Thursday This n That

 I'm late, but not as late as I was last week, so that's progress, right? 

I woke up later than usual today and somewhere between the bathroom and my first cup of coffee, a thought occurred to me... IT'S THURSDAY!  And panic ensued because 1) I hadn't sent in my timesheet for the week and 2) I hadn't done the spreadsheet I received yesterday which needed to be done so it could go on the timesheet so I could get paid for it this week.  Needless to say, I got my cup of coffee, had a quick smoke, and got to work.  I got it all finished before 7am (which is 8am office time and when my sis gets in and starts doing payroll) and finally took a sip of my coffee.  It was cold by then, but hey, I got 'er done.  

Nothing like a bit of panic first thing to really wake a gal up.

I'm a bit sore today from wrestling the feather topper thing into its newly-created pillowcase.  Derp.

Since I didn't do any marketing this week, I'm sitting at 38c in earnings.  3c in page reads and one 35c sale of Dying Embers.  Woot.  Go me.  This shows me that I really need to get off my ass next week.  

We have a little fox who's been hanging around the general area lately.  We see it just about every day now.  It's super cute.  It's probably from last year's litter.  Awww.  I'm happy to have foxes around the house.  They eat destructive critters and I'm rooting for it to eat that blasted packrat, which is probably the reason why all my lilies recently got munched.  (Probably since I moved all the deck plants out of munching range.)

Living in the woods is awesome, but it does have its downsides.  One being critters munching my plants.  Another is that once the leaves fill out with leaves, we don't really see much in the way of stars at night or rainbows during the day.  :shrug:  It's a tradeoff.

I keep forgetting to set up my game camera.  Derp.  Maybe today I'll remember.  We'll see if I make it from doing this to doing that without the TV getting in the way.

Speaking of the TV, I'm convinced that Roku is evil.  There are so many awesome things to watch that I get distracted by it easily.  I sit down to eat breakfast and watch one show, and the next thing I know, it's bedtime and I've wasted the whole damn day.  I really need to start policing that.  And I will, right after I eat breakfast and watch my one show.  XoP.

I had a thought the other night that I would get back to wood carving and start my own like Etsy store or something and I would call it XoP Designs.  (If you don't know what XoP is, turn your head sideways and look at it again.  It's the old way of doing a face with squinty eyes, a little round nose, and a mouth with the tongue sticking out.)

And on that note, I should probably go be productive or something.  I really need to tend my garden, clean the house, cut my hair, and sequester myself in a room until I edit or write something.  (For the record, I am NOT ready to retire from writing.  I may not be doing it but retiring isn't in the plans either.)

Peace out.

Bright Ideas?

 Me and my bright ideas... We had a 'feather' topper on our bed, but we hated it, so it's been sitting in the spare room. We also have the flat sheet to a set of flannel sheets where the fitted sheet was roached years ago. Bright idea? Use the flannel sheet to make a 'pillowcase' for the feather topper and turn it into a cat bed.

I thought I'd pin it and then sew it. No pins. I could've sworn I had a box of pins leftover from my previous sewing adventures. Nope. I had safety pins, though, so off I started.

The cats, being cats, were deeply interested in my goings-on such that I had to shut them out of the bedroom where I was working. Meowing insued. I let them back in and Finn decided he wanted to sleep in the middle of my work. Sawyer, seeing that I was distracted by Finn, proceeded to stick his head in my coffee cup and slurp away. They were promptly kicked back out of the bedroom and I ignored the caterwauling.

I get the whole thing safety pinned, flip it right-side out, and try to stuff the feather monster into its new home. A half-hour of wrestling later, it was in there. It ain't pretty and it's incredibly lumpy, but it's done. (For now. I may actually sew it later.)

Finn loves it. It jumped into the middle and laid there like he finally had a bed worthy of his royalship.

I'm Tired

There won't be any marketing this week.  I'm tired.  Hell, you might even say I was depressed. (From a writing perspective.  I don't feel depressed otherwise.)  Thinking about writing, or my lack thereof, makes me sad.  

I try to be all Positive Polly, but the act only stretches so far.  

So, I spend my days doing everything/anything that doesn't remind me of my unfinished novels and my stillborn ideas.  Which is probably why I don't spend a boatload of time blogging or visiting blogs lately.  Marketing is about the only writerly thing I can manage, and the only reason for that is seeing the zeroes on my KDP Dashboard makes me more depressed. 

It's like the writer part of me is curled up in the fetal position over there in the corner.  I keep saying I'll get over this, but I'm not sure if I can.  I'd like to think I'm not done with writing, that 18 books isn't the final total of my life's work, but I don't really know.  

I have a book sitting in the spare room that's done being written.  It's DONE.  All it needs is editing, but I can't bring myself to finish editing it.  Well, editing, proofreading, cover creation, getting it set for publishing... :shudder:  So I'm stuck in this weird place where I can't make myself finish it.

