For an update to Wednesday’s post, I still don’t have my package. I got to the end of the delivery window on Wednesday without it coming, they said it would come by end of day, and then they gave me a Thursday delivery window. The same thing happened again. They then gave me a delivery window for this afternoon, so we’ll see what happens. I’ve noticed that they haven’t given me the name of a driver and said he’s on his way, so I wonder if it’s actually left the distribution center. They may have loaded it onto a truck or set it aside to load onto a truck, but it may not have gone anywhere. If it is actually on a truck, you’d think their logistics system would have to give the driver a route based on the packages in the truck, and that would give them an idea of what could be delivered in a day. They might be a little outside the delivery window, but not miss delivering entirely. They keep saying they’re not delivering because of “dangerous weather,” but the last dangerous weather was nearly two weeks ago. Today’s the day when Wayfair said to contact them if I haven’t received my order yet. We’re nearly at the start of the delivery window and it’s not shown as being on a truck yet, so I’m not optimistic about today being the day.

I was hoping to finish setting up my office before Christmas so I can start the new year ready to go, but that may not happen. I bought a hospital tray-type table to go alongside the desk I have so I’ll have more working space. The desk and table are on wheels, so I can reconfigure to meet my needs. I’m not sure which I’ll use as the computer desk until I see how it works/feels. I want to replace one of my office bookcases, but I need to know how the desks are going to lay out before I order anything. Then the old office bookcase will go in the spare room and I’ll move the metal bookcase from the spare room to the basement. I need to get the basement organized to finish putting away the stuff I brought from where I was storing it at my parents’ house. So this delivery is the domino that needs to fall so I can get my life in order.

I’m taking the next couple of weeks off posting for the holiday, though it’s possible I’ll do a year in review post on New Year’s Eve or the following Friday. Right now, my Christmas Eve and Christmas will be busy. The church where I sing in the choir does a big Christmas Eve service, and fortunately this year they moved it an hour early so I should be done by 11 rather than having to stay up until midnight. Then there’s a service on Christmas morning, and then there’s a community lunch for anyone who needs a Christmas lunch. I volunteered for that last year and am doing so again. It seems to be mostly homeless and seniors. They have drivers go pick up older people who are alone for the holiday, and it’s a big, festive occasion. I’ve been invited to join someone from choir for Christmas dinner, but I think the lunch will overlap and it’s possible that I will be peopled out and exhausted by that time, so I’ll just want to come home, put on my snowflake pajamas, and watch Christmas movies while eating cheese and crackers (what I did last year — they sent me home with a plate of leftovers from the lunch, and that was my Christmas dinner).

There’s supposedly a neighborhood New Year’s Eve party at my next-door neighbor’s house, but I haven’t heard any details yet.

I’ve been weirdly lax in preparing for the holidays. I did all my shopping in October and early November and not much since then. My tree is up, but I haven’t put decorations on it other than lights. Fortunately, my new neighborhood isn’t big on decorating outside, so my wreath on the door is enough (besides, I’m near the end of a dead-end street, so no one will see it). I put a lighted garland on the stair rail this week so there’s something festive downstairs. Maybe I’ll finish decorating the tree tonight. I think I’ve gone full Episcopalian and am doing Advent, with Christmas starting on the 25th and going through until January 6. That’s when all the parties I’ve been invited to are.

Anyway, happy holidays and a joyous new year, and I’ll see you in 2026.

Santa may be struggling around here this year. I present to you the saga of the local FedEx meltdown, in which there is apparently a mountain of undelivered packages, with more arriving every day, so they can’t keep up with it. This crisis has taken over the town Facebook group, as people are bonding over sharing stories of failed deliveries. I’ve met so many people through this. We should organize a potluck.

It all started the Friday before last, when we got snow that made the roads difficult (school was cancelled), but it cleared up quickly. But then there was another round of snow on Monday, and roads didn’t get cleared until mid-day Tuesday. This apparently threw FedEx off because packages didn’t get delivered Friday and Monday, but more packages kept coming in, faster than they could deliver, until it got out of control.

I was supposed to have a package delivered last Tuesday. They gave me a delivery window. I went out to shovel my porch and front walk so they could deliver. Then the delivery window passed and the status changed to delivery by end of day. When it started getting dark, I turned on my porch light. At about 6:30, the status changed to delivery by end of the next day. The same thing happened again on Wednesday, with a delivery window that passed, delivery by end of day, then delivery by end of next day.

