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Jon and I got to have a leisurely morning. He fixed basil and ricotta cheese eggs in the egg poacher. (I was going to just write poacher there, but I had this sudden visual of a human poacher being used to make the egss. Bad visual.) We had his step dad Art over to share the breakfast. Mary had already gone out on errands. A leisurely morning is not what she wanted today. More eggs for us.

Jon and I noticed that we felt better on tour when we had breakfast, then we sometimes do at home without it. Tour is so hard physically, that if having breakfast can make that better, then we’ve decided to try it at home more often. Today was the first experiment to see how we do today. Is it worth getting up and hitting the ground running, and on week day mornings loosing the morning cuddle? I don’t know if it’s going to be worth that. At the hotels room service comes and someone else cooks. Where is that little silver bell that everyone rings in the old movies, so breakfast comes to you in bed? Honestly, Jon and I have decided that we are willing to do what it takes to make sure we don’t need permanent staff in the house round the clock. Our alone time as both as a couple, a family, and just individually, is worth the effort.

Jon is off to the vet with Pippin, who just seems off his game. Nothing specific, but the big puppy just isn’t quite well. So, off to let a professional check him out. I stayed home so I could work on SWALLOWING DARKNESS. But the computer updated something, and it turned everything off, and now I’m staring at two different files of Merry. The computer wants me to choose which stays and which goes away. I know all you techies out there would make short work of this; you’d press a button, use the mouse, and be done. I am frozen with indecision. What if I am wrong?

I called Jon and he gave me his best advice over the phone, but he isn’t here and we’ve learned that I don’t always look at a computer the way he would. Sometimes my reporting skills for computer stuff is a little odd. I’ll fail to mention something vital to my tech guru, then bad things can, potentially, happen. I don’t want to screw up this book forty pages out from the end. Nope, do not want that to happen. So, I can’t work on the computer until Jon comes back to rescue me from tech purgatory.

Darla is at her home with her family. Charles is having a birthday party for one of his kids. There’s a reason I have so many techies that I can call in an emergency, but today they’d need to see the screen and there’s no one here. Earlier in this blog, I wrote, that it’s worth having privacy not to have people working on the weekends, other than me. But there are moments, when I have the bad thought, that this kind of thing is why we were contemplating having weekend staff. But no matter how helpful it can be at times, it’s a trade-off. Having help always, in exchange for privacy. In the end, Jon and I decided it wasn’t a trade we were willing to make. So, I sit typing this, waiting for Jon to get back from the Vet’s office. I can work long hand on the fight scene. God, knows I need to continue planning. Yeah, I can do that. That is low tech enough for me not to be stymied.

I could also work on the next Anita book, but I’ll resist that siren’s song, because once I start thinking Anita it’s sometimes hard to get back into Merry’s head. Oddly, the computer that Anita #17 is on, was not effected by the update, or rather isn’t giving me hard choices. It just raised the file I needed and off we could go. Too bad this isn’t the book due next. The other computer is always a little more touchy than this one. Not sure why, maybe it’s the whole laptop verses desktop computer issue. Maybe. Regardless, I have to go work on something, while I wait for Jon to return and press a button, and make it all look so easy. Staring at the computer screen with the question, "Which one do you want to save?" does not sound easy to me.

More hot caffeinated liquid will help. Yes, that’s what I’ll do; tea.