Thursday, January 1, 2009

2008, Goodbye!

What a year!

Big gap between this and my last blog post. Didn't mean to be gone so long. A few unexpected incidents, some dealt with, others avoided.

Was cranking along on my novel rewrite, about 25% done and the file became corrupted. Usually, I back these up, this time, I was in a hurry, going to come back to it...when I did...nothing.

My own fault, got out of my routine and paid for it. The good thing about this? I found a book that I should have read about 6 months ago, have been reading it and it will help my novel a great deal. Which means that I would have been doing another rewrite anyway, IF I found this book. The reason I found it was because I was angry and depressed about losing the novel draft file, so went to the library. IF I hadn't gotten angry and stopped working on the rewrite, I might never have found this book. The rewrite is coming along great now.

Farm work? It never stops. I'm cutting fire wood for the new wood stove and it eats it like there is no tomorrow. The other farm projects never end. I could write a book about that alone.

Close calls...almost too many to think about. On the way to the store the other night, came around a curve. Bambi and his sister were standing in the road. I slammed on the brakes, put the truck sideways and counter-steered to go between the two deer. Missed the one on the right by about two feet and the one on the left by about the same margin. Good thing there wasn't any oncoming traffic, since I wound up in the left lane, coasting. I had hit the brakes so hard, before shoving in the clutch, that I stalled the engine. Probably rolled about two hundred feet before I realized that the motor was dead and restarted it. You don't even want to hit a deer of any size. You could both wind up dead.

Then I stuck the 4X4 pickup in the pine grove the other day. Bogged down in mud up to it's axles. Which meant towing it out with the tractor. A small tractor, one that's about a third the size of the truck. You ever try to drive a truck and a tractor at the same time? One towing the other backwards? I won't go into how I did it. It might give someone ideas and lead to them getting hurt. When I told a friend of mine about it, all he could say was, "YOU'RE CRAZY!" Yeah, OK, but I lived to tell about it.

So, 2008 was pretty much a strange year, for me and the world in general. Now that it's behind us, time to get on with 2009.

After all, we ain't dead yet, so it's got off to a good start!

Have a great 2009!