News! And The Devil’s Right Hand!
First of all: the third Dante Valentine novel, The Devil’s Right Hand, is now available for preorder at Amazon! Very exciting.
Here’s the blurb:
Dante Valentine, Necromancer and bounty hunter, just wants to be left alone. Unfortunately, the Devil has other ideas.
The Prince wants Dante, and he wants her now. Dante and her lover, Japhrimel, have no choice but to answer the Prince’s summons. And to fulfill a seemingly simple task: become the Devil’s Right Hand, hunt down four demons that have escaped from Hell, and earn His gratitude.
It’s a shame that nothing is ever easy when it comes to the Devil. Because of course, he doesn’t tell Dante the whole truth: there is a rebellion brewing in Hell.
And Dante is getting really tired of being pushed around. This time, she might just be angry enough to take on the Devil himself…
This was supposed to come out in July, but was changed to September to be part of the Orbit launch. But it gives one a little tingle to see it on preorder, indeed it does.
This last weekend was a busy one. It started Friday, with a trip out to the coast avec the Selkie. We hit Cannon Beach and Haystack Rock, then Ecola State Park. Next came the wreck of the Peter Iredale, a lovely iron skeleton rotting away on the beach. We finished up in Astoria, at the Gypsy’s Whimsy, then drove home.
Note to the small burger joint (Bundy Burgers) we stopped at: you lost quite a bit of business by greeting us with “You guys coming in?” and then not taking our orders. When two groups who came in AFTER us placed their order BEFORE us, even when we tried to catch your attention, it was the last straw. We not only won’t eat there again, we’ll recommend against it. It would have been a big ticket and an even bigger tip, because we were hungry, tired, and very happy after a nice day. Instead, the nice lady at the Oak Tree in Woodland got our business and a veddy nice tip.
Can you tell that irritated me? But as we decided, even the best day around needs a little hitch in it to bring the niceness of the rest into relief.
Saturday I worked at the bookstore, which was a lovely morning. I left early, fully intending to drive out to the coast again, this time with the Sullen One in tow, since the DHM and the little people were in Seattle visiting the DHM’s dad. Unfortunately, I was still exhausted from Friday and almost fell asleep driving home from work, so the Sullen One insisted I take a nap. It was far too late to go to the coast at that point, so we settled for shopping: Cost Plus, Best Buy (for a new laptop) and Trader Joe’s (we needed snackies.)
Speaking of Best Buy…why is it that for the half-hour I was looking at their laptops, six different people asked me if I “needed help”? With that particular look that means, “are you going to steal one of our bolted-down lovelies?”
Now granted, I was in jeans and a black hoodie, a pair of boots and a nose ring. But the observant among salespeople note my leather bag and the quality of my boots and figure out I’m not only not going to steal something, but I’m probably capable of affording what I’m looking at.
Too bad Best Buy’s salespeople aren’t paid enough to be observant. Because when I finally made my laptop decision (this is the product of several weeks of online shopping, BTW) there was not a single salesperson willing to help me or even make eye contact.
Color my buns cheesed, as the Sullen One would say.
So we went to dinner and picked up everything from Trader Joe’s. And a few hours later, the Sullen One talked me into trying again. This time I walked into Best Buy and virtually kidnapped a salesperson at key-point. I didn’t quite beg him to take my money, but I did announce that I WAS going to pay him so he’d better not go anywhere. He was very nice and apologetic.
So I got my hot little hands on a Gateway machine, at 6.4 pounds lighter than my old machine. It’s dual-core, 160GBs of hard drive, 2048MB of RAM. Plus a transfer cable. All in all, it was a very productive Saturday, not the least because I ALSO got the book I’d ordered a bit ago. Cue up another night of restless sleep, since the DHM was gone.
Sunday dawned bright and sunny, though a bit chill. Crab Caution showed up early (by early I mean before noon) and the Sullen One and I left him sleeping while we went for breakfast and then…(fanfare please) to the nursery!
A cartload of plants later, we arrived home, and both boys and I got to work. We planted black mondo, daisies, gladiolas, flowering tobacco, honeysuckle, lilies, poppies, lavender…all sorts of stuff, inside and out. The Sullen One cleaned out the sunroom so the new plants, including a Mr. Lincoln rose, could have a nice new home.
Finally, dirty under the fingernails and stuffed to the gills on Italian food–because the boys worked so hard, I took them out to dinner–we got home to find everyone had come back. Chaos. You know, no matter how hard I work cleaning something up, it seems like as soon as I leave the house it all starts sliding downhill. Each time I leave it gets messier and messier. *sigh*
Anyway, another exhausting day come to a close, I kind of stared at my new laptop screen for a while and finally went to bed fairly early. (Which means midnight.) And that, dear Readers, was my weekend. It was lovely.
Man, I’m tired. 
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