Through the zero hour I'll walk

Another week draws to a close, and another Friday night blog post lands from me - and surely no one will read it, because my timing is awful. But so it goes.

And anyway, there's little to report. I accomplished a fair bit of Writing Business, got the house cleaned, did some yardwork, and tried to stay out of the way when the yard guys were present. The yard guys will only be with us another day or so - but whether that's tomorrow or Monday remains to be seen. (Weather, etc.)

Lord knows they've been busy, but the yard has presented its challenges to their efforts to restore/repair/rebuild the retaining walls and install a patio. For one thing, the yard is on a pretty sharp grade; for another, this house has been here for 120 years (give or take) and during that time, not everyone who's tried to keep the mountain from sliding through the back window has been an engineering genius, that's for damn sure.

Besides all that, there's been a crap-ton of debris buried in the mostly-clay-soil. So far the guys have turned up painted wood planks, decaying railroad ties, long-buried tree stumps, boulders, broken chunks of late Victorian clay sewage pipes, rusted metal mid-century camping implements, and so forth, and so on. They also had to re-route and manage a drainage issue, so that was another minor setback, there.

But it's really coming together. The walls are about 90% finished, and once that's done - there's nothing left but detail work, and the pavers for the patio.
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When we first moved in a couple of years ago, one of our neighbors [who shall remain unnamed] gave us a warning about yardwork:

"If you're digging around back there, you might find buttons, bullets, buckles...that kind of thing. And that's cool. You can keep those, show them off, whatever. But if you find human remains? You put them back right where you found them, and you keep that shit to yourself."

Our house stands on a square mile that saw a few thousand battle deaths 150 years ago, so sometimes these things happen. But so far, if the yard guys have turned up any interesting loot, they've kept that shit to themselves.

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On another note entirely, anybody want a free Advance Reader's Copy of Maplecroft? WELL THEN. There's a chance you're in luck, because the nice folks at Roc have put 50 of them up for grabs over at Goodreads.

Click here to enter the drawing , and may the odds be ever in your favor.

If you do successfully nab a copy, I'd greatly appreciate any reviews and/or word-of-mouth you might feel like spreading around. Here and there, people are already leaving (very low and/or very high) reviews - which is a hoot, because I can count on one hand the number of people who've seen it. So...whatever.

All I'm saying is, it'd be nice to have feedback from people who've actually read the damn thing.