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