Category Archives: reading

June Progress, July Goals

The Key To Time Travel is published.

How can I possibly have progress in a month that I was taking off from writing? Well, taking time off for me is different than for others. It’s hard for me not to keep up with writing even during my month off. So I got a few things done. I’ll list them along with the goals, then I’ll see what kind of goals I can set for July.

  • Blog twice a week, Mondays and Fridays, as always. Even with grandparent busyness, I was able to get this done. Each day had a real blog post written and posted.
  • Attend writer groups meetings as I can based on travel schedule.  As expected, travel kept be away from all but one of the scheduled meetings.
  • Proofread as much as I can of the four completed volumes of A Walk Through Holy WeekI proofread parts 4, 5, and 6 (which I didn’t remember proofreading last year). Part 7 will be a July goal.
  • Work on the cover for the AWTHW series. I don’t sell enough books to pay for cover creation, so I just have to do it myself. I have a concept I want to use, if I can do the graphics. Which leads to my last goal… This is done, sort of. I worked with my 10-year-old granddaughter, who shows some artistic talent, to go from my preliminary concept to a working prototype. Whether it’s a fully workable prototype, I’m not sure.
  • Work with G.I.M.P. on how to do more artistry in covers. I’ll have to find some tutorials.

Other things I got done were:

  • Catching up on correspondence, both new writing and filing all unfiled correspondence for 2023.
  • Publish The Key To Time Travel. I didn’t mention this as a June goal because I wasn’t sure of the timing for getting the cover. After dealing with some health issues, the cover designer finished her work, and the book went on sale this month.
  • Work on the source material for the next Documenting America book. See the July goals.
  • Do more reading than normal.
  • Brainstorm an idea for a new Bible study, and read some source material for it.
  • Made a few updates to my website—not major ones, but things that needed doing.
  • And one thing that wasn’t writing related, but which I feel like mentioning, was digitizing my genealogy files. No, they are not done—far from it. But I added to what I did in prior months and fine-tuned my filing system as I went along. At the end of the month I felt good about how much of this I accomplished.

Now, for some July goals.

  • Blog twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays.
  • Attend two writers meetings, one of which I’ll present at. A third meeting may happen and I’ll attend, if the library can schedule them.
  • Work on Documenting America: Run-Up To Revolution. Last month, even thought it wasn’t on the schedule, I managed to copy most of my source documents and load them into a Word document. The next step is reading and condensing them to the right length for the format of the series. I anticipate this will take all of July and possibly even longer.
  • Write up my recent Bible study idea into a proper outline of what it would be.

That’s a good number of goals for a month after a break. Documenting America will be my main task for the month.

The Tree Came Down

Here’s the view of the newly fallen tree, as it looks from my reading chair in the woods, off in the distance.

Summer is upon us in northwest Arkansas, both by the calendar and the weather. But our temperatures are hovering just below 90°F, or even in the upper 80s, for the daytime highs. Nightly lows are still in the 60s. That won’t last long. A forecast for next week shows us hitting 100 towards the end of the week.

But, I find it is cool enough to go to the sunroom and read around noon. That won’t last long either. My alternative place to read is a spot on our wood lot just south of the house. The lot is sloping, and finding a level spot to set a chair is a challenge. Last year I tried it but had a bad spot. Sitting wasn’t comfortable.

A little bit of enlargement. You can see how it’s at about a 45% angle. I haven’t walked down there yet to see what’s holding it up.

This year I chose another spot, just off the path to my compost pile. It’s not deep in the woods. In fact, when the sun comes around to due south and then a little to the west of south, the canopy of leaves becomes imperfect and it gets kind of hot. But, before 12:30 PM, when the sun is in the right spot and the shade is full, it’s quite pleasant there, even with the ambient temperature above 90.

The problem is, I find sitting in the woods distracting. I come out through the garage, walk the 40 or 50 feet down the path, put my coffee and book on the log I’m using as a table, set out my chair, and have a seat. I open whatever book I’m reading (currently C.S. Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms), and read.

