I joined a month long writing gig last week. You begin by stating your goal. Mine was 40,000 words. That means I’m to write half my book, first draft of course, by the 31st. How am I doing, you ask? Not. One. Word. Yep. I’m in limbo. It’s supposed to be my third Sarah book, but I’m feeling a bit in a funk over Sarah. I do this. I was like this with Amy. The first book was out and the reviews were coming in…”Amy is naive”, “Amy drives me crazy”, or “Someone buy Amy a clue.” Okay, okay. But she turned out great. If I must say myself, “Finding Amy” is probably my favorite book. It came together so well for me. Maybe that’s what will happen with Sarah. Everyone seems to like Sarah well enough, they just want to poke me with stick pins for the ending. I get it, and I apologize. My husband likes to compare it to taking the reader to the cliff and then pressing the gas pedal as hard as I could. I assure you, I didn’t intend to. I just got carried away with the continuation…where to do it, how to do it. You know…

This fourth of July we did very little. As we always ever do. Actually I didn’t feel wonderful. I think it was a sandwich I had for lunch. My stomach is the worst for acting up over any little morsel. Butter, oil, you name it, it always sees these things entering it as the enemy. Then I get sick and it isn’t pretty. Anyway, I managed to go down to my local grocery parking lot and score what last boxes of explosives they had for sale. They were noisy, pretty, and shot almost 7 feet in the air. My kids loved all ten minutes of it. That included sparkler time, when half of them were freaked out for holding fire in their hand. I assured them they would not explode if a sparkler strayed and pinged off their arm. Then we watched a movie. It was a cool day all in all.

We’re making our hallway closet into a pantry. We took my husband’s closet and halved it to sacrifice for our food items. (His part is on the other side of the wall in back). The kitchen is getting a new look as well. This is the pantry. I picked a sort of putty color for the shelves. Sometimes it has a pink hue, sometimes a peach. It’s very beguiling, especially when you’re painting it and staring at it for long periods of time. There are shelves on all sides, but alas, my camera does not perform miracles in showing them off. It’s also missing some doors and drawers, but you get the picture. I’m going to actually nail those tins and frame some quilt squares I sewed of canned veggies. I’ll post later if they turn out! 🙂


 Then I made a cherry pie. Okay, so not the crust, but I pitted the cherries, added the other stuff and baked it for about an hour. It was all right. I’m not a big pie lover, as we all know. I much more enjoy a good slice of cake. But my peeps like the pie. And it’s all gone, so that’s good. I’m going to try my hand at some homemade ice cream this weekend. I’ve made it before and was rather pleased, so we’ll see!

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