Artist is Beth Cavener. Title: L’Amante.

Her gallery of shots is much better than mine, but here’s a closer view I took.

Now for the rest of the pictures.

Relaxing in Fort Collins

Rocky Mountain National Park

Colorado School of Mines Geology Museum and Golden, Colorado

Driving home (through Kansas and Kentucky)

Last morning (and the best doughnuts in Lexington, we believe)

Our itinerary:

Pennsylvania to Madison, Wisconsin, overnight stop in Elkhart, Indiana

In Madison for a few days with my mom and younger brother and his fiancée

Madison to Fort Collins, Colorado, overnight stop in Nebraska

In and around Fort Collins for a few days with my in-laws

Fort Collins to Pennsylvania, overnight stops in Lawrence, Kansas, and Lexington, Kentucky

It’s a lot to pack into two weeks, and it was wonderful. (Click through to see pictures up to our arrival in Fort Collins. There are a lot, but even this is just a subset of what I took.)

Henry Vilas Zoo in Madison

Chazen Museum of Art and University of Wisconsin campus

Heading through Iowa

Through Nebraska and to Fort Collins

Lots of driving. Couple stops.

Also lots of reading novellas.

No writing.

Daughter’s final hair color. (Though shes going to be swimming, so it will fade.)

Swan we saw on one of our stops

From same stop as the swan

Some really fun things today. Our daughter decided she wanted purple streaks in her hair, so I helped her do that — bleaching, rinsing, dyeing, washing and conditioning … we’ll see how it looks in the sun tomorrow. Didn’t get to it until late.

Also maybe not fun but related to fun, I sent my twinkling stars skirt back to ThinkGeek for exchange because one of the light strings doesn’t work. I love the skirt, so I’m really looking forward to having one that works completely.

And I wrote 675 words tonight.

Coming up: time visiting family. Still will be posting word counts.

Picture my daughter colored on an app. She likes lots of bright colors. I love her creative use of the colors.

A good chunk of my time today was spent hanging out to get my car serviced. I went in for an oil change and to get new brake pads. Decided to go ahead and get the state inspection while I was at it. (I did not know I could do that two months early!)

Unfortunately, they found more wrong, so I hung out. At least I had good reading material on my iPad, an unpublished novella that I fully expect to see on awards ballots in the future.

With one thing and another, I didn’t sit down to get words until well after 9, and I only wound up with 271 today. Still, it counts. Onward!

Such a busy day. End of school always is, as I take the kids for ice cream and to the comics and gaming store, as well as to the library. Lots of spending time with the kids, recommending things they might enjoy, and realizing just how much they’ve grown over the last year.

Late writing tonight. 547 words though, which is a step in the right direction.

So … finished the copyedit in the wee hours. Author has confirmed that she can open the files with no problem, and we’ve reconfirmed the timeline.

Other than that, I’ve poked at e-mail and browser tabs, picked up my son after his last final, and cooked dinner. It didn’t even occur to me until late this evening that I could have caught up on American Gods today. *sigh*

Did manage 214 words.

Tomorrow will be hectic, but I might be more alert, so that’ll be fine.

Finished the freelance deadline. Wrote absolutely no fiction on Monday.

Going to sleep tomorrow. We’ll see what sort of productivity Tuesday brings.

In addition to lots of copyediting, I played laser tag today. Our friends had a birthday party for their son, and they wanted it to be for families. Rather amusing — our son, our daughter, and I wound up on the blue team, and my husband was on the red. Our daughter was quite indignant about the fact that her dad shot her.

On the blue team, our son was the high scorer two out of the three games. On the red team, my husband was. Me? Well, I scored better than our daughter and her best friend.

But it was a lot of fun. We all enjoyed it, which was the point.

Oh, and I managed to squeeze out 481 words at some point here. We’ll say they were Sunday words.

Now to go grab a few hours sleep before getting kids off to school and starting the last round on this manuscript!