Blue-Footed Musings

• My novel is 43,000 words and counting. Slow progress is better than no progress.
• Marshall, upon hearing a recording of Vladimir Horowitz playing a piece that I often play on the piano, told me that I play it just the same. I like to think that either I play the piece really well or Marshall is really polite, because then either way it would mean I had done something right.
• Last night was Family Movie Night. We watched Jumanji (2017). It was cute, though some of the humor was IMHO not ideal for impressionable young girls.
• Speaking of girls, Livia is a mosquito magnet. Counting up her bites last night, she said he had 26. That’s a lot of bites! Poor thing. Of all the traits she could have inherited from me, it’s too bad she got that one. Mosquitoes love me, too. I’ll never forget the time I was standing outside with my husband and sister-in-law, and I was getting eaten alive by mosquitoes while they went untouched. Life is unfair in this way. The best I can hope for is that Livia won’t become as badly allergic as I am. In the spring, mosquito bites are merely a nuisance to me, but as the season goes on, my sensitivity goes up, and by late summer bites become huge welts that are so unbearably itchy that they wake me up in the middle of the night.
• And speaking of what’s unfair, I was just reading an article today that says if you’re a night owl, you should stay up late and wake late. To do otherwise is to risk your health. As if I didn’t already hate having to get up in early a.m., now it’s going to kill me, too. 🙁
• Out in the yard, the caterpillars have not done too much damage, at least not yet. There are quite a few blueberries developing on the wild blueberry plants on the edge of my yard. The violets have gone by, but they had another very good year. The little white ones had expanded their range to cover most of the back yard, and they were like stars in a grassy sky.

I was very sick yesterday. My throat hurt so bad I could barely speak. I had the chills so bad that I was shaking. Then my head hurt so bad that I needed an ice pack. I could barely get out of bed. It was so bad that, for a moment, I even considered that I might be dying.

I guess I finally caught the cold that men always seem to get! 😉

One benefit of writing every day is the miscellaneous moments that get recorded that way. From last May’s writing:

The kids are doing tongue twisters and jokes. . . . They want me to do them, too, and I did: “Cooked cookies crumble quickly!” (ten times fast). It absolutely wore me out. I have nothing left for the day. I told the kids that, and they gave me some of their energy in the form of kisses.