Sunday Miscellany

Gorgeous weather this weekend. Cooler, finally, and sunny skies. On Saturday, I worked at the Democratic Party table at the African American Heritage Festival, and that was a lot of fun. We were promoting candidates for this fall's election, but I was also getting signatures on petitions to place our several (many) Presidential candidates on the February primary ballot.

Today has been spent mostly on preparing submissions to magazines. Many magazines reopen to submissions in September after a summer break, so now is a good time to hit them. I did a fair amount of writing over the summer, so I've got several things looking for homes. And I didn't get it all done today, so that will be my job for tomorrow, as well. That and hitting the copy shop.

It was a good day for yard work, too. I mowed and picked up litter along my road frontage. (It never ceases to amaze me that people throw their trash out along these country roads. I understand that people who are drinking beer in their cars (pickups) want to dispose of the evidence, but throwing it on my land doesn't seem like the right solution to their problem.

I have a couple of Adirondack chairs that have been sitting since I assembled them on the lower deck of my porch, i.e., a spot I never go. So after I mowed today I moved the chairs out to the yard, near the creek. They look good there and I might actually use them now that the weather is a little cooler. But Bhikku (the dog) was with me on the upper deck of the porch before dinner and he spotted the chairs: something new and uninvited in the yard! He growled at them and watched like a hawk, just in case they started moving.

Over the next two weeks I need to finish a complicated new story so I can submit my revised story collection to a couple of contests. That means the story will be raw -- I won't have had a chance to get comments from anyone -- but at least it will be done. I've got another project I must work on in October!