Sunday, August 25, 2013

Busy, busy, busy!

Crappy week at work, every day it seemed like something broke. Thank goodness I'm not a lead so I don't have to worry about things like that, just doing my job as best as I can. That isn't difficult, as I managed to get into a job that's fairly easy and hard to mess up. The overtime has to continue for a few more weeks, but it's coming down a day at a time. Before I know it, the week's over, and so is a few more days of overtime that I don't have to pull. Yay! In other good news, this upcoming week, one of our littler bills will finally be paid off, and I can be proud of us. Despite one paycheck and that stupid garnishment, we're still managing to get by and have the truck down to $705 left to pay off. We're blessed that the guy we're buying it from is willing to work with us and take good-faith payments every week towards the payoff, rather than getting mad about it, gracefully waiting until hubby's back to work and getting paid so we can make bigger payments on it and get it paid off.

The only problem I have now with overtime is the nimrod they hired to replace the old night lead on my regular section. The new one is a decent guy, and was a lead in a different spot. However, he has yet to learn to read the work orders before starting the shift, so he knows if he needs extra help or not. Hate to tell him, but that section ALWAYS needs extra help. However, he pulled the old, "Well, the supervisor told me I shouldn't need more than eight people, so I guess I don't need you," on Friday night. I got overtime by asking one of the supervisors, and he put me elsewhere, glad to have the help. At  my ten-minute personal break time, I chatted for a minute with the backup lead over there, and she told me she was doing the work of three people because of this moron, and wasn't too happy about it. But what choice do you have when your new "boss" is a blithering idiot, more concerned with carving things in stone than in actually getting things accomplished? Not a lot, really, but as long as I can get my overtime for a bit longer, I'll be happy.

The nights I don't stay over at work for overtime, I come home, grab a fast supper, and get my butt out with Quentin to get things done. He's doing a lot of trash-burning and brush-burning. The stuff we can't burn for whatever reason, we're piling up near the edge of the easement, so that when the power company comes through and brush hogs and such in the easement again, they'll bury it for us when the doze all the stuff they trim off to the side of the easement. Heehee. Why work harder than you have to with something like that?

Lots of small trees and scrub brush are getting cut down. That's a lot of the brush-burning right there. The scrub and all the trimmings are going up in smoke, because we don't want them sitting around and gathering critters like snakes and skunks in them. Some of the wildlife isn't bad to live around, just annoying, but when you get things that can hurt you or stink you up involved, it gets a bit crazy trying to avoid getting sprayed. We found that out when Q left the last bit of brush piled up for a mere three days. He scared a young skunk out of the pile when he started to haul it to the burn pit, and nearly got sprayed!

And I'm officially a published author, lol. The Bountiful Farm Cookbook, full of nearly forty family favorite recipes, is up and running on Amazon! I'm pretty proud of myself for this, and it's only $1.99. AND!!! Next weekend, for three days, Friday the 31st through Sunday the 2nd, it's free! So if you're looking for a good recipe from me, feel free to grab the book next weekend!

I will say that I'll be glad when things pick up and we can do a lot more financially and get a place we're buying. Renting is great, we love our place, but we want to own, and it makes it hard to do anything when we have to ask to do a darn thing in the way of fixing things. We want to get stuff done, but we have to ask, wait days for replies sometimes, and then hope the answer's favorable. It bites, and we're a bit tired of that, so if not beforehand, once hubby's back to work, we're paying off all our bills that we're snowballing out of debt on, getting a nice downpayment together and going from there to get a place we like and can own. Neither of us likes the idea of a mortgage, with the economy the way it is, but we like the idea of continuing to rent with all the pitfalls we're having handed to us lately even less.

Speaking of free books, it's time for this week's free book mess, so have fun. I have to get these posted and get my butt back home. Chicken lo mein tonight for dinner and more trees to get cut down. FUN!!!!!!

