Monday, March 31, 2014

My Own March Madness

My day job just got incredibly busy and chaotic and as a result the entire month of March sped by in a blur. 31 days, gone in the blink of an eye!

I failed to make any time to promote my books so the montly sales was a whopping 3 copies (all on the Kindle) and no new reviews.

The last of our original flock of three Barred Rocks died. She was 6 years old and was still laying.

We brought home three new 14 day old chicks, an olive egger, a leghorn, and a sexlink/comet, their names (respectively) are: Sage, Fog(horn), and Firefly. They're in the cage with a heatlamp in the garage providing hours of entertainment.

With our drought here in California, we weren't sure if we were going to plant a garden this year. Just in case, early in the month, I tore into the task of preparing the big raised bed we have. I turned the now somewhat compacted soil and we pulled out all of the soaker hoses. Then I added many bucketfuls of compost from our finished pile and we re-ran the hoses to give us a new "drier" zone too. On Sunday, we planted a few onion starts a neighbor gave us.

All of the volunteer arugula has bolted.

I regret not having spent more time (or been more successful at) promoting the books. There are many tasks and jobs that I'm naturally good at, but book promotion is not one of them. It requires me to go far out beyond my introverts' comfort zone and so I find it very easy to neglect in the best of times. Throw in my extra busy life and it's no surprise that Jute has suffered as a result. I need to reassess the whole project and decide whether or not I'm going to devote time to it. If I am, I need to be serious about tackling the stuff I've been avoiding (Facebook page? Ugh.).

One other change in the day job is that I no longer have internet access to things like blogs or most other sites. I used to do much of my reading/writing during lunch, but now it has to wait until night, after dinner, when I'm tired of the computer. More changes to get used to I suppose!