GREAT LAS VEGAS DAY

Today was the kind of day I would love to have all year around. A little cool in the morning, great temperature until it got dark (don't like going off Daylight Savings Time) and it will be a little cool tonight. Okay, that's the weather forecast from Las Vegas.

Speaking of being on Pacific Standard Time, it is a real bummer for it to begin getting dark at 4:30-5:00. That's a little earlier than when I lived in LA because we are farther north, but I wish we could stay on Daylight Savings Time all year. It seems like lots of other people feel the same way from what I see posted on Facebook and the like.

Did this year go fast for you? I was thinking that Easter wasn't that long ago, and now we are getting ready for Thanksgiving. Where did the time go? Stores are putting out Christmas decorations even before Halloween.

Thanksgiving several years ago in LA at Cousin Barbara's house

Would you believe, we go to Baja Miguel, the Mexican restaurant in the South Point Casino for our holiday meals now? They not only offer their regular menu, but have special menus for holidays. For Thanksgiving you can choose traditional turkey, all the fixings and pumpkin pie or pumpkin flan for dessert. Not like the days back in LA when we had a pretty big family there and we traded off hosting the holiday dinners.

Mine was generally Christmas, my cousin Barbara who passed away a few years ago took Thanksgiving and my cousin Trisja generally made the Easter dinner. We usually had about 20 people. Those were great times with a fun loving family. My own kids are spread out all over now- Jason in Northern California, Jakki and my two grandsons in England and Scott in Australia, and my sister Phyllice lives in Oregon, so the memories of those big dinners are just that -- memories to be treasured. I am grateful for all of the years I was able to be part of a wonderful family experience, and happy to have friends and a cousin here to enjoy the holidays with.

LIFE'S LITTLE FRUSTRATIONS

Life in this cyber-world can get awfully confusing sometimes, even to someone who is computer savvy. I was attacked full force this week as I tried to use a mail merge on Outlook. I won't go into details, but I spent a full day trying to get it right. Finally gave up and decided that when I'm ready, I will use a service. Of course, being the bulldog that I am I will try it one more time when my head is clear before doing that.

Thank goodness for my little Dylan. Holding him and petting him returns me to reality.

Okay, so that one was out of the way. Time to devote time to final corrections to the print proof of MURDER ON THE MENU, to be released November 26---but the Kindle and ePub editions are available for PreOrder. So, since my sister Phyllice and I write this series together, we edit and correct together. I received my print proof first and set to work. What I do is create a matrix table with all of my edits or suggestions and send it to her so we don't duplicate. If I've found it and fixed it, that let's her know. This applies to missing words, bad punctuation--things like that. Simple right.

Yep, simple if somewhere along the line the file with the table was not corrupted. I had no idea that was what happened, finished going through the whole book and had a complete table to send her, hit SAVE, and Word shut down without notice, dumping all of my entries. And, yes, I do have Autosave set for every 5 minutes. Those files did not go into Autosave or if they did, they are floating around in cyberspace somewhere.

Back to the drawing board as the saying goes. So, fortunately I use little stickies to indicate every place I find a glitch. Back through the book, but this time I only made a few entries before I tried SAVE. Nope. Word crashed again. And again.

Dumb me. Never thought about a corrupted file and kept trying to retrieve the missing complete one. By the way, that also meant that all the corrections on the manuscript were lost too. By the end of a very frustrating day I finally began from scratch with a new file, when through the book yet another time and  viola! The SAVE  worked and I sent the table to Phyllice.

The good news? We should still be on time.