When I was living in Texas, I noticed that whenever we got hit by an ice storm (and it was usually ice rather than snow), people in more northern climates mocked us because it paralyzed the city for days. They didn’t seem to understand that we didn’t have the infrastructure for dealing with that kind of weather (and it wasn’t cost-effective to develop the infrastructure when it was something that happened once every few years) and that you really can’t do a lot about ice other than wait for it to melt.

Now that I live in a more northern place and in the mountains, I get snow more regularly, and they still shut down. They’re good about getting the streets plowed, but the school buses are too risky on the steep hills until the roads are truly clear. This weekend, though, we got a storm that was more like what Texas gets. It started as snow and turned into sleet. Now we have a crust of about 3 inches of sleet on top of about 4 inches of powdery snow, and the whole city has been shut down for three days. They can’t plow the ice (and broke some snowplows trying). They’re now going out with heavy construction equipment, the kind they use to break up asphalt to resurface roads, to break the ice up so the plows can then go through and move it out of the way. That’s slow going, so my little one-block side street that’s on the bottom of the priority list is still solid ice. One neighbor tried going up and down it with a snow blower, but that did no good.

To make matters worse, it’s getting single-digit cold at night, sunny and in the 20s (F) during the day, so the top layer is melting slightly while in the sun then freezing hard at night, so it’s like a skating rink. If you look at it, it looks like the kind of snow that looks like mounds of fluffy whipped cream, but I can walk across the top of it without leaving footprints. Well, I could on Monday before it slightly melted in the sunlight and refroze to be very slippery. Now I can’t walk on it. I was able to shovel a path to the street Monday by breaking through the top layer and flipping it to the side, but now that top layer is even harder and my shovel does nothing, so I can’t clear the driveway. I may get out the garden hoe to see what I can do today. I can’t do much at any one time because it’s very cold and my gloves aren’t up to the task. I have to come inside when my hands start hurting. I tried to buy some better insulated gloves last week before the storm, but they were clearing out their winter gear and setting out spring gardening stuff, so they didn’t have any heavy gloves that would fit me. I’m going to try knitting some mittens to wear over the gloves I have.

Once you get that top crust of ice off, the rest is light, powdery snow that’s easy to move. I’ve been able to clear much of the ice/sleet off my car, but the area around the car is still pretty solid, and there’s a wall of snow at the end of my driveway from when they tried to get ahead of the storm by plowing during it, which only made matters worse because it shoved the snow aside so the sleet was directly on the street. I don’t think I’ll be driving anywhere anytime soon. Fortunately, I stocked up at the grocery store last week. If I do need something, my neighbor has chains on his car and has been able to get out, and he’s offered to pick up anything I need.

We had a storm kind of like this in Dallas in 2014, and we’ve been paralyzed here just as long as we were in Dallas. The bright side is that I haven’t had to worry about the electrical grid crashing the way it did a few years ago in Texas during a winter storm.

I’ve been able to keep up with writing in spite of the distractions. I should theoretically have more writing time because I can’t go anywhere, but my brain has other plans. I’m close to the end of the draft, though.

I’m trying to be more mindful about how I spend my free time. I especially don’t want my weekends to feel too much like my weekdays, which tends to happen when you work at home. Even if I’m not writing over the weekend, I have a bad habit of spending a lot of time online or otherwise sitting at my computer. So, to encourage myself to spend weekends in a way that feels like a weekend, I came up with three main categories of kinds of Saturday, and I try to plan in advance what I’m going to do, so I don’t get into a round of “What do you want to do? I don’t know, what do you want to do?” with myself.

One category is work. That can include writing if I need to catch up after having other stuff come up during the week. It may also include things like workshops, conferences, conventions, book festivals, etc. It also includes projects around the house or in the yard, like organizing or gardening.

Another category is adventure, which is what I’m calling activities that involve leaving the house. That can include classes, touring and exploring, hiking, museums, and that sort of thing.

