Novels, a medallion quilt, and many rainy days ahead....

Gigi from yesterday enjoying a flowerbed inundated with weeds. She's looking pretty pleased with herself, lol. Photo courtesy of my husband.

Don't forget the chickens, yet will they forget the sunshine?

Sunday afternoon on the getting more soggy by the minute North Coast of California; I just finished adding the round of pinkish-orange Grunge around this developing medallion quilt. I've plotted out the next round, but am unsure how wide the strips will be. Currently the quilt is thirty-nine inches across, and if I add six and a half inch wide slabs of fabric, then I'm looking at a pretty large-ish quilt, with a couple more rounds to go. I'll have to consider this notion, but with over four inches of rain forecast for the next several days, I see myself sewing as often as my tinnitus allows.

It will be striking if nothing else.

Which has been every other day or so, but what's a little ringing of one's ears when it's super-wet out and cold for our neck of the Redwoods, ahem....

And those hens, what are THEY thinking? "Where did our nice dry digging spots go? What's all this falling from the sky? Oh, maybe I'll lay an egg...." LOL! They followed my husband from the covered coop area into the rain earlier today, but I don't see them hanging out in it now. It's been relatively dry for much of 2026, yet that trend is coming to an end starting today, and perhaps a little snow falling in a few days? We received snow back in 2023 in this very month, and I remember how it fell from tall trees in these massive wet clumps that slogged to the ground in a manner I had never witnessed previously.

With winter gripping Humboldt, Trinity, Del Norte, Mendocino, and other Northern California counties, I foresee plenty of indoor activities! In which I excel, though coop maintenance will be squeezed in whenever it's needed. That occurred yesterday; poo scooping, dustbox refreshing, feeder filling. Once sunny spring days arrive, those hens will be THRILLED to have their stomping grounds returned. How much of that medallion quilt will be completed, as well as a novel written, and another formatted for publication, remains to be seen.

From a couple of days ago, again courtesy of my better half. Although right now several of them are again foraging in the rain, LOL.

Writing will commence again tomorrow, as I take off Sundays for fiction. Blogging seems exempt from that edict, as well as formatting another installment of The Hawk; I sorted Book Five this morning. Not sure if I'll read a chapter of it today, but if not, then tomorrow definitely. I enjoyed reading a chapter an evening of the manuscript I was perusing for prequel consideration, so I'll start formatting Can't Be Done Alone: The Hawk Book Five in a similar time slot. That novel's release is a few months away, but as I have found time and again, there's no time like the present for those final revisions.

But how is that new story progressing? A chapter and a half, not bad for busy mornings. I can edit at night, but need mornings for crafting fiction. To finish chapter two, a lighter vein of prose is required, as the story starts out with HEAPS of DRAMA. Now if one is writing about miracles, then reasons for miraculous occurrences need to be installed. However, I don't want this story to get too heavy too soon. Maybe after I write that scene tomorrow, I'll put it here, just to give a little example of how joy permeates even the darkest moments.

One more from the Gigi in the iris bed photo shoot. She is a GROWLY girl if you approach her while she's in a nesting box, her name springing from Grouchy Granny, a character Muffin creates in a Bluey episode. No digressing here, lol....

That sentiment has been wafting in and out of my head and heart, rain and fabrics and hens notwithstanding. I listened to a lot of Kate Bush while sewing, an artist I've been enjoying since the early 1980s. I never imagined living in England when I was a teenager, nor did I ponder life as a nearly sixty-year old dwelling in Humboldt County, raising chickens no less! Or making quilts, lol. I did want to write novels, but it's one thing to desire fanciful notions, another to actually put pen to paper or hands to keyboards. Yet here I am waiting out the rain and other dreary situations (ahem), keeping my heart happy, my head clear of rubbish (or most rubbish), and plotting out how in the midst of the most debilitating issues (fictional of course) miracles can turn lives from dark to light.

Yeah, I'll need to post an excerpt. Because as Future Me told me last year, stay the course. And as Christ reminds me every time I seek his peace, his peace has overcome the world. 'Nuff said, methinks....