Wednesday, March 12, 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 1652:
As promised, after a lovely spell of sunny weather, yesterday the first of a new bout of rain came in. Very slowly and intermittently, more mist than rain which is typical for San Diego near the coast. Much as I like to experience a good hard rain, even a little thunder and lightning now and again, I know that this kind of gentle rain is safer for drivers, less likely to cause flooding, and is probably much better for the plants that are just starting to bud.
Consequently, I only got in one walk yesterday, but I did make some good progress on plot development for the short story and a long phone conversation with a friend.
Today it wasn’t supposed to rain, but here it is 10:30 and raining pretty steadily. But my husband was able to shorten the second dog walk so he made it home just before the rain started, the groceries were delivered at the same time, but it looks like I am not going to get in my morning walk. But maybe this afternoon. I did have a lovely long phone catch-up with a friend in Boston, and after I post this, and put away the groceries, I hope to get back to plotting before lunch.
Meanwhile here are some photos of the single rose that appeared last week on our only rose bush. The first one of the bud is from last Friday, then after a couple of days of sunshine, it bloomed quickly and I suspect it won’t have made it through these days of rain. But lovely while it lasted.
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It has definitely rained here off and on -- at one point a band came through that was pounding rain with fairly strong wind gusts. I'm sure it will continue a bit off and on and it was raining before I got up and was reading in bed.
I have successfully made soup from scratch! Beef and multi-bean. Hadn't done that in years so was glad I pulled it off. Soup is pretty forgiving, though. I was out of Worcestershire sauce, which is a sentence I've never uttered in my life, but soy sauce did the trick, along with a lot of herbs. It's a soup day if ever I saw one.
Am 85% over the reaction from yesterday's MMR shot. When your last vaccine for that was at some unknown date in the previous century, it's time. Today's malaise is also partly from the low pressure and damp, but as my major plans for today were making soup, drinking hot chocolate, and taking out the garbage, I can cope. I notice my spelling and typing is a little off and has needed correction even though I got 8 hours of sleep, so there's still a bit lingering
And now, we have lovely huge fluffy snowflakes cascading outside my window! Roofs are turning white. I’m enjoying watching from inside!