09:11 – Things are really warming up. It was 48.2F (9C) when I took Colin out this morning. Nearly all of the snow has disappeared. The driveway is completely clear, although still wet, and only a few patches of snow remain in the shady areas. When she gets home, I’m going to tell Barbara that I shoveled all the snow off the drive and swept off the entire 1.5-acre yard. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
Colin and I are doing fine. He misses Barbara, but he’s behaving pretty well with her gone. We had a frozen beef pot-pie for dinner last night, followed by doughnuts for our evening snack.
Barbara just called. She’s getting ready to head over to get a haircut, followed by lunch with a friend, running a few errands including a stop at Costco, and then head back home. I asked her to add a couple of three-pound #10 cans of Kirkland ground coffee to her list.
I finished Franklin Horton’s book four in his Borrowed World series last night, reading just for flow. I’m also about 60% through the copy-edit pass. Most of what I’ve flagged is trivial–typos, missing or double words, a couple instances of characters changing names, lie/lay/laid issues, and so on. Franklin is also one of very, very few authors for whom I have to keep a dictionary handy. For example, I’d never seen “cabbage” used as a verb, but sure enough it turns out to be a synonym for “steal”.
If I were to make one substantive criticism of Franklin’s work, it would be from personal preference. His dystopian novels are dystopic in spades. They can be painful to read. Kind of like a Russian comedy: at the end, everyone dies horribly. Franklin does not have a very high opinion of humanity in general. Even most of his protagonists are not very nice people. But Franklin is, first and foremost, a story-teller. His writing makes you want to keep turning pages.