Thursday, May 8, 2025

Short stuff!

Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully. Occasionally, I will also publish some of my shorter fiction in this newsletter to read for free.

Daily Diary, Day 1709:

Yesterday, the sun finally came out, and temperatures hit the high 60s, and over the next three days, the forecast says we will be in the mid-70. So, a touch of summer. I have my usual zoom meeting, followed by a phone meeting, so I will try to get in a very early first walk, so that I can fit in the second walk before I start to fix lunch before the meeting starts.

I did successfully intersperse writing with breaks, and as a result, only had problems with shoulder and elbow in late afternoon, which a bout of the heating pad and rest took care of. Going to see if today I can skip advil altogether, but I am very pleased that the swelling in the elbow has gone down again. In fact, after four months my right elbow actually looks almost like the left elbow—nice and bony (smile.)

I did reach my 500 word goal yesterday, and I hope I will reach this goal today, despite the busy middle of the day.

Beginning to see signs of baby birds. So fluffy they actually seem bigger than the adults, with a tendency to flap wings frantically as they come to the feeder. And they often sit right down in the floor of the feeder, looking bewildered. Yesterday, while I was doing my scheduled phone call, I saw one of them being fed in the willow tree outside my window, and one poor baby sideswiped the front window in the afternoon…lost a few feathers but seemed all right. Hopefully learned an important lesson.

A black-headed grosbeak couple started to show up several days ago (bright orange body), along with the usual house finches, lesser goldfinches, spice finches, California towhees, lark sparrows, house sparrows, song sparrows, and white-crowned sparrows. There was even a dark-eyed junco, a bird we see in the yard all the time, but seldom at the bird-feeder.

Wow, until I started to make this list, I didn’t realize exactly how many different species we are feeding! Definitely gives me small shots of joy throughout my day when I glance up from my laptop to look at the feeder.

Spice finches in photo above are my favorites. They tend to come in packs of 8-10 and try to crowd on the feeder all at once. When they first started arriving, the other birds were sort of hostile, but now they are more comfortable sharing, especially with the lesser goldfinches, which are more their size.

And I can’t skip showing you some more flowers!

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