I decided the only thing to do about my depression at losing the first 17 chapters of my novel that disappeared when my MAC turned on me after I made the mistake of uploading El Capitan was to go back to the novel and start over. I’ve done that and am now almost up to the place where I lost the newest revision. I’ve been rewriting almost every day full time. I really had to work up a head of steam to make myself get back into it. I expect to continue almost full time till I get a new draft done and send it off to my agent, if she can do anything about it.I swore I was done writing novels, but I liked this one and I feel I have to finish it. in the middle of that big effort, my assistant Penny announced she was leaving. An old friend died and now the husband wanted to hire Penny full time as office manager of his plumbing business. It’s always a blow when somebody I’ve trained and gotten used to working with gives notice. But I put an ad in the paper for two weeks and last Saturday, I found someone, Emily. She’s supposed to come in Monday for part of the day and the whole day Wednesday for Penny to teach her the ropes. Monday the 23^rd will be her first day on the job without Penny.This continues to be an unusually long fall and much of the time, unusually warm, sometimes hot and humid. Not my favorite fall weather. We had one period of total rain from Harvey that wiped out my lettuce seedlings. I replanted but we just won’t have the huge amount of lettuce we’re used to and enjoy. I know it’ll drop below 40 soon enough, so I made pesto with our abundant basil crop four days ago and another big batch on Thursday. I freeze a lot of it and use it all year round. Now I’ve filled all my small containers.We bought a new Suburu Outback last year and had loved it. But a couple of weeks ago, it developed a problem. When we try to pull the key out to turn off everything, the key gets stuck. For a while, Woodiy could fix it by driving back and forth a little bit and then the key would come out. But it’s gotten much worse. Woody brought it in to the dealer last week and they worked on it. They not only did not fix it, but it got even worse. Sometimes he couldn’t get it out at all. imagine leaving your car full of stuff in a parking lot with the key in the ignition. They have the car again and we have a large Buick barge as a rental car in the meantime. They finally recognized that this is not a singular problem: we were just the first to notify them. Now others have come in with the same problem. Woody knew it was a common problem with our model as lots of people on line are having the same key trouble.I really hope they can fix it or we’re really screwed.Now it’s time to freeze the final batch of peppers for this year. We’re expecting the garlic we ordered from Territorial to arrive any day, so Woody had to pull out the peppers. They were finishing anyhow, just little green gnarled fruit. We planted our biggest order of fall bulbs last weekend; a smaller order should come soon, and so should three kinds of hardnecked garlic.