Weather: We Have It.

Greetings to everyone! California has been in severe drought for the last several years which has been scary and sad. We’d stopped planting our yearly tulips because even with a six week rest in the fridge before planting they require February frost and freezes, and for the past 2-3 years we were getting spring in February and it was making the tulips mostly not come up. In hindsight I wish I’d bought tulips this year, because we had the kind of cold that makes the tulips thrive. In 2022 and so far in 2023, my part of California has been hit by constant stream of wild weather; high winds, atmospheric rivers, snow that stayed on the mountains nearly five days, plus hail multiple times. Snow is a once a decade thing here and hail is almost as rare. All the trees are stressed from drought, and, also in hindsight, I wish I’d been even more aggressive about taking out trees along the driveway. Without that preventive work though there would have been serious damage. All told we lost or had to take out 10 trees either because  they fell or became a hazard. Elsewhere on the property we lost a 60+ year old oak when the water in the creek washed out its roots. Three other trees came down in later storms. I had to construct berms and troughs to direct water away from the sole driveway drainage because the neighbors below us discovered some major drainage problems which they can’t fix until it’s drier and the water from that drain was shooting up into the air from a broken pipe on their side . . .

The good news is none of the falling trees blocked us in (because we’d already taken those trees out) and the tree guys were able to mostly straighten the crushed fence. We had cows visiting from the neighbor above us because they’d learned about jumping over crushed fences and after making that discovery I believe they went looking for all the places they could go eat someone else’s grass — which is waist high in places! So we got that bit of fence sorted too and have not had more cow visitors.

Writing!

Bound in Smoke is going well. Getting My Wicked Enemy and My Forbidden Desire on sale took some time but fortunately I was ready so that went relatively smoothly. Then I reached the point where I wanted to do a paper read through of Bound in Smoke and it turned out HP has basically borked my model of printer [insert angry ragey emojis here] with a driver system that refuses to recognize the printer even though MacOS says it’s right there and by the end of trying to get it to work, I reached a place of white hot hatred for HP so I bought a new printer and it is NOT an HP printer. The new printer arrived and was easy to set up. So, I don’t write in Word but in order to print a book, I port my book to Word so I can set up everything (almost) the way I like for a read-through and then it turned out the Word print dialog box does not have the check box for 2-sided printing and there was no way to make it stop printing 2-sided — because someone somewhere decided the printer should print 2-sided by default and there is no way to change that at the printer. I need the back of pages blank because I use the back of the page when I run out of space for editorial changes on the front. OMG.

Anyway eventually I opened the Word doc in Pages and when I clicked print, there was the box that let me un-click 2-sided printing. And so, after more frustration than seems fair, I have the MS printed out and I am doing my read-through. So far, I’m pretty happy with how it reads. I like the new printer and it’s not an HP. I also have a new shredder.

There is more rain headed our way. I like winter weather, I really do, but I’m going to whine and just say, I could do with a break.