Here it is April of 2025 and I realize I haven’t actually posted in more than two years. So, for all two of you who happen to see this, thanks for checking in on me.
The Young Master (YM) is about to turn seven (how did he get that old?!), and since we’ve moved into this house my life has been consumed with two things: homeschooling and housekeeping. This house is only about 600 feet bigger than the one we had before the sojourn in the tropics, but it’s about 50 years older, and so needs a good deal more keeping. We have so far replaced every appliance except the washing machine and the refrigerator – most recently, the HVAC system – and a couple of fixtures besides. On the other hand, it’s starting to look like this may finally be the year my garden does something. I planted peas, carrots, beets, and greens at the end of March, right before a giant storm system swept through, and at least some of all of the above have come up. That said, I’m behind on starting my tomatoes and the rest of it, so I guess we’ll see.
YM is doing great with his lessons. I dropped the reading curriculum this year in favor of writing (which includes both copywork and narration/basic dictation), and he’s breezing through second-grade math. Our core curriculum is Gentle + Classical, which is partially based on the pedagogy of Charlotte Mason, so I’ve done a bit of a dive into her writings to try to figure out what I’m doing.
Lest you worry about that switch, YM blew threw two levels of the reading curriculum in kindergarten. We realized he knew how to read when, at the age of three, he asked a question about One Piece based on the subtitles. But, he was having trouble doing some of the activities in the book because he didn’t have the handwriting chops.
I’m moving forward with writing, just atrociously slowly. I’m waiting to hear back on a short story I submitted for an anthology, and I’ve been trying my hand at other short stories – but mostly not finishing them, I’m afraid. Some of them may become novels later, some of them might get finished and put up as shorts. As with so much of life, we’ll have to see.
I’ve been within about 5,000 words of finishing my unicorn knights story for about the last year or so (which 5,000 varies: right now I’m adding a subplot with a secondary character so that the ending makes sense). Once I’ve put the finishing touches on that maybe I’ll put up an excerpt – here or on my even-more-neglected Patreon/Substack/Kofi remains to be seen.
Once that’s done I have a decent start already on a WWI supernatural thriller (I guess?) full of Indiana Jones-ish goodness… or that’s the idea anyway. And then maybe at some point I’ll actually be able to write Chandi’s story on Dance of Desolation, the sequel to Advent of Ruin – no, I haven’t forgotten it, I just keep running into brick walls, and I’ve been having a devil of a time finding a good source of Indian-sounding writing music. The RRR soundtrack seems like it may be a good start, though.
Somehow we have four (four!) cats now. Gilgamesh and Tam Lin came back to us from my in-laws when we returned to the mainland, but Tam had to be put down in early 2024. Then we went to the shelter and picked out two more… and then three months later I find a little orange rascal mewling for help from under someone’s truck. Long story short, I “couldn’t just” leave him there, and DH “couldn’t just” take him to a shelter once we had him, so that was that. He looks like he could be Gil’s son, if Gil hadn’t been fixed ages ago.
So. After more than two years of silence, I can tell you that’s where I am. I can’t promise to post daily, or even weekly, at this point, but I do want to get back into the habit of posting something. Even if it’s only pictures from a nature walk.