Neighborhood Excitement

I got a cold call from a Realtor this morning asking if I'm thinking of selling my house because she has clients looking for this kind of thing all the time, so that means I need to get my act together. I have cleaning, decluttering and organizing to do, then I need to pretty much put a plumber on retainer for a day to fix a bunch of little things (ah, the joy of really hard water that corrodes everything). I have a few little carpentry repairs to do, and I need to repaint the downstairs bathroom and do some touchups elsewhere. I probably also need to get the garage door inspected and the opener possibly replaced, as I think the current code requires a sensor. So, yeah, I need to get busy.

We had a little excitement around here on Tuesday that helped reinforce my decision to move away from the townhouse and into a standalone house. I was on the conference call with Apple when I started hearing sirens. That's not odd, as my office overlooks a major road leading to the highway, so any wreck anywhere near means the fire trucks will be screaming past my office window. Then there were more sirens. And then something that sounded like someone shouting through a bullhorn. Then something that sounded like a helicopter circling. Something had to be up. So I checked the breaking news pages of the various local TV stations, in case it was a news helicopter. And it was. And the image on the breaking news page was of my complex. Two-alarm fire. Later, I went out to take out the trash and found the entire fire department lined up down the driveway. The fire trucks were a little farther along and it was the battalion commander trucks in front of my house. It turns out that the fire was in a building just around the corner and across the driveway. The only damage visible from outside is busted skylights -- possibly what the firefighters did to access the interior -- and the fire/water restoration service trucks were there about an hour later, with pumps running all night, and they were loading things into a Ryder truck, so it doesn't look like it was a total loss, and the structure seems to be fine. But still, when you share walls with other people, you can be affected by things they do. And it's a little weird to learn about something happening across the street by looking on the Internet.

In other news, I have a release date for the second book in the Fairy Tale series, To Catch a Queen -- March 3. That will be e-book, print and audio. I'll have a cover and a sneak peek soonish.

I don't have any obligations for the rest of the day and have already taken care of my morning errands, so I'm hoping that I can get some serious work done on redeveloping this book (and maybe a little housework). That is, if we don't have more neighborhood excitement.