So it goes...

Well, it's done. Book number two, or four, depending on how you look at it, is finished. I look at it as two, but that's just me. I'd tell you the title if I knew it myself yet, but I don't yet. I'm still waiting for it to come to me. And, like every word in the book, it will eventually. I feel like I'm zeroing in on it, with the help of friends and family. A few statistics about the work: It stands right now at 75,438 words. This might trend downward a bit depending on what a publisher might do to it. My goal once I saw where it was at was to keep it above 75K words. Why? Should that ever be a criteria for how to write? No. But once I hit it I was determined to keep it around that number. Okay, I'm weird. It also stands at 240 pages - including introduction, acknowledgements, dedication, and page breaks. I'm guessing this may go up as it gets formatted by a publisher. Again, I wanted to keep it above 240 pages for some unknown bad reason. Dirt...

Last week at work, my coworkers and I got to talking about a person from another department who was in the process of building a new home in Waukesha County. The discussion ranged from all of the design decisions to the choosing of a builder, a lot, layout, etc. This is clearly not a task for everyone. I can barely choose between the two colors for wall and trim, let alone decisions like wall/door configurations, flooring material, countertops, knob styles, etc. Starter home? Anyway, the discussion moved to some of the designs this particular builder had. I went home and looked at some of the various collections online. These are, by my standards, gargantuan homes. They are all beautiful, but instead of names like "Signature Collection" and "Premier Collection," they should have names like "Castle Collection" or the "Out-of-Your-Price-Range Collection". What was more interesting was the effect looking at the interior of these homes had on...

My sister in-law sold her house recently, and just this past week, moved into an apartment. I am very happy that she had a very quick sale, especially in this market. She was lucky to be able to get out from under the huge burden that it was becoming. As a working single parent, time spent between the house, the yard and the pool, and raising two daughters just got to be too much. Houses can sometimes be too much when you have two adults working on it. Take one of those out of the picture and I wouldn't blame anyone for downsizing. That doesn't mean the sale of the house doesn't hurt a bit. I'm sure it hurts her and her family with all of the memories tied up in it, but its kind of sad for me too. Because we stayed there whenever we went to St. Paul for holidays, etc., there are a lot of memories for myself and my family that that house holds. Countless "arrival" nights around the kitchen island having a few beers and decompressing after a long, some...