Well, smack my head and call me Grannie.

But wait until after August. That's when my VERY FIRST GRANDCHILD will be arriving!!!

I'm in shock, I think. Geez, this is going to take some getting used to!

This changes everything.

I think.

Trundling right along in my most-recent Grown-up Groove (having fixed the toilet all on my own last weekend), I loaded my lawn mower into my trunk this morning and took it to the mower doctor's place to get all fixed up for the oncoming mowing season. That sucker is heavy! And my rope and knots contraption to keep it from bouncing out of the trunk made the mower-fixer-guy laugh, of course, but who cares.

Then in a paroxysm of Grown-upness, I went & had my car cleaned, inside and out! Woo hoo! And then a roofer came and looked at my roof and told me that the best thing for me to do is to patch the one bad spot and let it go; I have asbestos shingles and it costs $2000 per 100 square feet to dispose of them! gasp! Well, as it should be, I say, that stuff is Not Nice for people to handle, and we shouldn't be just dumping it into landfills or whatever. He also said he'd save any salvageable shingles as he worked (if he gets my business) and wrap them up tight and safe so if I ever had another break, I could use the old ones. You can't buy them any more (of course, and perfectly fine with me) so used ones are going for $25 - 50 apiece on the open market. He won't give me an estimate on the needed repairs until he can get up there and look at the roof, which will be sometime this week. So, now two more roofing guys need to come over and tell me what they think. And when I've picked myself up off the floor, I'll have to decide what to do: go into debt now, or wait & save my money to pay for the work now. Depends on how much it is, of course.

And isn't this Adult World of Grown-Upness exciting? My golly, I'm just all -

Uh, just all -

Um. Well, I wore out that fit of Adultness quick, dint I? Phew.

But I've done a few housey things today, and now I've just subsided into my usual pile of inert So-whatness. It's OK; it's Saturday. Tomorrow is Errands and Chores day. Tonight I can channel surf and jack around doing nuthin' all I like. :^)

I've been posting mainly in Live Journal lately, especially since Speculations Rumor Mill has closed down. A bunch of Rumor Millers have migrated to LJ to huddle together in our bereavement. Someone, bless them, started a LJ Rejection/Acceptance Community that sort-of replaces the RM's. So if you have R/A's you want to post, I suppose the easiest way is to email me and I'll tell you how to join LJ (if you're already registered, my handle there is threeoutside); if you Friend me, and I Friend you back, I think you'll be able to find my Friends list, and the RMers and R/A Community should be accessible through that. (And I must say, I do loathe that verbing of the noun Friend. Just so you know. I use it under protest.)

In other news, I completed the first draft of my first short story of 2008 yesterday. I wrote it for the writer's workshop at WillyCon coming right up the first weekend in April. Jack McDevitt, the Author GoH, will be running the workshop and I'm thrilled and terrified that he'll be reading and critting my story.

Looks like I sold a story to Thaneros! Now, if you look at that word, it's a combination of two Greek words, one meaning Death and the other, well, Eros. So if you've an easily offended sensibility you won't want to be going and looking for this story - or, likely, any other story on that new ezine. But I'm very proud of that story, I think it's one of the best I've ever written, so if you're of a broad-minded nature, by all means when it's published, do read it. And I've a thick skin - let me know what you think of it, if you want to. I'll try to remember to post here when it's online. It's going to be published in three parts, one a week, by the way.

So I'm hoping yesterday's story completion means I'm climbing back onto the writing horse again.

In music news, I downloaded NIN's new four-disc album Ghosts I - IV yesterday, but apparently my old stereo system won't play MP3s, so now I have to invest in some batteries because the ones I scrounged up yesterday didn't have the juice to power my CD player. Bah. It's so frustrating! I do so look forward to hearing Reznor's instrumental music! This set is all instrumentals played with, as usual, by a large cast of his musical friends. Including Adrian Belew (whoa!).

That's about it this time.