can see, the big spaghetti squash is slowly turning yellow (which means it's ripening) and it'll stay out there until the vine is shriveled and dried and the stem dries up.  The gourds too.  I learned the hard way not to pick winter squash too early.  Ick.







The sedum blooms have opened fully showing their lavender pink color.  They look very pretty against the gray-green foliage and yellow-green ferns but the flash kind of washed the color out and the no-flash one makes a slightly blurry picture.  I'm going with the slightly blurry one because the colors are truer.

I didn't get much knitting done yesterday as you can see.  Just the barest beginning of Sudoku Stone #8, because I was busy assembling my manuscript, notebooks, 58 pencils (a rough estimate), various manifestations of Post-its, and an old copy of the manuscript from which I hope to mine ideas for expansion scenes, because the last time I read it through a lot of the scenes I had in my head had never made it to the page.  That's what I plan to work on next week, fleshing out the scenes that don't really advance the plot but make the storyline make more sense.  A good goal for the week, don't you think?  Oh, see what looks like a black bracelet?  It's really a USB drive in a strap that says "my novel" on it that you can wear around your wrist.  I ordered it a few years back from NaNoWriMo; it's the perfect place to keep my novel files. Plus it's cool, at least I think so.

September 23--Judah S. Harris, Big Ben.  The clock tower surprises you.  I mean, you know you're riding the train into London.  You've changed from the train to the Tube, and you know you're going to get off the Tube near the Houses of Parliament.  But you're not prepared to walk up the stairs of the Tube station to street level and be right on the banks of the Thames and Big Ben is smack dab across the street.  Smack. Dab.  And even more amazing it's chiming the hour, eleven in the morning, just serenely bonging away like it wasn't a widely-known landmark but just some random bell in a ho-hum town clock in a mediocre square somewhere.  It's really rather shocking.  Someone needs to warn people so they'll be ready for it.

I was thinking of you, DD, when I wrote that remembering being on the phone with you when you climbed those stairs and were so surprised to see Big Ben right there.  I think that was one of my favorite phone conversations ever.  I love you, Squirt, and I hope you're feeling better today.  I'm off, I've dilly-dallied long enough that getting to work on time will now be a race against the clock.  On my mark, get set, GO!
--Barbara