Day Eight Of Our Captivity. . .

My father-in-law had hip replacement surgery a little over a week ago.  He lives right next door so it's easy access for my husband and his sister to take care of him, basing out of our house.  We were all kinda jazzed about the fact that he was FINALLY having the operation as it's been over five years of suggestions on our part and emphatic "NO"s on his.  My husband, Ken, kept having people ask him when he was going to take his dad to the doctor and see about that hip, like he was just holding back, waiting for the mood to strike.  Anyway, it appears that this whole thing for my father-in-law has been a longterm race between fear and pain with fear winning out for a long, long time before pain leapt forward and tore away in a sprint.  So, the surgery was a success -- yay! -- and is now in the rearview mirror. . .sort of. . .

The intial belief that next-door accessibility was a good thing has taken a beating.  Our being so close has also created a kind of party atmosphere at my father-in-law's house whereby he asks where we've been, where we're going and when we'll be back whenever there's movement from his house to ours.  I am a step out of this as I've been through this with my parents and can lay down the "paid my dues" card.  This is not to say that I don't drop everything to suddenly make a sandwich, or move a chair from our house to his, or dig out the cable bill to call for rewiring so that cable is available in more rooms than the kitchen.  (I generally use my kitchen for cooking and eating, so it never occurred to me that it could be the family den as well.  Learn something new every day if you're not careful.)

That aside, my husband Ken's good-neighbor attitude extended to the people two doors down from us in the opposite direction from my father-in-law.  These people are doing a huge remodel.  Huge.  They've even moved out of their house while it goes on.  And so Ken offered up my father-in-law's driveway as a place the construction vehicles could park.  This was. . .oh. . .awhile ago, before the surgery was even on the docket, so just as soon as my father-in-law was out of the hospital and set up with 24 hour caretakers, and their respective vehicles, here comes a cavalcade of trucks and other vehicles I don't even recognize sporting coils of wires, ladders, tool boxes, you name it.  This is okay, except that the subcontractors don't always get the memo and I often find myself opening my garage door to encounter a variety of huge front grills glaring at me. 

The good news: it has forced me to sit down and write.  Or, take a walk to clear my head.  Or, look in the refrigerator and wonder if I'm going to expire if I can't get to the grocery store.  So, I've been writing and working my way down my Icky Task List, which is the ongoing list of duties I don't want to do but must everyday.  I feel good if I can get one item off the list each day.  At the top of the Icky Task List today was to find, yet again, an excerpt for WICKED LIES, the book my sister and I wrote together that's coming out next month.  Honestly, I love this book.  It was a blast to write and I can't wait for it to come out.  Normally coming up with an excerpt for it would not qualify for the Icky Task List, but I've already dug up a number of these excerpts and each publicity venue the publisher connects with wants a new version, not the same old thing.  Really?  There's no escaping the fact that it's the same story, people.  I have definitely been struggling to find some new scene that says what WICKED LIES is about in 500 words or less that I haven't already done. 

But onward....time to get to it....I need to cross Icky Task #1, WICKED LIES excerpt, off the list.  And I won't even look at what the next Icky Task item is until tomorrow. . .on Day Nine Of Our Captivity....

Mega Trucks