Phew! The yard sale is over

Whew, what an intense week. We finally had our yard sale.

Comically, after the last yard sale we had three years ago – which we vowed would be our last – a reader said, "You know you should never say never again." S/he was right, 'cuz here we are again.

We managed to target – literally – the only weekend in which rain was not predicted, either during the crucial set-up phase, during the weekend itself, or during the breaking-down phase.

As with our previous yard sale, we had items stored in several locations, waiting for the opportunity to sell them. We also planned to make multiple "sweeps" (as we called them) through the barn, the lofts, various sheds, and of course the house to remove everything that was superfluous.

When she moved out, Older Daughter also earmarked a great number of things she no longer needed, including a mountain of clothes. (I don't know where she gets her excellent taste in fashion, because it sure as heck isn't from me.)

We spent a long time combing through our possessions, being a lot more brutally realistic about what we did and didn't need. Those two baskets made from branches I used almost every week to transport food to our neighborhood potlucks? I haven't used them since we moved. Some extra blankets beyond what was necessary for house guests? Gone. A water pump Don bought second-hand years ago and has been taking up space since? Up for sale. You get the idea.

Next, we had to make sure our driveway area (which is very large) was clear of anything unrelated to the yard sale. Specifically, we had to get rid of the mountain of firewood, which is why we put so much time into splitting and stacking it.

With the firewood put up, that cleared a lot of space.

Next, Don used the tractor to pull this massive trailer from against the fence line and position it broadside across the driveway. This served two purposes. One, the trailer itself is for sale; and two, it would allow us to display items on its surface where people could see things from all sides.

We had an old and absolutely filthy propane stove we removed from our last house and which we've been storing in various barns for probably 20 years. We kept it because it's the old-fashioned kind that has a pilot light and therefore doesn't need an electrical ignition (they don't make them anymore) and we thought it would be nice to put it in a guest house. We decided to sell it.

It took me hours to scrub, vacuum, and polish it as best I could. Don't worry, the bottom photo is only halfway through the process.

Don started transporting tractor implements we no longer needed from the barn area behind the house to the front driveway.

Ironically, this six-foot yard rake is one of the first things we sold.

We had a number of old wood stoves we'd accumulated over the years. Don used the tractor to move them out of the barn.

In the days preceding the opening of the yard sale (which ran Friday, Saturday, Sunday), we kicked things into high gear.

After splitting and stacking the firewood, we reserved twelve smaller logs of roughly the same length to be used as table legs.

We screwed down sheets of plywood to make display surfaces.

We dusted off unneeded shop tools.

We rigged up a clothes rack by using a 22-foot steel well pipe rod. At first we (naively and optimistically) simply attached the rod to the uprights using Gorilla tape. Let's just say it didn't work. We ended up bracing the rod with 2x4s, which worked beautifully.

The clothes rod was held up by two shorter pieces of rod, inserted through a wooden base Don had made years ago and then pounded into the ground with a T-post pounder, then later reinforced with the 2x4s. These babies weren't going anywhere.

As a result, we were able to hang all of Older Daughter's clothes to display them.

Some things we just grouped on "$1 tables" and "$5 tables."

We tried to group things in sections: The clothing section, the furniture section, the tractor-implement section, the farm section, etc. Not everything fell into neat categories, but we tried. This is the camping section.

The furniture section. Most of this is furniture we were selling for friends.

The tractor-implement section.

The woodstove section.

We printed clear signage explaining what an item was and how much it cost (and of course, we were willing to dicker).

Finally, we put up signage, starting about a mile and a half away and guiding visitors our way.

We also put up a hasty sign directing people to a neighbor about a quarter-mile past us who was also having a yard sale, capitalizing on our efforts. We always told visitors to be sure to see what the neighbors had too.

After all the frantic prep work, the days of the actual yard sale were far less busy. We simply had to wait for customers.