FREE KINDLE BOOK FOR THIS WEEK

Sorry they are mostly cookbooks again - it seems that's about all I can find most of the time, lol. But at least nobody's gonna go hungry!! (I should note that for personal reading anymore, I'm enjoying the teen/young adult books a lot more than adult novels. The YA books at least move the plot along, whereas the adult stuff is pretty boring!)

Sunday, August 18, 2013

At least it stopped raining

Because now it's fall weather qute a bit early. Brrr! But good for sleeping, so comfortable and easy to get to sleep and stay there all night long. The cats are enjoying it a lot, curling up on window shelves Quentin long since installed for them and snoozing away the day. He's so ready to go back to work, he's literally counting the days until he's able to apply for rehire. I'm ready for it, too. Not that I don't love him and time with him to death, but there's times I'd like to have some time and space to myself. (I do get a bit tired of all his car shows ALL the time, lol.)

We have gotten a lot done lately, mostly him. A lot of trash got burned now that the burn ban's off due to nearly a month of rain. The ground's pretty saturated, things are wet and staying that way, so no burn bans, thus all the crap that's built up for a month can get torched. There's been a bunch of trees cut down to clear the view around the place, including a few yesterday. We had to stop a lot sooner on that than expected, because Quentin unintentionally stood on a nest of ground bees iand tore it to heck, stirring them up bad. He's allergic to bee stings (thankfully no stings from them), but it meant we had to quit until they settled down, and by then, it was getting dark. What we did get down got trimmed right off and left as full logs, rather than cutting to stove length. We'll let it season that way, so that if we do find a place and move, then it will be a lot easier to move the big logs rather than a bunch of stove length logs, though those will go with us, too. The more we've got trimmed back, the better the place looks, and the more firewood we'll have to take along for the ride if/when the time comes.

The mountain road's a complete mess. I'm surprised I can get the car through, as bad as some of the gullies the rain washed out of the road are. You literally have to roll through them slowly, unless you want to bust a tire. It's pretty rough and not a lot of fun at the bottom right now. Thankfully, there are ditches next to the road on the rest of it that make the runoff head downhill without carving craters in the road. I love our place here even though it's just a rental, but I'll be glad when we can buy a place and move. I know it seems like all I do is gripe lately, and I honestly don't try to. I think it's just I'm tired from all the overtime I have to pull to make ends meet, I'm tired of not getting things done around the place that I want to do, and I'm tired of being tired. A few more weeks (12 1/2 and counting) till Quentin can rehire, then a few more weeks after that before he is back to work and getting paychecks, and things will start to look up. I've already warned everybody that once he's getting a paycheck again, I won't do more overtime, period.

I will, however, keep writing, and keep up my needlework and doing thins around the house. Speaking of those, my knitting's gotten a whole sock finished finally, barring weaving in the ends. Date night every Saturday is now mandatory for us, as a choice to help keep our marriage more stable and give some sanity to our crazy life. And I do my best to make sure that I put things aside for a bit before I head to bed, and those little bits add up fast when you are working on something that doesn't require a lot of pattern reading. Sock heels to toes are easy to work without much thinking, so I got the heel flap done, the heel turned, the gusset worked, the foot done and the toe done, all over Saturday while doing laundry and then that night while having movie time with hubby. Warning, do not get Redline, Vehicle 19, or The Tower. They all sound good, but they're not that great. Redline was the best of the three, with John Billingsley (Doctor Phlox on Star Trek: Enterprise) being the bad guy; though the ending was not too smart, because you don't know if the people get rescued or not. Vehicle 19 started out good, quickly morphed into sheer boredom, and ended up boring, with another "what happened to end this?" ending. Cliffhangers are good for serials, books, and tv shows. NOT good for a movie, which to me means it has a definite beginning, middle and ending. The Tower was the worst. We didn't even watch a full ten minutes of it, especially after we realized it was "The Towering Inferno" in Korean, with English subtitles, set it Korea. (Or maybe it was Hong Kong, I couldn't figure that part out.) We both like TTI, but if we want to see it, we'll watch the original version in English, not some mashed-up gobbledegook version with subtitles. So movie night for movies was a total bust on the rentals. We did splurge on Super Storm for $10 from Wally World, and truthfully, we got it because we like disaster movies (in ENGLISH, please! We don't speak-a da other languages so gooder!), and it sounded good. It was well worth the $10 because the plot made sense (though I still laugh over the plot device of Jupiter's Great Red Spot disappearing entirely) of a sort, and made the night worthwhile. That, along with finishing a sock, was fun.

