Thursday 10 April 2025: The Life of Richard Cadbury

While I was so busy fannying around with spreadsheets, I forgot to mention that The Life of Richard Cadbury has finally been released as a paperback. Just in time for Easter! 

You can find it here, at books2read.com/DianeWordsworth. 

Personally, I think the publisher missed a trick not publishing it last year, when everywhere else was celebrating the 200-year Cadbury anniversary. Events must have reminded them they had it, though, because they wrote to me in November to ask me to check the cover. My complimentary copies arrived on Tuesday!

I also forgot to mention that I found the annotations I thought were lost for the next book review. I didn’t realise I already had the Kobo when I started to read this next book, and when I called the book up from the library, there the annotations were. That’s good. It means less of the review will be done from memory.

The missing large capacity bird feeder arrived before we were even up for the day. That’s brilliant service. When we did get up, we put it together and filled it with a mixture of bird food. It’s been hilarious watching the birds as they investigate these new bright things in the garden. They’ve all stood really, really tall while they try to look at what’s in them from a distance, but then once they’ve realised, it’s as though they can’t believe that all of this food is just for them. So funny. 

Dell Magazines/Penny Publications took my next payment, which meant there was a new Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine out. I went and collected it, but when I tried to import it onto the Kobo app on my phone, it said it was already on there. I checked, and it wasn’t. But eventually worked out that it’s reading the March/April magazine as the May/June magazine too. I tried changing the name of the book file, but it wasn’t having any of. It also means that series like Fiction River may only upload one edition, which isn’t great when I have several Fiction River anthologies. I don’t want to have to delete one to read another.

I chatted with a techie, who tried to do the standard fixes. But my Kobo app doesn’t match the instructions. It doesn’t have the 3 lines where Settings is usually found, and it doesn’t have 3 dots where synchronisation is usually done. It has different icons.

I finally got everything working properly in the 36-project spreadsheet. I think I’ve caught all the formula issues, but just in case I haven’t, I’ve just created it for January to April 2025 so far. I’ve decided to duplicate the current sheet when I’m ready to start next month’s work, rather than do it all in advance. Then, at the end of the year, I’ll make a copy and remove all the data I manually input, but keep all of the automation. 

Once that was out of the way I was finally able to start this week’s work.

The man came to fit the new smoke alarms. He was early and he was very quick. The new sun shades arrived for the campervan, but they’re too big and we couldn’t find any the right size. I don’t know what he’s going to try next, but I know he’s trying something. He nipped out to get a spare gas bottle. And he arranged to take the van in to have the radio code reset as we think we’ve used all of our attempts.

I started today’s blog post, then the first job on the list was the cover for Words Worth Reading Issue 3. That was quite a quick job. Next up was the covers for the stories that are in Issue 3 and I wanted to see if I could replicate the Canva covers in Affinity. It was another time-consuming job, but I learned a lot again. I just have to keep doing these things in order to remember how to do them, or at least be able to find the help pages quickly.

I managed to sideload the new Ellery Queen magazine onto the Kobo Clara. If the app doesn’t work on the phone, I’ll just use Google Play. It loaded there just fine.

And that was it. The day was done. My knowledge bank feels larger. But the to-do list is getting longer.