Over the three days of the sale, we met many lovely people – and a couple who was not so lovely. This couple, annoyed that we politely declined their lowball offer on our brush hog, actually tossed some garbage out of their truck before they drove away. When I went over to see what they tossed, it was – I kid you not – clumps of soiled toilet paper. Ewww.

As the sun went down on the last day, Don drove around and removed all the signage, then parked the car broadside across the driveway so no one could get in.

Today we're boxing things up for donation to various thrift stores. We have a fairly small pile of things to just throw away. We also took photos of all our big-ticket items that didn't sell so we can put them up on Facebook Marketplace.

Our goal is to put nothing back in storage, with a couple of exceptions. This torn-up wool blanket once belonged to my grandparents. It would be one thing if someone could use it for a project, but I can't bear the thought of it being tossed in a dumpster, so I'm going to hang on to it.

It's a good thing we had the yard sale this past weekend. We have rain moving in again next weekend, so we'll have to make sure everything is put away and under cover before the weather changes.

Both of us are wildly relieved this project is over. Planning and implementing this took a lot of our time and bandwidth. Now we can relax a bit and move onto other tasks.

Can I say "Never again" this time around?

Another "final" yard sale

If this blog is a little quiet over the next few days, it's because Don and I are having a Huge Yard Sale and we've been elbow-deep in getting ready for it.

This yard sale has been delayed numerous times. We had been watching the weather for weeks.

It was almost uncanny how the weather stayed clear during the weekdays, but had ONE SPIKE of rain at some inconvenient time, solely (it seemed) to interfere with setting out merchandise for sale.

Finally it all came together with a nice long dry stretch, so we've been doing yard sale prep like crazy.

So standby until early next week when I'll have a full write-up on whether or not we were successful in offloading a large amount of unneeded possessions.

BIG. HONKIN'. SPIDERS.

Many years ago – okay, many decades ago – I spent a summer each in Indiana and in Oklahoma on separate college jobs. In both locations, I was astounded to find Big Honkin' Spiders were fairly commonplace. (I won't post any stock photos of spiders for the comfort of readers with arachnophobia.)

In retrospect, they were probably wolf spiders – harmless but kinda startling, if you know what I mean. Wolf spiders aren't web spinners, but instead run after or ambush their prey. They're well-known for carrying their babies on their back. We find them often in our house. Including their leg span, they rarely exceed an inch-and-a-quarter, maybe once in a while an inch-and-a-half across. I use a bug-catcher to scoop them up and put them outside.

While none of us in the Lewis family are overly fond of spiders, neither are we overly fond of killing them and do our best to not harm them. There are exceptions, however. One time Older Daughter messaged me as follows: "I just want you to know I fought an intense ten-minute battle with a wolf spider and only screamed a little bit. Aren't you proud of me?" My answer: "You're a veteran of the Arachnid Wars."

Anyway, Younger Daughter is now living in a pretty little duplex apartment with a basement in the Pacific Northwest. She messaged the other day and wrote, "The spiders here are huge (even bigger than Idaho)."

I replied, "How big?"

She answered, "I still don't know the species. It looked like a wolf spider, but it was about 3-4 inches in length. Maybe some kind of huntsman? Anyway she's still living in my basement somewhere, probably eating mice or something."

Huntsman spiders are found in the U.S., but generally only in more southern areas, so it was unlikely she saw one of those. I said, "Nah, they're wolf spiders. Those suckers can get HUGE. You should see the ones in the Midwest."

A bit later she messaged again: "Actually I just googled biggest house spiders in the Pacific Northwest, and found the aptly named Giant House Spider. Pretty sure this is it. This is their distribution. Look at that little green blob right over my house!"

Wow. I'd never even heard of the Giant House Spider, and immediately looked it up. It seems the species is native to Europe and was accidentally introduced to the U.S. over a hundred years ago, where it gained a foothold on opposite sides of the country: The Pacific Northwest, and the Northeast. Whee.

And yeah, those babies are huge. Three to four inches across is not unusual. Unlike wolf spiders, they're web-spinners (albeit a rather messy funnel web). Males are inclined to wander at this time of year, searching for mates.

