The sun will rise at 9:18 this morning, and set at 3:54 this afternoon, for 6 hours 39 minutes of alleged daylight. Today will be 6 minutes and 35 seconds less than yesterday, but the rate of reduction is slowing. By the end of the month, we’ll be losing only a little more than 5 minutes a day.

Last week started cold, then abruptly warmed to 20 above on Friday. Result? Frost formation on the cold-soaked roads, and marks in the roadside snow all over the place where vehicles had gone into the ditch. The warmth was short-lived, though—we’re back to highs near zero. We did get a little more snow—the depth was up to 6” when it got too dark to see yesterday.

One of the reasons I don’t like driving on white ice. Where are the roads?

On #writemotivation I’ve written two more of Zhaim’s scenes, along with Jacyn’s, and I’ve reworked Tod’s story to give more show and less tell. Still a lot more to do, but I think I’m good up through Chapter 24. (Update Monday 8 pm: I’m now on Chapter 30, almost halfway through. Have to write another bit from my villain’s POV to finish this chapter.)

Finally, I’m going to do some griping for Captcha Craptcha day. Good timing, as yesterday was Six Sentence Sunday and Saturday was Science Fiction and Fantasy Saturday. Most of the blogs I visited were (thank goodness) captcha free, but I’ve finally reached the point where if one try

No, it’s not salt. This sidewalk is actually heated.

at a captcha doesn’t work, that blog simply does not get my comments. I’m tired of being unable to figure out photographed numbers that are unreadable even with the aid of a magnifying glass, trying to guess whether (and where) I am supposed to put spaces between separated characters, and trying to figure out whether that’s a w or two scrunched-together v’s. I don’t use a captcha on my wordpress blog because I don’t need one: the spam filter has yet to let anything through that I have a problem with. (If anything, it sometimes catches legitimate comments, so I do have to check the spam filter regularly.)