Much of Friday was spent finishing my wonderful spreadsheet – and it truly is marvellous. I keep wanting to look at it, to touch it, to play with the figures and watch it change.
I also shared Friday’s blog post to BlueSky and to Medium. And the gas man came to give the boiler its annual checkup. (It passed!)
When I could drag myself away from my lovely, shiny, sparkly spreadsheet, feeling so stupidly proud of myself for conquering LibreOffice Calc, we went and did the shopping. Neither of us was feeling in tip-top condition and we wanted to keep the weekend free.
We had ummed and ahhed about going away for a night in the campervan, but a dense fog came down and we decided we’d be better off concentrating on getting better.
On Saturday, we were rudely awakened by a delivery driver. He’d brought some Throat Coat teabags for the poet, courtesy of a recommendation from Devon. We only ordered them on Friday evening. Once he’d placed the order, the poet discovered if he’d searched a bit longer, he would have been able to order 4 boxes of 16 teabags for the same price he’d paid for just one! Ah well, he knows for next time.
He tried the tea straight away and didn’t find it offensive. But I still had to keep reminding him to stop singing. (He does love to sing and often bursts into a chorus or two of something or other.) We think his voice is starting to heal now, but we won’t know until he goes to band practice later this week.
We spent the morning re-arranging the living room and getting rid of some of the clutter. While we did the re-arranging, he also did a lot of de-spidering. Spiders love our house. Wildlife in general loves our house! But within minutes of him Hoovering up all of the spider webs in hard-to-reach corners, there they were again! The spiders must have been working overtime. And watching us… 😱
Just before 4pm we went out and ordered a carpet for the newly re-arranged living room. It’s a lovely parquet wood floor, but it’s quite cold in the winter. We’ve asked that they preserve the floor as far as they possibly can, and they said they will be able to do that. They’re coming to fit it tomorrow!
On Sunday we did nothing. Other than put all the washing through, which he did. I read for most of the day and he watched YouTube, in between us both admiring the new arrangement in the living room. And he made us a roast chicken dinner.
I’m so looking forward to working with my splendid new spreadsheet today. Here’s what’s on today’s agenda:
- Catch the Rainbow
- tomorrow’s blog
- weekly short story market work
- The Secret of Whitehorse Farm pre-writing
- brainstorm 12 STORIES IN 12 MONTHS for November (the prompt is also the title of a Def Leppard song, so that means it’s likely to be a Marcie Craig short story)
- proofread Holocaust book (this needs to be off my desk by month end)
- this week’s diary
- update 12-project word-count spreadsheet as I go
I’ve pretty much decided to start my Great Novella Challenge on 1 November. I need The Secret of Whitehorse Farm to be ready for the January bookazine, Words Worth Reading Issue 2, and I’ve pretty much decided that all 12 of the novellas will be around the 24,000-word mark.
Words Worth Reading Issue 2 was originally going to come out in February. But if I’m going to have 12 novellas by this time next year, I need somewhere to put them all.
What are you up to today?
I hope the Throat Coat helps. We have it in some of the local grocery stores, and in the food co-op. If you have a health food store in your area, they might have it, too. Might be cheaper than ordering it, but I don’t know how stores on your side of the pond carry medicinal teas.
We do have health food shops, but they’re usually three times the price. He’ll get the 4 boxes for £12 in the future, I think. He likes herbal and fruit teas, whereas I can only drink black tea with milk.