Holiday life update

Ever since Gen Con things have been pretty topsy-turvy around here, mostly due to transportation-related issues.

I picked up a temp job literally the week after GenCon, which at the time was nice because more money, but very soon became necessary because – you guessed it – more money. Early in October, DH was driving to work in the morning when his old Dodge Neon quit accelerating on the freeway. No accident (thankfully), but after having AAA tow the car to our mechanic, we found out the car was essentially unfixable. Timing belt, of course.

By the way, our AAA membership paid for itself at least three times over this year.

So. For the month of October, we car-pooled in my rickety Daewoo. It had developed a bit of an old-car rattle, but nothing I thought was too critical.

Wrong. Last week of October, we started having to add coolant basically before every trip. And then, in the first week of November, the rattle gave way and that car died. That weekend we signed the paperwork to lease a brand-spanking-new Toyota Corolla, which is a good car with lots of amenities, and we continued to carpool and suffer 10-12 hour days.

Star Wars joke obligatory
“She may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts.”

Last Thursday, I wrote a guy a check for this beauty. Please excuse the poor picture quality: it was snapped in the garage the same night I bought it, and neither cropping nor adjusting the levels seemed to do anything for it. She’s a 1992 Honda Accord Coupe (I always think of cars as female, it’s just a thing), and I’ve been calling her Falcon. I kinda love driving it, which is a nice change, and since it’s a Honda with less than 150k on it, I can probably drive it until I’m sick of it. Which is also a nice change, because as I may have mentioned my last car was a POS Daewoo.

Which means that we now have two cars again. Happy New Year to me!

In other news, I believe I mentioned back in April that I was submitting Advent of Ruin to my first-choice publisher. Back in October, I got an email from them saying that my manuscript had been “selected for closer consideration.” I got this email at the office, and so I spent the rest of the day trying very hard not to squee out loud. So that was some good news to come out of the fall. Hurdle one, cleared! Which of course makes it that much harder to wait to hear on the next hurdle.

Because I’ve spent the last 2 1/2 months carpooling, and thereby being out of the house for obscenely long days, there isn’t actually a lot else to update you on. I did discover just this evening that a standard-size pillow case can, with about 5 minutes worth of work, be converted to fit a king size pillow. I’ll post a quick tutorial next time I do it, if anyone wants one.

On the gaming front, for those of you who may have been following my Kasumi posts, those stopped primarily because we suffered a TPK (Total Party Kill) and I had quite a lot else going on at the time. My current character is a Monkey by the name of Toku Ren, who is a much more stable character than Kasumi ever dreamed of being. I can continue posting the Kasumi writing if people are interested, but this summer the blog was in danger of turning into just another gaming journal.

At any rate, I hope you all had a Happy Holiday – whatever you happen to celebrate. Now I need to get back to prepping for New Years, which we were contrary enough to pick for our big one.

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