I’m back.
What can I say? Being temporarily immobilized depresses me.
I have been working on novels since about the third week after my surgery – I
figured out I could put my NEO2 in my lap and then my slinged (is that a word?) left hand could
comfortably place itself to type – but I lost all desire to blog.
Maybe if we’d had Internet at home, I would have bothered to
post to this blog once in a while. But on top of being depressed because I
couldn’t even wash dishes for a while (can you imagine being depressed about that?), I was growing more and more
frustrated with the slow Internet connection at our local library. Trying to
order from Amazon was the worst. So I quit blogging.
But now, I’m back. So here are some updates about your
favorite author (right? RIGHT?) since she broke her humerus (not funny at all)
last October.
The garden
Shortly before I broke my arm, I promised you that I’d tell
you how my sweet potato and bell pepper harvest turned out.
I’ll start with the peppers. The humidity finally dropped
some and it finally quit raining every other day, long enough for the peppers
to get happy again and grow some fruit. However, it was so late in the season
that happened that I was forced to pick green peppers after the first couple of
frosts. That is to say, I was forced to ask my son to pick them. My arm was
still in a sling and still hurt like heck.
One night it was going to get too cold for the frost blanket
to protect the plants very much. So B picked them that afternoon, and J cut
them into strips and froze them.
Now, for the sweet potatoes. Are you ready? Yes, they grew.
Boy, did they grow! Some of them are as big as a small head! Here are a couple
of photos to prove it (the jar in the second and third photos is a 16-ounce peanut butter jar):
Once again, credit where it’s due, B harvested most of the
sweet potatoes all by himself. I was only a week or two out of surgery when I
realized they needed to be dug up, or would be lost to frost.
I ended up with close to the amount that I’d been hoping
for. A few dozen have been stored in our house in a box, the rest are in a
makeshift “root cellar”, basically a hole in the ground lined with hay and
covered with leftover roofing material from when J built the shed this past
summer.
I am thrilled that we can grow our own sweet potatoes. Can
you say, “save money on groceries”? After all, organic sweet potatoes at Whole
Foods cost about two dollars a pound.
My arm
I went to see the orthopedic surgeon on Monday of this week.
He took one look at my x-ray and said, “You’re healed. You don’t need anymore
x-rays or anything.”
I’ve still got to keep exercising my arm several times a day
to get all the muscles and joints back into commission, but I was very happy to
hear it, though not surprised. I’d used therapeutic-grade birch essential oils
for several weeks, twice a day, on my arm. Birch oil helps regrow bone cells.
My writing
I think it was late last summer, maybe very early fall that
I promised to have another book published to Kindle by November. Well, I did
have it completed and proofread by then.
And then I decided I didn’t like it. I found several things
wrong with it. So wrong, that I’m not sure I can change it to what I want it to
be without completely rewriting it. So it’s sitting in the novel folder on my
laptop, serving as a lesson, and a reminder: not every novel is worthy of
publication.
Since finishing that, I began a trilogy. I will publish all
three novels, within a couple of days of each other, once I’ve written and
proofread all three.
I’ve finished one, and am approaching the halfway point of
the second.
The Internet
We finally broke down and bought Internet service for our
home. Originally, we were going to try to just go to the library to do our online
business. A few months ago, we decided that was getting old, and would buy
Internet service once we moved into our new house (which is scheduled to begin
building the first week of April).
But I couldn’t stand the stress anymore. The stress of pushing
B to get ready whenever we wanted to go to the library. The stress of wasting
time going somewhere else to check e-mail and the weather. The stress of not
knowing what the weather was going to be (there’s no radio station nearby that
I want to listen to, and no way was I going to buy that Noah radio thingy and
have another gadget to find room for in this tiny house). The worst stress was
the slow Internet connection at the library, especially on days when we really
wanted to order on amazon but couldn’t get past the home page!
So we bought wireless Internet. Our other option here is
satellite, but check this out: to get 25 GB a month with satellite, you have to
pay $129. To get that much with wireless depends on the speed you opt for:
fast, faster, or fastest. Of course, being frugal we opted for the least
expensive option. Guess what we’ll pay for 25 GB a month with wireless? (And
the speed is equal to the Fios Internet we had in the ‘burbs!)
TWENTY-FIVE DOLLARS A MONTH. Fios was, a-hem, $63 a month.
So I’ll be posting with more regularity now. Thanks for
coming to welcome me back, and hope to see you around again.
Happy reading,
Emily Josephine