As for writing, sometime Monday, my first book will be available on Amazon for the Kindle. The Bountiful Farm Cookbook got published to my bookshelf there today and it looks good in the previews. I'm debating putting it up for print editions as well, but I'd have to make it run around $5 for that and I'm dithering on it. The Kindle version will only be $1.99 paid, though I did opt it in for the KDP Select program and I'll be doing a freebie promo on it in a couple of weeks, around Labor Day weekend. Mainly because I'm only online once a week, and I can't set it up for a promo until it's published. That takes about 12 hours, so it'll be midnight tonight before it's in publication officially, and next weekend before I'm online again to set it up for a promo weekend. Thus, two weeks before I give away (hopefully) LOTS of copies.

And I'm sitting here grabbing freebie books by the ton again because a - I can, and b - a friend is stopping by here at McQuack's to say hi and give me something Quentin and I have been wanting to get (and keep forgetting when we have a bit extra to order it). A can crusher for all his soda cans. We need the thing, he's getting a bit tired of stomping down all the ones he empties, plus all the ones we keep finding laying around outside. Easier to bring a five-gallon bucket of the things in from outdoors if they're laying around and run them through a crusher in a couple of minutes than to have to wait till he remembers to get outside and stomp them down.

So with that, it's time for this week's free Kindle books mess. Have fun. I'm off to get some lunch (my once a week garbage food indulgence) and read while my new books download. Hugs, all! Till next weekend!

FREE KINDLE BOOKS FOR THE WEEK




Ok, it's nearly four p.m. here and I need to hit Wally World for dinner supplies (ran out of spaghetti sauce, gotta buy a jar, though I much prefer my homemade, I'm too pooped to mess with it), and get myself home. I'll work on more books next week!

Sunday, August 11, 2013

Still wet!

It's still very wet around here. We're getting tired of it. It's gotten to where absolutely nothing gets done outside, because you can't get a thing done for it either raining or being so soggy that you squelch along. It's a good thing for the farmers and ranchers around here; they'll get at least three good cuttings of hay, if not four from all this weather. If you've got a garden in, it's great, too - a  lot less watering to do. If you are clearing stuff out, not so good, because you can't get anything done, lol. Poor Quentin's bored as all heck, and is literally counting down the days till he rehires so he has SOMETHING to do besides TV and video games.

I'll be glad myself, so I can cut back on all this freaking overtime. I'd like to have time for myself, too. I did get quite a bit done in relax after supper time, even on my overtime days, in that my socks are getting some serious progress (I turned the heel on the one I've been working on, so that's some nice progress since I only have the foot and toe left on that one, then I can start the other one.), as well as that afghan. Though the afghan's been getting short-changed because I've been concentrating on the socks. I'm down to one pair of woolies to wear to work, and a mismatched pair at that, because the third pair got worn out and the mates to the two that are left have done a disappearing act. I don't mind wearing mismatched woolies, but they're different lengths and it's a bit odd, lol.

And we're house-hunting, even though we are nowhere NEAR to being able to buy a place. We like where we're at, but it's not likely we'll be able to buy it, and with recent events, we want to cut material ties to certain people as much as possible. Our landlords will still be our friends, but the wife of the couple is the daughter of my very-former best friend, and so it's a sad year or so while we put together a downpayment. So today's post has to be short, because I honestly have GOT to get things done as quick as possible - there's a place only about 12 miles from where we're at now that we want to go look at. I know, it's Sunday and the realtor won't be there with us, but we want to go peek in windows and walk about the place a bit and see what we can see.

Hugs all. I've got to load up books for you and dump a bunch of them that I just got to my kindle for pc and get my butt home. Ta!

