Things are moving so quickly. On Friday, I made an offer on that house I looked at Thursday. They had four offers they were considering, and on Saturday I got the word that I got the house—the one that’s basically a cabin in the woods on the edge of downtown.

Yesterday was the inspection, and this time the inspector didn’t find anything too scary. I also didn’t see anything alarming about the neighbors—no kids setting fire to anything next door, and it’s even spring break, so the kids are home.

I did discover that a lot of the trees in the backyard are redbuds. I also found that I can see the Blue Ridge Mountains from the front porch and from the room I’m going to use as an office. When the trees leaf out, the mountains may be blocked, but I may be able to get glimpses through the leaves. I now know where I’m going to put my desk, so I can look out the window at the mountains.

So, I guess I’ve got a house. The seller still has to do a termite inspection, and then there’s closing, but I should be fully moved in before my lease in my apartment ends in May, so it’s perfect timing.

I have Rydding Village book 3 about ready to publish, so I need to get that done. Then I may not be getting much writing or other work done for the next month or so while I get moved and then get the new house set up. I got rid of most of my office furniture, so I’ll have to set up an office from scratch, and I have to get a new sofa — well, in that living room, it’ll have to be a loveseat. The rooms in this house really are rather small, and the closets are small, so I’ll be coming up with some storage solutions. There will likely be a road trip to the Ikea in the D.C. suburbs for an epic shopping trip.

I’m trying to decide what look to go with in my office. The floors are pine, a lovely golden color (the original hardwoods from 1945), the walls are a pale gray, and the woodwork is white. It’s a corner room with two windows, so it’s very sunny. I’m leaning toward white furniture to keep it looking bright and open, but I also like the idea of making it darker and cozy, sort of an eccentric professor’s study look. I think I’ll use my laptop stand as a desk for a while and move it around to find a good desk position before I start shopping for office furniture. Then I can decide what mood I want to go with.

The nice thing is that this house came in significantly below what I’d budgeted for buying a house, so I can spend more money fixing it up. It’s just been renovated, so I don’t have to do anything to the house before I move in other than put up some blinds and curtains so I’m not putting on a show for the neighbors. All the appliances are new, the kitchen and bath are totally new, it’s been freshly painted and the floors upstairs have been refinished, while the downstairs floor is new. So I just need to buy furniture and storage type stuff for the closets and the basement (the back half of the downstairs) and landscaping.

In the meantime, I have so much to do!

After that close call last fall with the cute house with the pyromaniac neighbor, I’ve resumed my house hunt, but there hasn’t been much I’ve liked on the market.

In late January, I looked at one that had a lot about it I liked. It had an incredible back yard with a greenhouse and fruit trees, and the rooms were a good size. It had some nice period touches. But it was also on a major road, with a driveway that went uphill, so getting on the road was a bit scary. Plus, the driveway was shared with the house next door, which had potential for problems. And the upstairs windows were wonky, just a bit awry in the positioning. From the inside, the placement made sense, but from the outside it was off enough to be unsettling. There was also just something about the house that made me uncomfortable, and I couldn’t tell what it was. Part of it was that the owners hadn’t finished moving out. The furniture was all gone, so the rooms were empty, but there was food in the fridge, junk in the basement, and laundry in the dryer (showing through the window in the door). My Realtor wondered if it was renters who’d cleared out, but some workmen who were on the property said the owners moved nearby and hadn’t finished moving. I couldn’t make myself get excited enough about it to put in an offer, and it took a long time to sell for something in that price range in this town. Part of it may have been that it’s technically in a flood zone. The creek that runs through the nearby park tends to flood down that street, so the basements on that side of the street get water in them. The city is redoing that creek area, which should stop or ease the flooding when they get it done, but there’s no way to know until they’re done and we get a heavy rain to test it. There’s a sump pump in the basement of that house, and we didn’t see any signs of water damage, but added to everything else, it was enough to keep me from going for it.

The listings that came up last month and early this month were mostly mid-century modern and very vintage, complete with pink bathrooms — pink tile and pink fixtures. I’m enough of a preservationist at heart that it would have hurt me to pull out those bathrooms and update them, but I didn’t think I could live with them the way they were. There were a few listings that looked possible, but when I drove by I felt really uncomfortable, or else they were farther out than I would like. I want to live in walking distance from interesting things.

Earlier this week, I looked at a house that was really cute, but strike one was when I saw that the house next door had a broken toilet sitting in the front yard. That might have been trash day, as it was next to the trash cans, but there was also a broken sink in the back yard. Then there was the big, scary dog in the front yard, behind a flimsy wire fence (in spite of the back yard having a wooden fence). The dog growled and lunged at the fence while I was standing on the porch of the house I was looking at. It was definitely one of those “I will kill you if I get to you” growls, not an excited bark, and the tail wasn’t wagging.

