Orange You Glad

I was so excited to see a male Oriole land on the feeder and stop for a few bites (sips?) of grape jelly. Finally. I managed to snap three pictures so you can expect to see them all in the coming days.

 

And the male Hummingbird visited twice, too. I thought the female came around suppertime, but when I looked at the pictures I could see the ruby throat and knew it was the male. Maybe he won't share the location of the feeder with the Mrs. 

 

I went out with my leather gloves and some lopping shears to cut back all of the dead rose canes so you can see how Dad's rose is growing. The sprouts have really shot up in the few days between photos.

 

This morning I had an email from GetCovers that included the final files of the Horizon
cover redo. I really like the change. It's so much brighter and attractive than the old, moody one. In the old one, the clouds were dark purple and the people were nearly invisible because it was so dark. Hopefully the new cover will attract more readers too. 

 

And I sat down to load The Seaview on to Ingram Spark for wider distribution. It took some doing to figure out how to work the website to get all the info they want entered but I used the Help pages and got it done. When I tried to load Horizon, it told me that the ISBN number is already in use which means the Extended Distribution through Amazon is still in effect. Dang it. It's a good thing I bought the 100 pack of ISBNs because I'll assign a new number to the paperbacks to get them uploaded and out there. Honestly, sometimes I'm my own worst enemy, but I can be good at fixing things too.

 

When I gave up on Ingram Spark, I took the laptop to the kitchen table to start typing in the short story starts from the prompt notebook I went through yesterday. I think I got about 15 of them on the computer with at least that many yet to go. They aren't long, the longest are 2 composition book pages, so it goes fast.

 

While I was working on the story starts, I heard a lawnmower rev up and knew that the mowing service was here. I was wondering when they'd come this week because the dandelions were getting pretty tall. The mower guy picked up the trash that blew into the backyard and even took away the branches and rose canes from the front yard where they were piled for the stick truck to collect. 

 

If I didn't have two vases of flowers from Mother's Day, I'd have cut lilacs to bring in this afternoon. When I went to take their picture the aroma enveloped me. So sweet.

 

JR, my car guy, called late this morning. The mechanic, S, had three of the four doors working but the back driver's side door needs a new actuator. I don't know what that is, but it's necessary if I want the automatic door lock to work and it ain't cheap. I told him to go ahead and install it because I'm hoping the HHR is my last vehicle and I want everything to work if possible. Naturally the part won't be in until tomorrow so I'll be without a car again tomorrow. Fortunately I don't need to be anywhere. However. If for some reason the part doesn't show up and S can't fix it tomorrow, JR'll bring my car back so I'll have wheels over the weekend and then I'll take it back after the Memorial Day holiday on Tuesday to be finished. I love cars.

I have more flower/plant pictures from today but I don't want to make this blog post too long. I'll save them for tomorrow.

--Barbara