I’m at the upper range of the two pounds that I keep floating between. This surprises exactly no one, given my lack of movement, as well as the extra desserts. (!!!)

But this last week was kind of hard. I wasn’t great all week, some somewhat meh days, and my hip as well as my knee have been bothering me.

Then the smoke set in. Air quality has been horrendous the last few days. Not any better today. I haven’t been going outside at all.

Walking around the house I’ve managed to average about 6K steps per day, which honestly I think is good enough.

As for writing, I finished two short stories last week. One is a cozy mystery for MCM, the other is a Space Marine story for BSQ. I’m really pleased with both of them. But I didn’t have a huge word count last week, only about 9K.

Today, I’m going to get myself extra caffeinated and plot out the next cozy mystery in the Lake Hope series, “The Tell Tale Heart Pin.” As cozy mysteries are escapist literature, I decided the first sentence is going to be something like, “By July of 2021, things were mostly back to normal in Lake Hope.”

So I have set expectations that maybe there were some troubles and problems, but everything is fine again.

Did I mention escapist literature?

I believe that part of the reason why my brain is so excited to write this is because it also wants to escape.

In other news – we harvested the pears and the apples last week, just before the smoke set in. I’ve been processing the apples all week. This has included dried apple slices for snacks and tea, pear butter, apple butter, apple crumble, and canned apple pie filling.

This week, we’re having pork roast with apples and will probably be mulling some apple cider. While we didn’t have that many pears, we had three large boxes of apples. And we gave away a bunch of apples as well, a couple more boxes worth.

Blaze harvested the grapes, and we now have a gallon of wine brewing on the counter. In a few weeks, after he kills the yeast, we’ll start a gallon of rum brewing.

My hydroponic plants appear to be doing well, finally. I plan on taking pictures and doing a post about them at some point.

And I think that’s it for now. We’re mainly just staying inside and doing stuff here, avoiding the outside. It looks like a gray, overcast day outside, but it’s smoke that’s filling the air.

What are you up to this week? Anything fun?