New fear unlocked. I don't know if my bug-catcher could even handle something that big. Yowza. 

Sequel to "Rachel's Folly"

When Don and I indie-published my sweet contemporary romance last summer ("Rachel's Folly"), people immediately began clamoring for a sequel.

The funny thing is, I had a sequel thoroughly outlined. What I lacked was the time to write it. But at this particular moment, I'm between writing assignments. I just sent that proposal mentioned earlier off to my agent; I have no immediate magazine articles due; and I'm waiting for the next multi-book contract from Harlequin and want a go-ahead from my editor before I launch into the next story.

So I dusted off the notes I had for the sequel to "Rachel's Folly" and am diving back into the story. It will take a fair bit of time to write, but it will be fun to delve into the landscape of what remains my favorite novel.

Onward!

Stats

I'm working on a book proposal.

I haven't had to write a proposal in upwards of six years, not since my agent (Bob Hostetler with the Steve Laube Agency) landed me at Harlequin's Love Inspired line. But I have a completed manuscript that's been gathering metaphorical dust in my desk drawer, and since it doesn't fit within the Love Inspired guidelines, my agent plans to shop it around to other publishers and see what happens. New publisher, new proposal. Bob is also in the process of negotiation my next multi-book contract with Harlequin.

The last time I wrote a proposal, Bob sent me a sample proposal and requested that I submit my information in the exact same format. The components included:

• Hook
• Summary
• Theme
• Audience
• Author
• Marketing
• Manuscript status
• Similar titles
• Other available books by author
• Synopsis
• First three chapters

As with many novice authors, a few of these categories were thin, notably the "Marketing" section, not to mention the "Other available books by author" section. In fact, I bent myself into pretzels with the Marketing section; for an explanation of why, read this blog post from March 2019 in which I was weeping with the despair of it all.

This time around, I'm following the format of my first proposal, and therein I made an interesting discovery.

Obviously I've got a stronger platform this time around, thanks to Harlequin's generosity in publishing so many of my books. But in 2019, I noted that this blog received about 1.5 million page visits per year. At first I was inclined simply to slot that same number into the current proposal – after all, 1.5 million page views is nothing to sneeze at – but then I decided to check my most recent stats. And that's what astounded me.

Here are today's stats:

The numbers are a little hard to see, so I'll list them:

• All time: 29,755,904 (this is over the 17-year span of this blog)
• Today: 118
• Yesterday: 25,545
• This month: 430,618
• Last month: 396,278

These are terrific numbers. But what really blew me out of the water was the total number of page views from the last year:

An incredible 4.37 million page views in the past 12 months! Almost three times as many as 2019!

And here's the funny thing: I never check my stats. Honestly, the last time I checked was ... well, probably back in 2019 when I was writing my last proposal. But somehow during that time, page views tripled. Go figure.

Don and I were discussing this, and he wants me to ask an honest question: Why do you, the reader, come to this blog?

And I'll ask a question of my own: What kind of information or material do you want me to cover?

Three is two, two is one, one is none

I saw an interesting opinion piece yesterday entitled "Mandating Grid Dependency" by someone named Jim Cardoza. It concerns California's increasing push to make everything electric: Cars, heating, cooking, whatever.

This being California, the push toward all-electric everything is not merely being encouraged, but increasingly mandated. Any legacy energy – gasoline production and sales, natural gas appliances sales and repair, propane water heaters or heat sources – are being blatantly phased out and/or heavily regulated to the point of extinction.

This is, of course, at a time when electrical costs for California citizens has increased 47 percent since 2019. As Cardoza put it, "There seems to be something incoherent about making electricity exceptionally expensive while simultaneously requiring citizens to use more of it."

But California politicians seem to be blind to the biggest elephant in the room: In a state 100 percent dependent on electricity, what happens during a power outage? Cardoza puts it this way: "Yet the financial cost may not be the greatest danger created by electrifying virtually everything. There is another cost that is largely ignored: concentrating life’s necessities in a single system creates a single point of failure."

