A big week in the skies above.

Cue the fanfare: We have a launch date (kinda sorta) for Kindle Vella. It will debut sometime in mid to late July -- next month, in other words -- and The Atherton Vampire will be available for your reading pleasure on your iOS device (or from Amazon's website) then. 

Once you've raced through the first ten episodes, there will be three new episodes per week, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

I'm so excited. I can't wait for y'all to meet Jerry and the gang.

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Yurumi | Deposit Photos

There I was, scrolling through the Father's Day posts on Facebook earlier today and noticing that several folks had posted about the summer solstice. "Y'all are a day early," I said aloud. "Litha is tomorrow." I knew that, see, because every year when I get a new wall calendar, I mark the dates for the solstices, equinoxes, and cross-quarter days. And my calendar clearly says the solstice is tomorrow. 

But then I looked up the time the solstice actually occurs, and guess what? For North America, it's tonight. Time zones are stupid.

I'm doubly annoyed because I've booked a session in a salt cave, and I set it up for tomorrow because I thought it was the solstice. I've never done halotherapy before. To be honest, I'd never heard of it until I picked up a flyer about our local salt cave. Here's how it works: a machine pulverizes salt and aerosolizes it in a very dry room; then you sit in the room and breathe in the salt air for a certain period of time. It's supposed to be good for everything from chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder to allergies to depression. I don't really expect it to improve my allergies and I don't have any of those other things, but I figure sitting for forty-five minutes in a room in the dark ought to be good for something, salty air or no. I'll report back.

The equinox isn't the only big celestial event this week; the full moon is Thursday and Mercury retrograde ends Tuesday. I will be very glad to see Mercury go direct -- I've been champing at the bit for the past several weeks, itching to make some changes here at home and waiting for things to get moving so those changes could happen. I'm not saying Mercury retrograde has caused the delays, but I'm pretty sure it hasn't helped.

In any case, it feels like things are breaking free here, including in relation to the virus. Our governor announced Friday that New Mexico has fully vaccinated 60 percent of the population, ages 16 and up, and that means all COVID-related restrictions will be lifted July 1st. Some businesses may still require people to mask up indoors, and of course the CDC guidelines haven't changed. Variants are still a concern. And for unvaccinated folks, infection rates are still as awful as they have been all along. But to this fully vaccinated individual, it feels like liberation.

Here's hoping the rest of the world will soon feel the same way.

Happy solstice! Blessed Litha!

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These moments of anticipatory blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Get vaxxed!

Summer supermoon musings.

I'm feeling kind of free and easy tonight.  The Annealed blog tour is done (and thanks to those of you who followed along); I've unpacked from vacation, paid the bills, bought groceries for the week (usually that gets rolled over into Monday night...), and finished two vacation scrapbooks in two weekends.  Yes!  Both the Danube cruise scrapbook and the Alaska scrapbook are done!  I had no idea how much those books were weighing me down until I finished the Alaska book today.  Whew.

I mean, I still have to clean the bathroom and do laundry.  But with the scrapbooks finished, I feel like there might be light at the end of the tunnel.

Hmm, maybe it's the supermoon.  Tonight's full moon is the largest of the year, because the moon is the closest it will be to Earth for more than a year.  Okay, so it's not the humongous moon that you see photoshopped into calendars, or into web graphics like the one on the left.  But still, there's a difference in size -- even if you can't see it with the naked eye.  I found a website that has a nice comparison of the March 2011 supermoon with a regular ol' full moon in 2010. To see it, click here and scroll down the page.  Kind of cool, huh?

Maybe my ease is due to the supermoon plus the summer solstice this past Friday.  We haven't had a terribly hot summer yet in DC -- just one big heat wave so far, which I cleverly managed to escape by being in Alaska that week -- and I'm hoping it stays that way.  Fingers crossed....

Or maybe clearing away all these other tasks is freeing up space in my brain to start plotting the next series.  I can tell you that it will be set in the same universe as the Pipe Woman Chronicles, but a few years after the Big Mediation.  I have written a little bit, but I'm hesitant to post any of it because it's early days and the story might change a fair amount.  The only thing I'm committed to, apparently, is that there will be a cat, or cats, in this series.  My daughter Kitty insists on it.  So there you go.  More news as it develops.

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Let's see, thanks and congrats:  Congrats to Froggarita of Froggarita's Bookcase, who won the complete set of Pipe Woman Chronicles e-books!  And many, many thanks to those of you who downloaded copies of Seized during my summer solstice promotion on Amazon.  Enjoy!

(Psst: I'll be giving away the other books in the series this summer, too.  Watch my Facebook page for dates and details.)

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So that's pretty much it for now.  I guess I'll go start the laundry.  Maybe I'll even get to bed at a decent hour tonight....  Nah.  I don't want to do anything rash....

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These moments of bloggy ease are brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.