The difference between 10am and 7pm…

is the difference between this post and my previous Sunday posts.

Wonderful four-mile walk today. I am doing more of these, and with more energy, these days. This sad little moose was from a walk earlier in the week, before last night’s wind, which blew the leaves out of the trees.

It is suddenly winter here, even if a sunny, not-very-cold winter. Luckily the squirrel nests weathered the storm.

Last night’s windstorm also seems to have pushed over a dead tree at the bottom of my wooded back yard: at least, there’s a tree at about a forty-five degree angle that I feel was not tipped yesterday. It won’t hurt anything where it is, though I might paw my way down there to make sure it isn’t leaning on one of my struggling little oak trees or anything.

Speaking of struggling oak trees, I spent a couple hours this afternoon hacking out Japanese hemlocks of every size and annoyance level. I need to borrow a smal chain saw to chop the brush piles to manageable chunks.

Speaking of this afternoon, I also spent hours and hours working on the freelance project, getting more than a thousand words on it. This is about the rate I work on my own fiction, but I have trouble imagining working for four hours in a single day on my own stuff. Still, here’s the proof I can — and still get other things done. So why don’t I?

On Friday, I did something I hadn’t done since January — drove somewhere. Because the Subaru is still fucked up, this meant a car rental, but it was worth it: two and a half hours to Columbia Missouri, where I say on Barbara’s deck and ate ham sandwiches (made with homemade bread) and applesauce, and then cupcakes — and then two and a half hours home. For those of you who know them, Barbara and Seth are well.