Camp NaNoWriMo word count: 8.551 as of 6:30am on Sunday, mostly journaling here, but also some revision based on discussion with Ann and a brief exercise from Writing the Other: A Practical Approach by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward. I was already halfway to my thousand words before 7am yesterday. 

Revised novel EMD word count: 74,883 This draft is still just sitting. I have not even peeked. 

We managed a walk yesterday morning between squalls, our normal 45-minute walk. The tide had turned and rushed high every few minutes and we had to retreat high up the beach into the rocks.

Gary found a “Darth Vador” black plastic shovel and a bright pink Little Mermaid plastic shovel and the broken handle from a beach pail. I found plastic straws and other trash, two drowned cigarette lighters, and a piece of pumice. I put the pumice in the pumice jar. 

A woman walking toward us was not quick enough and a wave washed up past her knees and flooded her boots, but no harm done. She sat on a drift log high up in the rocks to remove each boot and pour the water out. 

The sky went from downpour to clear blue and then started over. The cycle repeated for most of the day.

After I cleared off my work table, I finished our federal and state taxes. Gary will go over them too and we hope to mail Monday. Because the feds count our Social Security income and the state does not, I owe money to one and get money back from the other. Did our taxes go down? Well, yes, but then our real income was down too and our withholding went down, so it’s not really different. What is different is the forms, which were, frankly, irritating. All the same information must be documented on the federal forms, but everything is rearranged and spread out. When I had a question about where to list my estimated payments, I could not find an answer in the instructions or online. Neither could the first person I talked to at the IRS. Smarter people than me use an accountant. I am stubborn. 

I made a rough-puff tart with caramelized onion and pear and two cheeses for lunch. We finished it off for dinner. Scrumptious.

Gary is reading statistics about political incarceration of children around the world. Our country has taken children from their parents and then so failed to care for those children that they are unable to reunite them with family. How does such an abomination of itself not bring down a government? 

Consider an ally’s behavior in similar circumstances. During the Second World War non-English speaking children fled battlegrounds from across Europe and arrived alone in England. They arrived in the care of nurses, with names pinned to their coats. Some of them would never return home again. It was still the Great Depression, Britain—famously class-conscious and ethnocentric and seriously economically depressed before, during, and for more than a decade after the war—took these children and did not always welcome the refugees. They were not treated this badly. 

We painted the floor in one of the bedrooms. Bed and bookcase and little side tables are still stacked out in the atrium and today it will be good to have things back where they belong. I want to further tidy my work space. I have two very lengthy knitting projects in progress and a warp on my loom. The only thing worse than not having a visual project to keep my eyes and hands busy might be having three. I want to move on.