Saturday I woke up with my knee hurting more than it has been lately. Friday evening it felt good, and I wanted to walk to the highway and back, a 1.3 mile round trip. However, I was barely out of the driveway when the pain told me I wasn’t going that far. I walked a total of 15 minutes, more or less hobbling back.

Yet, Saturday morning I was determined to work in the yard rather than baby my knee. So I went outside early and began sawing logs, along with bringing a large tree cutting up from halfway down the yard. I cut for over an hour, adding about 25 logs to the pile. I didn’t finish the big one, but I made a start on it, cutting two or three logs off of it. After that I raked for a while, then went up to the front of the house and swept and did other minor work. I had hoped to go for two hours, but after an hour and forty-five minutes I was done, heading back inside for some rest. In fact, I laid on the couch and slept for an hour or two. My knee hurt, but probably no worse than Friday evening.

Later in the day I vacuumed the basement, including The Dungeon portion of it; changed batteries in a couple of key technology pieces; washed out the furnace screens; put the recyclables into the van for delivery on Sunday; and made the weekly Wal-Mart grocery run. All in all, it was a busy and active day. I didn’t try walking in the evening.

What does that have to do with writing, you ask, which is, after all, the supposed subject of this blog? The activity, the busyness of the day, left my brain in no condition to work on my writing. I had two chapters to read to prepare to teach Life Group on Sunday, and barely had the brainpower to read them and prepare. In an unheard of event for a weekend night, we were in bed by 10:30 p.m.

Sunday afternoon found me ready for a nap, but I think I only slept 30 minutes at most, and was at my computer. Logic told me I should work on my Civil War book, still standing at 40 or so percent complete. Instead, still being somewhat below par in brainpower, I decided to format my book on Carlyle’s Chartism. I haven’t worked on this since March or April, when I downloaded most of the source documents into it and planned the purpose, contents, and order of the book. I decided to work on the formatting. I had pulled in things from at least 15 different websites, and had over 50 different text styles, all of which needed to be regularized.

I worked on this for about an hour and a half (after writing and posting at my other blog). I’m a long, long way from finishing the formatting, but it’s certainly in much better shape. I need to do some more searching for related out-of-copyright documents: contemporaneous reviews, historical reviews, and even some predecessor documents. I’ve also identified three copyrighted reviews from 1990 onwards that I’d like to include in it. I contacted one copyright holder about a different matter, so know where and how to reach them. I need to determine the other two copyright holders and contact all three to see if I can get permission to republish their articles.

So, I made progress on Sunday. It’s nothing that I can say, “Oh, three more hours and I’ll be done with that.” I don’t know how long the formatting will take me. If I were forced to guess, I’d say two more days like Sunday and the formatting of what I have in hand would be done. I need to find other documents and include them. And I need to write my own essay, or perhaps a couple, about Carlyle’s Chartism, but those are down the line. I think, if I concentrated on this only, I’d be a year or so away from having it done.

In my next post, possibly I’ll explain exactly what this book is, and its purpose.