Cleanup

For the first time in weeks, I can hold a broom or a mop handle. This is awesome, and sorely needed. Unfortunately, released to "brace as needed" is not the same as fully healed, and the floors, well, they're so dirty you'd think they hadn't been swept or mopped in weeks.

Solution: for every room I sweep, and every room I mop, I get a glass of mead and some internet time. This encourages me to finish each room, and to take a rest break afterward. On the downside, this means after a few rooms, I've really lost all motivation to get up out of this chair and go do another. On the other hand, I think the injured limb is about done for the day anyway.

Now for a very weird fact: did you know down here in the south, land of 8 inch long pine needles, they bundle those pine needles together and sell them as "pine straw bales"? My mind, it is well and truly blown. According to the gent who showed them to me, as well as gave me prices for renting a tiller, "They're mostly used on flowerbeds, ma'am. The birds will also steal more of the wheat straw for building their nests."

It's a whole different world down here. I'll think I've got a handle on the culture, and then I stumble onto something like that, where "everybody knows" but a transplanted Alaskan.

P.S. J. R. Shirley - Lydia Bailey is on the way. Thanks for the recommendation!

A Good Day

The plane has passed her annual, and is waiting at the hangar, ready to fly.

The doc released me from the splint, provisionally, dependent on good behavior and progress in physical therapy.

A Ladies Love Taildraggers volunteer called, reminding me of their annual fly-in coming up.

After work, I found a bag of chocolates waiting all gooshy-warm in the car from a day in the sunshine. (I love my husband.)

It's a good day.

Hope you're all having a good day, too!

A Few Good Men - Good Read

I realized I've been selfishly keeping a book all to myself that I oughta share with y'all, because you'll like it. It has explosions, and political machinations, hilarious one-liners and jailbreaks, aerial battles, a pig in a dress, a dog named Goldie (the blonde of the dog world if ever there was one), misguided idealists, subversives on the side of right, central planning's consequences, unhappy merchants, confusion, chaos, and glorious fun. A Few Good Men, by Sarah Hoyt.

If John Ringo's March Upcountry was a retelling of Xenophon's Anabasis, then this? This is America, 1774-1778... From the initial inevitable (now that we look back) first clashes to the troops on the move. We don't get all the way to the end of the revolution. Although, given it starts with a jailbreak, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was the French Revolution there for a few chapters - pretty dicey on which way it'd fall on human nature versus human planning and reaching for something better. (I'll have to ask Jenny, of Cradle of Liberty, what she thinks - because the more of our revolution I learn, the more messy it becomes, full of humans and political pressures and cultures of the day, and the more nods to it I see in this book.)

This is a book that takes the idea that "the one right farm boy turned hero will automatically rule the kingdom well", and blows it into flaming chunks. It centers around a tyrant's son who stumbles out of solitary as an almost unintended aside to someone else's jailbreak, to find his father dead, his brother recently assassinated, and himself now the heir to a city-state. His household, the only people he can trust not to want him dead, needs him to take the reigns of power to keep the place from being carved up by the ruling cabal. Even they, though, aren't what they seem; they're riddled with rebels who are looking for a time and place to start a glorious new republic.

Luce's inability to be the tyrant his father was creates a power vacuum, and there are many, many forces and factions rushing to break the stasis and the status quo to seize it. Even his allies may prove as dangerous as his enemies... and his enemies are very dangerous indeed.

That only covers the first few chapters, and doesn't even start to get to the pig in a dress. You'll have to figure that one out yourself, by reading it. But beware - woven in with all the action, there are a couple places where she should have put Class IV beverage alerts in there!

Ebook option at Amazon (linked above), and all formats at Baen Webscriptions. First 10 chapters free here. Enjoy!