Except, I find it impossible to concentrate for long. I’m constantly looking up to see what is in the woods. Or to listen to whatever sound is about. Our street is little traveled and so doesn’t give off much noise. If a strong enough breeze is going, I can hear the trees swaying and rustling through the leaves. I don’t hear many critter sounds. Sometimes a squirrel will be dashing here or there perhaps a hundred feet from me. I will watch it for a while. A bird or two may fly through the woods, but birds I hear more than see.

I will take that walk down the hill soon. But I don’t think I’ll do much about it.

Anyhow, one day last week, I interrupted my reading to look into the woods. Off to the right and quite a way down the hill, but still on our lot (or just a few feet south of it), was a tree that was newly leaning, closer to horizontal than vertical. I knew this tree. It was one of three trees in the area where I had established a brush pile and a log pile. The trees were dead, but standing. One of these trees, about 6-inch diameter, had come down over the winter. I’ve slowly been cutting it to movable lengths and taking them down to the log pile.

This new one is at least 12-inches diameter. It sits, as I said, a few feet south of our lot line, but is falling in the direction of our lot. I can’t leave it how it is. In North Carolina they called this type of tree a “widow-maker”. So this will be another one I’ll have to clean up.

A 12-inch tree is too big to try to cut without a chainsaw, so maybe I can get a friend to come with his chainsaw and help me out. I want to keep the lot clean for when the grandkids come, so they can play on it without a lot of stuff to trip over. But that will have to wait until after blackberry season, which is now in full swing.

What’s the point of all this? The difficulty of concentrating, which might be a sign of aging? Enjoyable things seen in the woods? The extra work that an extra lot puts on you? I suppose any of those could be a subject to expand.

I was thinking, though, of how using our senses results in expanded observations. When did that tree come down? We had a windstorm, with a little rain, over Saturday-Sunday night. That might have been it. But, it could have come down sometime before that. I’ve been sitting in the woods off and on for about a month, and I don’t remember seeing it before. Had I not seen it, or was it a new casualty of the forces of nature?

I’m not sure how much we use all our senses. Sight. Hearting. Touch. Taste. Smell. Rarely, I think, do I take a moment to observe around us and evaluate the area with all five senses.

I’m trying to do a better job with this. Right now, Friday evening, I’m sitting in the living room. The TV is on in the background, providing sound. It has to compete with ringing in my ears, however. The sight factor is easy, and I won’t describe to you the combination of furniture, clutter, carpet, etc. that I see. No particular smell stands out from whatever the background smell is. I’m sipping cold water, which has a neutral but somewhat enjoyable taste.

As to touch, I’m in the recliner, laptop on my lap. The chair presses in on me, causing some pain in my slowly-recuperating left shoulder. It reminds me that I don’t much like this chair; something about the height of the arms and the way they press in. The “pillow” behind my head also is a bit too big.

Ah, using the senses. Time to get up and find something to exercise more fully my sense of taste. Peanut butter and jelly, perhaps? Or maybe half a grapefruit.

Working Hard

It’s 6:26 a.m. on my blog posting day. I normally try to have this written long before this on the day before, but circumstances worked against my getting that done.

The circumstances are, we are in West Texas again, the third of four trips here this year. The first was to babysit the grandkids while our daughter and son-in-law were on a mission trip to Thailand. The second trip and this one are to help out as they begin transitioning to a new location, south of Houston. Richard is down there two weeks and back here two. While he’s gone, we’ll come here to help out.

Yesterday I got the three older grandkids working on pre-move projects. They couldn’t get on screens until they had achieved a certain degree of completeness. They did it without complaining. In the evening, I worked on Bible quizzing with the two middle ones, as they will have a competition in June.

During the day, I have so far been working on yardwork tasks. Yesterday I completed the main task I had, though in reality there is much more to do. I’m going to take today off from outdoor stuff, I think, as I was quite worn out yesterday. I also slightly injured my chest swinging an ax to cut out some old, dead roots from a long-gone hedge. But that’s done, the debris discarded, and I need a day for the old bones—or perhaps it was muscles, ligaments, or tendons—to heal.

We’ve eaten leftovers so far. Today I’ll have to cook something. I can’t say I’m looking forward to that.