And then there’s cozy/creating. This is good for rainy or snowy days and involves things that are good to do on a cozy day at home. I added the “creating” so I’d have to do something other than just read. It may involve baking, cooking (especially trying new recipes), sewing, embroidery, knitting, coloring, music and stuff like jigsaw puzzles.

I pondered a social category, but that usually involves leaving the house, so it could be “adventure,” or else it’s something like a block party that involves work or creating to prep for. A few weeks ago, there was a choir party, so I spent the day baking before the party. Generally, social activities are an add-on to a weekend, and if they’re a focus of a weekend, like the church retreat, then they’re also an adventure.

I imagine I’ll have a lot more cozy/creating Saturdays during the winter, more work in spring and summer when I have yard work and gardening to do, and more adventure in the fall, when there are all the festivals, looking at leaves, hiking trips, and that kind of thing.

I generally try to save Sunday afternoons for rest. I have church and choir in the mornings, and I usually walk there, so that gives me some exercise. In the afternoons I read and maybe cook. Sometimes I have things scheduled that would fit into my other weekend categories. The church does field trips and the pastor leads prayer walks (meditative hikes) once a month.

The Saturday before last was a cozy/creating day because it was rainy. I baked bread and read. But there was also some work because there was an online seminar.

Last weekend was a mix of all of them. I had a pottery class in the morning, which counted as adventure, creating, and work (since it’s research for a book and I asked the teacher questions that have come up in my writing). Then in the afternoon the hiking group did a city walkabout hike. Between walking downtown and back for the class and the hike, my phone says I walked more than 9 miles that day. It’s a good thing I had a restful Sunday afternoon planned because my legs were tired and my upper body got a workout from the pottery.

This coming weekend I have another pottery class on Saturday, then a committee meeting after church Sunday and then one of my neighbors is having a party Sunday evening, but we’re also expecting a big winter storm, so I don’t know how much of it will end up happening. It’ll be really cold Saturday morning but the snow isn’t supposed to start until later, so the pottery class may happen (I’ll drive instead of walking if it’s that cold), but we could get about 10 inches of snow overnight Saturday, so there’s a chance the Sunday stuff won’t happen. I don’t know if the neighbor will cancel the party or just assume we can fight our way through the snow across the street. After the pottery class, I plan on going full cozy. There will be baking, soup, and cocoa. If it’s going to snow, it would be nice if some of it would happen while I can watch it. I’ve found that it tends to snow overnight here. You wake up and there’s snow on the ground but you don’t get to watch it fall very often, and I only really like snow when it’s falling. I love to watch it fall but could do without it once it hits the ground.

The local weather people started off all “don’t buy the hype” about the storm but are now saying to make preparations, so that means grocery shopping today to beat the rush.

Winter is probably my biggest adjustment in my move from Texas to the mountains of Virginia. Summers are humid, but much cooler than in Texas, and spring and fall last longer and are glorious. But winter is colder — sort of. There’s something weird in the way the temperatures feel. We do get truly cold days, where it’s below freezing all day, and we get more snow here, but then on the days when it’s above freezing it doesn’t feel as cold as I expect from the thermometer. As a result, I’m usually overdressed when I go out, or else I resist going out because it’s cold, only to find that it isn’t that bad. Last winter, I shoveled snow while wearing a sweatshirt and leggings, and I wasn’t that cold (I did have on gloves and a hat). I’d gone out bundled up but had to shed layers while working in the sun.

