WordPlay

The Monday Post

This is the second Monday in the new home!

On this Monday, the office is in minimal working condition–no stereo yet, boxes on floor diminished but present, no pictures hung.  Internet access still relies on ArroyoNet, a remarkably stable WIRELESS WIZARD WIN! as long as a certain wireless phone at the broadcast end isn’t being used.

On this Monday, Duncan Horse is one step closer to his first ride in his new place–the modest north flat now clear of machinery and introduced on a nice walk-in-hand.  He has also observed his large donkey neighbors up the road with much indignant strutting of his studly stuff, to which the donkeys said, “Got it, you’re a horse, yada yada yada.”

There is still a lot of mud.  Much of it is now on Duncan.

On this particular Monday, I get to start the week knowing that over the weekend, I not only unpacked things, drove out new routes to old places from this totally opposite approach to the city, beat up on non-functioning new appliances (marginal success, sigh), spread shavings and straw over the aforementioned mud,  and cleared the garage of some freecycle items, but I slammed through a huge chunk of the second pass through Demon Blade (the next Nocturne novel) and wuh!  Finished it!

The last couple of previous books, I worked second pass on directly on the computer…logistics made it more viable.  But this one hit hardcopy early, and it went everywhere with me.  To doctor’s offices, where long waits ensured work time.  To the vet’s–yes, even to the doggy ER on New Year’s Eve while I was waiting for the vet to return with ConneryBeagle’s x-rays.  On the road between the old house and the new, every time we drove over to check on progress, plan out the fence line, or try, once more, to figure out where the little barn would fit.  If I went, the battered manuscript pages went, too.

It’s been a busy and well-traveled book, yes it has.  Me, my customized clipboard, my stack of papers, and my Energel pens.  Purple or green, please.

Tomorrow I start putting changes into the laptop, and then it’s time to make sure all the threads hold together and all the little rough spots are polished.  And then I get to call it a BOOK!

I am almost inspired to cackle with glee.

(Ha!  Maybe I even did it!  You’ll never know!)

What’re you cackling about this week, out there?

ConneryBeagle Crate Countdown: THREE DAYS!!!

PS: WordPress spellchecker suggestion for “ConneryBeagle” = “anaerobically.”

The Wednesday Post

So the first thing I saw after the movers arrived was my refrigerator rolling…

…untended…

… off the back of truck.

Well, maybe I should start at the beginning.

I started off the big relocation by taking out the dogs and horse a day early and spending the night in the unfurnished house.

No fridge?  No problem.  That cold snap was sweeping the nation–my fridge was the great outdoors.  In fact, my deep freezer was the great outdoors.

Our little wood pellet stove tried very hard to keep the great indoors from being my deep freezer, too, but it was severely handicapped by my extensive experience with basic old-timey wood stoves–all my instincts are wrong!  We do have a furnace to back it up, but I’m still learning how to balance the two.

So I spent the night/morning dealing with unsettled animals, and along about mid-day the movers arrived.  They wasted no time getting things ready to go–so that was when I opened the back door to the sight of my refrigerator rolling toward certain doom from a five-foot truck platform.

I believe I squeaked.  Or something.  And the nearest moving guy’s eyes bugged out, and he threw himself at the fridge in a near-sacrificial way and saved the day.  And I then said, with much dignity:

“I’m going back inside now.”

If anything else almost fell, I didn’t see it.

Hours of chaos later, the moving guys eventually hooked up the icemaker to said fridge–and boy you gotta know how I go through ice–proudly indicated the lack of leak, and then left before anyone realized the fridge wasn’t actually running and the water supply hadn’t actually been turned on.  And once we turned it on …

Ahhhh! Turn it off!  Turn it OFF!

Oh yes, leaks.  Persistent leaks.  Crazy-making, GIVE ME THE TEFLON TAPE NOW leaks.

But lo!   Persistent people, too!  Grunt, swear, curse, repeat, repeat, repeat, and the leaks were fixed!  And yet…

The fridge wasn’t running.

Oh, we were very tired by then.  But being clever, we eventually tried a second outlet.  No joy.  But being especially clever, we thought to check the outlets themselves.

Oh.

One hundred feet of coiled heavy-duty outdoor extension cord running across the kitchen later (hey, you work with what you’ve got, right?) and lo! The fridge was running after all!

Still being clever as we pondered those two dud outlets, we went hunting GFIs.  We crawled behind boxes, we reset GFIs, we headed for the circuit box and flipped every breaker not once but twice.

Finally, we muttered darkly and put a call into the builder, and my sister (the resourceful person from the previous post) went home.

