Tuesday, July 1, 2025

Edgar's Back!

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 1763:

Edgar and friends: Miss Teeny still hanging in there, but right before I took out for my walk this morning, I saw that Edgar is back, hanging out on the other side of the magazine rack. I had dust moped about 30 minutes earlier, and I would swear he wasn’t there then!

Lots of baby birds again yesterday, most obvious were the California towhees. They are the largest of the birds that usually hit the feeder (followed by the black-headed grosbeaks, who are more infrequent.) Towhees, both sexes and juveniles, are a uniform dull, grayish brown, with the tiniest rust color around their beaks and on their rumps under their tails. I can tell these towhees were babies, because they were smaller than the adults, one of them even doing the flapping of their wings that is so characteristic of baby birds, and about 3 of them definitely were hanging around more than the adults ever do at the feeder. Adults also tend to scratch at the seeds (scattering them) or hunt down below the feeder, these smaller ones are just busy sitting at the feeder eating their little hearts out.

Not sure if I saw chubby house finch today. There was bird who reminded me of him, but if so, some of its fluffiness has smoothed out and he didn’t stay around the way he used to (perhaps because the towhees which are bigger were now dominating.) There were also a couple of small, slightly fluffy song sparrows, at the feeder, one without any tail feathers, and again size, fluffiness, suggest might be babies.

All of them much fun to watch.

Yesterday I got in my two walks before lunch, cleaning and laundry, ordered a new bird feeder because this one is losing its paint and cracking here and there, so I wanted a back-up. I did a little novel writing and more reading, as well as an unscheduled short phone call. It got warm enough for us to turn on the a/c for a couple of hours yesterday as well.

With the warmer weather, I am going to try to go for my walks earlier, at least for days when I don’t have a morning phone call to fit in. The other reason for this is that I am working to get my blood sugar down after breakfast when I don’t have yoga. You would think this wouldn’t be a problem since when I eat breakfast, its been at least 11 hours since last meal, all I have is one half of a whole-wheat English muffing, a tablespoon of almond butter on it, and a glass of a protein shake (virtually no sugar or carbs—all protein). In fact I seldom take my blood sugar then, concentrating on other meals. But after a couple of unusally high readings after breakfast, I knew I couldn’t eat less (all my life I have fainted if I didn’t get breakfast in me before doing anything), so the next option is exercise, which if you do right after eating is supposed to keep blood sugar low. So, today I did 15 minutes of cleaning, then 30-minute walk, and my blood sugar was back to normal when I just took it.

So, I will test a few more times this week, and if it stays consistent, I know what I need to do going forward. As I keep saying, I’ve found that managing my health and well-being is a constant experiment!

Finally, here are more yellow blooms for you all.

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