This push to electrify everything violates the single most important rule for preparedness: Three is two, two is one, one is none. Redundancy is crucial. To forcibly mandate the elimination of redundancy is dangerous to the point of insane.

"The issue, therefore, isn’t whether electric cars, heat pumps, solar panels, induction stoves, or electronic payments are good technologies," writes Cardoza. "The question is whether politicians should deliberately eliminate or discourage alternatives, making citizens dependent upon one centrally regulated infrastructure for nearly everything."

What are your thoughts? Should electrical everything be mandated for the sake of a net-zero goal, or is this a fool's errand?

Snapshot of a homestead refrigerator

A neighbor came over the other day, and we were chatting while I was doing something in the kitchen. In the course of our conversation, I opened the refrigerator to put something inside. The neighbor made a comment about how many homemade things were in our fridge.

I didn't give her comment much thought until this morning. I opened the fridge again and realized ... she was right.

Aside from the usual assortment of condiments, at this particular moment the fridge held the following items:

• Bowls of leftover rice, leftover beef, and leftover gravy that were, well, left over from a meal a few nights prior when we had some friends over for dinner. (We've been eating our way through the leftovers.) The meal was "zesty orange beef" and the recipe can be found here. I threw everything in the slow cooker for extra-tender meat.

• A jar of minced garlic.

• A container of whole garlic. Don uses it for blood-pressure control.

• A quart of strawberry preserves, three-quarters full, waiting for me to make another batch of survival cookies.

• A bowl of peaches for fresh eating, last of the loot from our trees. I puréed the rest.

• Four pounds of fresh mozzarella I made the afternoon before. I'll be grating and freezing it in one-pound bags for pizza.

• A huge hunk o' beef that was defrosting. Don is in the process of making biltong, a sort of South African beef jerky.

• Two gallon jugs of peach purée. I processed the peaches a day or two before and then canned up the purée.

• A half-gallon of sun tea, my beverage of choice.

• Two dozen eggs from a neighbor's hens.

• A bag of flour tortillas.

• Leftover biscuit gravy from breakfast a couple days before.

• Some sliced meatloaf I made a few days ago. Don likes to make meatloaf sandwiches.

• Some tomatoes and a whole bunch of broccoli.

No milk. I store the milk and cream in a small beverage refrigerator in another room.

In short, we have a lot of basic ingredients and no processed food except condiments. And that's a snapshot of our homestead fridge.

The last of the peaches

After the bountiful harvest of peaches from one of our trees in early August, I had been waiting for the other trees to be ready to harvest. Two of the remaining four trees didn't produce much, but one of the trees was loaded.

I know I should have picked the fruit earlier than I did – evidenced by the number of windfall fruit on the ground – but we had a busy spell and I didn't get around to it. Finally I got my rear in gear and got the fruit picked.

I weighed the harvest.

Twenty-five pounds, minus the tare weight of the tub, so about 22 pounds altogether.

My plan was, as before, to spread a towel and some insect netting on the woodstove and ripen the peaches indoors. (The netting prevents fruit flies from swarming the fruit.)

But the moment I spilled the peaches onto the towel, I realized they were way, way beyond the need for ripening. In fact, if I was going to save this portion of the harvest, I'd best get crackin'. I pivoted and spent the rest of the afternoon processing them.

So I settled into peach processing mode: Scalding a batch, slipping the skins, gutting the fruit.

I held back the best peaches for fresh eating, and the rest I puréed. Why purée instead of sliced peaches? Quite honestly I use purée a lot, using it to flavor such things as ice cream and yogurt. Besides, it's easy to do.

After running the fruit through the blender, I poured the purée into gallon jugs. I stored these in the fridge for a couple of days until I had time to can the purée.

Then I canned it up. Filling jars...

Ready for lids...

Into the canners...

Rolling boil for 35 minutes...

...and cooling off.

Thirteen more pints of summery goodness to take us through winter.