Today I took ‘my friend’ in for a regular check-up and to have the snow tires put on. I was sitting comfortably in the waiting room, Kindle in hand, when the Service Manager entered and looked my way. “No, Russell,” I said. He grimaced. I groaned. *Sigh* Three major problems that will become safety issues in a matter of a few weeks…okay, one major problem probably won’t occur for a few months, I was told. But the other two must be attended to within the next two to three weeks, depending on how much I drive the car.

Now I’ve got what I consider, officially, as a clunker, no matter how much I love the old thing. I can no longer feel secure in its loyalty or that it guarantees my safety of the safety of those who travel with me. Time to give it up. No use in investing a few thousand dollars which could go toward a new vehicle. But it’s like say goodbye to an true, faithful pal.

Alas, next week I will go out and test drive a few cars and prepare to say goodbye to some $$. But I continue to say it isn’t the $$ and my friends and family continue to laugh at me. It really isn’t. I’m giving up a comfortable, faithful mode of transportation that has served me well for almost 13 years.

Before the final turnover, I have to rescue all the treasures that travel with me…garage door opener, fav. CDs, doggie blanket for his lordship, etc. Here is my second *sigh*. LOL

My mother, who is now 88 years old and in bad health, and I found ourselves each alone and purchased this house together about 22 years ago. We’ve been diligent about upgrading, adding energy efficient furnace/air conditioning/appliances etc, and keeping the house in good repair overall.

This past Friday I suspected the water softener was out of salt as the water seemed hard (not too many frothy bubbles in the washing machine or the sink for dishes…I won’t even mention the shower!) and we have a lot of lime in our water. So down…down..down to the bowels of the basement I went (very steep steps) to check it out. There, on the concrete floor was a stream of water and white foam floating into the floor-drain. Okay, the water heater has a leek and it’s only a few years old. Also discovered the water softener, that is not yet a year old, is not working. It’s still full of salt that I put in three weeks ago.

Back I go, ascending to the first floor and pick up the phone. First the water heater people. They sent a repairman out within a couple of hours and he replaced a valve. By then I had already set up for the water softener people to come out…Sept 6th is the earliest. Okay, hopefully our house pipes won’t clog up with lime in that length of time, so I can deal with that.

So, water heater fixed on Friday…water softener repair ordered. In the meantime, I confirmed two specialist doctor appointments for my mother, aka “The Coach”. She likes to tell the Toronto Blue Jays how to play ball. And let’s not even start on the Toronto Argos!

Saturday I wake up and hear rushing water. Hurried downstairs (I’m didsabled so I don’t run anywhere) and could really hear water rushing on the main floor. Make my way back down to the bowels of the basement and it’s okay down there. Back up to the top floor…upstairs toilet has running water in the tank. Being once a property manager many years ago, I think, “I can fix this.” I take the top of the tank and fiddle around…okay, so I can’t fix this. Back on the phone I get and call a 24 hour emergency plumbing service. A repairman arrived, good to their advertising word, 23 hours later. Nice young man he was, too. He replaced a flow value in the toilet. That was Sunday. So, we’re good to go!

Not quite.

Monday about noon a town’s crew arrived and started digging up some broken sidewalk in front of our house. Now, my dog, Trooper, always goes to daycare Monday and Wednesday afternoons to play with the other dogs…he needs that interaction. I put the dog in the car, press my gizmo and the garage door goes up…there is a back-hoe across my entire driveway, digging up the sidewalk. I couldn’t see it from inside the house because of the trees. And obviously they would not be moving for a time. So, I put the garage door down, take my confused dog out of the car and we go back into the house, whereupon I call the daycare and advise that Trooper will not be coming as planned.

Then, wisely, I decided to go back down into the bowels of basement and just check things out down there. Augh! The water heater is still leaking water and foam! Back on the phone I get to call those repair people to get their butts back out here!

As I’m talking to them, there is a knock at my front door. Live call in progress I went to the door with phone in hand and my neighbour asks, “Is your phone working?” Um, yeah, and I held up the phone…”I’m on a call right now.” “Is your cable TV working?” he asks. At this point I’m wishing I were two people. I invite the neighbour in so the dog won’t run out the door (dawg is a real runner!), resume my phone conversation and flick on the TV at the same time. No cable! The guys digging up the sidewalk cut into the cable lines! We were lucky as we had the phone line…they had cut off the neighbours phone line as well as their cable.

Neighbour goes home. Water Heater guy shows up within an hour.

Down the repairman goes into the bowels of the basement. Now I’ve got the dog on a leash attached to my wrist so that he doesn’t run, when I hear, from the bowels of the ‘earth’, “Hello”. I go to the top of the stairs. “Um, your water heater is bust.”