I actually enjoy cooler weather, and I’d rather it be cold than hot, but I generally enjoy cold weather by being inside, wearing a sweater, with fuzzy socks on, wrapped up in a blanket, and with a cup of hot tea. I’ve been slacking off on exercise because I’ll look at the temperature and think it looks too cold to go out, but I completely lost that excuse last weekend. It was a sunny, cold day, but still above freezing, so I walked to church. It’s a little more than half a mile, and it’s not much faster to drive because I can walk right to the churchyard gate, but if I drive I have to go past the church, then go through a couple of stoplights and make left turns to get to the city parking garage behind the church, then walk from the parking garage. It is uphill both ways from my house to downtown, since the road goes up and down hills, but it’s definitely easier heading to church than heading home because I live far uphill from downtown. The main hill is big, but it’s a fairly gradual slope. When I’m driving to downtown, once I get to the crest of that hill, I just coast the rest of the way. Walking home up that hill is a bit of a trudge.

There was a brunch after church on Sunday, and when I left, it was sunny and quite pleasant. No wind, and the sun made it feel warmer. Kids were playing on the church playground. I was enjoying the walk home, thinking about how nice it is walking through a historic district and looking at all the Victorian houses along the way.

Then I got to the crest of the hill, and it looked like I was walking into a dark tunnel. Next thing I knew, I was in the middle of a blizzard. There were dark clouds, the wind was whipping around, and snow was blowing. I’m not sure how far the visibility went because I kept my head down so the snow wouldn’t blow straight into my face. I kept my eyes on the sidewalk, putting one foot in front of the other. The front of my coat was crusted with snow. I was glad I hadn’t driven because the streets in this general part of town are pretty hairy in good conditions. There are all the hills, and the streets were laid out before cars existed, so they’re pretty narrow. On that street between my home and downtown, there’s one particular part that’s treacherous, where there’s a sharp curve on a hill at a point where the road narrows. I suspect they cut into the lawns of the houses to widen the street so there are two lanes (one in each direction) plus room for parking on one side. But at this one spot, there are churches built right against the sidewalk, and they’re historic (one is on the National Register of Historic Places), so there’s no tearing them down, and the road can’t be widened there. There’s no parking in that stretch, but people do the “I’m just running in for a second” thing and park anyway. It’s supposed to be a 15 mph speed limit there, but most people ignore that. I can’t imagine trying to navigate that area with no visibility.

I only had to walk through the blizzard for a few blocks before I turned off to head to my street, and there I was sheltered from the worst of it. Then on my street I was heading away from it, so there was snow falling, but it wasn’t blowing into my face. At my house, if I looked out my front windows it was snowing, but if I looked out the back windows it was sunny. By the time I changed clothes, the sun was out all over and there was no sign that it had ever snowed. I couldn’t even see any dark clouds. It was above freezing, so the snow didn’t stick.

The TV meteorologist calls that a “flizzard.” It’s blizzard conditions but with the scope and duration of a flurry. This one was so small that it didn’t even show up on the radar unless you zoomed in. It covered that one little spot, a few blocks long and barely wider than the street, and it moved past quickly.

But Monday when I was looking at the temperature, around 42, and thinking it was so cold, I remembered that I’d walked to church when it was 33 and walked home through a blizzard, so I had no excuse. That was a pleasant walk, though I may need to find better walking shoes for cold weather. I have Skechers, and they’re ventilated. That’s great in the summer, but you don’t want a cold wind blowing through your shoes in the winter. I was wearing fleece-lined boots on Sunday, and that was perfect, but those aren’t really walk-for-exercise shoes.

This coming Sunday, it’s supposed to be in the 20s for a high and may be in the teens in the morning, so I’m going to plan to drive. By any standard, that’s a bit cold for a comfortable walk. Getting from the parking garage to the church will be bad enough.

I’m back from the holidays and diving into the new year. To update what’s been going on since my last post:

I finally got my new desk delivered. Once I had it set up, I ordered a new bookcase for the office and got it just before Christmas, so rearranging my office was my big project for the week between Christmas and the New Year. It also involved rearranging my spare room because I moved the old office bookcase in there. I still need to set up the basement with the shelves from the spare room, but that’s a project for later in the month. I also have some fine-tuning to do in the office as I decide exactly where everything needs to go, but it’s at a point where I can comfortably work in it. I took my old desk chair to the Habitat ReStore, which cleared a lot of space. The spare room now has enough floor space that I can do yoga in there again.

