I don't have a tripod (yet--but I think one is looming in my future!) for my new digital camera, but here is a photo of my backyard swing without me in it. You can see that I was indeed swinging in it--you can see my footprints there in the snow.

This is where I sat and had my morning coffee as the sun was coming up today. It was really peaceful out there. Oddly enough, while I was sitting out there, swinging, drinking (coffee, of course!), and just all-around digging the wintery scene, I was starting to feel very excited about spring coming and all the flowers that were going to be blooming back there. This is, of course, assuming I do a ton of planting and, better still, can afford to buy all those flowers!

The news from moi is that I am making some very interesting progress on the current book proposal. This morning I had the mental image of a sort of machete whacking away the worn out concepts that are currently dragging the story down. (How's that for being obscure?) It was a really happy, uplifting feeling. I felt like I had a whole new take on where my two main characters needed to go, or what they needed to represent/express.

more in a minute...