Happy St David's Day!

If you're not from Wales, you probably don't celebrate St David's Day.

You may not even realize it is St David's Day. Well, now you do. We have always celebrated it because, well, we have Welsh ancestry and a son named David. It seemed like a good reason every year.

Plus, March 1st means it's almost spring. The daffodils are -- hereabouts at least -- not quite poking their heads above ground. But the snow is mostly gone and things are definitely looking up.

Things are brightening up on the home front as well. I have a new best friend -- a Fujitsu 510 document feed scanner that swallows 18 pages a minutes (or so it says, and I believe it), reads BOTH SIDES of the document, throws out blank pages and turns the resulting files into searchable .pdfs.

It's amazing. I don't know how I lived without out it. Well, yes, I do. I had an office that looked like I papered the floor -- five layers deep. And this was AFTER I'd filled sixteen file boxes with paper first.

No more. The paper is dwindling fast. The floor has reappeared. The scanned files are building up in the nice new external hard drive I got to go along with the scanner. They are making my life so much neater, not to mention how much easier it is to find what I'm looking for.

And while I scan, I commune with Demetrios. He looked, at first glance, far too perfect and easy going. I felt like the old lady shouting, "Where's the beef?" because there didn't seem to be any conflict. I pointed that out to him. I said, "Anny has problems. You are on top of the world. What's up with that?"

He didn't answer for what seemed like weeks. But then the other day while I was scanning, he came in and stared at me and when I stared back, he said, "Shows what you know," and turned around and left again.

First cross word I've had from him. Hmmm. And now it turns out he's had things going on in his life I knew nothing about. Important things. Life altering things. And everyone knew it -- including, it seems, the paparazzi. Everyone but me.

So we're getting somewhere. He's talking a bit at last. Thank heavens. We need to get to work here.

I'm reading over Christo in galley form. I hate galleys. I've read the book too many times (especially this book) and I have no perspective anymore. I can't always even see typos, so I have to read it out loud. It's excruciating.

Meanwhile, Heather is sending me book pages to proofread and get read to link up. She's got the most current books loaded (the last three), and she promises a vast upload of backlist sometime this week. I'll be excited to see them again. I hope you'll check them out, too.

Happy St David's day! Happy almost spring!