And then around midnight, the phone rang.  “Hey,” she says.  “Wasn’t there an outlet hidden at the back of the pantry cabinet?”

And lo.  Behind the door, behind the roll-out drawer, an outlet.  A GFI outlet.

The GFI outlet.

Fridge.  Power.  Non-leaking icemaker line.

And it was good. Right there around midnight.

The thing is, we have two fridges.  One is merely old and the other is ancient; both are modest beasts.  We don’t need two–but neither quite does the job on its own, so until we can sort out something better, this is it. It’s a merging-households situation.

And now the old one is suddenly no longer cooling the food.  Oh, the freezer is working great!  But the fridge part…maybe not so much.

Well, it’s still winter out there..!

(Don’t appliances always just know–?)

The Monday Post

And almost, I am not posting.

Because yes, we moved over the weekend. Fraught with the usual hair-raising fun that I will admire out loud as soon as I manage to get the hay stall door open so I can feed the horse. That could take a while, it seems. Not. Quite. Right.

Yet.

But first, the Internet access. So this was us several months ago, calling the cable company (which shall remain nameless except maybe for the great big honkin’ clue).

Us: Cable People! We would like hookup. We’re calling way ahead because it’s new construction.

Cable People: Okay, how about we come out the day you’re moving in?

Us: Let’s do it in the morning before the movers arrive. But don’t you need to work further ahead than that, because it’s new construction?

Cable People: Nope, you’re ready to go. Saturday morning, you say? w00t. It shall be so.

…Saturday Morning: A certain someone gets up very early after settling newly moved horse and dogs late into the night, and commences to wait.

…waiting…

Us: Cable people–??

Cable People: You’re scheduled for the afternoon, didn’t you know?

Us: Gosh, that is very unpleasant.

…eventually, Cable Guy arrives in midst of movers…

Cable Guy: Oh, hey, I can’t hook you up for cable. This is new construction.

…pause during which yrs truly did not swear. not once. ever.

Cable Guy: It’ll take two weeks to get you hooked up. Or so. Or whenever we feel like doing it, really.

…Web clients on hold since the holidays for this move. Critical behind-the-scenes book stuff in play right now. Stress shedding, COMMENCE! (Very much like Miss Belle Cardigan at the moment.)

Enter stage right, my endlessly resourceful sister. And her friend, the Albuquerque Wireless Wizard. I am assured–and I believe it–that no one else in this city could have done what he did yesterday–nevermind on the spur of the moment, all necessary equipment in hand.

Because I am now, than you very much, coming to you courtesy of:

*drrrrrrrumrrrrrrrolll!*

A half-mile high-power wi-fi bridge from my sister’s house  (over the arroyo and through the woods)!

This connection is called ArroyoNet (and secretly called UpYoursDumbcast*). It comes from omni-directional antenna on my sister’s roof to a pole-mounted receiving antenna attached to the horse fence outside my office, and then cables in under the office door on power-over-Ethernet, hits our local router and beams wirelessly through our house.

So it goes from street cable to local wired network to long-distance beam-me-up-scotty wireless to another local wired network to a wireless network and are we tired yet?

And just for kicks, since we use Vonage for our phone, we now also have our heretofore missing landline!

We hope it’ll stay stable until the cable company gets its act together, but so far it’s performing far above expectations. Not to mention far above the cable company’s turn-out.

*PS THIS WAS YOUR CLUE

Cable company FAIL.

Albuquerque Wireless Wizard WIN!

Crate Countdown:  Eleven more days of confinement for ConneryBeagle!

The Friday Post

It’s my last day here. Today at noon, Duncan loads into his transport and the dogs load into their travel crates, and off we go to the new place, where I camp out until tomorrow. Somewhere during the course of Saturday, the movers will arrive with Everything Else.

During the past couple of weeks, I’ve been taking note of the neat things around here that I’ll miss when this happens.  Just the little things, you know…the things you might miss if you weren’t looking.

Like the seasonal incursion of the Sandhill Cranes as they’re drawn to the Rio Grande, and their distinctive ratcheting-cooing noise…

The interesting collection of canal-oriented birds–several firsts for my lifelist, like the black phoebe, and the wondrous flock of nighthawks that spent an evening swooping and diving over our backyard trees…

The trees themselves–actual deciduous trees!–although these elms are dubiously distinctive more for the way they drop branches on your head than the way they drop their leaves…

Or the huge bull snake prowling the canal that lines this property.

It’s been interesting living next to the sheep, too.  Duncan Horse and the ram have spent  no little amount of time giving each other the studlier-than-thou eye through the fence, and occasionally flipping each other off.