Oh good, that’s fine. “I’ll have to replace it,” he says. “Oh good, that’s fine,” says I. Meanwhile as he’s working I’ve got the poor dog confined and attached via his leash to my wrist because the repairman is going in and out to his truck…the water in the house is turned off for the better part of the afternoon, but, hey!, the new water heater is finally installed, the water is turned back on, and off the fellow goes.

I’m exhausted but all should be hunky-dory now. We’ve got the regular, annual furnace check-up scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. No prob…piece of cake. And I was still laughing about it all.

At this point, the house is locked up, I free the poor dog, and myself, from the leash and I walked out into the kitchen to pour myself an adult beverage, because I had damned well earned it! And I hear water rushing…augh! Just shoot me! I am no longer laughing! It’s the upstairs toilet tank again…the one that was just repaired yesterday.

So, myths busted, I should have a quiet day tomorrow and be able to get some work done. After all, I’m still hoping to get Trooper to daycare for his play, the furnace man is schedule to arrive between 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. and I’ve got to call the plumbing service to get their butts back here! LOL. And, hey, by tomorrow night, we might have our cable TV back in operation!

Jill…signing off from the House of Nonsense in downtown Georgetown.

There were several things I loved in school…the first of which was history. There were two things, as a kid, I cried over. The first was spelling. Man, this is going to date me. But in grade one I got caught, along with all the other kids, in a pattern change in the teaching techniques for spelling. It was my worst subject. And the more the teacher punished me (she would smack a wooden ruler across the palms of our hands), the worse I became at it. Finally I taught myself and my mother, for years, proudly annouced that I was self-taught when it came to spelling. Typos are another matter, LOL. It came to light several years later that the grade one teacher had a few problems of her own…but we kids suffered for it.

The second thing I hated was algebra. When I hit highschool, that subject hit me right between the eyes. It didn’t go into my brain, ever…I just didn’t get it. I carried it over another year and still didn’t get it. I excelled at English and History but a mathematician I was not.

So I switched electives, which meant I could not go on to university. Ha! Not so. After ten years at working at this and that and being disatisifed, I returned to school and spent two years in college and picked up a number of university diplomas.

In the end, the dreaded algebra didn’t do me in after all. But algebra in middle school. That made me shudder! LOL

It’s wonderful to see it available after all these years. The title came to me while I was attending my first Romantic Times Convention. Spring Blossom had just been released and RT had nominated it for an award as best first book in Historical Romance. So, there I was in Chicago, totally high with all excitement. Running up a massive telephone bill as I called home every night to report the great things that had happened during the day.

That was where I met Marsha Canham, btw. Marsha lived on the east side of Toronto and I lived west and we met getting into a limo to go to a booksigning in Chicago! Huh.

Back to the title…I walked into my room at the hotel one evening, flipped on the TV and there was a ballroom dance competition going on. Watched that for a few moments and, voila, Lila’s Dance…jot that down.

So, I had a title and that was all.

A few weeks later I was enjoying a driving vacation and stopped for breakfast at a small place in the country that cooked wonderful food. But the conversation at the table beside us proved very interesting, indeed. Went back to my car…grabbed paper and pen and made a few notes.

Now I have a title and an underlying theme of small town, family life. From that, the romance between Lila and Daniel was born. And out of that story came one of my fav characters…Sammy. I don’t know where he came from in my imagination, but I love him. *g*

Have a great day, everyone!

Met up with an ex-neighbor recently. Our families lived side-by-side. And it made me think fondly of our days on Tannery Street (yes, there had been a tannery just up the street but eventually it turned into a bowling alley). Anyway, the youngest neighbor boy and my younger brother were constant companions. Those two little boys got into the best of mischief. One winter day, with my brother wearing a brand new snowsuit, the boys went across the street and got messing around with an above-ground oil tank. They opened the valve, drained all the oil, and ruined their suits. Oil was less expensive then (what wasn’t) and that neighbor agreed there should have been a lock on the value. Meanwhile, two more snowsuits had to be purchased.

Another day, the boys (and they were little guys then) got behind my father’s lovely home-made bar and got into the Vodka, thinking it was water. One sip did it and they were staggering up the stairs.

The following summer the boys went uptown and were caught by the village police officer, throwing stones at cars. They were taken home in the one and only patrol car and were quite proud.

Of course, I never pulled any of these pranks. Oh, there was the time I put my baby brother in my doll carriage and pushed him across town with him screaming all the way. Someone called my mother and ratted me out.

By the way, our phone number in those days was one long ring and two short. LOL What does that tell you?

Share some of your fondest memories. Come on!

Visit BacklisteBooks to keep up with many more of your favorite authors and stop by the Bookstore, while you are there!