While I was ordering stuff, I bought a small chest freezer. I got tired of wrestling a frozen pizza out of the way every time I opened the freezer part of my refrigerator. It’s the drawer kind on the bottom of the fridge, and it doesn’t handle large things well. When I cook, I like to freeze portions of leftovers and stock up, and I’ve never really had enough room for that, and I also run into the situation where you only get good deals on meat when you buy the family pack, so I freeze the meat in portions. The little chest freezer is clearing space so I can actually find things in the fridge freezer, and I’ve got room to shop sales. Now I can bake a casserole and have room to freeze the leftovers. It paid off for me yesterday when I found that Aldi had the frozen German hard rolls on clearance. They were in large bags that I wouldn’t have been able to fit in the refrigerator freezer, but I was able to buy a bag and just drop it in the chest freezer. I also picked up some frozen entrees that were on sale for those days when I’m too busy writing to bother with cooking dinner.

The other thing I bought that has improved my life in surprising ways is a little milk frother, as I’ve gotten into making tea lattes. I’ve had chai lattes at coffee shops but usually drink my chai plain at home. Then I ran across a recipe for a London Fog latte, which is a latte made with Earl Grey tea. The recipe called for a lavender simple syrup, but I have some Earl Grey tea with lavender in it, so I thought I’d give it a try, using my immersion blender to froth the milk. I’m not normally a huge fan of Earl Grey tea, but this was really good. I then tried making a chai latte and enjoyed that. So, when I saw that milk frothers were pretty cheap at TJ Maxx, I got one. I got one that has an eggbeater attachment, as well, and that makes scrambled eggs a lot easier without having to get out the mixer. I don’t necessarily make a tea latte every day, but it’s a fun way to make a little afternoon treat, especially when I want to reward myself for getting a lot of work done. (I know that lattes are supposedly a breakfast thing in Italy, but in the morning I want the tea full-strength, with just a splash of milk, and I don’t have time or brainpower to mess with heating and frothing milk.)

After we had snow for the first half of the month, we had a fairly warm Christmas week. I went on a hike on Christmas Eve, and it wasn’t too cold for the late-night church service. Then I was able to walk to church for the Christmas morning service. I served drinks for the community Christmas lunch open to all who need it (mostly homeless and seniors) and then ate some of the leftovers afterward with the other volunteers. I then came home and collapsed and put my feet up for a nice afternoon of reading.

During the holidays, I got to work in earnest on developing the fifth Rydding Village book, and now I’m about to start writing it. One of the main characters is a potter, and while I was developing her, I saw a notice that a pottery center near me is offering a four-week intro to clay class on Saturday mornings. You get to try several techniques, like hand-sculpting and working with the pottery wheel, and you end up with some finished pieces. So, I signed up. I figure it’ll be fun, I’ll learn stuff, and I’ll meet people, and it counts as work because I’ll be getting details to use in the book. I’ll be able to describe how the clay feels and smells and have a sense of the process. And since I’ll be getting to know the teacher, I’ll have someone I can talk to if I have any specific questions. The class starts a week from Saturday. I’ll also be getting exercise because I can walk to the class.

Meanwhile, I’ve found myself re-reading the Narnia books. I’m not sure what got that started. I finished the library book I had on Christmas, and I guess I saw The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe on the “holiday” list on Disney+, probably because of the snow and the Father Christmas scene, so I pulled it off the shelf to reread, and from there I was sucked back in like I was when I discovered them as a kid. I’ve been on a portal fantasy kick lately, looking for stories about people traveling from our world to a magical land.

Now I’m trying to be good about being focused on work but also finding fun things to do when I’m not working. That’s going to be my priority this year. We’ll see how long it lasts.

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.