A busy week

First off, a belated "Thank you" to fabled megablogger Alex J. Cavanaugh for giving Ghosts a mention last week in his Ninja News. If you haven't visited his blog yet (and, let's face it, if you've managed to find The Bald Patch you must have encountered Alex somewhere in your travels. To say otherwise is a bit like saying you didn't notice England but you found the Isle of Wight!) then you can find it here.

Secondly, I hastily joined Goodreads. I have never felt enticed to join up before, too few hours in the day for the forums I already use, but I looked into it on the suggestion of blogger friend and Weekend Writing Warriors admin, Teresa Cypher.

When I saw that Ghosts was listed on the site, I decided I really should establish a presence and claim my property. You can find my author page here.

But that's not what made last week so busy - even without the BC teachers' strike forcing a distressingly hasty end to the school year.

The weekend before last, we wanted to get the trailer ready for its first outing of the year. It spends the winter parked out of the way with its back to the road, but it's quite a game reversing it out through the narrow entrance, avoiding a ditch along the way. When we need a quick getaway, we usually plan ahead and turn it around at our leisure so it's facing the right way to just hitch up and go.

That was Sunday lunchtime.

By half past lunchtime we realized we had a big problem. Our ten-year-old Ford was not looking too healthy. Suspension gone. It was not towing anything anywhere.

Moreover, even if it got fixed it's been playing up a bit this year and we decided it was time to retire it from towing duty. This is something we've talked about over the last year or so, just hadn't been expecting it so soon. Or with such urgency attached.

Ali is the purchasing queen in the household, so she was straight on to all the local dealerships looking for a second-hand truck with the oomph needed, and the cab space for a family. Long story short, after a stressful few days of frantic phone calls, we finished the week with a very decent F350.

So, on Friday Ali got away for her drunken weekend with work colleagues, and reports the new truck is a dream to drive and a delight to tow with. Should make things easy for our big drive up island later in the summer.