Apple Blossoms by Connie Cockrell

It’s been a hectic quarter for me, and I can hardly believe it’s over.

The yard and garden continue to be worked. I have trimmed 3 more of the 12 rosebushes and did yet another run of pulling mint out of my deepest square foot garden bed. The peach tree seedling I transplanted into a small container is doing well. So are the mystery tomatoes. I think I’ll just buy hot peppers and sweet peppers and a few of the other things I put in the garden. I really should put the peas and beans in now. It’s already a hot spring for us. A neighbor gave me a lot of ancient flower seeds. I’m going to set up some pots and see if anything will sprout. Who knows, I may end up with a lot of flowers this year.

Sunday I made a new batch of soap. The last batch was made fifteen months ago. This time I made half the batch a rosemary scent, leaving the other half unscented. The unscented stuff I’ll use to make my own shampoo. Since I’ve been making my own shampoo I think my hair is much softer and not all dried out. I poured the liquid soap into a 2 qt glass measuring cup and poured out the unscented soap into silicon muffin cups. Then I mixed the ground rosemary (from my own rosemary bush that I dried and ground myself) and a half ounce of rosemary essential oil into the remainder and stirred it all through. I poured that into a second silicon muffin pan. Twenty-four 4oz bars of soap are now curing in my dining room.

I finalized the editing on After Math and sent it to Clarkesworld, who rejected it after two days. I immediately sent it back out to EscapePod. No, the two day turn around wasn’t particularly fast. I once had a submission rejected in 3 hours.  So, we’ll see how EscapePod likes it.

I’m excited that a new month starts Wednesday, along with the April Camp National Novel Writing Month. I’m all ready to go on that. While waiting for that I used some time to update my web site a little bit. I’ve added a Media page where you can find my contact information, a sub-page with information about me, and another sub-page where I point out I’m available for speaking events. I tried to load an audio file of my February presentation to the Arizona Professional Writers, Rim Country Division but the site requires me to upgrade to a premium service. That’s the big push now. Since I have to upgrade, I’m going to go full website. I will retain the site as Connie’s Random Thoughts but it won’t be a blog only anymore. I also bought my name as a domain. I now own conniecockrell.com, along with 2ndWindPress.com and ConniesRandomThoughts.com.

The Payson Book Festival planning is moving right along. You can see the information on www.PaysonBookFestival.org if you’d like. Authors, there’s still time to sign up for a table. You can share a table, too, to make your costs less. Fill out the Author Registration and get that in to us so we can reserve you a table. Author registration closes at the end of April so we can put the program together. You’re not an author? Then mark your calendar to come to Payson for July 25th to meet us. We’d love to chat with you.

Thanks for stopping by my blog today.

Lost Rainbows released January 25th! I’m pretty excited about it. You can buy it and my other books at: Apple, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, or Smashwords today!