June 17-18, 2009 - Welcome Signs

Life -

Lindsay and I took the dogs up hiking to Scout Mountain on Wednesday. We were actually supposed to go camping by Lava for a few days, but between having to call for jury duty every day and still catching up from my downtime with my ankle, we decided to put it off.

One of the nice things about living in Pocatello is the nearby nature areas, it's always great to be able to drive 15 minutes and be in the forest. Scout Mountain was always one of the common stomping grounds for locals and clearly still is, though on an extremely rainy Wednesday afternoon, the mountain was pretty much deserted, apart from some rather annoying forest service crews doing something with saws and a backhoe.

We'd planned to pay for a picnic site and eat some Kowloons Express that we picked up in town, but it was raining pretty heavily and for some asinine reason, they've raised their prices this year to $10 for the picnic sites, which seems excessive, especially when that's the same price that they charge for overnight camping.

So instead, we ate in Strontium parked at the lookout, which was pretty pleasant. Then we took the Scout Mountain Nature Trail, a roughly mile long loop through the forest that I hadn't been on since I was a kid. Apparently neither had anyone else. The trail used to be nice and wide and had little wooden poles that corresponded to a pamphlet about each little feature along the way. Now, the trail was more of a runoff ditch and the pamphlet box had been empty for some time. There were fallen trees all over and someone had stolen #12 on the path. Its still a nice little loop though, and it was great to get out and walk in the rain.

The next day, we hung our mask collection in the front room, just a little step that's made the house feel more like home again.

Writing-

Designed a "Welcome Sign" for the eventual logo for my separate Moonstone Bay Blog, which will be a place that I can post chapter previews, artwork, character bios, etc. I'll still post most of my writing updates here, it will be more of a place I can send someone that is interested in that particular book series.


Also continued editing my MS, with an eye towards finishing it ASAP, mostly ferreting out repetitive phrases, which is something I do a lot. Something I do a lot is repeat phrases as I type, so I've been trying to find all of those and fix them, as well as reading it aloud to see how it sounds. I need to work on my Aunt Grace voice.