Thursday, with the delivery window I got the name of the driver who was on his way, and the scan record showed that it had been put on a truck (which suggests that those previous days it never even made it onto a truck and was never actually out for delivery). After the delivery window passed, the name of the driver changed and it said by end of day. Then I got a bright orange flag on the delivery, saying it would have to be rescheduled because of dangerous weather and they would notify me when they were able to schedule the delivery. Mind you, this was a day when even I, the weather weenie who won’t drive if it’s raining, was out driving. The package was scanned back into the FedEx facility.

The next update came Sunday morning, when it was scanned on a truck and out for delivery. They gave me the name of a driver. And it was stuck there until this morning, with the only update being that it went from delivery by end of day Sunday to “we’re actively trying to find a delivery time for you.” It wasn’t scanned back in, and it still said that my driver was on his way. We had a really bad cold snap, and I worried that this poor guy had frozen by the side of the road, since he was still on his way days later.

Now the package was supposedly scanned onto a truck this morning, for delivery this afternoon. I’m not holding my breath since it doesn’t say anything about a driver being on the way. This is just something for my office so it isn’t crucial. I just get frustrated with the constant changes. If they’d simply said that they were backed up and they would deliver next week, I’d have been fine with that. I get annoyed when it’s day after day of being told it will come and then they don’t show up. But there are other people in town who have perishable items like food or medication that was shipped in dry ice or in cold packs, and it’s now been out too long to be safe. There are people waiting on Christmas gifts that they ordered in plenty of time and that got to town more than two weeks before Christmas but that may not be delivered in time. Businesses haven’t been able to receive items they need for their businesses, and they apparently aren’t making scheduled pickups for businesses trying to send things. One of the pharmacies in town isn’t getting shipments of medicines. There are people expecting packages that require a signature who have taken off work to wait for the delivery, only to have it not show up.

People who work for FedEx say they’re completely buried after getting backed up. When people offered to go to the facility to pick up their packages so they wouldn’t have to deliver them, they said that wouldn’t work because they couldn’t find the packages in the pile of backlog. The only way they’re able to chip away at it is to just load packages on trucks as they can go. I’m picturing something like that episode of I Love Lucy where she’s working on the chocolate conveyor belt and it all starts piling up, but with packages piled everywhere and still coming in.

There are other things I want to order to finish setting up my office and kitchen, but I may wait until after Christmas to see if they get settled down rather than adding to the pile-up.

This might make a fun Christmas movie plot, with the delivery service overwhelmed with packages and a bunch of people from the community dress up as Santa to come help them deliver so that Little Timmy in the cancer ward can get his present on time. I doubt FedEx would allow that, but in Christmas Movie World you could make it work.

Supposedly, last winter was unusually snowy for around here. Everyone kept telling me how unusual it was that we got a big snowstorm in early January, reinforced by another one a little later, and then it didn’t get much above freezing all month so the snow never went away.

And now we’ve already had two big snows this season. We got the first one on Friday, with the snow tapering off later in the afternoon after dropping about three inches of very fluffy snow. Then the weekend got into the 40s and was sunny, so the roads were clear and most of the snow was gone. Then it started snowing very early Monday morning and snowed all day, into the evening. The forecast here was for a trace to an inch, and we ended up with close to five inches. It’s dry, fluffy snow, so apparently it has the same amount of water as what they forecast, but it was colder than they expected, so it was fluffier. Everything’s been shut down. I was supposed to get a delivery today, so I went out to shovel the walk and the front porch, but then they changed the delivery date late in the day. Of course, that meant I got little done because I was so distracted by waiting for the delivery and checking to see if it was here. Then it got changed to today.

It’s warming up, now above freezing, so the snow is gradually going away, but we’re supposed to get another round Friday. Depending on which forecast you look at, we’ll get either a trace or a foot. Since the last trace ended up being five inches, I’d probably better prepare for a foot.

I put up my Christmas tree on Friday, but I haven’t decorated it other than the lights. It’s a tabletop tree that came with pine cones and red berries on it (I suspect whoever made it doesn’t know how pine trees work. They don’t have red berries) so it looks festive even without ornaments, but I may do the real decorating during Friday’s snow and call that my “office party.”

All the snow does help me feel festive. Unfortunately, it kills my productivity. Maybe someday I’ll be used to it, but I can’t seem to do anything when it’s snowing but look out the window and watch the snow. On Monday, I spent the whole day looking out the glass doors in my den. In addition to the falling snow, there were swirls of snow when wind picked up the dry, fluffy snow and blew it around. It was utterly mesmerizing.

