Things have been quiet around Katzenhaus Books lately, because the boss (that’s me!) has been insanely engaged in the “Spring Cleaning” impulse that arises every year when the weather warms up. When i was a kid, we knew it was finally spring in Ohio when the fire in the furnace was banked and put to rest until fall. But that event brought on the next. Every room in the house was now coated with a fine layer of black coal dust after the winter’s heating. The bathroom and kitchen were not a problem because the walls were painted and could quickly be scrubbed. But the other rooms all had wallpaper, and it was real paper, not vinyl, so we couldn’t apply water to it.

The solution was complicated. All furniture was moved to the center of the room and draped with old sheets. Then we opened the yearly supply of Kutol. This was a nasty mixture resembling putty and smelling like a chemical factory. Actually, it was little more than salt, flour, water, and cleaning substances, kept moist in a can until we took out handfuls, wadded them into ball and started wiping down the walls. As it picked up the soot, the clay turned from pink to gray, which called for further kneading until the dirty surface was replaced with cleaner particles. The process worked, but it was messy, and took days. I can still smell those chemicals.  The advent of the gas furnace was a major turning point in my young life, but by the time we converted the old coal furnace,  I had absorbed a need to clean somewhere deep into my genes. It rears its ugly head every year.

This year the impulse began with a search through the garage for a nail to rehang a picture. My hunt turned up 15 containers of used nails, most of them bent, rusty, or tinged with paint. It also revealed several cartons of household goods that had not been unpacked when we moved here twelve years ago, along with box after box of unsorted photographs. Those discoveries, along with a neighbor’s sidelong glance and offer to help me clean up “this horrible mess,”  were enough to trigger the whole “Spring Cleaning” drive.  I’ve been at it ever since. And once I got started with the garage, it carried over into several closets and my husband’s old office furniture. I’m happy to report that I now have a clean garage with room to park an extra car if I should ever need to, as well as a cozy new “girl cave.”  I still have my writing office, full of books, papers, and computers, all of them telling me to get back to work. But this new room is a place where I can curl up in a comfortable rocker and read or daydream or listen to music without feeling guilty.

All those changes fall into the category of “good news.” The bad news is that I haven’t done any writing, and that includes both the new book manuscript and the usual blog posts. Ugh!  I would firmly resolve to get back to work, except that I’m going to be tied up all next week with a writers’ conference.  So to carry us all over until I can be more productive, I’ve scheduled another book promotion. Many of you have read “Damned Yankee” and wondered what happened to the Grenvilles after the Civil War. Now’s your chance to follow them through the turmoil and challenges of the Reconstruction era. I promise it will be more fun than spring house cleaning!

 Here are the details:

On Saturday, May 21, starting at 8:00 AM (Pacific Time), the Kindle edition of “Yankee Reconstructed” will be available for just ninety-nine cents. That’s a price reduction of something like 80%.  Grab it quickly, because at 8:00 AM on Sunday, May 22, the price will jump to $2.99. That’s still a bargain at half-price, of course. But don’t delay further, because at 8:00 AM on Monday, May 23, the price reverts to the list cost of $5.99. This is a once-a-year bargain countdown deal. The clock will be ticking, and the remaining time will show up on the book’s Kindle page, for those of you who need to convert to other time zones. Click here to grab your copy:

This may be my only blog post for the next few days. it's a rough week.  A horrible, terrible stinky bad week.

As many of you recognized by sending greetings via Facebook, today is my birthday, and I'm feeling pretty old.  it was bad enough hitting the 3/4 of a century last year. Today I move beyond that, and the view is not pretty.  Of course plans have changed since my husband died in January.  We had booked a trip for this week.  We won a contest for couples who had met while in school at Kent State.  The prize: a night in the presidential suite of the university hotel, dinner in the hotel restaurant and chocolates and champagne at bed-turn-down. Not happening, of course.  I was able to pass the prize on to a family member, but my Lean Cuisine lunch was something of a come-down.  Then I spent the rest of the day doing paperwork, getting names changed on the house title and our Sam's card. Neither one was easy, but Sam's clearly won the bureaucracy award.

And it doesn't get better from here. This is the weekend of the Tennessee Lions' State Convention, starting Friday. I'm not going, of course, because it's on the other side of the world's widest state, and there's no one else going from here  -- so too far for me to drive by myself with only partial vision.  And that means I'm missing the state necrology service, where they will retire Floyd's Lions pin and put it on display for the coming year.  And finally, Sunday is Mother's Day -- a holiday I quit observing in 2000, when my only child died of cancer. 

So it's a horrible week, and I hope you'll forgive the lack of postings until the sun comes back out from behind this black cloud hanging over my disposition.  I think I'll go scrub the bathroom.  Might as well take advantage of a bad mood to get something useful accomplished.

This is a crazy time of year --always has been.  For all those years I spent in a classroom, I knew that May would be consumed with finals and grading and farewells, and graduations.  And now that I' supposedly safely "retired," I thought my schedule would slow down.  Apparently not! I'm in such a habit of forging ahead that once the weather turns to lovely spring, I simply stretch my days to match the lengthening sunlight.  The result? Blogging -- that contemplative bit of self-indulgence in my life -- suffers.

So what's been happening? Well, on April 27th, we sent the last of our conventioneers home, cleaned out the hotel rooms we had been using, and headed home ourselves -- to a whole list of things we had to catch up upon. About all I can do here is whip them into some sort of RBOC list.

 

And from here? Well, we leave on Friday for a ten-day vacation combined with a couple of great book events in South Carolina.  More

on those later.  For now, I need to finish whipping the house into shape for the cat-sitter, and start making packing lists.

With apologies to all of you book people, I am signing off here until I can put the weekend behind me.  I'll be in town, but spending every waking hour helping my husband run a Lions Convention for 150 people from all over the state of Tennessee.  We're providing all the printed materials (from name tags to individual meal programs), the entertainers, the menus, the schedules, the registration packets, and the hospitality suite, plus hosting a guest speaker from Belgium and a past president of Lions International.

Please don't call or message me unless the house is burning down -- and even then, try the garden hose first!

I'll be back on Monday with news of the book launch and a book tour to South Carolina.  Until then, I hope you find something fun to read!