"Home is any four walls that enclose the right person." - Helen Rowland

I worked on the second book until 1:05 a.m. this morning. I knew if I went to bed I wouldn't sleep; I was far too bothered by the problems for my brain to shut down.

Through all of this I've learned:

• Mac Pages exports text to PDF well but gets glitchy if there are graphics, including simple line diagrams. Resolution gets all messed up and it's beyond fixing.
• MS Word for Macs exports to PDF well but is also full of glitches. If you export a Pages doc to Word it will come across with issues that can be fixed, but you're just getting started.
• The next time you open Word for Mac will fix things in your doc that aren't problems, make a TOTAL mess of them, and give you no way to reject those "fixes," no "turn off auto-correct" button. Want to place tabs in specific places? Good luck with that. You can insert page breaks but Word will randomly remove them whenever it gets a mind to. 
• Just when you think you have everything set Word will take a section of the manuscript and change page size, margins, footers....all kids of pretty important settings.

At 1:05 I had what I think...what I hope...is a stable version exported to PDF and sent off to Amazon. Unlike the version I'd sent them an hour earlier their computer accepted this one and sent it on to their technical review team for a closer look. I now wait anxiously for the email that tells me if the ms. passed their inspection. If it doesn't....

I can't even think about that. 

Before I shut down for the night (morning) I gave approval to my first book to move on to publishing on Amazon. It will appear on their site in 3-5 days and on Kindle almost immediately after that. 

At 1:30 I decided that instead of going to bed and potentially waking Pam up I'd just go to chair. My internal alarm clock had me up at 6 a.m. to get a fire going, get the goats fed, have some b'fast and...take a nap. 

After lunch I fired up Sally and took her for a very short drive to see if my carb rebuild improved things or made them worse. I think I need some time to learn how she wants to be choked when cold and where to set the idle speed but...!

The float setting was definitely a problem and now that it's correct Sally wants to dance. It's still a straight six and isn't going to chirp any tires but give her a touch of throttle and she responds with surprising pep. 

I needed this success. 

THIS JUST IN! - 

I got an email from Amazon saying my files met their criteria and are acceptable for printing. Yaaay!

The normal next step is to order a proof book but I've already done that. To get it here in a timely manner is pricey so I'll download the PDF of their version and also look very carefully at the online viewer the have. 

I sure hope I don't see anything amiss because I do NOT want to deal with Word for Mac ever again. 

I read about an Austrian snowboarder who fell in his race and broke his back. Thankfully, he won't suffer any permanent damage and has been flown back to Austria for surgery.

This isn't his first injury from his sport. So far he's broken 5 ribs in one crash and broke his shoulder and tore four ligaments in another.

I'm thinking he should consider bowling as his sport. 

We're watching the second night of the Westminster Dog Show that we recorded earlier this week. Some really beautiful dogs in the sporting group. 

I don't think I'll make it to the end, though. I am really sleepy.