Miscellany

The blog's been really quiet, but I've actually be fairly busy.

I built the second raised bed/bench thingy, a perfect clone of the first. They're in place now and that part of the yard looks much better. Of course, now the compost zone looks like a disaster so maybe I'll find a way to clean that up next.

I made an adirondack chair from some free plans I found on the internet. Despite really taking my time, the chair turned out to be a disaster. I tore it apart and threw most of it away.

I did save a few boards because I'm going to take an old chair I found in Tahoe, disassemble it (done), and then trace all the pieces and recreate it. I'm working on that now.

California's in the middle of a terrible drought so we're saving shower water to use in the garden. Our garden is much smaller than usual this year, as we're trying to balance wanting to grow food and having to water it. Hope the drought lets up soon.

Of our three chickens, TWO are broody at the moment, making for some hilarious scenes in and around the egg box. Firefly, our red sexlink/comet, is laying daily though.

And finally, the novel. I've been off and on editing the novel from nanowrimo last November. I found some fairly serious issues that ruined the story for me, but I managed to stick it out and find viable, fixes for each of them. In fact, I'm back in love with the story, and feel it's much stronger now. I've been working toward a beta draft to send out to folks who want to help give it a read and hope to have that done in a month or so...

Once that's finished and a few folks have read it, I'll be ready to make a version for editing/proofing and then I'll publish. I sincerely hope to have it out by November. It's taking much longer than I wanted, but it's definitely a better story now than it was at any time in the last 6 months.