Moved! The Evil Toilet Rears Up Once More... And Finally Writing Again!

Wow, it's amazing how sometimes life will just take over and leave you lying in the street, a melted puddle of sludge. That's pretty much what has happened to me over the last seven months. It started in April, when I came down with severe bronchitis. Three months, one cracked rib (from coughing so hard) and four full doses of antibiotics later I finally started to get over that horrible attack. Which is when I slipped on the stairs, fell down and cracked my tailbone. OUCH! Talk about "not feeling well!" It was back to bed for me for another few weeks.... but six weeks later I was finally feeling almost normal again. Finally! HOORAY!

That's when we sold our house. Now this is the BIG house we've been renovating for the past eight years and it was full, and I do mean FULL, of stuff. We had stuff packed into every single room, the basement, the 40' x 42' garage/shop/lean-to and the 20' x 30' room above the garage. The house we moved into is 800 square feet with no garage and a damp basement. (We do have a rented storage space to put some of our things in... like my out-of-print books. Those I could NOT get rid of!)

Oh, yeah. That was an easy move.

NOT!

It would have been a bit easier if I hadn't tripped over a pile of stuff while sorting and packing. My poor right knee blew up to four times its normal size and my entire leg turned black, blue and green from the injury. Doc said it's not broken (thank heavens!) but it will be six months before it totally stops hurting and is back to normal.

Is there a normal for me? I'm beginning to wonder...LOL!

We no sooner got our stuff out of the big house and into our little one (boxes are EVERYWHERE!) than we turned around, packed up again, and headed for Arizona for the winter months. I left the bulk of the unpacking at the little house for when we return. Mwahahahahaha! (Well, until we return, that is. Then it won't be so funny, I'm sure.)

So here we are, in Arizona again, and what does my hubby decide to do? To once again tackle The Evil Toilet in our little trailer! (See my March 25th Blog for the full story on this toilet that did not want to be replaced!) Hubby bought another new toilet (the third one) and pulled The Evil Toilet out once again. Of COURSE the new toilet wouldn't fit in the space after he got The Evil Toilet out. The back stuck out too far, making the bolt holes not line up with the bolts in the floor. So... The Evil Toilet was reinstalled in the trailer for the fifth time, while hubby gnashed his teeth, screamed obscenities at The Evil Toilet, and generally made a nuisance of himself for a few hours.

We contemplated returning the toilet to the store, but it was EXACTLY the toilet we wanted in the space. Instead of all those bumps and ridges like most toilets have on the outsides, making them a nightmare to clean, this new one has perfectly smooth, straight sides with all those tube-like ridges hidden inside. It also has an elongated seat, is slightly higher than a normal seat, and has a very narrow (just 14 inches across) tank, so it won't stick out into the doorway to our bedroom like The Evil Toilet does.

So we put on our thinking caps and came up with a slightly unorthodox, but clever solution. Hubby ripped out the inside of the wall behind The Evil Toilet, the one that backs against our bedroom, and we recessed the back part of the tank into the opening of the wall. IT FIT! It worked! And we only had to pull out that Evil Toilet a total of SIX TIMES to finally get it replaced! (Snork!) HOORAY!

I immediately put a notice up on the RV park's bulletin board that we had a flush toilet for sale, cheap! ($50) It sold in one day. Now someone ELSE can deal with that EVIL TOILET! Mwahahahahahahaha!

And now we can finally move on to other projects. Like WRITING for me. Yeah. I've finally finished a new story. It's been sitting "on ice" for the past couple of weeks so I can hopefully look at it with eyes not fuzzy with the excitement of a new story and see if it's good enough yet to send to my agent. I hope it is. I will most likely look at it again this week to see. Actually, I'm AFRAID to look at it again for fear it won't be as good as I first thought it was. LOL! Writing is such an interesting journey, as anyone who has ever written for publication certainly knows. It's filled with ups and downs (mostly downs) and is never, ever boring. I can't imagine doing anything else!

A few weeks ago I got the F&G's for my next book coming out - Civil War Drummer Boy. What a fabulous book this is going to be! Here's a sneak peak at the cover of it (the interior is even more spectacular and wonderful than the cover!) and I'm so happy with it.

It feels great to finally be writing again, to know that the huge house payments of that big house are gone forever, and to be down here in Arizona, where the weather is in the 70's, instead of up in Washington state (near Idaho) where it's snowing and the weather gets down in the 20's at night. I'm running around in shorts and Tshirts, enjoying the sunshine a LOT.

I have so much to be thankful for! This is going to be a very happy Thanksgiving for hubby and I. (And NO Evil Toilet in the house to mess up our happiness, either!) Yep. It's definitely going to be a Happy Thanksgiving on Thursday.