Friday 6 December 2024: In a rhythm again

I’m still trying to catch up with the blog, but I think I’m getting there.

I spent a couple of hours on Thursday at teatime watching Flight FR2088 coming back from Cork to Manchester. Just before the poet boarded his plane, we had tornado warnings issued. Biblical rain was already banging down in Manchester and was crossing the Pennines into Yorkshire. And shortly after take-off, the flight tracker showed the above image.

The plane almost dropped out of the sky!

I sent 2 texts to the poet for him to see when he landed. The first one asked him to let me know they’d landed safely. The second one asked if anyone noticed that drop in altitude.

I carried on watching, and was relieved to see the plane hit cruising altitude and then start to descend into Manchester. But that descent line was very wobbly, and when I looked at the tracker from above, it was wobbly that way too.

Before he even saw my texts, the poet sent me one when he landed saying it was possibly the worst flight he’d ever been on. Then he called me to let me know he was through security and to tell me about how there was screaming and crying onboard as everyone was thrown about. He was watching a film he’d downloaded to his phone and his phone lifted out of his hands!

Scary! I’m so glad I wasn’t on that plane.

His journey over the Pennines was just as hairy. The Woodhead Pass isn’t the greatest road at the best of times, but in torrential rain, gale-force winds, heavy traffic and the dark, it’s horrendous. By the time he got home he was a nervous wreck. But he was glad to be home, even if he was also thick with cold man-flu as well.

Still, he was home now, and safe.

We had Pest Control coming this morning again, for their third and final visit. The poet had a Teams meeting at 8:30am, though, so I had to be up and dressed as well, just in case they were early again. At 10am we both had some breakfast, and the doorbell went at 10:15am. I was already working, so the poet let them in.

The same lad who came before checked in the loft and said there hadn’t been any more bait taken since his last visit and the trap was empty.

He took the trap away and checked around the eaves of the house to see where something might be getting in – and we know something did get in because it gnawed through a water pipe. He found one single hole, where the ivy is also attacking the flat roof. When the poet feels a bit better, probably at the weekend, he’ll block it up.

I sent the picture of the flight tracker to myself from my phone, straightened it, cropped it, and added the arrow. Then I uploaded it to WordPress ready for today’s blog post.

I did some more work on my file tree. Don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you with the details again. There were a couple of straggly short story files here and there, so I moved them all into the Short Story Master folder/directory. And because I’m currently working on novellas, I tidied those up too, making the Great Novella Challenge the first folder in the Novellas folder.

Next, I found The Horby Bells with ease so I could read through it and revise it if necessary. It was so nice reading through it again at a distance from when it was written. Fortunately, it was already in good shape, but I did tweak it a bit here and there to make it tighter. It’s now moved from Revising on the Nobo power board to Proofreading, but it stays in In Progress on the computer until the proofreading is done and it’s ready to move into Waiting to be Published.

I went onto Canva to download the cover for The Horby Bells, so I could put it in the right folder, and the little image at the bottom of the cover, of Stevie, which will be on all of the Stevie Beck/Horvale short stories, has red hair. So I went into the Scrivener file and the Word file and changed a reference to blonde hair to red hair.

The next job was sharing Thursday’s late blog post on BlueSky and Medium. I went down BlueSky to delete posts dated December 2023 only to find they were dated September 2023. I was reading the date the wrong way around. So I removed all posts that were more than a year old.

I do this so I leave less of an online footprint behind me, and I’ve discovered it’s easier to do it as I go along than sit down and start ploughing through years and decades of stuff.

On Medium, I try to read at least 3 articles after I’ve posted something, and one of those took me down a NaNoWriMo rabbit hole, although I stopped at 3 articles. One of the other articles told me how to remove AI scraping from Word on Mac, so I did that next. 

The poet made us something to eat and I went out to feed the birds. The goldfinch gang was back, which means the garden is going to get livelier in the coming weeks.

Then I started to revise The Mucky Duck. It’s going in Words Worth Reading in January ahead of being published as a standalone flash fiction story, and it started life on 12 Stories in 12 Months.

I’m going to leave this one here so I have something to schedule for Monday. Then I should be back to normal.

Have a super weekend!