ethylene (350 words)

I'm sooo bad. In order to distract myself, I have been haring off after the exact word for the shed where they treat tomatoes with ethylene.

In the process, I have found:

Ripening Mutants

All about tomato production in Merced County

The Return of the Flavr Savr Tomato

scary! fruit ripening, ethylene, and the environment

And this for a chapter I am finished with, except for the last couple of paragraphs -- yesterday's chapter. I figured out the end of it as soon as I gave up and went outside to attempt to clean up my yard.

Yesterday I got frustrated with my pruning tools and went out and bought: a long-handled lopper which can cut a 2" branch: a new little clipper shears: and a saw. And found that the saw is the easiest of the three for my hands, and that I could, in fact, take off the two dead and two huge live boughs from the apricot tree. The branches were bigger than I thought. The city compost can is full, full, full. I've started on the apple tree, too, which is ailing this year and I think I see the source -- funkiness in the bark that wasn't there before.

The plums are eating-ripe, which means winemaking-ripe in a couple of weeks, and I haven't racked last year's wine in months. I hope it isn't undrinkable (the wine from the first year was wonderful, the wine from the second year, when I followed instructions and topped it up with water, was not so wonderful).

Back to work.

a little more than a thousand words

I'm going to let the nice fellow play with the computer for a while. I'm going to grout the tile on the wall above the breakfast nook and do some other things, and then I will claim the computer again and write the rest of this chapter. (chapter five) I've gotten my guy down to the desert and stranded in a truck stop, and here is my truck driver! The next part is pretty easy to write, so I should top the 2500 mark today and finish this chapter with no problem.

But I don't think I'm getting all the way through the man at the bar -- I think that will have to be its own chapter, and I don't mind, because by my calculations, that would mean that the Boss would appear about page 45. For the rhythm of the story, that would be about right, because if the Boss and the flashbacks take up about a third of the book, and the events leading to Candelario and after meeting Candelario take up half the book, the book would be 250-275 pages at that rate.

1500-odd words

I was struggling to find a decently detailed map of the Valley so I could figure out the truck driver's itinerary, to make it last juat as long as I think it ought to. In the process I found:

A Geographer Looks at the San Joaquin Valley

Animated Winds of the San Joaquin Valley

San Joaquin Valley Disease

Everything but a road and city map

Agricultural Settlement

and a bunch of other stuff which I'm linking to here because I might find them useful later.

I have spent most of the day waiting for the nice fellow I married to get the hell off the computer so I could write a little. I just have to get up before he does on days he has off, especially when I have to go help out at Bingo like I do tonight. My daughter's band is trying to save enough money to go to Hawaii next spring, which is good for her, because she missed a paid ticket there this summer to stay with her grandparents (and grandMoher's coven) -- she needs her Japanese class and couldn't take so much time off from it.
Her bagpipe teacher called to check on her progress memorizing "Red Hector of the Battles."

I have to be done, even though I'm less than halfway through the chapter. I'll make up for it tomorrow, if I have to poison the nice fellow.