StanleyWheeler

Nature changed her mind. She had written a wonderful spring week with abundant sunshine filling days with the warm supple feel of a baby's smooth cheek. She had brought not only green but striking yellow hues about which bees and assorted other insects turned to and fro in their ecstatic aerial dances. She had a change of heart on Friday. She ferociously rewrote, adding plot complications that included gray skies which brooded in a dark funk above the landscape before lashing out with furious winds and unleashing airborne oceans to remind us that April is a capricious child prone to sudden (and sodden) tantrums. Nature is all about character development. She writes in epic colors with the voice of thunder and tempest without ever forgetting the details that bring her characters to life--and yet she is not nearly so eloquent as the empty tomb.

In other words, it was too wet to mow and too wet, windy and rainy to spray the weeds. I did manage to repair a cabinet door and launch into a game of Song of Drums and Shakos (Large Battles) on Saturday while the wretched wetness reigned outside. The Austrians were supposed to be fighting a defensive battle but they seized the initiative and have relentlessly taken the fight to the French. It's a fun and fairly simple game. It's not quite as fun as the wild beast I created by combining Age of Eagles with elements of Rogue Stars, but it is simpler and quicker--although, I think the rules could have been more clearly written that they were.

I should have been writing but I made my thousand words per day during the week. I'm at 19,000 words. That's nearly a quarter of the way through Power to Hurt, the sequel to Threading the Rude Eye. I still expect to have it ready by the end of July this year.

Given recent events, I've included a few pics of Notre Dame Cathedral taken when we were there in May 2017. My other pictures of the place would be from 1983 or 84 (I'll have to find them).