I did get some quality thinking done, though. I’ve started developing the next Rydding Village book, and now I have a pretty good idea of the main characters. I guess that counts as productivity, since book brainstorming is what I planned to do right now. I can do that while watching the snow fall.

I’m back from my Thanksgiving journey, which involved traveling across four states (parts of two, completely crossing two). It’s a two-day drive each way, which is kind of draining, but for Thanksgiving travel it’s probably less draining than flying would be, since I’d have to either change planes multiple times or spend a lot of time driving at each end of the trip. Travel is one thing that was made worse by my move, since I went from living a two-hour drive from my parents’ house and 15 minutes from a major airport to living a two-day drive from my parents and living near a small regional airport that currently only offers flights to one city (they’re adding a city next year). Since my parents also live near a small regional airport or else a long drive from a major airport, that complicates travel. So, I drive.

It’s actually mostly a pleasant drive. There’s some beautiful scenery. It gives me a lot of time to think. I brainstormed a book while I drove and came up with some good ideas. I sang along with my driving playlist and got in some good vocal exercise. The tricky part is planning the trip. Since it’s two days and driving all day, it can be challenging to find a good time to travel. I had to head out a day earlier than I planned because there were storms forecast, and that meant I had to rush my preparations. It was a good thing I did it, though, because I’d have been driving through heavy thunderstorms a whole day if I’d stuck to my schedule. Then on the return trip, I had to fit my travel in between a big storm front that brought heavy rain and a front with freezing rain. The heavy rain/thunderstorms were a day ahead of me as I traveled and the freezing rain was a day behind me, but I had perfect travel weather. I just had to deal with some nasty traffic because I was driving on the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

For that, I thought my navigation system had lost its mind. I left early in the morning and was making good time when suddenly it moved my estimated arrival time to half an hour later. Then a little later it moved it 15 minutes later than that, with nothing changing about my driving. There was a small traffic slowdown from a wreck, and I thought it might have been accounting for that, but it added 10 more minutes (it also told me the wreck was 900 feet ahead right after I passed it, so I was losing faith in my nav system). I got to where I was 50 miles from my destination and it told me I’d be there in two hours, so I thought it was nuts.

Then I saw the brake lights ahead. There was apparently a wreck, according to the highway signs, but it must have been cleared by the time I got there. We started moving again, and there were signs for another wreck, and there was another slowdown but no signs of the wreck. Then another slowdown with no explanation. Because they’d cleared the wrecks by the time I got there, the slowdown must not have been as bad as the travel time had originally estimated because the arrival time flipped back by half an hour and I was only about 40 minutes later than the initial estimated arrival time.

Still, that was better than the freezing rain I’d have had if I’d waited a day. We got snow and ice overnight after I got home. They even cancelled schools on Tuesday, though it did warm up, so it would have been clear by the time I got here.

It’s good to be home. Now I need to do the house cleaning I was planning to do in my initial travel prep schedule. I like to have everything ready a day early then spend the last day tidying everything that got messed up while I was packing and then have time to relax before travel. The cleaning and relaxing didn’t get done when I changed plans.

Since it was icy and I was tired, I did that relaxing yesterday on my first full day home. Now to tackle the cleaning so I’ll be ready to put up my Christmas decorations. It’s my first Christmas in my new house, so I’ll have to figure out where to put everything. The house is really tiny and full of furniture (and books), so there isn’t much space for a tree. I bought an artificial tabletop tree, and I have the garland I used to put on my loft railing and stairs that I’ll have to position. I don’t have as much stair railing, so maybe some can go on the old chimney in the kitchen or on the bookcases in the living room and office.

Next week is a holiday week, and I’m making a grand expedition across the country to Texas, so I won’t be posting next week. After seeing the weather forecast that called for a big thunderstorm to cross my path on one of the days I’d be driving, I’ve moved my travel plans up a day, so today’s planned big thoughts will have to wait until later because I have to cram two days of to-do lists into one day. Eep! I got a lot of it done yesterday when I started thinking I’d have to adjust plans (the chance of thunderstorms and tornadoes in Arkansas was not encouraging), so I should be able to do it, but my rough estimates come down to about six hours of work today. I hope I’m overestimating, but better to overestimate and have extra free time at the end than to underestimate and run out of time.

Normal posting will resume the week after Thanksgiving.

One of my ongoing struggles is planning. I love to plan, but I tend to be very unrealistic about the plans, so they fall apart once I start implementing them — if I implement them. I get a lot of satisfaction out of planning, but then often my brain decides it’s done, so I have a plan but feel no need to carry it out. I also tend to get enthusiastic about something and overestimate what I can get done when I’m impatient to dive into it.

