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