Well.  Soon enough, I’ll be learning all these little things about the new place, too.  I’ve already been dive-bombed by a Cooper’s hawk…how cool is that?  And I love the way I can look out the living room windows and see the pinons in the wash dancing in the gusts, while the house feels perfectly snug and cozy.  So good-bye, little things.  And hello, little things!

Bet you have you some of those, too…bet everyone does.  Sometimes you just have to stop to look…
———-

Come Monday, I may or may not be blogging; I may or may not be coherent if I do.  So I leave you with this image, which is what you get when you take an already oppressed broken Beagle, remove the vetrap and pain patch on one back pastern, and discover beneath that the skin was  clipper burned and then inflamed by the patch, and that it must Not Be Licked.  And so you add a BiteNot collar.

No, indeed…he is NOT SPEAKING TO ME.

Crate Countdown: Thirteen Days!

The Wednesday Post

Midway through the Week of Move and it’s soooo easy to lose track of the fact that I’ve just had a book released.

Well, maybe it seems that way.  But I haven’t lost track at all…in fact, I hug it to myself on a daily basis!  I just haven’t found many moments to talk about it.  I haven’t even put up my nifty review quotes!  Too busy moving the barn (it’s just about done, at the new homeplace), making arrangements to overcome the truly astounding mud of new construction in delicate sandy-clay soil, and oh my yes…you knew “p@ck” was a four-letter word, right?

But Wolf Hunt is here, the third book of the Nocturne Sentinel series and the fourth Sentinels story (because hey, you gotta count Wild Thing, the Nocturne Bite!)  And here are some of those review quotes, because yes, they are made of happy.

“Strong characterization…  Meticulous details and original ideas… WOLF HUNT is a spellbinding combination of supernatural magic, emotional passions and perilous danger.” –Cataromance.com, 5 Stars

“Durgin returns to the world of the Sentinels and the evil Atrum Core with a novel that nicely moves the story along. Her characters are particularly well drawn. Nick is clearly an alpha male, and Jet comes across as strong and determined in spite of her insecurities.” – Romantic Times, 4 Stars

Have you hugged a book today?  No?  Then go for it!

Counting Down: Fifteen more days of strict crate rest for ConneryBeagle!  Today he convinced me to play a simple stationary game of take-the-dumbbell and was most pleased with himself.

The Monday Post

Really, this has got to be the most Monday ever.

This is our second week of wildly toting stuff between the two dwellings, a two-hour round trip, while hoping that snow doesn’t close the pass between us.

But only a week to go…

This is the first day of the barn-moving process, which should last five days, and which has started just as two horses have moved into Duncan’s neighborhood and put him into a high stallionesque dudgeon (no, he’s not.  But he was gelded very late and he still thinks he is).

Only four days of barn de- and re-construction after this one…

Truth is, we don’t actually know yet when I’ll be switching home bases between the houses–whenever Duncan goes–those logistics are to be decided today.

But in a short while, I won’t have to wonder any longer…

And this is, as it happens, Day Four of the three weeks that Connery Beagle is crate-restricted after his New Year’s Eve adventure in the yard, an over-enthusiastic romp during which his clueless, larger, and brain-injured (no, seriously–at birth) brother slammed him into some unyielding object and broke some ribs.  The wee little last rib and the one above–see them there, up on that little x-ray crop?

(Truth is, the very last rib isn’t visible, but I played with contrast and effects to get rest of it showing well.  They should ALL be nice and curvy-round…not, you know…crumpled).

So, no more walks on the land for the joyful Beagle for a while.

Only seventeen days to go before we can start careful rehab walking.  And we did have our single excellent walk out on the land together on Christmas.

Looks like a life of countdowns, starting with Monday!  Someone, tell me I’ve got company…what other countdowns are going on out there?

PS Countdown to no Internets?  TOTALLY UNKNOWN!
PPS Likelihood of Wednesday/Friday posts this week?  TOTALLY UNKNOWN!

The Friday Post
Happy New Year!

No, seriously…do it. Fence me in! And do it right!

Last Thursday, I had a Christmas gift I’ve been looking forward to for a very long time: I took a walk with the dogs around the new pasture fenceline on the new property.

Oh, it’s only about half the property–the back half is deeply cut by an untamed arroyo of the sort that forms a little highway for coyotes and possibly the occasional bear. (So I hear. I’m hoping we’re just out of normal range, but all the same, I’m keeping birdfeeders away from the house. Apparently bears think they are way cool…)

So we didn’t include the arroyo in the fenced area.  That leaves a modest pasture of perhaps just under two acres, but it is so delightful!  All rugged and wooded with juniper and pinon, with a deep swale (a pre-arroyo?) between the house and the arroyo.  Lots of  variation, lots of cover,  a flat area of juniper nursey soon to be lightly cleared for agility and a flat area for riding on.  And best of all, it’s fenced.

