Never do-it-yourself, dammit.

The garage door repair guy came by last night with the newly arrived part we needed. We now have two working garage door openers again. Hurray! And his rates were quite reasonable. I was pleasantly surprised, especially since he also noticed and fixed a few other less-than-professional odds and ends to do with our openers while he was here. If anyone in the Metro Atlanta area needs garage door opener maintenance, I’ll be happy to refer this guy to y’all.

I’m pretty sure the previous owner of our house installed our openers, as well as screwing up a bunch of other half-assed “projects.” There are many examples of his obviously do-it-yourself type “improvements” in our home, all of them staunch arguments for always hiring professionals to do such things for you. We’ve gradually either torn down and had redone, or had to fix most of his crap work.

There are still some things which are broken or screwy he did that we’re ignoring. Like the koi pond pump leaks, so if we turn it on, all the water drains out. Ergo, since we can’t turn the pump on, we have a stagnant pool of water in our backyard instead. Yup, we’re hosting a breeding ground for mosquitoes. The other “landscaping” he did also sucks. He tiered the backyard into two levels with a line of bricks which fall over at the least provocation, making mowing far more difficult than it should be. And the backyard lighting that he affixed to the fence has never, in the time we’ve lived in this house, worked. Grumble.

Writing stuff:

Did the clean up of “Body and Soul Art.” The editor also wanted me to add a little closure paragraph for the main character at the end. It was an excellent suggestion and I agreed with her that it would add resolution to the character’s development, but I had a hard time coming up with something satisfying that didn’t sound trite. But, after several false starts and deletes I did it. So much brain strain for seven sentences. Goodness.

Overall, the whole editing project took hours to accomplish, hours! It was a very extensive edit. But also very gratifying. I feel like “Body and Soul Art” is much tighter now than it was before. Just about ready to face the public. Going to give it another go over before sending it back to the editor. We’re on a bit of a tight timeline on this one. I think she said the deadline for issue fourteen is June 15th, but she works fast, as do I.

Also wrote a review of “The Best Christmas Ever” by James Patrick Kelly in Sci-Fiction for Tangent, and saw that my reviews of “Family Bed” by Kit Reed and “The First Commandment” by Gregory Benford are up. My editor lives!