It Came Back

The Nuthatch came back today. A bunch of times. So I was able to take its picture. I like the streamlined shape of it and its blue-gray feathers. I almost got a picture of it having a drink with a bunch of Sparrows but it flew away too fast.

 

A Red-bellied Woodpecker visited at the same time. I chose this picture because you can see the reddish smudge on its belly that gives it a name. It isn't very red but I suspect that Red-headed had already been used for a different Woodpecker so it got named for the not-very-obvious smudge on its belly.

 

The only drawing I did today was yesterday's gratitude journal page. I was grateful for it being sock-washing day, but most of all for getting to drive the after school pickup. 

I spent some time reading and writing in the cozy mystery workbook I got last week. It's got good explanations for the difference between a mystery and a thriller, and good descriptions of the function of the characters. I haven't gotten all the way through it yet but I think it'll help clarify things in my head. At least I hope it will. Right now I feel kind of lost.

 

My little Pacific Sunset Maple tree is finally changing colors. They're not the vivid reds and oranges of some maple trees, but more muted orange and rust colors.

 

And the big tree on the curve is stubbornly holding onto its green leaves.

 

The lawn mowers came this morning and before they mowed, they leaf blowed (leaf blew?). He even got up on top of the retaining wall to blow down all the leaves that had collected up there and blew them more into the middle of the yard so he could zoom over them with the mower and suck them up. 

 

Tonight at Friday Night Knitting, I added more rows to the Alpaca Sophie scarf. You can see in the upper right of the picture that I'm on the decreasing side, so every eighth row I decrease one stitch so after a loooong time, I'll get down to 7 stitches and follow the last finishing instructions and be done with it. Then I'll have to find something else to knit. Maybe I'll wind up some cakes of thicker alpaca and knit another Sophie scarf only thicker. Or I could finish the sock I've got on the needles.

 

Writing went a little better today. I ignored what the how-to book said I should do next and just wrote the next scene I had in my head which was the second murder. I didn't write the murder per se, not the gory stuff, I wrote the discovery of the body and the police coming, etc. I stopped writing when I hit 1133 words because I liked the way it looked and it was time to make supper before knitting.

Oh, and the last copy of Horizon that didn't fit in the carton yesterday showed up today in a plastic padded envelope. 

I was so relieved that Outlook was back up and running this morning. I had 50 new emails to read through. Some of them I just deleted and 16 of them I still need to read. I wonder if the grounding off all the airplanes in the US today was part of the same Microsoft problem.

Periodically I look in my Junk email folder to see if there's anything that shouldn't be in there. Today I found a couple to send back to my inbox. I also found three emails from people wanting to help me promote three of my books. Each of them had obviously had AI read my books and make suggestions. So I copied them each into a Word document so I can see about doing what they said without having to pay someone or be the victim of a scam that will cost time and money. I can be sneaky too.

--Barbara