Today was more of the finding my way back into my routine–getting caught up on correspondence (or at least trying), putting the house back together, going for a swim, actually showing up at the real estate office (after hours, but still) and finding important things there (like my new business cards, and fliers for the open house I’ll be doing this weekend), and finally started my new christian internet marketing strategy thanks to https://www.tom-johnston.com/seo/christian/ to improve my business.
Also, I wrote! Only a few pages, but it felt wonderful. I’m still so very close to finishing the new chapters in Nightcraft Mother–though not as close as I thought I was, as the pacing will suffer if I bull through as planned. Instead, I’m doing a “you think this is going to happen–but it doesn’t!–and then just as you’re getting used to that idea–it does after all!” kind of thing. I hope it works. After I finish this part, I’ll reread the whole new section (currently 58 pages, 16K words) and then stitch them together better with what follows. Then I might have a decent novel!
Of course, I got a short story idea yesterday that is so brilliant, I can’t believe it hasn’t been done (it probably has). But even if it has, mine would be different. Right? 🙂 Anyway, I made notes and set them aside. Really, brain. Do we need MORE items on our plate?
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But enough about today. What about the whole last week, when I didn’t blog at all hardly? Well, it was a very fun visit. My folks were here for two days, then we all went up to Seattle for three days, then back here for two more, then they headed out. We did a ton of fun and interesting things that we would never have done without out-of-towners to prompt us–like underground tours in both Portland and Seattle (Seattle’s is way better, sorry Portland!); the Space Needle (I did post about that); wandering around Bainbridge Island (awesome shopping!); even spending way more time at the nursery than I ever allow myself. My stepdad is a (retired) professional gardener; I knew he’d like to see my nursery, but of course, being new to gardening myself, I didn’t fully get quite how fabulous it is till I saw his reaction to it. He was VERY impressed. We spent two hours there–I went to quadrants I hadn’t ever ventured into before–we could have stayed lots longer except my incredibly patient mom was finally fatiguing. (Clever Mark had stayed home.) Stepdad bought a bunch of stuff to take home, and I bought a bunch of things for here (including the last few Sungold cherry tomatoes that they had in stock); Stepdad planted all the big things for me, and replanted/pruned several things I already had here. Fabulous. 🙂
Other than the nursery visit, oh and an aquarium store visit, our time in Portland was a bit more relaxed than our time in Seattle. We had Mark’s cousins over for dinner Sunday night, which was delightful.
All in all, it was a very nice visit, even though everyone was quite exhausted by the end of it. Mark went home today, earlier than we’d initially planned–because he’ll be back on the weekend, for a number of fun social things. This will be his first time home alone for several months. We were there a few days last week, of course, but with all that was going on, it was, for him, more like visiting a nice hotel that felt strangely home-like, rather than actually being at home.
Oh and the other thing that happened last week was that we finally changed our Facebook statuses, relationship-wise. This had been long overdue; we’d put it off because we were being sensitive to, you know, issues out there in the world; but as things in that arena are getting so much more comfortable, we felt it was time. Of course you can’t change status without a notice going out, and the resultant flurry of responses. He got a lot more of those than I did; apparently the concept of him being in a relationship is far more astonishing than the concept of me being in one. 🙂 Anyway it’s changed now and that feels good and right, even though I hardly ever use Facebook.
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I leave you with a photo from my grocery shopping this afternoon, of blatantly incompetent parking times two. It’s kind of hard to tell from the photo, but the red car is about nine feet shy of the end of its space, leaving a huge amount of car jutting out into the driving lane; the grey car, on the other hand, is four or five feet BEYOND the end of its space, blocking most of the access to where you put your shopping carts back.
As I was taking the photo, both drivers came back to their cars. I pretended I was texting and not, oh no not at all, taking pictures of their crappy parking jobs for anonymous mockery on the internet.