New Covers…and a Repeat

I was very honored to receive an email from Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, a couple of days ago. He told me that the second book in my Coach’s Boys series had been doing very well for the past couple of months, and he wanted to pitch one of them to one of the larger online bookstores for some ‘promo love.’ The problem? My covers weren’t professional, so I found Tatiana at Vila Design, and she came up with three great covers in two days. What do you think?

Click on the covers for a more detailed view

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Now for a post I wrote back in 2011. It made me chuckle when I found it tonight, so I decided to share it again.

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Since I’m not really sure what an author is supposed to ‘blog’ about, I’m just going to write about ‘whatever.’  And tonight that ‘whatever’ will be yet another installment in my continuing trials with the septic tank system.  If I can find any of the others, I’ll post them later.

First I’d like to make it crystal clear that when it comes to septic tanks, I am cursed.  It’s the only aspect of country living that I truly despise, and my initiation into the nightmares of how waste is disposed of once you leave the city limits began about five months after buying my house.

But that’s another story.  This one concerns something called a lift tank pump.  Horrid, filthy water flows there from the septic tank, to be pumped into an above ground drain field.  Or it’s supposed to do that.  If your pump doesn’t stop working….

Which this one did.

So I called a handyman who, along with his wife, came late this afternoon to fix it.  I’m  not going to go into detail about how disgusting it was to stand in my yard while they were working on it, but I think I might have made use of a gas mask had one been available.

The entire time they were kneeling over the opening to the lift tank, they would wipe their hands on an orange towel because…well you know, they had to actually touch stuff in the tank in order to get the new pump hooked up.

Did I mention that I have an OCD-like thing about some germs?  That’s important to take note of here.  Seriously, it’s not actually OCD, but it’s a close runner up, so you just have to know that anything having to do with a septic tank is going to be something I avoid like the plague.

And I did, even when the guy said there might be a problem with the electrical box in the tank and I should come over and take a look so he could explain it to me.

Um….

Huh?  Actually, you know what?  I’m not going to know what I’m looking at anyway, so why don’t you just tell me what you need and I’ll call around for parts tomorrow.  I heard his wife say, “She’s not going to walk over here.”  And she was right, I wasn’t going to.

So they finally finish and we stroll back to their truck, chatting for a while, making sure the mosquitoes got a full course meal.  All of a sudden she swats at one of the little bloodsuckers on my arm.  With the orange towel.

Oh…my…God…

From the corner of my eye I see my daughter just about double over and I know she’s trying not to laugh.  I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention though since I was too busy trying to keep my chin from hitting the ground. I was also wondering how many times I was going to have to wash my arm before it felt clean again.

A minute later she swatted one on my neck.

My first thought was that I was incredibly thankful that, due to the extreme heat today, I’d clipped my hair up.  My second was to try to remember to not move my head because I didn’t want to ‘get any of it’ on the collar of my shirt…because that collar would be touching my hair on its way off – just as soon as I got in the house.

I know the woman was just trying to be helpful, but whoa!  Septic tank germs are like the mother of all germs

Finally they got in their truck and my daughter and I turned and headed for our front door.  I swear that they hadn’t even pulled out of the driveway before she started laughing.  Hard.

You see, my daughter is well acquainted with my germ ‘issues,’ and she found the whole ‘orange towel incident’ incredibly, extremely, unutterably hilarious.

Unlike her mother.

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