Update: Nothing to report

Sorry! I had a busy week and weekend in other ways and progress on all fronts was slow.

My pump failed. That was more than a week ago, but last week was when it got fixed. This wasn’t so dire because when the pump first failed, the well guy switched my house over to the other well — my mother’s well — so I only lost water for half a day. Then he pulled eight hundred feet of pipe out of my well and … did stuff … and fixed everything in whatever way things like that get fixed, and put my house back on my well. He thought at first they’d have to drill a whole new well on my side of the road, but no, fortunately. Even though the problem turned out not to be too extreme, I will say, my water was really muddy for a day or two. But it’s almost clear now. I’m going to get drinking water from my mother’s house for another day or so, though.

So that was exciting.

I also had a computer glitch on Sunday. I was too mad about that to sit down and read a book, so this gave me time to start getting caught up on (truly dire) housework, eg dusting, because what the heck else was I going to do? If you have gravel roads and a terrible drought in late summer and fall, the dust, I’m telling you. Now that I’ve started, I guess I’ll dust everything. The biggest issue is dusting hundreds of cookbooks and the various kitchen counters and the enormous kitchen island and then putting everything back. Also I’ve been throwing papers on a pile or two all year and I guess I need to sort those and dust that table.

After this, it should be way better until we hit next summer’s drought.

Also, Sunday was my mother’s birthday — she’s 87 — and she swore she did NOT want a whole big layer cake, so I made cupcakes and iced ONE cupcake and sprinkled it with crystalized orange peel and took her this ONE cupcake, and she laughed. I took her the other cupcakes this morning. Except for the ones I kind of ate in the meantime, of course.

As for the laptop, I just set the dratted thing aside, brought it to the IT people at work today and said I HAVE STUFF TO DO, CHRIS, MAKE IT WORK. He did, so I’m pretty sure that’s fixed. So, that’s good, and the coming week should be better, I hope.

I will just mention that the thing with the well made me remember a time when I looked up how people used to dig wells back before modern equipment. Wow, what an enormous amount of labor that used to entail. That was when I was writing The Mountain of Kept Memory. You know why there’s a river that runs past that mountain? Because I wanted a small homestead there and I didn’t want those people to have to dig a well, that’s why. The story changed and changed again, so that in the end I could have just said There’s a well, let’s move on, but by that time the river already flowed past that homestead and the mountain.