For the past few days I’ve been at a friend’s house in the Coast Range for the clam digging tides at Astoria. We’ve been working on building up a supply of fresh razor clams to keep in the freezer to nosh on the year around for both fried clams and chowder clams. The razors are the most flavorful and tender of the clams available on the Oregon coast, at least in our opinion, and while using the clam gun (a metal tube with a long handle and suction hole) is easier than digging bay clams, it’s still a bit of work. But oh, the flavor…
The other thing I’ve been doing while down on the beach is collecting whole sand dollars and pretty rocks/shells to use for art projects for fall and winter craft shows, combined with lots of leftover bead stuff. I have more beads than I’ll ever use in jewelry for sale, so I’m going to be doing art stuff with them. Crafts will happen in the summer, when I can sit under the pine tree in the shade and work on them.
Meanwhile, I’m still letting Beyond Honor sit and will get back to revisions sometime next week. In the meantime, I’m wrestling with a cozy-type gnome story that is being difficult. I don’t normally do cozy OR gnomes, so that’s part of the problem. But I started this for a theme anthology and sidelined it when other deadlines took precedence. Now it’s time to dust it off and get it finished. The conflicts just seem so small compared to what I usually write. Deep sigh. It counts, it counts, it counts.
I’m also putting in twelve hours a week monitoring PE and Health students working through online classes. It’s been a big learning curve for me, but it’s also been an opportunity to see how this type of teaching operates. I have opinions, but I’m waiting to see how it all shakes out by the end of the term before I say more. I will say, though, that in my opinion this sort of opportunity can be golden for some students but absolutely worthless for others. But we shall see.
At this point, I’m looking forward to the end of clam season and the frequent runs to the Coast (which will become garden runs) and the end of the school year, which will allow me to pick up some more projects. I’m hoping that things will settle down and I can focus even more on writing and editing. Keeping my fingers crossed that life doesn’t throw me any more complications…..
