{"id":5413,"date":"2013-07-24T19:08:18","date_gmt":"2013-07-24T23:08:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=5413"},"modified":"2013-07-24T19:08:18","modified_gmt":"2013-07-24T23:08:18","slug":"summer-days-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=5413","title":{"rendered":"Summer days report"},"content":{"rendered":"

Apologies for not posting yesterday.<\/strong> The day went in a direction I hadn\u2019t planned.<\/p>\n

This week I\u2019ve been taking what\u2019s now known as a stay-cation, loafing some and pottering with things I\u2019ve been putting off handling. Yesterday I\u2019d planned on going to dinner with a friend I see periodically, and somehow that restaurant date turned into a reunion with other old friends, and then an evening at the home of one of those old friend\u2019s relatives, up in the trackless wastes of the far northern suburbs. We spent the hours talking about old times, some of which I\u2019d shared in, and it was pretty late by the time I got home.<\/p>\n

Today I went to the post office to get my picture taken so I could send in my passport renewal form. I wanted to do it at mid-morning so I wouldn\u2019t be slowing down a long line of customers. The clerk who helped me was the nice-looking lady there I\u2019ve long admired, which may explain a certain wistful look in my eyes in the picture (I think I\u2019m the only person in the world who generally likes his passport photos).<\/p>\n

Then I found out the renewal fee. When in the name of all that\u2019s wholly unreasonable did the price of renewing a passport get to be $110.00? Plus the cost of the photo and certification of the letter? I\u2019d write to my congressman if he weren\u2019t Keith Ellison.<\/p>\n

Then in the afternoon I gave blood. This was at my favorite hemorrhaging venue, the VFW in Golden Valley, where they serve you sloppy joes as a reward for your suffering. I got the pretty technician, which should have put me on alert from the start. Pretty women almost always end up hurting me, and this one didn’t break form. She finally had to get another tech to find the right place to puncture my vein. In fairness to them, I\u2019ve given a lot of blood and there\u2019s a great deal of scar tissue inside my left elbow. Nobody\u2019s ever been able to get anything out of the right arm.<\/p>\n

And then home. Some reading, and then I worked a little more on revising the last completed novel I\u2019ve got in storage, which may or may not come out as an e-book after a while, depending on how diligent I am. I\u2019m worried about one character \u2013 someone I don\u2019t like, and who was intended as a caricature of a kind of person we all know. I don\u2019t like plain caricature in other people\u2019s novels, and I need to get past it in my own. I\u2019ve got to find something admirable or sympathetic in this person. I\u2019m working on it.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Apologies for not posting yesterday. The day went in a direction I hadn\u2019t planned. This week I\u2019ve been taking what\u2019s now known as a stay-cation, loafing some and pottering with things I\u2019ve been putting off handling. Yesterday I\u2019d planned on going to dinner with a friend I see periodically, and somehow that restaurant date turned … Continue reading Summer days report<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5413\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}