I’ve had plenty of indoor time to work on my other “jobs”. Over two days I added over 3,300 words to A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 7. I’m down to only one chapter left now, most likely three days of writing. Then I’ll have the Introduction to do and, of course, editing to turn it from a first draft to a publishable book. On to the little bit of work left to Part 5 of AWTHW, which I hope to finish in May. I’ve had time the last two days to do my stock trading. Fortunately, the type of trading I’m doing right now doesn’t take a lot of time. It’s relatively low risk, yet I’m ahead of the market for the year. That’s nice to see for a change.

I’ve been able to get a little reading in, but not a lot. It’s been good reading, however. To be a good example to the grandkids, I’m reading in a print book when they are around rather then one of three books I have going on my phone.

So, it’s been a good trip. Still more than a week to go before we head home. Lots of work to do. Today I’ll have to take a little time to work on The Key To Time Travel, as the cover designer has reached the point where she needs book dimensions and back cover copy. Since she’s there, it’s time for me to get a few last-minute edits done. I should have that published in May.

Library Memories – Part 2: The Company

These massive structures took computer programs to design optimally. A library helped me do it well.

The first company I worked for had several libraries, one for each of the major divisions. But the main library was in the main building, Building A, on Meadowlake Parkway in Kansas City. I discovered this when I was working in Building N (or was it Q?) in Roeland Park, Kansas.

I had to go the 10 miles to Building A a couple of times a week to deliver a deck of punch cards to the main computer room, where they fed it into a modem to have the program run at McDonald Douglas in St. Louis. Don’t laugh, folks. This was 1975-76. Sometimes I would go, drop the cards off, and get the results the next day in the interoffice mail. Sometimes I was supposed to wait for the results. On those times, with nothing to do, I found the library and browsed in it.

This led to what I call two of my “career moments”, those times when you do something so spectacular that you remember it for the rest of your career and even after. At the time, I was with a group that was doing the structural design of 230 kV lattice steel transmission towers for the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. A few years later, I would be in Saudi and get to see those towers on the ground.

We were designing the towners using what we thought was a very good computer program, and none of us knew a whole lot about it. In the library, I found shelves full of journals of the American Society of Civil Engineers. One of those was the Power journal—many years of it—dealing with all things a civil engineer does for the electrical system. I found several articles about transmission towers. Needless to say, this was interesting reading.

In one issue, I found an article comparing the six or eight major transmission tower design computer programs (the analysis done by an unbiased party). The one we were using, the BPA program, was ranked second. The one that was first was proprietary, available only to the company that created it. My boss was about ready to head to Japan to a meeting about the Eastern Province project. I showed him the issue and article, and he took it with him and read it on the plane. In his meetings, someone criticized our program, saying it was not the best. My boss, fortified by the article and with the issue in hand, said, “Well, the ASCE Journal of Power Engineering says it’s the best program available. Look at this.” He won the argument and I was a hero. Career moment #1.

In another of those issues was an article on the general methodology of structural design of those towers. That led me to check out the manual on the BPA program and I learned it was a whole suite of programs. We were using the Design program, but after that we were supposed to go another step and do a more detailed analysis with the Analysis program. Based on what I learned, we started using it.

I learned this while a full-scale model of one of our towers was being tested in Japan, and we had a man there watching it. We worked late into the night and discovered that tower was 3% overstressed in one structural member. We quickly made a change, reran the analysis program, and had our fix, and waited for our man to make a pre-arranged call (no cell phones back then).

That morning, our man in Japan called and said that the tower being tested had failed at 97% of full load. We gave him the fix and were able waive the re-test, saving thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. Career moment #2 was in the books.

My next corporate library experience: While in Saudi Arabia, I discovered an Aramco library in Dhahran, where I frequently had to go for meetings. Perhaps it was more of a privately run public-type of library, but I’m calling it a corporate library. Whenever I had a half hour to kill between meetings, I would go there and browse. My main find was an atlas of the universe. I don’ remember the exact name. This had more than star charts. It talked about all things stellar and galactic. I learned about stars and galaxies near and far, and clusters of galaxies. I learned what a parsec was and how it was used to measure distances in the galaxies.

This gave me a fascination with space travel. I have several books queued up about that. Not sure when, if ever, I’ll get to write them.

