Goodbye and Good Riddance

The hulking mass of rusting metal and tornado fodder that's been the bane of my existence all summer is finally gone. I'm extremely happy, because instead of the solution we expected, having to pay to get the thing towed away for scrap, someone actually took it - a man who plans to renovate it and give it to his sister who currently has nowhere to live. So, not only did we get rid of it, we recycled!

In celebration, we spent the day Saturday cleaning up the aftermath. The movers left the porch and its roof (second photo). The LOML dismantled the porch, but we're still up in the air about the roof section. The tin is still usable, so we put the whole thing off to the side, hoping some brilliant idea will come to us about how to use it. In the meantime, this area of the property looks sooooo much better.

September was the six month anniversary of the start of The Renovation Project, and so far I'm more than pleased with the results. We've reclaimed huge sections of the lawn and flower gardens, started on the wooded areas, and even done a little of the demo work on the house. For a project done on odd weekends and days off, I think we've made lots of good progress.

The novel is coming along nicely as well. Out of my literal mountain of notes and scene snippets, I have cobbled together three good chapters so far in draft one, and the words have come steadily every day. My goal is to finish a draft by the end of the year, but ideally I'd love to be done long before that. I'm thinking hard about doing NaNoWriMo again (yes, I love torture), so to be done at the end of this month would be great. We'll see, though. I'm not going to beat myself up over it - I've missed too many self-imposed deadlines to think that might work.

Rain, rain, rain since we got back home Saturday night, and I'm not complaining. Rain is good for contemplation. It cleanses the mind. And if there's one thing about me that's dirty, well...

'Til next time.

05 October 2009