What I accomplished this weekend

Originally this weekend I was going to work on the print copy of the new book (The King of Las Vegas - go buy one! hint hint! ;-) ) as well as the print copy of Reprise, the last Portals of Infinity book. How that last one fell through the cracks is beyond me, but it did.

Instead, I worked on the fence (because it was starting to fall apart). The fence around my house is a wooden one with those cedar slats like you see in the home depot/Lowes stores. It goes around the backyard, it's nothing fancy, and I have no idea when it was put up, all the houses in the neighborhood have the same thing. Of course setting 4x4's in concrete means rot, sooner if you don't do it right, but even if you do, eventually it has to be fixed. At this point I've fixed about half of the 4x4's, which is a pain. I can't get my neighbors to do the work, because in the past they were all way older than me, or no one was living there. Now, one is way older, the other is at work all the time. At least the new one on the one side has taken to doing work on their side, and THAT is very much appreciated.

So on Saturday, I had to fix a spot where three fence lines meet, and they meet at weird angles because of property line changes, my house was the last in the line of the type one developer built, so the next one, and the one behind me are different, and have different property setups. I had to remove ten to fifteen feet of each fence section, only two of which border my property (the other one borders the other two neighbors) dig up an old concrete footing, set in a new 4x4, replace all of the stuff I took down, and then I also set in too steel fence posts, in concrete, to give that corner additional bracing. Because I have a 120 lb GSD that likes to jump on the fence, and the neighbor behind me has an 80 lb mix that does a bit of that as well when they're running back and forth.

So I spent all day Saturday, getting materials, tearing down, cutting new materials to size, digging holes, building back up (with the post set in the proper place this time), mixing/pouring/setting concrete, then cleaning up all of the junk I had torn down.

I spent Sunday mostly goofing off, because I'm not as young as I used to be, and surprisingly quite a few joints are complaining about all of the work I did. You know, I don't mind getting old, I just hate feeling it :-P !

So tonight, after I get back from my bass lesson, I'll start on the paperback versions of the last two novels. Which leads to a question for any of you reading this. What size do you prefer paperbacks to be? I go with 6 x 9, because it keeps the costs down (you pay by the page on printing costs and I want to keep my prices low for you) and I've seen it used a lot. I've see some people doing 5.5 x 8.25 which ends up increasing page count by about 25 percent. If I did the paperback size you see in bookstores, then the price would be a lot higher. But just curious as to what preferences people have.

So, back to work!