Despite the slower pace of living in the country, life has been pretty fast-paced lately. I meant to update this much sooner, but I’ve been so busy.

Winter seed sowing in gallon jugs is underway. It’s been 2 weeks since I sowed the first of the seeds — salad greens — and those are the only seeds that have sprouted so far. All except for the Swiss chard. Gardening is really about experimenting anyway, so if this particular experiment doesn’t work out, I still have plenty of seeds.

I have 13 jugs on the porch right now. I will be planting tomato seeds soon.

It’s mostly felt like spring with the occasional cold day. Perhaps the groundhog was wrong. Though I suspect we’ll pay for all these warm days in the spring.

You may have heard about the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, two weeks ago. It made the national news, though if you live outside of the U.S., you may not know about it. My husband, who works for the state government, had to deploy up there shortly after it happened. He sent me this chilling photo as he was sheltering in place at an elementary school during the controlled release of chemicals a few days after the accident.

He’s home now, but he wasn’t given any protective gear while he was there — no mask or anything. Time will tell how devastating this will be on the community, but it’s already taken a huge toll, and I really feel for the people and animals who live in the area.

In other news, we’ve had a deer carcass in our yard that’s been dragged around by coyotes, I am assuming. (Honestly, what else could it be? Bears aren’t that common in Ohio — not in this part of the state, anyway.) Until now, it’s just been dragged through the wooded parts of our yard, but now it looks like it exploded. Fur and body parts everywhere, including the open part of our yard where I walk Blitz almost daily. I asked L to get the SD card out of our trail cam. He set it up so it was aimed at the carcass, hoping we might capture something exciting. Stay tuned.

Work-wise, I finally got my first travel booking. So exciting! A Trafalgar tour for 2 to Great Britain this summer!

As for the writing and editing biz, I am working on a huge copyediting project at the moment and have some other irons in the fire. Things are starting to pick up. Next month, Words in Bloom will celebrate its first anniversary.

I have jury duty coming up on Thursday. I have never had jury duty before. I need to call a day ahead to find out if I still need to report to the courthouse.