Big Newses and Small Newses!

Best of 2012

Not sure why saving this on the Mac made it green...

First, because I can hardly contain myself… (and my apologies to those already inundated with this via Facebook)  last week a friend of mine, Mark Sadler, who is one of the staff writers for Suspense Magazine  informed me that The Azalea Assault was chosen one of the best cozy mysteries of 2012!!! I’m so excited! If you go to the magazine and click on it, it will download and I am on page 40!


Medium Wrong Edits DONE

For now, anyway… I’ve sent it off to two of my FABULOUS, reliable beta readers for the ‘big feedback’ and will get back to editing it over Christmas break. In the meantime, I need to find my latest version of What Ales Me and work on THAT. The ANNOYING piece of this is I have to do version magic to get it from my old hard drive where it is in Open Office into Word when none of the computers I have at the moment likes to talk to each other that way. The one that will read the old hard drive has too OLD a version of word to convert… So I need to send it all over, convert from work… all that irritating stuff…

Best Book of the Year

I downloaded this a few months back, but only managed to get to it recently and OHMYGAWD… I will do a full review when I finish, but I am humbled and amazed to know someone who wrote such a fabulous book. So if you are looking for a read… or have someone on your Christmas list who loved The DiVinci Code (but are maybe more of a stickler for real facts to back up the story)… Helena Soister’s The Compass Master is your book.


And Lastly… Tree is up… first set of cookies baked (have an exchange at work today, so I had to do that—will tell you what and share pics FRIDAY as part of Angela Felsted’s Book release cookie exchange!)… I even got a significant dent made in my shopping…

And now I need another weekend.

Our New Baby

So historically we are people who don't buy a car until the situation is desperate and we then scramble for the thing we hope will last longest of the used cars in our price range, right? We've had family help out. We've bought on credit. We just have never had enough income to save for a car. And until about a month ago, the only car we had was a fourteen year old Toyota Sienna Minivan—a very good car at one point, but one we bought with 75,000 miles on it. As of Friday, it had 168,391. It was a good car. It served us well. But in August we put in $500 work and it needed another $800...

This is coupled with the recent passing of my aunt and some money coming my way. Not a lot. But more than we've ever had come to us in a lump sum... so HWMNBOTI and I started talking... Since we so rarely have extra money, we wanted something we were SURE would last a long time. We talked a little about newISH cars... a newer model Toyota or Honda... but Hyundai kept coming up... and the NEW Hyundai's 100,000 warranty... I mean... if we rarely have money for a purchase this size, talk about something that would give us piece of mind!

HWMNBMOTI did most of the shopping and checking out, but each night reported to me what he'd seen... how much... what was included... and finally I went with him to the Hyundai dealership... we wandered and both kept gravitating to the same car, so we test drove it...

And then I came home and signed up for Carwoo to see if we could find the same car in the area for cheaper... looked online a little... We bickered some about what exactly a person needs to collect information-wise to negotiate (having neither one of us been very successful in that domain, historically)...

Then Thursday, when we felt like we had a solid feel for what we MIGHT be able to get away with... we went in and made an offer. And it worked... Oh, not EXACTLY... but a lot closer than we thought it would...

So we are now the thrilled new owners of a 2012 Hyundai Elantra Touring... Titanium Gray... HAWT... it had 57 miles on it when we drove it off the lot... Isn't it gorgeous!?

Anyone else have that much excitement this weekend, or do I win?

*smooches*