Maybe it's fear of failure.  Maybe it's being tired of pushing books out there into the world to crickets.  Maybe doing this for myself isn't enough anymore.... maybe it never was enough.  I dunno.

From time to time, I still think about writing, so there's still hope.  Although, some days, I'm inclined to agree with Gena Showalter's take on Hope - it was always the worst of the evils in Pandora's box.

Anyway, sorry to be a bummer on a Tuesday morning.  On a happier note, my greenhouse is doing it's job and protecting the plants.  Yay.  I wish I had a greenhouse to keep my writer self warm and happy and thriving -  a greenhouse for the soul, so to speak.  

Sunday Update - 2026 Week 18

Well hello there.  It's Sunday.  It's morning.  It's time for an update.  This week was a busy one for me and I am understandably both tired and sore.

I spent a lot of time this week on the deck garden.  Last Sunday, due to critter carnage, I moved the entire garden worth of pots inside.  About half of the pots went into the garage and the other half went into the sunroom.  The potato pots are huge, so we're talking probably 30-40 pounds each, but I did it. (Hubs' back is toast right now, so I've been doing stuff myself rather than have him lift and carry.)  I also thinned the carrots.  

My new greenhouse arrived.  It's a beaut.  Not a large enclosure at roughly 5x5x6.5, but large enough.  Hubs helped me put that sucker together on Friday and I populated it with all the plants that can handle full sun.  Not that the deck gets a whole lot of full sun, but enough that it would probably kill my redbuds.  Then to further discourage the critter, I put blocks all the way around it - each block sitting on the edge of the plastic greenhouse cover.  This will also give the greenhouse some stability in the wind, so yay.  The three mornings since I put the greenhouse together have been carnage free, so yay to that, too.  (I haven't taken any pics yet, so if you want to see the greenhouse I bought, click the link.  It's still on sale as of this morning, if you want one, too.)

When I ordered the greenhouse, I also ordered a game camera.  That arrived on Friday, but I haven't put it out yet.  I did set it up and managed to take several pictures of my hands.  It's not the wifi kind, so I'll have to take it down and plug it into the computer if I want to see the pics, but I'm okay with that.  

I've been feeding the deer all week, so Hubs can rest his back.  The deer are getting fat pregnant.  I always feel so bad for them, waddling around the yard.  Judging by the size of their bellies, they might drop fawns earlier this year.  We'll see.

Friday, I went grocery shopping.  Wallyworld was a zoo.  Anyway, while I was there, they had a bunch of beef marked down, so I ended up getting a London Broil.  I'd never cooked one of those, but it was cheap and cheap beef is hard to find.  I took half of that and threw it in the crockpot with spaghetti sauce and mushrooms, and we had my version of steak pizziola last night for dinner.  Yummers.

I did some marketing this week.  Not a huge amount of books moved, but eh, it's better than nothing.  The start of a new month makes my KDP dashboard look so depressing with it zeroes across the board.  Having numbers there, even if they're small, helps.  Not sure what will be on the Marketing Monday rota tomorrow.

And since I started this over an hour ago and it's been sitting here forgotten as I scroll through X and FB, I think I'm probably done.  Have a great day and a wonderful week.  :hugs:

Thursday This n That (delayed)

ACK!  I started this post yesterday morning and never finished it.  Derp. Here's what I said then...

I made pizza last night and now my hands are killing me.  It was totally worth it.

Yesterday, my new greenhouse arrived.  I'll work on putting it together today, I think.  We'll see if the hands allow it.  Then we'll see if it works to foil the critter's plans.  Our new mower arrived, too.  That's Hubs' job.  We'll help each other if we need it.

We're going on 22 years married.  For the most part, the us part has been pretty easy.  That's what happens when you're with the right person.  Yay.

And now for the stuff I didn't write yesterday morning...

I did put the greenhouse up, put blocks around the base to hold it down and keep critters out, and populated it with plants.  This morning, no signs the critter has been back, but it's early yet.

No sign of the marauding mouse from the other night.  

Hubs put together the mower and mowed a little to see if he had the height settings right.  It works like a dream.  Yay.

Gah, Sawyer's being really annoying this morning.  This is an especially bad morning for him to be a turd, as I am really sore from the activities of yesterday.  Putting together the greenhouse was pretty easy, except for being on my feet for so long, and then the moving of all those pots, and the sweeping beforehand. 

I really should go grocery shopping today, except the aforementioned soreness is making me really not want to go.

Bitchbitchbitchbitch.  Why yes, I would like some cheese...

What's on your this-n-that list today?

Nature is Revolting

 Okay, first off, the saga of the garden...

