Sunday Update - 2025 Week 6

Six weeks into 2025 and I'm feeling pretty good about life in general.  Specifics?  Eh, the jury's still out.

I finished the second round of edit notes on Tuesday, took a day off, and began inputting them.  I'm only at pg38, but it's going well.  I guess.  I'm trying to just go from note to note, but I keep finding things I missed making notes on, so it's going slower than anticipated.  Like I said, I won't meet my goal of having this finished by Valentine's Day.  Not even close.  I am shooting for before the end of the month now, but that will depend on how fast I can get these notes entered, the next pass through and notes completed, sent out to readers and how quickly they turn it around back to me.  Then there will be formatting, etc.  Actually, typing all that out now makes me wonder if I can have this done by Easter.  (And I don't know when Easter even is this year.)

I did some marketing this week.  Not nearly enough.  I slacked off on this one.  Project Hermes did move 71 copies and had some page reads, though.  Tomorrow, Dying Embers starts its freebie week in celebration of its ten year anniversary.  Woot.

Reading still isn't happening.  I can't seem to muster the urge to read right now.  :shrug:  This, too, shall pass.

In baking news, all I made this week was Italian bread pizza.  It's like French bread pizza, but with a loaf of Italian bread.  Big shocker there, eh?  Anyway, it was totally yummy, and I still have half a loaf of bread left to make it again sometime this week.  Also, this week, we need cinnamon rolls.  We ate the last two a couple days ago and I'm jones'n.  Oh, and I plan on making carrot cake this week.  Maybe today.  I bought a huge bag of carrots for this purpose and for the beef stew I made yesterday.  OMG, that stew turned out amazing.  Yummers.

On the activity front, I did something active 5 out of 7 days.  Cleaning, walking, woods work, etc.  Oh, and I went fishing one afternoon.  I didn't catch anything, but lugging the gear around after ages of not going fishing was a real workout.  Speaking of real workouts, day before yesterday, in addition to my puttering around in the woods, I lugged a couple dead dogwood tree trunks up the hill.  And I paid for every inch of both the trees and the climbs.  Dogwood is not a light wood.  OMG, ouch.  I'm still feeling that one.  Weight as of Wednesday: 173.0

I found a couple really neat rocks in the woods, too.  One of these days, I should take pictures of all my neat rocks and let y'all see them.  Anyway, one of them was small and has interesting differently colored stripes in it.  The other is bigger and has some kind of translucent brown mineral layered into the white base rock.  Not sure what it is, but it's cool, so home it came.  Hey, Hubs didn't tell me this time, as he often does, not to bring any rocks back with me, so I went for it.  LOL

Yesterday, I hit Wallyworld ahead of the coming weather scuz.  And this morning I remembered that I forgot coffee :gasp: and some other essential, but less important, things.  This means a Dollar General run shortly.  

And that's about all I have for you today.  I hope wherever you are, life is good for you, too.  Have a great day!  And leave me a comment or two when you get a chance.  

Pockets Full of Rocks

I've probably said this before, but it bears repeating... I love rocks.

From all reports, I always have loved rocks.  My mom tells a story about how my bus driver used to make me empty my pockets before she would let me on the bus, because I was always finding rocks at the bus stop and absconding with them.  

I have an old shoebox with all my favorite rocks from when I was a kid.  That sucker has traveled everywhere I've moved, much to several poor mover's laments I bet.  A lot of those have fossils, because where I grew up in Michigan was lousy with fossils and the landfill next to where I lived was constantly moving dirt, unearthing more of the treasures.

Now I'm here in the Ozarks where, I think, one of the ice ages stopped, dropping all the rocks it had pushed along the way.  Our property is covered in rocks.  

This, of course, makes digging for any reason a little difficult, but we deal with it.  There are also rocks pushing up through the lawn all the time, which makes mowing fun sometimes.  And gardening is always an interesting experience.  We pulled three wheelbarrows worth of rocks out of my front bed last month.

Nevertheless, I am in rockhound heaven here.  I wish I knew all the names for all the different kinds of rocks we have here.  All I know is one strikes my fancy for whatever reason, it goes in my pocket and comes into the house.  (Yes, I haven't changed in 45 years.)

I know I have petrified wood by the scads out there.  And quartzes of all sorts.  There's something called Mozarkite on the property.  I have a big one I'm currently using as a corner border for one of my gardens.  We also have a bunch of rocks with geodes in them, albeit not the huge fancy geodes - usually just a hole or a crack in the rock filled with tiny clear crystals.  

Yesterday, I found a rock that is super sparkly on its broken face.  The other parts are bland and uninspiring, but that one side is amazing.  It's sitting on my bathroom counter now where I left it after I washed it.  Every time I turn on the light, it makes me happy with it's sparkliness.  

I also found a rock in the roots of an overturned tree the other day that I finally brought inside and washed yesterday.  I'm not sure how to describe it.  It's like someone took a geode and flattened it out so the whole length of it is covered in sparkly bumps.  I really should take pictures, but photos never turn out the way I see the rocks.  Trust me, they're pretty amazing.  

