Cooling Down

Gary just called from Lost Lake campground to tell me that tonight the expected low temperature there is 48 F.  He is sitting next to a fire.  He'll use the extra warm sleeping bag tonight.  I hope the weather stays sleeping-cool until I  get there on Thursday.  With meetings scheduled, I am staying here in Seymour until then. 

With moderate temperatures, I gardened. During the hot weather, it was next to impossible to do much about the weeds.  Now that it's August, I am not only weeding, I am doing my fall clearing wherever I can.  Summer will soon turn into autumn and autumn into winter.   

Before he left, Gary was checking on his camper out on the Manzke farm.  Susan sent home eggs, tomatoes and zucchini.  Tonight, I'm baking banana bread.  Tomorrow I'll use the tomatoes as the base for a vegetable  soup and tomorrow night, bake zucchini bread.  I picked the first two tomatoes from my own garden so more soups and sauces are on the way.   

It isn't so cold that I need to turn on the furnace, but using the stove makes sense right now. 

With Gary gone, I can get to work on some writing projects.  Wade and I have selected our stories for the Black Coffee Fiction short story collection we intend to self-publish.  When I did the word count on the stories I've written so far, I figured I had enough to do the collection with Wade and still had enough of the "Love Through the Decades" stories to do another book.  If I spend another Advent season writing depressing Christmas stories, I could have another collection for the following year.  

At the same time, I need to finish up the novel and continue this blog.  I'm setting up new storytelling tours, too. I will be in Illinois in October and Mississippi or South Carolina in February.  By the end of September I'll be setting up the summer 2013 tour. 

Finding the time for all those projects is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle.  Each item must fit into the hours allotted.  With all that, I will not be camping with Gary as much as I did last summer, just a few flying visits to his campsite and even then, I'll be working on a computer.  

And people ask how I like being retired!