Tuesday 16 January 2024: Meat-free Monday

The first job I did yesterday was yesterday’s blog post as I hadn’t done it last Friday, for some reason. I only managed 474 words, and it went towards yesterday’s wordcount rather than last Friday’s. This week I hope I’m more organised and get it done on the right day. We’d usually be catching up today from the weekend, but as I did that yesterday – from memory – I won’t be doing it today.

I managed to fall down another rabbit hole on X via Facebook and had to force myself to step away from it all in the end, after trying to rephrase a question several people have asked regarding a confusing clause in a competition’s T&Cs so that they knew what we were trying to say.

We have SNOW forecast this week so I loaded up the weather app/website to see when it’s likely to hit us. Apparently, we have 100% chance of getting it Thursday evening, and 67% chance of it continuing into Friday. (Yay!)

It was bitter cold yesterday. There was frost on the ground when I let the dog out just after 7am (on top of a 1:30am bedtime earlier that morning), and when I got up for real a bit later, I had to pour boiling water on the bird drinkers in the garden when I topped up their feeders. For most of the day, there was a flurry of bird activity in the garden. That’s usually a good sign that some kind of weather event is approaching.

I had a reply to the topic I got sucked into resulting in the organisation in question amending their T&Cs to remove the ambiguity and confusion mentioned above. So that was a good result. I turned the snow off on the blog (did you notice?), and changed my animated snowing wallpaper on my Opera browser. Erm, for another animated snowing wallpaper on Opera.

We’re both meat eaters. The dog is a meat eater. We like eating meat. Well, I’d sooner be a vegetarian, actually, but I don’t like vegetables much. Or curries. Or spicy food. Or anything that’s been titivated far too much. But this year, we decided to give meat-free Monday a go, just to see if we could.

So far we’ve eaten one meat-free meal: egg, chips and baked beans. Today, I think it’s fishcakes. (Fish is apparently okay…) Next week it’s either cheese & onion quiche or omelette. The week after it’s either omelette or cheese & onion quiche.

The point is, we struggled last week to remember that Monday was supposed to be meat-free. I remembered in time to make myself a cheese sandwich instead of a ham sandwich, but the poet had taken a soup to work with him and it had chicken in it. (He didn’t eat it!) I think we’ve both done better this week. The poet took a tin of tomato soup with him yesterday and I had a cheesy pasta soup.

I struggled to get going at all throughout the day as I kept checking X, I kept checking Facebook, and I kept checking to see if the first of the sci-fi mystery workshops was up yet. So that I at least did something useful, I went and collected the last of my writing articles from Substack and added them to Scrivener. The only post I left up is the one with the links to the blog and the newsletter. Everything else is now gone.

This added 3,254 words to NOTES FOR WRITERS, bringing the current running total to 16,787. The target for this book is 30,000 words, and I have yet to nip over to Medium to collect any stories there that weren’t on Substack. I had a play with covers for potential books, and then spent an enjoyable hour or so, on and off, chatting with an old writing buddy from Solihull.

I had *another* internal system error on the comment form and couldn’t reply to anyone. I tried refreshing the page, but that didn’t work. So I did a search and it suggested clearing my cache. I did that and, voila! it worked!

Last job of the day was a handwriting Pomodoro for THE SECRET OF WHITEHORSE FARM. I only wrote 338 words. I didn’t even manage two pages. It was 6:30pm and the workshop wasn’t up and ready to watch yet, and I couldn’t really wait all night. So I closed everything down for the day.