Free Kindle books for this week

Remember that they may not be free when you get to them, but at the time I post them, they are. Have fun!




Stopping here today because I really need to get home so we can print off the directions to the one place nearby we want to see and get our butts over there. Ta, folks!

Sunday, August 4, 2013

Endings and beginnings

This has been a week for endings and beginnings and one that's a lot of both. Last weekend, a bit after I'd posted the entry for the week, I found out through Facebook that my Uncle Bill was very, very ill. We'd known for some time that he wasn't in the best of health, dealing with lung cancer, but last weekend, I found out that he was in the last days of stage four.

I posted this: Prayers going out to my Auntie Laurie, who is going through a really tough time due to Uncle Bill's illness (last days of stage 4 lung cancer). I don't know how she finds the strength to handle this. She is a tough, tough lady, and so classy. Her life hasn't always been easy, but she's always managed to deal with what's been thrown at her in a way that showed so much grace and fortitude. She is absolutely amazing.

She thanked me for the sentiments, but honestly, she is one of the most amazing women I have ever been lucky enough to know. She and Bill were married 21 years, and his company, Thistle Construction, will now close after 31 years. Sad that they have no more time together on earth, but they had an amazingly long marriage for all that. I can only hope mine with Quentin is as long and happy.

And for the other news that is mixed, we found out the other day that Quentin's dad is in hospital. He weighs 400 pounds and his birthday was yesterday (Saturday), making him 71 or 72. Apparently, the men in his family don't generally live much past their mid-70s, so it's everybody is expecting Ronald to kick the bucket any day now. Especially with why he's in hospital now. Ronald is a cantankerous old fart and disallows a lot of the care he should be getting and they can't force him to accept it in-home - now that he's in hospital, it's a lot different. He has, at the LEAST, gangrene in both legs quite badly, nerve damage where he can't apparently feel anything or much of anything, and (this is what grosses me out) MAGGOTS in the wounds. The nurse that Quentin talked to said there were so many of the little pests in the wounds that they aren't sure if there are hundreds or thousands of them. It's just that bad. It is possible that Ronald may have to have double amputation of his legs clear up to the hips from this, but we don't know for sure yet. He's getting MASSIVE doses of antibiotics to try to clear up the infection so the doctors can see just how bad it all is and go from there. We've all been told not to expect him to last more than another year though, with as bad as it is. (Plus he smokes like a fricking chimney, possibly has untreated diabetes which he hasn't ever let himself get tested for, and goodness only knows what all going on. You can imagine how upsetting this all is. Argh.)

The beginning that I mentioned is a good one. The beginning of the end of Quentin's rehire wait period. Just over three months left and he can apply for rehire. Thank goodness for that, because he is going nuts. He's gained a little weight (not a lot, only a couple of inches around the waistline really) and he's bored. The weight gain is from being a lot more sedentary than he usually is, and mindlessly eating tater chips all the time while he watches TV. He's so bored, he is pretty much literally counting the days till he can rehire. We've already planned that since he's eligible on a Thursday, the next day, we'll come here to McQuack's and do his application over a splurge on crappy fast food (heehee), or do it at home after I have dinner, depending on if DishNet is at our place by then or not. They're closer than they were, but it takes them a while to get even a few miles of repeater going around here. Wouldn't be so long to get it going other than all the mountains in the way of the satellite repeater signals, lol!

So with that said, I'm going to get busy adding the freebie books for the week. If I have time today, I'll add other books, and some gadgets and who knows what all I'll find. I do like the idea of the astore, but honestly, it's a pain in the butt to change things around there (as in you can't move something from one category to another, and adding categories is a bit problematic when you don't get it right the first time). Thank goodness for all the links I'm putting in here, lol ... when I get the website running, I'll be able to just edit these posts, grab the links and paste them THERE. Save me some time, right? (Maybe ... lol.) Till next time - hugs and happy homesteading!

NEW FREE KINDLE BOOKS FOR THE WEEK