Tuesday 14 October 2025: The garden man is here

I’d already done quite a bit of work on Friday when I got round to writing the blog post. But I got through a lot afterwards as well. I’d just posted Friday’s story on Patreon.

Once I updated the blog, I scheduled the same story I’d posted on Patreon to post on here in exactly 4 weeks and 1 day. Then I remembered that Amazon doesn’t like it if Draft2Digital send them a story that’s already ‘freely’ available online, despite it being behind a paywall *and* being for sale as well. So I thought I’d best go and publish the story as a standalone as well.

It had already been in Words Worth Reading, which came out last week. So now it had to be published on D2D. It’s scheduled for 27 October, but I’ll have to watch that in future.

I wanted to write yesterday’s book review, but I couldn’t find the graphics. I think either I didn’t do any for this book, or I deleted them when I did the next ones. Either way, I had to create the graphics again.

And that was it, really. For the rest of the day I took it easy, and I didn’t beat myself up over it because I’d worked hard over the previous couple of weeks, including some weekend working too.

Before the end of the day, the client acknowledged the invoice and said she’d put it through for me.

Grand-doggy #1 arrived around teatime-ish.

We took the dog for a big walk on Saturday. My biggest one so far, this time out. It was only 3 miles around one of the lakes in the Rother Valley Country Park, but for someone who’s building her fitness up again, it was enough. I’d taken 2 Panadol before we went, and that really worked, but when I woke up Sunday morning I could feel it.

On the way home we dropped in to see the mother-in-law as we had some pears off the tree for her. We didn’t stay long, though, as her friend was taking her for her Covid jab. Yesterday the same friend was taking her for her B12 jab.

For tea we had home-made beefburgers from the butchers (they make them themselves) and we had cherry pie and custard for pudding.

We nipped to Meadowhall on Sunday to swap out a t-shirt for the poet. He’d picked up the wrong size last time we were there and he wanted to change it for the right size and get another 2 t-shirts. I stayed in the car with the dog, and then we went for another shorter walk.

The first place we went, Scout Dike,  the car park was chock-a-block. The second place we went, Langsett Reservoir, we squeezed into a space reserved for horseboxes for equestrian events. As there were no equestrian events, and as we were there for less than half-an-hour, again, we didn’t worry too much about it.

For tea we had a turkey dinner, but we didn’t fancy a big pudding so we had ice lollies instead. The client edit author acknowledged safe receipt of his book and promised to get it back to me as soon as.

On Monday we struggled to get up, again. Must be the diminishing sunlight…But the poet went off to work and I entertained the garden man. Well, I said hello to him and left him to his work. He worked hard throughout the day and we could really tell he’d been through the front garden.

I was distracted, though, don’t know why, and I didn’t do a lot of work. I managed this week’s diary and I opened up the next editing job, which is actually the one that’s been dragging on since March. The author finally sent me his final version of the book and now I’d got the other one done, I turned back to this one.

I fed and watered the garden birds, I put some washing through both the washing machine and the tumble dryer, I put some washing away, and I emptied the dishwasher.

The garden man was done by 2:45pm. He’ll be back tomorrow.

I wrote up yesterday’s book review, because I hadn’t got around to it on Friday. Then I shared it everywhere and updated my Trello card for that book. I have another book to review, by the same author, in the same series, and I’m currently reading his third.

And then I had a look at that editing consolidation.

Grand-doggy #1 went home and we had my favourite tea: fried egg, chips (fries), and baked beans. Nom!