MacDuff and I went to the inland waterway side for our walk this evening and watched the sun go down. Summer Haven is a pretty special place to live: sunsets over the ocean in the morning, sunsets over the river in the evening and half a dozen different beaches to walk on depending on my mood, the weather and the tides. What more could I want?

Well, for one thing, I could be published in novel length fiction by now. I do want that, and I'm working hard toward that goal. I just finished by latest WIP and I'm feeling a little bereft. It's like these really neat people I liked a lot and who's company I enjoyed every day have suddenly pulled up stakes and moved to California. I know they're still there, but I'm not going to see them any more. Of course, there's the synopsis to write and the book itself to edit and peddle, but the story's been told and at the moment, at least, until I begin the next one, I'm feeling a little sad.

I read a quote today I wanted to share with you, by William Arthur Ward.
"The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails."

I used to walk along a little road down the middle of the dunes toward that little round dome of a house. You can see a bit of the road just across the NEW inlet to the river (the river is to the right, out of sight), but the rest of the road has been swallowed by the sea just as the dunes were. This photo was taken from where that road used to be, well above the reach of the sea, but my feet were in the water today.
When I first moved to Summer Haven this little house was completely buried in the dunes. Then a tiny bit of the front wall began to show. First a few feet, then more. Eventually the whole front wall higher than head height showed and the front stairs appeared. This past summer parts of the sides of the house began to show as unusually high tides swept away sand and dune. Then we had one northeast storm after another. The first uncovered the old septic tank. The next tumbled the front wall onto the sand. This last one completely destroyed the house and carried away all the dune that once surrounded it and this is all that's left. I wonder how long it will be before the dome house and the dunes around it are swallowed by the sea or washed into the river beyond?

Someone suggested downloading Angry Birds to my new phone. Didn't do it - at least not yet, as I've heard that really REALLY takes over your life. But I did sync the new gadget with my Kindle so I can read books on it. And there's the scrabble games I've got going and the endless chat with my kids. Seems to me, before long they will pack so much into such a small item that we can do away with computers, phones, books, the TV and who knows what else. I wonder if I could teach it to drive the car so I can nap on long trips?

I got my new iPhone yesterday. Wow! What an amazing little gadget. And what a huge learning curve for the technically challenged like me!  I blew away half the morning in a chat with my kids while they coached me on a bunch of stuff like adding emoticons, figuring out how to access the family website, playing scrabble and a number of other things. And that was after I spent the entire afternoon yesterday just setting stuff up. I think the passwords are going to do me in, though. If only I could just establish ONE password, but NO! Everyone wants different parameters so they are all different. And if I write them down and carry them around in the case, what good is that? Anyway, I expect that very soon, I'm going to wonder how I ever lived without the thing. Whatever happened to the Pony Express? In the mean time, learning how to use this is taking over my life. That and all the fun chatting with my kids I can do now.