Alas, my last couple of memories about corporate libraries aren’t good. When CEI moved into our new building in 2000, we had a great library. The then-director of training and his assistant did a wonderful job of organizing and labeling everything. And we even had a digital card catalog. This worked great from move-in day to around early 2005. A re-organization caused the library to move to less prominent quarters in our building. Things didn’t get put on the shelf the digital card catalog said they were on. This was not a downsizing but rather a reduction in usefulness at the start of the search engine era.

The downsizing came in 2009. After three or four layoffs, we were giving up our beautiful building and moving into rented offices. The library would move, but would be reduced in size. I was assigned the task of deciding what to keep, what to throw away. First, I had to organize it, which resulted in finding many duplicates of manufacturer’s catalogs and many we didn’t need. Things such as old phone books, old municipal standards, etc. all had to go. It was hard, but I made the cuts, and the truncated library barely fit in its new shelves.

That wasn’t the worst. As the Information Era came on full blast, and as we had a little growth, around 2012 the library lost much of its usefulness. It had to be shrunk even more, to maybe 125 linear feet of shelf space in a conference room. Again I had to make those hard decisions. Then, around 2016 the company decided to get rid of it all together. I took some of it into my office, got other people to take things, and got rid of everything else. Those were hard decisions to make, and hard to see valuable books and references overflowing in our dumpster.

I’ve wondered what my first company did with that library in Building A. The thought of all those journals being discarded isn’t a pleasant one. Maybe they found a way to keep it. I hope so.

Three White Ribbons

It’s hard to see, but in this photo are three white ribbons (paths) and two houses, mostly unseen most of the year.

Monday morning, we woke up to a layer of frozen stuff that fell in the night. It was thin, almost more condensation than falling precipitation. This was forecast; no surprise. For the rest of Monday, the frozen precipitation did come. Sleet. Freezing rain. Ice. Maybe even some snow. By the end of Monday daylight, it had accumulated to perhaps an inch, maybe less.

Tuesday dawned cold, around 18° F and cloudy. Mid-morning brought some more frozen precip—again as predicted—though not as long as expected. Maybe a little more accumulation.

I didn’t leave the house for these two days, not even to check the mail. The farthest I went was one step onto the deck to strew birdseed. We stayed inside, did inside tasks, and, to some extent took it easy. Put away a few Christmas decorations. I was glad that I got some yardwork done on Saturday.

I spent my usual time in the chilly sunroom, including some looking out the window time. Behind our house is a valley, known in these parts as a hollow, or “holler”. The photo above is from the sunroom. If you click on the photo to get it full screen, then enlarge it as much as possible and pan around, a few features come out, features that are totally obscured by forest vegetation seven or eight months a year, and features that can’t be seen except when show highlights them.

One of the features is three white “ribbons”—strips of land that are significantly lighter than adjacent areas. At the bottom of the valley is the channel bottom, covered with light-colored gravel. Up just a little higher is part of the Tunnel Vision Trail. Built in 2019 to early 2020, this trail forms a 20 mile loop in western Bella Vista, popular with mountain bikers. That is also light-colored and visible in winter months even when there is no snow.

Then, up at the top of the photo, hard to see, is a strip that is a road going up the hill on the opposite side of the valley. I saw those clearly Monday night and Tuesday morning. Alas, by the time I snapped this photo, the City had run the plow up the road. If you look closely, you can see a black ribbon. That’s the road. It is totally not visible except when snow highlights it, in this case the absence of snow shows where it is.

Our house on the left; the 700 ft house at the line on the right; the other house above that. Note the density of the forest canopy in the valley.

Other features that can be seen near the top of the photo are two houses. You can see the white roof of one. It’s on the far side of the black ribbon road, just right of the vertical projection of the evergreen tree near the bottom. The other is harder to see. It appears as a dark rectangle, partly obscured by tree trunks. This is the house that is closest to us across the holler, on this side of the black ribbon road, 700 feet as the crow flies. These two houses are barely discernable during normal winter conditions. The tree trunks reduce visibility that much.

There’s a metaphor somewhere in all of this, but I can’t tell what it is. Remove the foliage of life to see more of the background. Add a little adversity to see things even more clearly. Enlarge the vignette to see more details. I suppose I ought to explore that some.

