2008-10-08

While the pale sun peered intermittently through the overcast, after Morning Offering Mick set out on a gardening-only day. He weeded, trimmed and mostly transplanted and seeded for two customers who are improving their gardens. He had thought to be able to clean up a vacation property on the river for a customer’s Mom today but one of his gardening customers kept adding bushes, grasses and even a whole new planting bed with brick trim to his work, and he felt lucky to complete that by bath time.

It’s a blessing to have enthusiastic customers like her at this time of year, when there is a small pause between mowing time and leave-crunching time. It pays the bills! And since both gardeners live on our little street, it’s beautifying our immediate neighborhood!

I spent my day asking for favors. I wrote all the rest of the people Gary, Mick and I had identified as people to ask for blurbs for the back cover of 101.

Then I wrote an invitation to Romi and Melissa to come for a Saturday afternoon of work on the two odd pages of Dana’s Alphabet Mosaics. I promised wine and brie! This work should get us over the hump on the remaining tasks needed to assemble Dana’s book. We’re working the Ro Man hard on this project, but Dana was his special friend and he asked for the job, so that’s OK! It will all be repaid when we actually have this beautiful and provocative work printed.

Then I took a careful look at Jude’s final manuscript of The Aaron/Q’uo Dialogues, and I am happy to say it was impeccable. I saw not one hair out of place. I bet it is the cleanest manuscript ever submitted to a publisher! And kudos to Steve M for his great job on the revised session summaries in the Table of Contents! I attached the manuscript to an e-mail to Bob F at Hampton Roads Publishing, asking him to replace the manuscript he had with this one, detailing the changes – trivial except for the replaced Table of Contents – and meekly asking, “Sir, excuse me, Sir, but could you, after four months, give us a yes or no on accepting this book for publication?”

The remainder of my work day was spent on locating the most crucial e-mails in my Inbox and responding to those. There were nine of them, and I was finishing the last of them at bath time. Ah, timing! There’s a sea of e-mail in my Inbox remaining and a ton to do ahead of me there, but it’s wonderful to feel that I’m at least responding to the highest priority issues and using my time well.

In the edges of the day, when I was recovering from having to make a trip away from my office, pant, pant, I reworked a recipe for Banana Muffins and collected three new soup recipes, Cream of Tomato and Garlic Soup, Cream of Tomato and Artichoke Hearts Soup and French Onion and Garlic Soup. They all sound deliciously good for chilly days!

Gary ran around all morning – again – working with the generator installers. Lights went on and off ad infinitum and my little office printer went bazoo, generating any number of power-off sheets. Finally, they have the generator working, after two break-downs and two special parts needing to be ordered.

Tomorrow is the Presenting of the Bill. I checked with Pam, our bookkeeper, and we are ready to write the check. I was pleased with just how much of our needs will be met. We will lose the freezer, one refrigerator and one water heater. But we still have one fridge and one water heater, so we’ll fare well, only having to make an adjustment or two. Everything else except the air conditioning for the house will be on-line during outages - all the lights; all the computers. This is superb!

I offered the closing prayer at the Gaia Meditation tonight.