South Jersey Writers Conference…and Snow

On Saturday, a group of writers got together for the 2nd Annual South Jersey Writers Conference. The original location was only about 5 minutes from my house, but then it got moved to a place 45 minutes away. But I went anyway because this is a great group of writers to hang out with and we always have a good time!

We kicked it off with a workshop by Laura Kaighn, then the keynote by K.A. Magrowski. We rounded out the day with two panels where we discussed everything from what/who inspired us to write what we write to marketing to process. As always, much learning was accompanied by much laughter.

photo by Kristin Battestella

Many thanks to Kristin Battestella for organizing the South Jersey Writers Conference, and to all the people who came by–including my cousin and his wife! A nice surprise.

 

 

The rest of this week was taken up in mopping my floors and steam cleaning my rugs. (I live such a wild life.) I gotta say, when you have a child in the house, it takes longer to clear out the room so you can do the rug than it actually takes to do the rug. Still, it was worth the effort.

Today, it’s snowing. Since I have nowhere to go, I am able to actually enjoy watching the snow fall, and take pleasure in the beauty.

Power Outage 2018

So I didn’t get a chance to put up a blog post yesterday because we lost our power in the nor’easter. It didn’t start out too badly, and I hoped we would escape the worst of it.

It started coming down heavy after noon.

My husband came home from work around 3:30. He started cooking a pizza a little after 4. Power went out 3 minutes after he put it in the oven. (He left it in the hot oven for a couple of hours and eventually deemed it cooked enough and ate it!)

The heavy snow took its toll on the trees, including ours. We are lucky the branch landed behind my husband’s car, leaving only one small scratch on a brake light.

We played some games by lantern light, read a little while, then crawled into bed a bit early. After my daughter fell asleep (after insisting she could NEVER fall asleep without her fan running for white noise), I poured hot water in the fish tank to bring the water temp back up to normal. Then I went to bed.

Around 2:30 AM something started beeping, and I was the only one who woke up, so I traipsed around the cold house with a flashlight until I found the culprit–the CO/natural gas alarm in the washroom, whose battery was running out. Replaced the battery and climbed back into bed.

3 AM the power came back on! Got up again, went downstairs to turn off the lights that were on and plug in my phone to charge. Went to my daughter’s room to turn on her salt lamp and her fan. Happy to see the heater in the fish tank was running. Dug my daughter’s head out from under the blankets so she could breathe. Went back to bed.

It was a long, chilly night. I am grateful to the power crews that got things back online so quickly. The kids will go back to school tomorrow, and things can get back to normal.

And that’s why I don’t have some pithy writing-related post ready for today!

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