SomeTHING got onto the deck and munched a bunch of my plants over the course of a few days.  First, I sprinkled cayenne pepper over everything.  Nope.  Then I mixed up a batch of my Rat-B-Gone (peppermint, cloves, and cedar essential oils).  Nope.  I tried putting up a length of fencing around my tastiest plants, too, but whatever it was climbed right over or went through the spacing.  Sunday, I moved all my plants inside - half in the garage, half in the sunroom.  And I ordered a small (5x5x6.5 roughly) greenhouse from Amazon.  That'll be here Thursday and it's supposedly pretty easy to put together.  I also bought a game camera to keep an eye on everything.  Fingers crossed.  

The plants that got munched... Of my trees: my baby black cherry, my little persimmon, one hickory, three redbuds, and a dogwood are all sticks now.  My buckthorn has two little leaves left about 2" up.  The other hickory has been halved.  Of my produce: all 4 green pepper plants are sticks, one of my fingerling potatoes is sticks, my best pots of carrots had about 2/3rds of the greenery munched off and the other two that were doing well also saw munching.  The one carrot pot that only had a few carrots coming up only has one now.  Thankfully, it left Pedro Potato and the Tomato Trio alone.

Okay, so I've got a fix for that on the way.  One would think I'd be done with critter mayhem, right?  Umm, no.

Last night, about 1:30 a.m., I hear the scrabble of claws on vinyl flooring.  And it's not the usual sound of the cats chasing each other.  I turn to Hubs, but he's not in bed.  None of the lights are on, so I figure he's on a bathroom break.  The noise has stopped, but that doesn't mean anything in a house with cats, so I get up to go see what the hell is up with The Boyz.  I wander into the kitchen to find Finn intently staring at the space under the catfood cupboard.  I get a flashlight and shine it under there.  Nothing.  But he won't be swayed.  We keep a cooler next the cupboard so the cats can jump up there easily.  I move the cooler.  MOUSE.  He was terrified and I was stunned, so we just looked at each other for a minute.  He recovered first and took off, followed closely by Finn.  

Did Finn catch him?  No.  The little bastard ran along the wall, across the space by the front door, and I lost sight of it.  Finn didn't.  He started circling Hubs' recliner like a hound who'd run a fox to ground. 

By then, Hubs had come out to see what the hell was going on.  We upended the recliner.  Couldn't see it.  I tried beating on the recliner, but no sign of it.  We eventually found it on the other end of the room behind the shelf I keep our TV on.  Haha! thinks I, we've got it trapped.  

Nope.  We tried to get it, but it skittered away, ran down the wall, and went into my recliner.  So there we were trying to get it out of my recliner.  Not a sign of the damn thing.  

For some reason, at that point... it being now 2:30 and me being me... I decided to check behind the TV again.  Sure enough, the little bastard had slipped by us and was back where it thought it was safe.  I put sticky traps on either side of the shelving and we debated on how best to get the little bastard out of there, both of watching to make sure it didn't escape again.  At one point, I checked and it was still there.  More debating.  Checked again.  Would you believe it, the little fucker was gone.  

At this point, we had both cats locked up in the office because we didn't need them underfoot, especially considering that Hubs was prepared to whack the little shit with a shovel, and we didn't want the cats to get in the middle of that.  Since the cats were put away, I went around laying sticky traps and snap traps all over the living room.  I made coffee and we plopped down in front of the TV to both settled down enough to go back to bed and to see if we caught the furry bastard before going to sleep.  

It was around 4am when we went back to bed with no mouse caught.  I got up at 6:30 with still no mouse.  We finally put all the traps away and let the cats out at 8 with no success.  We did, however, kill a mouse in the garage last night.  Not the same mouse.  The dead one was lighter than the marauder.  

Neither of us has any clue as to how the furry bugger got in the house.  I've spent untold time over the years plugging every damn hole that would allow ingress for mice.  It's been years, in fact, since we saw one inside the house.  More investigating will occur, but not now.  I'm bushed.  I leave it to the cats to find it and kill it, if it shows its twitchy little nose again.

Unfortunately, Finn did not show prowess at killing the mouse last night and Sawyer, when given the chance, was terrified at the prospect.  I'm revoking their cat cards until they prove their worth.

Between the mysterious plant-muncher (packrat, I assume) and the nighttime visitor, I'm about 75% wondering what I did to piss Nature off, because I think she's staging a revolt.  Pray for our safety.  There are more of them than there are of us and we're getting to old for this shit.

Marketing Monday - Rumor Has It

Amidst the throes of garden woes, the show must go on - which means Marketing Monday.  This week, I'm putting RUMOR HAS IT out there for your free book downloading pleasure. Enjoy!  

Starting today, RUMOR HAS IT is totally free. (Always free with Kindle Unlimited.) Step back in time with this gritty noir mystery now. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08ZNXQKPC

And if you enjoy it, please leave a review, then head over to buy the next book in the series - THICKER THAN WATER.  It'll be a win for you and it'll help fund my fight against the critter noshing my plants.