There’s nothing quite like finally getting around to closing the pool. Since Wednesday is fun with chemicals day, my goal was to get to the point where I can start doing the final additions before draining some of the water out and putting on the cover. Before I could do that, I had to deal with the leaves which had decided that they wanted a swim while the weather was still nice. There was some skimming, then some vacuuming, then a lot more skimming. I finally got almost all of the leaves out. I sat down for a quick break…only to watch the wind push another batch of leaves on top.

That’s Tomorrow Me’s problem. Right now the pump is circulating algaecide. I’ll let that go for a couple of hours, then shock the hell out of it tonight.

Yeah, I finally came to the conclusion that even someone who learned how to swim in Lake Superior wasn’t going to want to spend any extensive amount of time in the pool if the temperature was in the fifties.

This week I also learned that I have completely lost the ability to read a calendar. For weeks I thought that the special dinner for The Mrs recognizing one of her achievements was today, only to realize yesterday that it’s next week. Crap. I shaved for nothing.

I also went to CVS to get a follow up shot for one of the batch I got a month ago, only to find out that I had scheduled it for Friday. It appears that I really wanted something important to happen today. Ah well.

I had a great time at the 12 Hour Horror Movie Marathon last Saturday. It was a fantastic line-up of horror movies including a mini Family Ties theme with Michael J Fox in The Frightners and Mark Price in Trick or Treat. It’s too bad they did Tremors last year or we could have had a trifecta.

I’ve also started decorating the front yard. So far there are only two things up, the two that live in the garage because their boxes are too big to fit in my car. I had planned on going to the storage place yesterday to fetch more, but Finnigan wasn’t feeling well so I stayed around the house instead. I’m torn between feeling like I am way behind in decorating and the knowledge that the whole time we were in Ferndale I only put things up a few days before Halloween (due to one year which saw some of the pieces go missing).

Between the pool prep, final yard work, and decorating I’ve been outside quite a bit. I may have a tan until Thanksgiving.

Listening To: Wolf Worm by T J Kingfisher. Man is this ever a creepy book. Someday I want to have one of my audiobooks narrated by Mary Robinette Kowal.

Currently Reading: The How To manual for Scrivner.

Current Obsession: The outside stuff mentioned above. And plotting, as much as it pains me to say that.

As mentioned above, Finn had about 36 hours of GI distress. I assume he got into something while outside, quite possibly deer poop. Despite having to…shall we say evacuate his bowels fairly frequently, he did an amazing job of letting us know in time every time. This is quite an achievement for a puppy who is still under a year old.

I did make another dog related purchase, the leashes which I hinted at in a previous newsletter. Now we have leashes which we can just use on walks and when they go on car rides. The ones we use when they go out in the yard tend to get a little muddy.

Quinn and Finnigan accompanied us to the facility where their grandmother (The Mrs’ mom) lives on Sunday. They were pretty well behaved. Everyone cooed over them and their matching fleeces.

This is another bye week for us in terms of shows. We are still editing away, desperately trying to get this year’s publications in order.

Well, about that.

As I already stated, I spent a lot of time reviewing Scrivner, a software set designed for writers. I’ve toyed around with it before, but never done any substantive writing with it. I figure that this project will be a good one to finally start working with it. The app has a lot of functions designed to make it easy to incorporate notes, timelines, and such. Since this particular story has been banging around in my head for three years, I have accumulated a lot of those. I’ve started fishing through the various notebooks, texts, and digital scribbles so I can input them all and try to make some sense of them before jumping in to this story.

Yes, this sounds suspiciously like plotting, which as we all know, is something that I do only in a vague sense. As far as the autocrit novel writing thing goes, I am listed as a Plantser, walking that fine line between Plotter and Pantser.

Yes, it might also sound suspiciously like I’m coming up with writing adjacent tasks that will make me feel like I am being productive while at the same time putting off the writing which I am afraid to start.

Shut up.

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