A week's worth of updates

Okay, it's been nearly a week (already) since my sister and her family left. On Tuesday, Kevin and I drove my parents to the airport in San Jose. They didn't have very good luck with their flights. On the way here, one of their flights was cancelled and they had to return the following morning and missed half a day of their organized tour. Once in Costa Rica, they had a great time. They were on their tour for nine days (company is Caravan Tours and my parents highly recommend it) then at our place for a week. It was nice that they were able to overlap with my sister's visit, too.

While my sister and brother-in-law were here, I learned how to prepare and serve foods without gluten... and without cheese! The two things I love. But, it's awesome that I can accommodate – without sacrificing flavour – guests who have certain diet restrictions. We do what we can with the resources we have. 

Since Tuesday, Kevin has been back at it, working on the property with Martin. He transferred the baby trout from the concrete container to the small pond next to the hatchery... and so the cycle begins. The 'baby' trout that were transferred from the small pond into the large pond last August are now weighing in at 2/3 of a kilo. They're no longer 'babies', that's for sure.

Kevin has also removed the nets that help filter the leaves and dirt in the sediment pond and has power washed them cleaned. They were due! It's amazing how much muck accumulates over time. Good job done!

Martin has been busy chopping the trees that fell in a strong winds two weeks ago. We didn't want him making all that noise when my family were visiting, so he postponed the task until Wednesday. Kevin's been helping him with lugging the logs under cover in the wood shed. This wood is alder, which burns cleanly. There's so much of it, we can afford to get rid of the other wood that seems to smoke out the house every time we burn it. I'm not a fan. Now, we don't have to be stingy with the alder logs... there's lots!

And while Kevin's been busy catching up on farm chores, I've been working on reformatting my book. The writing, editing and proofreading are all done, yet there's a catch. I've uploaded my manuscript to Kobo and it translated my Word document into an ePub file. Perfect. I knew this was the process, but I didn't realize how time consuming (yet again) it would be to fix the formatting changes. The one thing I'll say is that Kobo client service has been great! I email my questions and get a thoughtful and helpful response back within a day (sometimes within hours). Writing a book is new to me, but dealing with technology, file formats, etc. is really new to me. What has happened is that while I've been typing away in my Word document, I've been clicking the 'Enter/Return' key to create a line space... sometimes between chapters, I've tapped twice to add double spaces. It looks aesthetically pleasing and it's what I want it to look like when people are reading my book. Well, little did I know that every 'Enter/Return' equates to TWO spaces in an ePub format. They call that a 'hard return'. So if I want two spaces, it means it will actually be FOUR spaces, which is huge! And, there's no way of correcting this error within the ePub format. I have to go back to my Word document and fix every 'Hard Return' by backspacing, making sure there are no spaces at all and then pressing Shift+Enter, which I'm told is considered a 'soft return'. It will leave a single line space. Also, I have to add my cover picture to my Word document before formatting it into an ePub file. Next time (if there is a next time) I'll know better. The learning process is not the problem... I like learning new things. It's the time it's taking that is driving me crazy. Oh well, I'll I can say is soon, people, soon... I hope!!!

Oh, and on Wednesday evening, while Kevin and I were watching TV (and working on reformatting my book to be ePub friendly), we felt an earthquake. It was strong enough for the drinking glasses to rattle on the shelf. It lasted at least 20 seconds. Then a few minutes later, we felt an aftershock. It was the first true blue earthquake that actually felt like what I imagine an earthquake to feel like. It wasn't scary. We prefer little and often than infrequent and BIG.

The temperatures this week have been reaching 28°C/82°F nearly every day, with no rain whatsoever. The nighttime temperatures have been dipping as low as 5°C/41°F. We're loving every minute of it. We're following the weather reports in Ontario, Canada and England and we feel sorry for our family and friends who are suffering through such harsh conditions. It's the last day of January... only six or so more weeks and hopefully the polar vortex will disappear.