Stop and Smell the Rose

I was surprised and pleased to look out my bedroom window this morning to find one of Dad's roses had bloomed so I hurried right out to take its picture. There are a couple more buds out there so I'll be keeping an eye on it.

 

In the morning I drew yesterday's gratitude journal page. I was mostly grateful for spending the day with OJ but getting more tomatoes from GBB was pretty awesome too. 

 

Around the base of Dad's rose the purple mums are blooming up a storm. Will they still be blooming in September and October when chrysanthemums are supposed to bloom? I have no idea but we'll see.

 

The yellow mum plant had one tiny flower on it. Lots of buds but only one flower. So far.

 

I looked out and spied a squirrel trying its darnedest to get into the new round green feeder. It pushed up the lid but the seed was too low for it to access. It tries to get at the seed it can see through the clear plastic tube but the metal cage around the tube protects it. Take that, tree rat.

 

The Red-bellied Woodpecker came by a couple times that I saw today. I managed to snap this picture of it posed between the suet nuggets feeder and the Oriole feeder. At least you can see the darned thing today and not just the top of its head.

 

I spent most of the afternoon and early evening making story starts into stories. I went back into a couple of them, thought they felt done in their shortest form, and plunked them into the Flash folder. Then I turned three of them into regular short stories. I was on a roll today, in the flow, whatever you call it when things are going right. Last week I read an essay about authors needing to prove that they've actually written their work instead of having it written by some form of AI. One thing that was recommended was to save all your work on something like OneDrive which autosaves so you can prove you've done the work and sends it to the cloud for safety. I've even read that writers are leaving typos and awkward sentences in their work now to "prove" it isn't AI-generated. I find it all mind-boggling. All of my writing is my own--mistakes, awkwardness, and all. 

 

Today's drawing is Clover. All those little florets were a pain to draw and ink but I like the way they look now that they're colored. 

 

This morning I spent time scheduling Substack stories into early October. That made me realize that I needed to write more short stories because I was quickly running out again. Luckily I have a whole folder of Story Starts to play with. 

My left foot is sore for no good reason. I put on socks and shoes today and my left instep started to ache. These are not new shoes or new socks, so there's no logical reason for my foot to hurt. It let me take a walk this evening so it didn't impair me, but sitting still like I am now it's just aching away. Sometimes getting old sucks, doesn't it?

--Barbara