Ho-Ho-Ho!

     It's been a busy week. I've been working on The Falls: County Fair, the 18th in The Falls small town mystery series, every day in the morning and in the afternoons I've been editing The Falls: Cupid's Arrow, 7th in the series, getting it ready for publishing as a paperback in CreateSpace. What I do when I edit and change over is I have up two document on the screen. The Word doc of The Falls: Cupid's Arrow, which I edit and clean up, and the template that I will use to transfer the book to CreateSpace. I edit a few chapters in Word, then copy them onto the template, careful to avoid any formatting errors (I use the special paste when I place in the template, not the normal paste in order to ensure that). Then I change the font to Callibri and clean it up. I usually do nine to twelve chapters from the Word doc each day placing three or four of them into each chapter in the template with *** separating them. Anymore at one time and I lose focus.

     I went to my ENT doctor for my fourth post-op visit this last Thursday. He cleaned out my sinuses again and this time he extracted a piece of bone fragment. It still hurts some. Made an appointment to see my dentist to get my front tooth either ground down and capped or extracted with an implant. Good grief! Falling apart, huh?

     Then there's Christmas decoration duties. Put up the nine foot tree, and the outside wreaths (on every downstair window and door), and wrapped the back palm tree in garland as well as placing the other decorations we have accumulated over the years. Now we're on to the inside. Garland on the stair bannisters, the two cresh sets (nativity scenes) go up today as well as a small decorated tree in every room in the house. Colts and Seahawks stockings are up as well...chuckles. Hope they bring good luck for our teams. We are NFL fanatics.

     Got to get to work on the cover for The Falls: Cupid's Arrow (changing over from the Kindle cover to a CreateSpace one) and making a myecovermaker.com cover for the newest Falls book, County Fair. It has been chilly here in Tradition (Port St Lucie) the past few mornings for our 7 AM walks. In the forties. Chilly for Florida anyway. The Christmas Cactuses hanging in the trees aren't amused by the cold. But the other hanging plants and potted plants don't seem to mind.

     Time to get to work. May your day be filled with small pleasures and may the dragons watch over you all...

Back!

     Well, like in the scary movie, we're back. After spending the last week or so in Carlsbad, California, we're home. Thanksgiving was a good one, with our son Chris, his wife Cheryl, our granddaughter Chelsea and Carolyn's sister's family. Chris' family is always so supportive and wonderful to us. We used to have Thanksgiving with them every year when both families were in New Mexico, but since coming to Florida, we have been spending Thanksgiving with our son Patrick (in North Port, other side of Florida). They went on a last minute cruise this year and we headed off to Carlsbad (near San Diego). It was great.

     Now we're home and we've spent the day getting things back into our pattern, like setting up computers we hide away, watering plants, picking up packages and mail. doing laundry, getting a few things at the neighborhood Publix, etc. I bought a MacBook Pro 13" laptop online in CA...($250 off for Black Friday...although technically bought on Saturday). That's the best I've ever seen off on it, got it at Best Buy. I've been watching them for about a year now. Wanted a compatible computer to go with my iMac during all the long thunderstorm season here in Florida.This way I can write during the lightning strikes. The iMac had to be plugged in daring the storms means the danger of losing everything. I can use the external hard drive and passport I have with the laptop as well. Just downloaded Word onto it and ordered a wireless mouse. (Yes, I'm addicted to mice...not a fan of the finger swoop and tap.)

     The order of three The Falls: Fourth of July author books came in and I wrote the next chapter of The Falls: County Fair this morning. Spent a couple of hours getting my MacBook Pro set up with favorites, etc. and emailed myself the latest County Fair document and downloaded it onto the MacBook Pro.

     I'm really enjoying the two new wooden storage units under the stand up desk. They are very close to the same wood grain as the credenza and storage unit on the near wall, even though in the picture they look a good deal lighter.

     If I missed any messages, birthdays or whatever over the last week, my sincere apologies. The white board on The Falls: County Fair is beginning to fill up. I'm about 70 pages (about half) into the book. I have included the white board as of this morning and the standup desk storage units as I said I would.

     I hope you all have a wonderful day! Great to go away, but I'm a home boy, I'm afraid. Chuckles. Tomorrow I return to the ENT doctor. Whoop, whoop! Cleaning out my sinuses and finding out where we go from here. May the dragons watch over you all...