Even the dogs know what that means–and they knew instantly, when I took them for their first walk on the land last Friday.  It means running in wild circles without being stopped, because their boundaries are a given.  It means the safety to romp and range away from me while I walk, and the freedom to come back, check in with me by meeting my eyes, and spurting away again.  It means exploring together while making their own choices, yet still being with me…us, the pack, walking our territory.  Together.

Once there’s a horse involved, things will really get fun.

So yes, by all means–fence us in!

Besides.  I had a lot of gates put in.

I’m going out there again this weekend to do it all over again for the new year.  I hope you’re having a good one!

The Monday Post

It’s a different kind of Monday this week…out of kilter, out of pattern, and full speed ahead!

(Okay, that last part…pretty much always that case.)

Coming off a holiday weekend of packing and moving stuff, it turns out that Demon Blade, the WIP,  is…well, it’s  DONE DONEDONE.  It’s time to dive right into second draft, of course–not to mention more packing, and wow,  I’m about to dismantle the stereo, so you know I really mean business!

This week, while I have some web work to tend, most of it is for little old me.  With books out in January and February, I’d darned well better get my act together, oh yes.

So this past weekend, I played with graphics.  It’s the best way I learn, because I’m on my own time–and by golly I’m not afraid to waste it!  And so, with “two-page” ads all the rage these days, I have made me one of those.  See it, over there, to the left?  Is it not so very pretty?  My very first shiny, annoying, two-page ad made by my very own self!

(I swear, the author banner I’m making for this same site will be a nice static little piece.)

Still, isn’t it fun?  Don’t you just get that same little thrill, looking at something you’ve put together from pieces of this and that, and finding the whole of it then sitting before you?

To those of you who celebrate it, and to those of you who don’t…may you all have an especially pleasant day today!

Due to the move last year (not to mention this), my most recent holiday photo is from the previous year.  And yes, there’s Miss Kacey, reaching out from the past to be part of this season’s greetings, too.  And for those of you unfamiliar, that’s Belle on the left, Jean-Luc on the right, and Connery Beagle perching up out of the way.  (It is not, in fact, a large recliner.)  Miss Kacey, the grey-face, is the one pinning you with her utterly perceptive stare.  She knows this is a camera thing, and she would like the photographer to explain F-stops.

This day, we’re living in the soon-to-be-former home while celebrating with family in the soon-to-be-now home an hour distant.  We’re looking at Christmas steaks, Christmas gifts, a living room warmed by a pellet stove, and a panoramic view out back of our very own arroyo with Cedar Crest and the Sandia Mountains beyond.

We plan to have a good day.  I hope you do, too!

It’s Monday!  And there’s the week, stretching out before.

Because yay, we made it through the weekend!  UHaul rented on Saturday, corral panels, pallets, and agility equipment moved (A-Frame…grunt), and lo!  The corral gate panel moved, too!  (We estimate this puppy at about 200lb of awkward, oscillating steel.)

Duncan Horse is now in a sized-down paddock, giving me a look that says you haven’t slipped this one past me, in case you’re wondering.

No toes broken!  No heads bashed in!  No fingers crushed!  And everyone’s standing up straight today!

Of course, I could sleep for a week…

But no!  This week has SO MUCH left to do!  Packing, packing, PACKING and ooh, a few more Blue Hound Visions chores to finish up before I go offline for the holidays, and hey, did I mention that book I’m trying to finish?  Demon Blade? I think the race to get it done by Christmas has been lost these past couple of days.

Maybe if I hadn’t come home from yesterday’s day-long adventure and drooled through the evening instead of working…but I did.  OR maybe if my muse hadn’t dug in her heels and said, “Excuse me, but I don’t think this transition is working.  I’m willing to go where you want to go, but find a different way to get there.  I’ll wait as long as it takes.”

Okay, I think we’re coming to an agreement on that one.

So it’s now full speed ahead!  The new cookies are frosted, the  boxes are ready to be packed, the office floor plan has been remeasured to the inch for planning purposes, and if the fence goes up as planned so the dogs are safe, we’ll even have our holiday dinner over at the new place as hoped!  Ooh, I’d love for the end of that book to be within sight on Thursday night…

And how’s it for everyone else?  If this is your holiday week, are you working full steam to the end, or are you taking the days to immerse yourself in the spirit of the season?