All of which is so many words that doesn’t get me anywhere down roads I want to travel. Oh, I suppose better usage and description of metaphors would help me. My main concern Tuesday evening, when I began writing this post, was would I be able to get out of my driveway on Thursday to be able to attend the afternoon meeting of the Scribblers & Scribes critique group? That’s the road I need to travel next. By then the roads should be good enough to drive, but will I be able to get up the 50 feet of driveway to the street?

All of this is hurting my head. Too much thinking for a Tuesday night after a full day of editing, reading, and disaccumulating. I’ll add an update just before posting this on Friday.

A Pleasant Weekend Behind, Crunch Time Ahead

On Wednesday, we drove to Meade, Kansas, my wife’s home town, to spend a long Thanksgiving weekend with my wife’s cousin and her husband. We had our Thanksgiving dinner on Friday, to accommodate the schedule of another cousin.

Thursday we went through a box of old family photos that we brought from Bella Vista to Meade. How we came to possess this box is a complicated story, not to be recounted here. We sorted the photos by family group and era, and were able to identify almost everyone in them. A few were mysteries, but after the sorting we figured them out. One was a puzzle, a photo of Lynda’s grandmother as a young girl, sitting on a man’s lap. The man’s name was written on the mounting cardboard, but no one in the family knew who he was. I did some quick internet research and discovered he was a neighbor at the old homestead in Finney County. A mystery solved.

I got in a fair amount of walking around town. Most of the streets are wide, there’s not much traffic, and, since the sidewalks are mostly in rough shape or non-existent, it was quite safe to walk on the streets. Still, even with the exercise, I came back almost two pounds heavier than I was when I left. So the crunch time for weight loss begins today. Despite that, my blood sugar readings were mostly good.

We had lots of good conversations, watched some good music performances on TV, though a little too bluegrass for my tastes, ate good food, had a good Sunday school class and church service yesterday. Our son called us from his vacation in Spain a couple of times. I wrote two letters, one to a pen pal by e-mail, and one to a grandson on paper.

I got done a lot of reading, mostly in the biography of David Livingtone. I’m still less than halfway through this 633 page tome. I started on another book, Great Voices of the Reformation, which is close to 600 pages. Trish and Dave gave me two C.S. Lewis books I didn’t have—compilations of essays and stories, though I did have some or the individual items compiled. So I may have come back more encumbered than I went.

Thus, we come to the crunch time, mainly writing. I’m going to try to finish The Key To Time Travel before the grandkids arrive after Christmas. 1000 words a day and I’ll accomplish that, with time to go through it once editing.

The crunch time is here for clean-up. The special projects I’ve talked about in a couple of blog posts now need to be wrapped up and the “residue” put back on shelves. Piles of books need to be returned to shelves. A few Christmas decorations need to replace the few fall decorations. And then we’ll be ready for the family celebration between Christmas and New Year’s Day.

Now, I must leave you and see what trouble I got Eddie Wagner into in the future, and how I’m going to get him out. Oops, guess I just gave away some of the plot.

 

A Busy Week Ahead

I hope to do some writing on the sequel to this this week.

It’s Sunday evening as I write this, multi-tasking as we watch the specials about 9/11. I’m looking ahead to tomorrow, and realize I don’t have time to write the type of post I’d hoped to have for Monday. Even Friday is a little iffy for a post that takes a lot of time.

This is a killer week. Not so Monday and Friday, but the other days have a lot of activities and appointments.

First, I have two “gigs” this week. On Tuesday, I will repeat my presentation on the Universal Postal Union to the NW Arkansas Letter Writers Society. I made this presentation in May, but almost everyone who normally attends was gone that day. So I’ll do it again. Fortunately, all I have to do is dust off my PowerPoint and run through it once or twice.

Then, Wednesday morning, I am to be at John Tyson Elementary School in Springdale (40 mile drive), where I will make a presentation of There’s No Such Thing As Time Travel to Henry and Izzy, the two students I had Zoom meetings with about a writing project they were doing, then had them be beta readers for my book. They don’t know I’ll be there and giving them the finished book. This will be at 9:00 a.m.

I have several hundred more of these WW2 newspapers to inventory.

Then, at 12:00 noon, I have an appointment with my cardiologist’s P.A. Hopefully I’ll learn how well the cardio rehab program went. Between those two appointments, I’m hoping to meet someone for coffee. We’ll see if that happens.