One of my bookshelves has an assortment of rocks with a circular pattern in them.  (Lined up in front of the books... come on, I can't spare a whole shelf for just rocks.)  Another has various pretty smaller rocks I've found.  I have a crystal dish with all my super special rocks in it.  There's a chunk of smoky quartz I found on the TV stand.  There's a cool swirly patterned rock I'm using as a bookend in the spare room.  

Pretty soon, Hubs is going to start telling me to empty my pockets before I come in the house.  ;o)

I joke.  He's amazingly patient with me and my rocks.  He enjoys looking at them when I show them off, so that's a plus.  I'm forever going 'hey, look at this one' when we're out on the property.  More often than not, I show him a rock and then let it fall back to the ground.  But when they're really special, they go into my pocket.

Maybe someday I'll hit a geology show and find out if any of these super special rocks are worth something to anyone but me.  I could be sitting on a financial windfall.  LOL, or not.

What about you?  Are you a rockhound?  Or do you think I'm a little cuckoo?

Sunday Update - Week Something or Other

It's morning and I'm a knuckle-dragging troglodyte right now.  Blerg.

As you know, I'm not currently writing, so let's move on.  I'm up to page 71 in editing and I have five and a half pages of notes left to go through.  I'd like to get that done today.  We'll see how it goes.  Right now, I'd happily curl up in a ball and forget that I have things to do.

Marketing fell apart.  Early Grave is still on sale, but I lost the will to market somewhere around Wednesday.  The cascading sale thing was a failure.  Eh, it was worth a shot.  We'll try something else next month.  Last night someone in the UK bought all three of the Model Curse books, so that was a happy surprise.

I read two awesome books last week.  One was Silver James' latest release.  Yay.  And the other was a new-to-me author.  Also yay.  

In baking news, I did Outrageous Chocolate Chip Cookies and something called Yummy Lemon Coconut Loaf.  Plus another batch of frittatas.  

On the activity front, I did something five out of seven days.  Two of the days were housework.  Two of them were working on the south plot (which we finished clearing yesterday).  And I got a mile long walk in on the other day.  I weighed myself last Sunday morning, before all the active stuff, and I was 182.6 - only two-tenths of a pound up from three weeks of doing nothing and eating like a cow, so yay.  I'll weigh myself later this morning and see if the week's activity made a difference.

Like I said, we cleared the south lot.  There's still some minor tweaking left to do - mostly pulling up Virginia creeper roots and shoots - but the big work is done.  While I was doing that, I found a bunch more garbage, including a pretty little butter knife.  It'll go with the fork I found last year.  I also found more interesting rocks.  I'm paying for that activity mightily this morning.  Yay Aspercreme.  

Speaking of rocks, I was doing some research and discovered we have scads of Mozarkite.  It's the state rock.  We also have something called Fortification Agate.  Cool stuff.  This lead me to looking at various ways to make my rocks pretty - tumblers and rock saws and junk.  Whoo that stuff is expensive.  Truly doing it right can take weeks or months.  Sheesh.  Anyway, if you're into rocks, here's a neat site.

The neighbor sent us a big tin of popcorn as a thank you for our help with their water situation.  Very nice of them, but unnecessary.  It's good popcorn.  I made the mistake of thinking the red popcorn was some fruity flavor - apple, strawberry, cherry - but nope, found out the hard was that it was cinnamon.  Red Hots type cinnamon.  Hubs can eat that.  

The world is further descending into madness.  I saw an old dude wearing two masks at the Wallyworld.  'Nuff said about that.  If you don't see the madness, I can't help you.

All the snow is gone.  We hit almost 70 one day last week.  There was like a 90 degree difference between the 16th and the 23rd.  We had a mild thunderstorm yesterday afternoon with some booming and loads of rain.  Crazy weather.

Well, for being a trog, this ended up being a long post.  Thanks for reading to the end.  What went on your world last week?

Geology Time with Commander Geode

Okay, not really... I just thought that subject heading was funny.  I know not as many people are jazzed about Geology as I am, so I'm not going to get all nerdy on y'all.  I just wanted to show you this neat rock I found...

If you click on it, it gets larger so you can better see how weird it is.  I believe it's some kind of geode with sparkly crystal beads - like grains of rice or tiny balls of pasta - all over the face.  Pretty cool, huh?

Or am I the only one who geeks out over stuff like this?

Rockin' It Old Style

Like really old style.  As in, here are some rocks I collected...

There they all are... at least there are the ones I haven't cleaned up so they can come inside.

I think that one is petrified wood.

No clue what that is, but isn't it cool?

More petrified wood, I think.  I'm a writer, not a geologist, Jim.

That one has a sparkly crystal geode in it.

Might be zebra quartz.

This one has a couple tiny crystal geodes in it.

I'm almost positive that one is petrified wood.  You can see the rings.  (Hubs calls that one the grumpy rock.  See the face?)

I have a bunch more in the house that I haven't photographed yet, but I won't bore you with those.  Well, maybe someday I'll post a pic of this crystal thing I found.  It's pretty wild.