I had an old story idea (really, more of a concept/situation) lying fallow for a long time because I wasn’t sure what to do with it. Then I had a burst of inspiration about it and came up with the right thing to do with it, and it’s something that would be pretty marketable right now. I got very enthusiastic about it and planned to get it developed and outlined before Thanksgiving and then write it during December.

Meanwhile, I was feeling overwhelmed because I dove into working on something else as soon as I was done with Weaving & Wyverns, since that was the start of a quarter and I was eager to get going on my plans for the quarter. I didn’t do a reset/regroup like I usually try to do, getting caught up on housework and taking a mental break. I thought that the time I took off for fall exploring would count. But it didn’t. I’d stalled on some of my setting up my house when I dove into writing the book, so the basement, spare room, and office are still in chaos, and that bothers me, but I haven’t been allowing myself to take the time to deal with it.

I had a burst of realism yesterday when I realized how soon Thanksgiving is and how soon it will be before I travel for the holiday. This story is nowhere near ready to write. I have the backstory and setup, but the characters are still vague, and I have only a broad idea of what the plot should be. It needs a lot of thinking time. Even if I devoted the entire next week to full-time story development, it wouldn’t be ready to write after Thanksgiving. As such, I’m letting myself take the rest of the year to regroup and think. It may take me all that time to develop the new idea, and then I also want to outline the next Rydding Village book. Then there’s planning for 2026. And getting the house in order. The to-do list I came up with is pretty hefty. And since I’m in the choir and we have a number of big events in December, I need to account for that, too.

I’m planning to do a lot of writing next year and not a lot of publishing, since I want to stockpile some books and try to get farther ahead of the publishing schedule. That means getting some systems and schedules in place, which is also on the to-do list for the rest of the year.

I feel a lot better about giving myself permission to take time to breathe and think. And clean. I’ve been trying to work during the week and then I’ve been exploring on the weekends, so the house is getting cluttered. It’ll be nice to finish my office so it’ll be a pleasant place to work. I want to get enough of the new idea figured out that it can develop in the back of my mind while I write the next Rydding Village book, and then I can dig into specifics and it might be ripe for writing.

Today, though, may be an out and about day because my neighbors are getting a new roof installed, and after two days of hammering, I need to get away because I can’t take it anymore.

One interesting feature of my new neighborhood is that it comes with cats. There’s a colony of feral cats that makes the neighborhood home, and they wander from house to house. My house seems to be a highway between two of the houses that leave food for them, so even though I don’t leave food out, they still pass through my yard or across my deck. The neighbors say the cats hung out on my deck while this house was abandoned.

There’s a lady the next street down the hill who is the primary caretaker. She has little insulated houses for them and feeds them, and it’s apparently a gray area of whether she “owns” the cats. She considers them hers, but I don’t know that she’s providing veterinary care or has any kind of registration. Some of the cats have tipped ears, indicating that they’ve been trapped, neutered and given some vaccinations, and then re-released. They aren’t friendly or cuddly cats. They usually bolt at the sign of a human. The neighbors say we don’t have a problem with mice or rats around here, so that’s a good thing.

Even though the cats aren’t friendly and run at the sight of me, I enjoy observing them. I’m not really a cat person in the sense that I’ve never had a cat, though I don’t dislike cats. If I see one, I want to pet it. But I’m pretty allergic to them. Whenever I’ve spent the night in a house with a cat in it, I’ve come down with a bad case of bronchitis, so I will not be adopting a cat to live with me. This is almost the next best thing, aside from not getting to pet the kitties.

Among the regulars is this gray one. It’s a bit less skittish than the others. I was easily able to get a picture through my glass door, even though it spotted me. I leave a dish of water on the deck, and this one will come meow at me through the door when it’s had a drink or when I need to refill the dish (though it will flee if I go outside to fill the dish).

The main regular, though, is the elusive white cat one of my neighbors said she thinks is haunted or possessed. I don’t know about that, but I know that the squirrels are less skittish around me than this cat is. It will flee if it even sees me through the window. I’ve been calling it The Magnificent Floof because just look at how fluffy this cat is. I’m amazed that a stray manages to stay this white and clean. Although it looks pretty magnificent much of the time, this cat is kind of a dork.

For instance … There was one day when I was sitting on my deck. I had music playing and was reading something on my computer, so it wasn’t a surprise that I was there. This cat must have wanted to travel the highway, going from under the fence, up the steps to my deck and then down the stairs that go from my deck down the hill to the street level (my house is built into a hill, so the deck is off the upstairs, which is ground level in back), so it was trying to sneak past me, going between the table and the deck railing. I glanced over just as the cat was trying to sneak past, and the expression on its face made me laugh out loud.

