No Need To Water

When Jake from Lindley’s Garden Center planted our new citrus trees on Saturday he said they needed to be watered every day for four weeks, and to continue watering our perennial peanut plants with the soaker hoses once every three days or so for a while yet.

I always try to listen to the experts, but I didn’t follow Jake’s advice yesterday because it rained most of Saturday night and it sprinkled off and on for most of the day Sunday. I did go outside during the afternoon, just to check on them, and everything looked good. The soil around the trees and plants was very wet and the plants themselves were covered in raindrops.

I was actually glad for Mother Nature during the watering because in the month that we were watering the perennial peanuts every couple of days, our water bill went up over $200. Even though we are surrounded by it, water is a precious commodity here in Florida, and some people’s water bills are out of sight.

Yesterday I was back at my desk writing again, and during the afternoon I finished Big Lake Hoarder, the 19th book in my Big Lake small town mystery series. It is my 43nd book, and my 6th book this year. It came in at just over 80,000 words. I started it on September 28, so it took just under two months.

Today I will read through the last two chapters that I did yesterday and polish up a few things, then pass it on to Terry. She and my two other proofreaders have been doing a few chapters at a time as the work has progressed, and I have made the corrections they pointed out as needed, so a lot of the preliminary work in the proofreading and editing process is already done. When the last chapters are finished and all corrections are made, Terry and at least one other proofreader will go through the whole book again, looking for anything that slipped through earlier (and something always does), and once that’s finished, it will be formatted as an e-book, uploaded to Amazon, and released in a few days. It will be a few weeks longer before the print book is ready to go.

The weather here is supposed to be wonderful this week, with daytime temps in the mid-70s and minimal chances of rain. Once the book is out, I’m going to do everything I can to convince Miss Terry that our kayaks need to get wet. It’s been a long time since we’ve been on the water and I have missed it. Who knows? We might even take our fishing poles with us and try to convince a fish or two to come home with us.

Congratulations Larry Rosenow, winner of our drawing for an audiobook of Free Ride, the thirteenth book in my pal Ben Rehder’s popular Blanco County mystery series. We had 43 entries this time around. Stay tuned, a new contest starts soon.

Thought For The Day – The reason I am old and wise is because by some miracle I survived being young and foolish.