April 13, 2023:

Daily Diary, Day 954:

First of all, I want to thank all of you who have responded so far to my poll about how many of you are writers and/or are interested in my posts about the process of writing and publishing. If you haven’t participated yet, do go to the April 12 post and chime in, there is one more day to do so.

It did, in fact rain last night, and has been gray, with some intermittent drizzle today. However, this did not discourage me from taking a walk this afternoon. After yesterday’s twenty-minute walk, my back was definitely less comfortable last night and today, a gentle reminder to me not to be so impatient. I did jump from a 10 minute walk on Tuesday to 20 minute walk on Wednesday, so I doubled length of time, my bad. So today I only added 5 minutes, so walked 25 minutes and will stick to that for the next few days to see how this goes. But, walking did feel good. On the walk I finished a Shedunnit.com podcast on the role of country houses in Golden Age Detective books, and then bopped along to the Neville Brothers singing the old classic, Fever. Also got some more photos. Here is a rose from my own garden.

Otherwise, besides my usual noon zoom meeting on Thursdays, I worked on the short story, Dandy and the Dognappers, that I hope to start posting here on subtack. This morning, I thought about where a dognapper might have the best chance of snatching a dog in San Francisco and decided that one of the local parks would be the best place. I considered how my intrepid sleuths, the children Jamie, Ian, Emmaline, and Georgie, from my mystery series, could figure that out. But, then I needed to know what parks were near the center of the city in 1882.

So, I spent a couple of hours combing through old maps, doing some google research, looking at photo archives, etc.  Tomorrow, I should have enough material to also do an Historical Tidbits on Parks, or at least on the ones that might show up in the story, so stay tuned! I will work a bit on that post this afternoon, and tomorrow I hope I can then move on to reading some of the links I’ve found so far to articles about dog stealing in the newspapers of that period.

We watched the second Bourne movie last night because my husband was feeling tired and wanted something that wouldn’t put him to sleep. It had been a long time since we last watched it, and it certainly does keep you awake with all the action scenes.

What kind of movie or tv show do you like to watch when you are feeling sleepy?