Then, Wednesday afternoon, Lynda and I have dental appointments. I’ll barely have time to get home after seeing the cardiologist to leave for the dentist. But, unless we head to church that night, that will end appointments on Wednesday.

At noon on Thursday, Lynda will have her MRI to find out what, exactly, caused her sciatica attach in July. That has been twice delayed, not because of us, but because of insurance and provider problems. Then, that evening, is a semi-monthly meeting of the Scribblers & Scribes critique group. I’ll have some preparation time required for that.

In addition to this, I have my normal activities, which at the moment include:

  • morning 2-mile walks
  • digitizing a minimum of 10 printed letters a day
  • inventorying a minimum of 30 issues of the Stars and Stripes
  • whatever writing I can squeeze in, most likely on The Key To Time Travel, though I have other projects to work on as well, if I want to do so.
  • A little bit of yard work, although the work I got done on Saturday puts me a little ahead of where I normally am.
  • reading for research as well as for pleasure, including a couple of C.S. Lewis writings.

At some point, I need to begin the strength exercise program recommended in the cardio rehab program. I hope to begin that on Monday.

So yes, it will be a busy week. Hopefully I’ll be able to see progress on all my tasks.

Dog Watching, Heart Rehab, & Other Things

It’s now 7:13 a.m. on Monday, my posting day, and I’m just getting to this post. I had intended on doing a book review, but the time has gotten away from me. So, instead, you’ll have to settle for a mish-mash, oh I’m-so-busy post.

Since last Monday, we have been watching a friend’s dog, Rocky. He’s a good dog. Small, white, curly fur. Not terribly demanding. But oh how he interrupts life’s normal rhythms. When I get up in the morning, after weighing, checking my blood sugar, dressing, and taking my pills, instead of going to The Dungeon and having devotions and begin my work day, I walk Rocky. Just up to the stop sign and back, about .34 miles. Then there’s a walk at 9-ish, then noon, then 5, then 7, then 10 at night just before bed. Some of those walks are shorter. One, at 7 or 8 p.m., is about a mile or a little longer. I’m getting my steps in and losing a little weight.

Rocky goes home tomorrow. We will miss him, but it will be good to resume normal daily rhythms.

Which, unfortunately, are being interrupted by my heart rehab program. Based on the heart cath in April, which showed one artery 50% blocked and a tear in one artery, my cardiologist wants me to undergo heart rehab. I did the work-up last Tuesday, and I start today. One hour, three times a week, 20 miles away. Exercise and education to start, and I take it just exercise by the end. 36 sessions, though they say some people “graduate” out after about 12.

I won’t lie: I’m already resenting the time and gas money I’m going to have to spend on this. I know it’s for my good. But the angina has essentially gone away. All these walks with the dog and I don’t think I’ve experienced any angina. I’m wondering if that tear in my artery has already healed itself (as they say it does in 75 to 95% of the cases). I doubt that artery has opened up in such a short time, but who knows?

As to the other things, I have writing, stock trading (looks like a bad day today), household chores, outside work, and trying to keep up a good reading schedule. All in a day of retirement.

 

Another Blustery, Rainy, Busy Day

Rain came in Wednesday late. At least I think it did. I was asleep and didn’t hear it. When I woke up Thursday morning, I heard the plink-plink on the skylights. While waiting for the coffee to brew, I went into the darkness of the sunroom and listened. The wind was easy, the rain light, and the sounds wonderful.

As for my “work” day, after the coffee was done, I went to The Dungeon. Light was just barely visible between the blinds slats, darker than normal due to the rain. I had my devotions and read morning newsletters, then planned my trading day. Thursday is a busy day for my trading system. I did some analysis and laid out some trades. I then made them slowly as the day unfolded.

For writing, I pulled off The Forest Throne to get back on the church Centennial book. As I’ve said before, the writing work is done. I had also begun formatting it for print a week ago. My main task was to add photos. Some of those were on a shared Google drive. Some were in church archives I had at the house, and some were loose or in envelopes. I worked with them all morning. By the time lunch came around I had approximately ten pages of photos added. It’s not done, but it’s now close. Another morning of work and I’ll have added all that are available to me. Today I plan on doing that work.