Why I Love eBooks
by guest blooger Julie Ortolon
I take pride in being indirectly responsible for dragging Jill into the ebook world through our mutual friend, Marsha Canham. Like a lot of authors, I’m sure Jill crossed the threshold with a good bit of apprehension and a strong desire to grab onto the doorjamb and scream “I don’t want the world to change!”

I don’t blame her. I felt the same way! But boy am I glad I jumped into the water, and dragged a few friends in with me. I’m excited about ebooks—not just as an author but as a reader, too. Why?

Variety, my fellow romance novel lovers. Walk into any bookstore and look at what’s on the romance aisle. Looks pretty different than what you would have found back in the ’80s and ’90s when I first fell in love with romance novels. Where are the cowboys, the ship captains, the knights in shinning armor? New York publishers decreed years ago that readers no longer wanted long historicals with a lot of history. So out those went.

In came the age of fun, sexy contemporary romance, which was good for me, since that’s what I write. I had nine novels published by big name houses, hit the USA Today list, and won some prestigious awards — until publishers decreed romance readers don’t want books like that either. At least not in large enough numbers to make publishing them worthwhile.

So there I sat a year and a half ago with my highly acclaimed, award-winning backlist going out of print and no new books on the horizon. Equally depressing, as a reader, I found very few newly released romance novels I wanted to read. A sad place to be.

Then came the ebook revolution, and everything changed. Now, as an author and a reader, I’m no longer restricted by what print publishers deem marketable. Or what big chain bookstores choose to stock on their shelves. Thanks to backlist ebooks, I now have a world of affordable romance novels available that appeal to me.

I’ve also just re-released the third book in my popular Pearl Island trilogy as an ebook. Much to the joy of readers who loved the original print book, I added a bonus chapter at the end of each book, so people can see what’s happening at the Pearl Island B&B today.

My Pearl Island trilogy encapsulates everything I personally love about the romance genre, it’s fun contemporary romance with bits of history and pirate lore thrown in thanks to the island’s ghost. The series did great when it was first published in the early 2000s. Would it sell to New York today? Probably not. Will it sell to readers? You betcha!

And that, my friends, is the joy of ebooks. Variety adds spice to this new world of fiction.

Julie

SPECIAL OFFER: To celebrate the release of Don’t Tempt Me, the final book in the Pearl Island trilogy, Julie is offering a 50% OFF coupon for book one in the trilogy, Falling for You. Click here http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/17218 and enter the coupon code TX24R. You can learn more about Julie and read excerpts of her books at JulieOrtolon.com
Julie’s ebooks are available wherever ebooks are sold, but the best place to be sure you get properly formatted copies is Smashwords.

SMASHWORDS

I was raised in the small village of Streetsville. Streetsville had a park with an outdoor skating rink but that park also had a really great hill…a huge hill… the best around for tobogganing. If you didn’t have a toboggan, you went behind the IGA and grabbed a cardboard box…flatten the thing out and it served the purpose. And we kids would swarm that hill, just as the kids here do today.

Now, about half way down that hill there is a substantial ridge. We would cram as many kids as possible on a tobaggan and we all knew, if you were last on, what was going to happen when that tobaggan flew over that ridge. Last kid on was usually the only one to fly off. And, if you fell off you were the schmuck who had to tote the mode of transportation back up to the top of the hill. That’s the way it was…code of honour amongst kids. But it was great. We would spend hours there, no matter how cold it was. Then face concerned mothers when we all went to our respective homes, soaking wet to the skin.

Today…well, I have to go to the store. I need a bottle of dark beer to try out a new slow-cooker recipe. I’ll go to the store in my car and my car has a working heater. But, I don’t wanna go! Baby it’s cold outside. LOL

How times have changed!

Then I was asked to write a non-fiction book and I accepted. Big mistake…a huge mistake for me. I was a long way from retirement then. I was working 5 days a week and, as it turned out, working the weekends as well because that is how it felt, working on the non-fiction. It took two years. During that time my muse went into hiding and my passion for writing romance disappeared along with it.

A very well known Romance Author once told me that she wrote something everyday, no matter where she was or what else she had to do. She was afraid, if she didn’t write everyday, she would never write again.
Hmm…profound, now that I look back on it.

But this new, wonderful world of e-Books is an exciting venture. I was thrilled to see Spring Blossom available again and I’m currently re-typing Family Reunion to make it available, also. Unfortunately, at this stage, those are the only two books for which I have had my rights returned. But I’ve requested the rights to the others and am awaiting THE word.

As I am working these days, I’m hopeful that my muse will come out of hiding and hit me on the back of the head. I need new characters mingling around in there, telling me what to do. LOL

Signing off today as…Hopeful.