Weather or not

I am hoping I can go to work tomorrow. At the moment the sidewalks are treacherous with their coating of packed slush that no one has cleared. I have been housebound all weekend. According to the forecast it is supposed to rain tonight, but I've heard that before. In fact, the low today and tonight is supposed to be +4, but it is only +2 at present. Several nights the forecast has been for above freezing but the salty puddles have frozen solidly. Now they lurk beneath the melting slush waiting for their next prey. I've learned that a friend slipped on the fresh slush that fell yesterday and broke his wrist.

Although I have been housebound, it hasn't been as miserable as the period before Christmas. The cafe that normally hosts Faerie Coffee each Sunday was closed today, the second weekend in a row. Since I am only half a block away they descended on my place instead. ("Location is everything!" my realtor told me when I bought this place.) So I had Aunty Tinkerbell, Danzante, Gerry and our 3 friends visiting from Portland, Periwinkle, Otter and Wallowa. It gave me good reason to clean on short notice. We sent the visitors off on the long drive home at 1:30 with prayers to the Border Angels for safe and speedy passage. Danzante went off to work and Tinkerbell and Gerry hung around an extra hour and a half to play "Settlers of Catan", our favourite board game.

So now all is quiet again and I am resuming work on the draught of my novel. At present I am still revising chapters I have written before, tightening up the prose and adding details. Last night I got beyond Chapter 22 where I have been stuck for a while trying to decide what to do. It delights me that I lose all sense of time when I am working on it, where otherwise I would be feeling anxious and trapped when I cannot go outside.

My main goal this year is to finish the first draught. Presently I am at 340 pages and 208,150 words (thank you, MS Office word count). My story covers a period from the 1840s to shortly after the turn of the 20th century. I have written the first draught up to 1884.

"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make when they go by." -Douglas Adams