Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully, including my struggles to maintain a balanced life, what I listen to, read, and watch for entertainment, and occasional bits of information I’ve gleaned from doing the research for my novels.
In addition, now and again I will provide some of my fiction to read, for free, on this newsletter. Everything is available to anyone who subscribes, but I am always pleased when someone shows their appreciation for the newsletter by upgrading to paid.
Daily Diary, Day 1414:
Another short post. There is someone here tiling the shower, which will probably take at least 2 days, and the person to measure the counter tops in both bathrooms is doing his stuff. Meanwhile, the project manager just came and is getting rid of all the empty boxes in the laundry room, which is the staging room. Makes it a lot easier to move around in and I suspect to figure find the materials for the next stages after the tiling is done.
I’ve had my first walk, done a load of wash, and more extensive cleaning because it was a fair amount of sawdust everywhere from the work done yesterday, and my husband just got back from the second walk of our dog. We can probably stay inside while the person is tiling upstairs since he won't need to come downstairs. We just need to keep a fence up at the bottom of stairs so that our dog Leeza doesn't feel the need to go upstairs and investigate what's going on.
I do have some additional business to do, like paying bills and calling the insurance company to update the information they have on our house before I pay, since they still list the roof as 27 years old and it is now only three years old. Don’t know if that means the cost will go up, but at least they aren’t canceling the policy, which has happened to a number of people in Californi.
Meanwhile, I have made it all the way to book eighteen in the series, and at least right now there’s nothing in particular like scheduled phone calls to interrupt that.
Oops, the gardeners just arrived, and the big truck that empties the porta-potty is here. We have noticed that every workman on the whole street (and there always seems to be something going on—right now it is painting on the house across the street), the postal carrier, and random deliver guys make use of, so we are glad it gets cleaned out weekly.
But much noise and activity, so time to close this out with a couple of photos of decorations I noticed in recent walks.
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I was hoping someone else would ask about the blue thing that appears to be on a roof. It may not be unusual on the Coast but I'm clueless.
Hello,
What's a porta potty? ( I think I know!) but am curious to understand why you provide it for public use and indeed ( I imagine) pay for it to be emptied weekly!
We in the UK, certainly in London and the surrounding areas, have lost virtually all public toilets- luckily, during the day the innumerable coffee shops offer these facilities to customers!!