December 13, 2022
Daily Diary, Day 833: My Favorite Thing #7
As you might have guessed, one of my favorite things is the decorations that people put in their yards, which make my walks so enjoyable. Some of these are permanent, but most are seasonal. If I was scientific about this, the Halloween decorations in terms of sheer number and variety probably would win. However, I think Christmas holiday decorations do come in a close second.
Here is my favorite so far, I think because it is so understated.
I would say the vast majority of homes have at least a wreath or greenery on their doors or windows as well as lights of some sort.
Yet, since I don’t walk at night, I don’t get the full impact of any of the houses that only have up lights.
I even thought about going out and taking a few shots of these houses, because some of them can become pretty dazzling, but in the interest of honesty, I can’t say these lights are one of my favorite things because they don’t have any positive effect on my walks.
What I found interesting, however, is that one of the most prevalent decorations combined lights with wire ornaments, that are, unlighted, still interesting.
Like the skeletons of Halloween, I would say that reindeer dominate this year’s decorations, something that I hadn’t noticed last year. Here are some examples.
And then there are the houses that seem to include everything they can think of, which I call the “everything but the kitchen sink,” style of decorating. And what is up with those Santa Boots!
I will leave you with a few miscellaneous options, that charmed in part because of their simplicity. The last is my modest contribution, decided to put out something that is supposed to be a tabletop decoration but that I thought would add my own bit of whimsy to the season.
Meanwhile, as I expected, I didn’t achieve a lot of writing the past 3 days because of numerous scheduled phone calls and finishing up the task of uploading all my books with updated back matter so the links were all up to date. So, 32 different books, each loaded up into 4 different distributors: Kindle, Kobo, GooglePlay, and DrafttoDigital. Draft2Digital then uploads to Apple, Nook, Smashwords, library distributors and a bunch of foreign platforms. Slow, tedious, but now done. Until I publish my next book, when it will need to be done all over again.
Anyway, I finally finished this task this morning and actually had the time to go through the novel outline again, which resulted in me cutting 4 whole chapters from the outline that now felt redundant. I am hoping that I will start to get my word count up over the next couple of days.
In addition, I didn’t get my daily walk in until this morning, because the past 2 daus it rained. You read that correctly. Two days where it rained off and on for hours. There was even a couple claps of thunder. How cool was that! And it wasn’t just drizzle. Sunday there was .92 inches, and yesterday, .56 inches. And this was enough to make a small stream run down our hill to the drains, cause puddles, and bring out the weeds over night. Real weather, and as you all know, that is one of my favorite things!