After lunch, I fell asleep reading C.S. Lewis’s essay “De Futilitate”. So I got up and went out to the sunroom and went back to reading it. I was able to finish the essay, but didn’t really understand it. I think it’s a three or four reading just to get a basic understanding but that wouldn’t be enough to be able to discuss it intelligently.

Pizza and salad for supper, then an evening of…what? I could write, edit, read, chill out watching TV, wash the dishes, declutter. Hmmm. I’m actually writing this Thursday evening, around 7 p.m. Well, I worked on decluttering and disaccumulation last night; I’m not sure I’m up for it tonight. The dishes really need washing, so I’m sure I’ll do that. I may then mess around with e-mail archiving. That’s easy to do in distracted conditions.

The rain is about over, but the winds have risen. I hear the roaring through the closed window. This is blowing-down-trees strength wind. I enjoy listening to it, but won’t appreciate the clean-up afterwards.

This is the last post for October. I’ll be back on Monday with a writing progress report.

Post Not Ready

Six ads running for this, getting impressions, clicks, and a few sales. Other promotion is bearing fruit.

This morning I went outside to work shortly after I got up at 6:45 a.m. The temperature was 60°, and it felt good. I planned to work a half hour, mainly cleaning up a few things and pulling a few weeds from the backyard. When I did what I wanted and went inside, I was surprised to find I’d worked more than 45 minutes. I was way past scheduled time for my blog post, but I wasn’t worried about it since I had a post partially started—two posts actually—and thus could post it quickly once I got to it.

Alas, I finally came to my dashboard here, found there was only one post, and realized it is no where ready to be posted. Bad memory I have.

So here I am with nothing prepared to say. I could talk about any number of things off the cuff: what I’m writing, what I’m reading, how book sales are, what I’m doing for book sales promotion, life in general. I guess I could tackle all of those.

I’m still working on little changes to the church centennial book. I got some new information yesterday that will require a minor change. I also have decided to double-check a couple of places in the book. One I’m fairly sure will require a change, the other one maybe or maybe not. Still, I come closer to done on this every day.  Also, my short story inches along. Every couple of days I open the file, re-read it to remember where I was, and add a few hundred words. I need an uninterrupted , undistracted couple of hours to finish it.

For reading, my time is taken up with Way Truth Life, the book for our Life Group lessons. I’m also reading a book on the Genesis flood. Sorry, I don’t remember the exact title, except that it might be The Genesis Flood. It is a scholarly work from the late 50s-early 60s. I’m not enjoying it a whole lot, but will stay with it a while longer. As to recently finished books, I have four sitting here on my work table waiting for me to write my book reviews.

Book sales are good in September. So far I have 14 sales outright, and I think two accesses from Kindle Unlimited with both people finishing the book. This is my first time to have KU reads (not many of my books are in KU), and I need to figure how to account for them in my stats. I suppose as 2 sales, bringing the total to 16. That’s a good start to the month.

Sometime soon I’ll make a presentation to the local Civil War Roundtable. That will be my first author event since June 2019.

I have been a little more active in book promotion the last week. I still have my Amazon ads running for three books, and they seem to be generating sales. I contacted two influencers in our denomination, both men I’ve interacted with in the past, about giving a shout out to Acts Of Faith. I heard back from one on Friday and he is going to put a promo in his next newsletter.  Another promotional item concerns my Civil War book, Documenting America: The Civil War Edition. Back in July I gave a copy of it to the president of the local Civil War Roundtable. I heard back from him yesterday. He liked the book and wants me to make a presentation to the Roundtable. I don’t yet know when that will be, but should know today or tomorrow. So book promotion is in progress and, at least a little, seems to be working.

Life in general is good. I’m still having trouble losing weight, but in general my weight is dropping very slowly. My blood sugars have been under control, though just a little higher than I’d like. This morning’s was good. My right knee has been hurting more of late. Perhaps replacement surgery will have to be moved up. Although, the last three or four days I’ve done a few different things to try and ease the pain and it seems to be working. Four nights of good sleep in a row. Yardwork is in much better shape than in past years. Household projects are slowly being done. My devotional life remains consistent, with room for improvement.

Life goes on. I’ll have a better post on Friday, and will start getting some of these book reviews done.