Home Sweet Home

Whew. What an experience.

Yesterday, after six months of searching, negotiating, and paperwork, we finally closed on our new house. It's been a wild ride, and the fun is only just beginning since now we have to clean it, paint most of the rooms, and figure out how to organize all of our stuff and our lives so we can move our daily routine exactly 1.1 miles from our old house to a new town.

The new place has a smaller yard [I have to say goodbye to my giant maple tree :(, the pool :), and all the various an sundry critters and creatures that reside in the mini-jungle I call my back yard right now.] But on the upside all that room we're giving up outside is now inside - I'm gaining a dining room, cabinet and counter space in the kitchen that is to die for, the kids will have a game room, DH has his own office with a built-in desk and I will have my own office [with a door! and it's own private deck!] Maybe in a month or so, when all the dust settles, I can hang my shingle up on my office door and call myself a serious writer again, since I haven't been one during most of this tortuous process.

Things I've learned from this experience:

1. Real estate agents never sleep - ours seemed to be on call 24/7 and available at a moment's notice to do anything and everything associated with finding us a house and helping us buy it.

2. Banks and mortgage brokers can kiss my shiney metal a$$. New rules and regulations, while I can see the merit in some of them, are basically designed to waste time, paper and money. What good does it do to make someone sign a paper saying they promise the money they borrowed from the bank was NOT used to fund terrorist activities? Do they really think the terrorists are going to tell the truth there? Seriously?

3. The term 'broom swept clean' is open to a lot of interpretations. The least of which is 'clean.'

4. The most fun [and scary] part of walking through your new house is finding all the goodies [and baddies] the previous owners left behind. Ours left us champagne in the fridge and a freezer full of ice cream! They also left all the garbage cans full and 10,000 plastic hangers, and a few things we haven't yet identified.

5. The post office does not really understand the concept of forwarding mail. They may have invented it, but they don't really understand it.

All that being said, here's the new place - this is the real estate photo, not one I took myself. Home Sweet Place I Can't Wait to Repaint and Furnish.

Catch you after the holiday weekend. Have a great one and hug your realtor today!

Are you still LOST?

So who all watched the 2 ½ hour LOST series finale last night? I was glued to it…and still remain somewhat confused, but I think I sort of get the mythology.

I won’t go into spoilers. All I’ll say is, I’m glad for happy endings for the major players, I’m glad none of the really annoying characters showed up, like Anna Lucia or Michael and Walt, and most of all I loved the spiritual component of the ending – this huge soul family has all come back together to welcome one of its own into the fold and move on to another plane of existence.

I still don’t get the smoke monster…or the polar bears, but maybe they weren’t as important as everyone thought.

So what’s your take on LOST? Are you glad we were all finally kicked off the island or would you go back if you had the chance?

Signed and sealed

Today I feel like a writer. I haven't really felt like one in a while, because I've had to push writing to the back burner in favor of all the angst and stress that comes with buying and selling a house.

Somehow, in the middle of it all, thought, I didn't manage to write, edit, submit and sell a new novella! Well, Bernadette did.

Today I [she] signed a contract with Liquid Silver Books for the first of a sci-fi series. The novella is called Icarus Rising [my NaNo story] and here's the blurb:

To save a dying race, sociologist Caleb Faulkner will forfeit his humanity. He has volunteered to join with an alien creature in order to take part in an ambitious breeding program designed to spare the dominant race on the planet Icarus from certain extinction.

Dr. Zara Abbott has spent months helping to prepare Caleb for the joining, hiding her feelings for the man who will become the mate to an Icarian female as soon as he receives his symbiotic wings. When the joining proves disastrous, Caleb and his alien symbion can think of only one thing, mating with Zara. After so long preparing to sacrifice Caleb to the Icarians, will she be able to refuse the man who makes her heart take flight?


I have a portion of the next story in the series written - called Icarus Unbound and now I've got to get cracking on that. Off to dust my keyboard and put some fresh ink in the printer.

Stay tuned for more info!

Team Jacob

Since I prefer my doses of teen angst to be few and far between, I have not read the Twilight saga, but I have watched the movies.

Last night I finally got to my Netflix copy of New Moon, the 2nd in the series. I watched it by myself, since no one else in my house can deal with vampires that sparkle in the sunlight.

Mild spoiler alert!

I won't go into a long rant or even a review of the movie or the story. I will only say that there must seriously be something wrong with Bella Swan if she can choose Edward, who is practicalyl invisible except for his red lips and bushy eyebrows, over Jacob who runs around tattooed and shirtless.

I thought it was funny that they reserved Bella's one shocked gasp for the end of the movie when Edward proposes rather than for the scene in which Jacob peels off his shirt to reveal abs that would make a wash board weep with envy. Seriously, I wanted to slap the girl.

While when it comes to vampires, I shall forever remain staunchly in the Angel* camp, I have to say, if forced to choose Team Edward or Team Jacob, it's really a no-brainer.

* Angel: Look under 'real vampires' in the wiktionary, thank you Joss Whedon