Imagine a teenager coming home after curfew to find that all the lights in the house are out. They think this means if they sneak in quietly and get in bed, no one will know they came home late. When they’re halfway through tiptoeing across the living room, the lamp next to their dad’s recliner suddenly comes on, and they realize their dad has been waiting up for them. They’re so busted. That was exactly the look on this cat’s face when I looked at it. It froze for a second, then it backed all the way to the steps down from the deck to the back yard before turning and fleeing.

This morning it was trying to sneak past while I was sitting in the living room, and when it passed the glass door, I said, “Hey, kitty.” It stopped, looked around, then finally spotted me inside the house, jumped in fright, turned, and ran. When it got down the steps into the yard, it turned back to look at the house, and when it saw me through the window, it turned and ran away.

This cat is also obsessed with the groundhog that lives in a hole on the side of the hill (the hill my house is built into continues to rise behind the house. There are few flat surfaces in this whole town). The only time the cat doesn’t bolt if I appear is when it’s waiting outside the groundhog’s hole. Sunday I was watching the cat as it seemed to be making laps around my yard, then started nosing around the groundhog hole. Just then, the groundhog emerged from the hole, and I swear, that cat teleported across the yard. It was in one place, there was a moment of confrontation, and next thing I know, the cat is on the opposite side of the yard. It waited there a second, eyeing the groundhog like it was trying to decide what to do, then turned and walked away like “I meant to do that.” The groundhog stood outside the hole for a while, looking smug and radiating “King of the Mountain” energy. The cat has gone back to the hole a few times since then, but is being much more cautious about it. It seems to like stalking the groundhog, but it would rather not actually encounter it.

Aside from not having to worry about mice, one other nice thing about the neighborhood cats is that I finally have cat pictures to post on the Internet. That seems to be the key to engagement. I wonder if I could leave out one of my books and get pictures of one of the cats with it. It’s tricky to get pictures. I have to take pictures through the glass door and do it quickly before the cats notice me and flee. Or I could edit cats into pictures with my books. Cat pictures in general are the key to getting attention online.

I’m trying to plan this weekend’s adventures. The fall color is still around, but it’s really windy today, so I’m not going to try to head into the mountains, where it will be even windier. I ran some errands this morning and explored the huge used bookstore that I think might contain extradimensional portals. The guy running the place was walking around, asking customers if they heard something weird and saying he thought the place might be haunted. I don’t know if it was a Halloween bit or if it was just the perfect weird used bookstore. The rest of the day will be a workday at home. I live on a short dead-end street with only one kid living on it, and she’s way too shy to knock on a stranger’s door, so there won’t be any trick-or-treaters. My neighbors say we don’t get any here. There was some talk of a party on the block, but I haven’t heard anything lately. It may be an impromptu “drinks on the porch” session, if anything.

For Saturday, I saw something on Facebook about an open house at a sawmill. They mostly sell bits of lumber for woodworking, but for the open house they’re doing lathe demonstrations and have some small items they’ve made, like cutting boards and Christmas decorations. That might make for a fun outing. They’re near but not in the mountains, so it would be a scenic drive getting there, and they’re close to some other things I might want to visit.

Sunday evening is my first “concert” with the choir I’m in now. It’s actually an Evensong service, but it’s mostly music, with the choir singing a lot of the liturgy. I’m Methodist but am going to an Episcopal church because all the Methodist churches (and there are a ton of them, about five I could walk to) are tiny and don’t have choirs or much in the way of activities. The Episcopal church has been around since the 1740s, has an amazing choir, a spectacular organ (and the organ building company is local, so some of the people who built it are in the choir), and a lot of activities in the community, as well as being in a building on the National Register of Historic Places, with the stained glass from the Tiffany workshop from the 1800s, so I ended up going there. It’s not too different from what I’m used to, but Evensong isn’t something I’ve done before. The only Evensong service I’ve been to was at Westminster Abbey. The music is beautiful, but challenging, especially because this choir needed altos more than it needs sopranos, and since my range goes that low and I can read music, I’m singing alto. It’s taking some getting used to and requires a lot of focus. I definitely can’t go on autopilot.

I’ve been treating October as a light working month. I’ve been brainstorming the replotting of a book I drafted years ago. When I reread it, I really liked it, but the plot needed work. I’ve finally figured out what to do to fix it, so next week I’ll dive back into serious writing.