Hello! I hope you all had a great weekend. I know I did. It was sunny and relatively warm. OK, it got above freezing, if only by a degree or two, but the bright sun made it feel warm! The week wasn’t as cold or nasty as it was in some parts of the country, but the weekend weather sure was welcome!

Mostly because of the weather, but for a few other reasons, I have not been running in almost a month. Even in the cold weather I typically bundle up and run at least three times a week, so a month off, well, I could feel it. And then last week I was feeling a little down. I started to do my normal exercise routine on Monday, but my left arm hurt, so I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it Tuesday either. Or Wednesday, Thursday or Friday!

Hi all! I did have a lot to smile about this week, but one is special. On Tuesday, the 9th of February I released my book the Old Mill.

The Old Mill started as a serialized novel here, on my blog, back in early 2017. In 2019 I rewrote it mostly from scratch. And then, well, it has been two hard years of drafting and editing and such. In that time I also created a cover and did other work. Anyway, it is finally out!

This is a smile, not a promotion, so I’ll leave more details to the release post here.

Releasing The Old Mill was my smile for this week.

What made you smile?

Winter has arrived in New Hampshire! Well, we had some frigid weather for a while, but the real snow arrived last week. It has snowed a few times and there is a thick covering over everything. It is very pretty.

I took several walks over the weekend in what can be described as a winter wonderland. At the edge of a our town there is a bare hillside. The backside is used as a sledding hill. It is called Carnival Hill because for decades back in the late 19th century, early 20th century, there was a huge winter festival there that drew people up from Boston. Part of it is the Three Town Toboggan Run, since it is on the corner of the three townships, and you can literally sled through parts of all three.

Anyway, Saturday evening, at sunset, it was gorgeous up there. The sky glowed pink and purple. There are places with wonderful views of the chain containing Temple Mountain, Pack Monadnock and North Pack. The snow glowed.

That is half of my smile.

It has been a busy week, but then, they all are. This week I had a special project that I’ve been working on. There is a huge amount of background, that I’ll save for a later post, but the main idea is that I have been working on two static websites (as opposed to the blog).

I am working on two pages. The first is part of the “Trent’s World Universe”, and so a static version of the blog. It highlights creativity, mostly in music, drawing, painting, photography and writing. (This is my trentsworld.com site.) The second is my static author’s page.

Back in the prehistoric age, I used to create web pages by hand, writing in the html markup myself. So now I am using a version of Word Press to do it. I chose WP because I am familiar with it from my blog. And it was free ;)

This week was a pretty good week and I had a lot to smile about. How to chose? Hmm, a good problem to have :)

I was out walking the dogs Friday afternoon. There is a road at the edge of our village that goes up a large hill to several houses. A field covers most of the hill and at the bottom the is a Community Garden. Just above the garden, a small strip of woods lines the field.

I was walking down the road, heading back into the village, when I saw something up the hill close to the edge of the woods. I stopped and sure enough, it was a fox. I watched as it came down the hill towards the garden. The dogs hadn’t seen him, so I stood and watched. I also talked to the dogs in a loud voice, so the fox would know I was there. And that the dogs were there….

When it entered the garden, I felt it was close enough so I started to walk again. The fox had another idea – it barked. Just a single, strange bark.

That got the dogs attention!