Today is absolutely, positively, hands-down the most beautiful day I've seen in months.

And I'm at work.

I just might need to take a couple of walks today. Or smoke breaks. Something.

Yesterday was pretty nice, too. After they got home, Matt and I put Penny in her stroller and we went for a little walk around the neighborhood. I'm looking forward to more of that sort of thing, as the weather gets nicer.

Tonight, we've got a guy coming over to give us an estimate on building us a deck. We got a flyer stuck on the side of our mailbox a few days ago, and we'd decided that we were going to use our tax refund this year to finally build the deck, so it seemed fortuitous. I called the guy, and we set up the meeting.

His flyer makes it sound like they do all kinds of construction jobs. If we like the work he does on the deck, maybe we'll hire him again to do the bigger job of converting our garage into a family room.

I came into my office this morning to find that my computer had Blue-Screen-of-Deathed on me again. But a simple reboot seems to have solved its problem.

I need to back up all my work-important crap onto the server this morning, I think.

I started re-reading Circle in the Sand yesterday. It's been at least eight months since I so much as looked at it.

I was really afraid that it was going to suck. And lord, it could use some work. The prologue is disjointed and rambling. And has some fairly glaring editing mistakes. (Like, about halfway through the writing, we changed the name of one of the countries, and missed fixing it in the prologue.)

And the first chapter - oh, sweet gods. It's all over the place. Too many characters with too many intertwined relationships introduced far too fast. I got confused, and they're my characters. And the dialogue is pathetically wooden, and we're explaining too many of the wrong things, and not explaining other things that desperately require explanation...

I was so afraid that the whole novel was that bad.

But it got better after the first chapter. I read through about Chapter Seven last night, and while there are still rough patches here and there, nothing else has been that bad. So it's salvageable. But it definitely needs another round of editing. A more ruthless round than we did last time.

And last but not least... Here, have a picture of Penny in her nice spring-y dress to round off this lovely spring day.

--Liz