🙂 The secret: Birds. Birds raiding a feeder are total Dog Freak-Out.
It’s a San Diego morning: cool, slightly overcast, occasionally misting a little sprinkle. Absolutely gorgeous. After a mile’s walk with the poochies, I felt inspired to refill the hummingbird and the real bird feeders.
Couple of weeks ago (or more?), I dumped the rest of some old bird seed in the two plastic feeders that lurk around here, habitually disused. With two of them filled and the cat barriers holding off the neighbor’s predator, we were rushed with flying bug-eaters of all kinds: finches and sparrows and thrashers and towhees and mockingbirds and doves of three varieties and a number of things that I have no idea what they are.
It was really quite lovely. So I decided I should do that more often. Having used up the bird food and sunk under another tsunami of work, that plan was forgotten until yesterday, when I serendipitously stumbled upon some bags of bird food at the Walmart. Hallelujah!
So the birds are now fed and I’m in the Leafy Bower enjoying a very pretty morning, and the dogs are going BATSH!T chasing the birds.
Cassie, who will eat anything (it’s a corgi trait), is trying to hoover up seeds that drop when they spook the birds into flight.
Doesn’t take much to amuse a human, does it?
Yesterday I started working on the client’s book layout at 5 a.m. Flew to a doctor’s appointment at 10, running late and carrying page proofs for the book I’m supposed to be indexing. Couldn’t find a place to park at the Mayo; parked illegally and raced up three flights of stairs, only to be told they’d moved to a new building. Ran down the way to the new building, raced up another three flights of stairs.
Got there so late that there was exactly zero wait time, putting the eefus on the plan to get at least a little mark-up done on the textual study of umpty-umpteen centuries of Semiramis narratives. Oh god.
Back to the Funny Farm; back to work on the book layout. At a little after 7 p.m., sent word to the client that page proofs had been ordered. Bolted down some food and then went back to work on the Semiramis index.
And that is what I should be doing right now. But I’m not. Because I’m beat. And it’s totally too nice a day to be mining salt.
How would I like to be fooling with my next novel idea? Let me count the ways.
Over at Plain & Simple Press, I posted another excerpt from a work-in-progress in the Fire-Rider series.