The house itself was nice. The kitchen was incredible and there was an amazing view of mountains from the back porch. But the house was a lot smaller than the listing let on. It included an upstairs room that would have been mostly useless. It wasn’t heated or cooled and had no light fixtures, and while there was a bathroom there, it was in an alcove without a door. The toilet was visible from everywhere in the room. I think the square footage also included the basement. When I added up the footage of the rooms on the main floor, the actual living space, it was smaller than my current apartment. I couldn’t figure out how I’d be able to put any furniture in the living room, it was so narrow. The owners just had a chair in there, and they had chairs and a TV in the room I’d have used for an office. I decided to pass on that house.

Then a listing came up Wednesday night that I initially dismissed because the layout was pretty weird and the rooms had to be tiny, given that it was 4 bedrooms in 1100 square feet. I couldn’t figure out how I could work with the space in the living room, as there were no solid walls. The house is built into the side of a hill, so the front of the house is on ground level there, with the back of the first floor under the hill, becoming a basement. The front half of the first floor is one big room, with a kitchen on one end, a bar as a room divider, and then the rest being windows and stairs. I couldn’t think of where I’d put a TV and sofa, and there was definitely no room for bookcases.

But then the upstairs is ground level at the back, with a big deck across the back, and sliding doors onto the deck from one of the rooms. I started thinking that this would make a good living room. When my Realtor sent me the listing this morning, I said we might as well look at it.

The rooms are small, but I think I could make them work. It would be cozy. I think I’d use the downstairs as an entry hall/dining room, maybe put a chair in there, but otherwise have a dining table. If I had people over, I could use that room for entertaining. The closets are small, but the basement is climate-controlled and insulated, so I could use it for storage. The house was built in 1945 but it’s been completely remodeled. New roof, new siding, new electric, heater/AC, etc. The downstairs is all new, with new floors and a totally new kitchen. Upstairs, it looks more like an old house, with the original hardwood floors, interior doors, wide baseboards, and window frames. The new things upstairs are the sliding glass doors in the room I’d use for a living room and the bathroom, which has been gutted and redone.

But the setting is what I like. The deck is beautiful, and the backyard is wooded, so it would be almost like living in the woods. I could do forest bathing in my backyard. There’s also an in-ground stone fire pit in one of the non-wooded areas. And all this is half a mile from downtown, one block off the main street. I’ve joked about my ideal house being a cabin in the woods on the edge of downtown, and this may actually be it. It’s on the end of a dead-end street, so there wouldn’t be a lot of traffic. And while there are hills, they aren’t as big as the one I currently live on.

It’s not the house I had in mind. It’s not what’s on my vision board. It’s also not the neighborhood I was looking at. But it may be what I need. After a sleepless night spent mentally arranging furniture, I told my Realtor to make an offer on it. I have another month in this apartment, so the timing is good for me to be able to get something and start moving. I’d have time to get a washer and dryer ordered and delivered (It comes with all the other appliances), gradually move in the stuff I’d move myself, with pros moving the big stuff somewhere along the way, then I could clean out the apartment before the lease ends. And then I’d get to decorate the new place. I’ve already spent way too much time looking around online and figuring out what could fit where.

The Dungeons and Dragons game was a lot of fun, though not entirely what I expected. Some of that may have been because some of us were pretty new, we were playing characters we weren’t familiar with, and we were all strangers. There was a woman about my age, her teenage niece, a couple of women right out of college (including one who just moved from the Dallas area after graduating from the University of Oklahoma—I swear, I run into someone from either Texas or Oklahoma at every event I go to around here), and the person running it was probably in her 30s.

I think part of my issue was that it’s essentially a storytelling game, so my writer brain kicked in, but it is a game that involves players taking turns and rolling dice, so an action event that takes a few minutes in story time can take an hour to play, and sometimes the play means we’re spending that much time in dealing with a secondary issue. Our group had to fight our way through a series of rooms, and we really struggled with the first one, with it taking a few rounds of turns before we got through. We got through the second one fast (mostly because I managed to roll a 20 on my turn, and I was the first to go, so my turn got us straight into the next room). And then it seemed to take us nearly an hour in the next room because nothing we tried worked.

I was playing a bard character (I used a pre-made character rather than trying to create one), and the time I rolled a 20, I was playing a lute to lull some monsters to sleep, so I had a vivid mental image of the Chris Pine character from Honor Among Thieves when he walked into a situation playing the lute as a diversion. My song worked so well that we just walked through the room.

I think the people who wrote some of the instructions of how the spells work also write IRS tax forms, and that was what took us a while, having to read and decipher what our characters might be capable of and how we might be able to use that in this situation. Aside from being able to put things to sleep, nothing I could do was all that useful for this campaign. Again, my writer brain kicked in and thought this character was a poor choice for the story.

But I think to some extent those kind of constraints could be interesting to work with in writing — identify exactly what your characters can do up front, then stick with that through a story. It would be a fun exercise that would force some creative solutions.

The main thing was the getting together with other people to do something fun. Once we got warmed up and into the spirit of it, we all loosened up a bit. I need to learn a bit more about it to understand how the game really works, but I’ll probably go the next time there’s an afternoon game. There’s now a big group chat of women in the area, so they’re organizing games at various times on different days. It’s a good way to meet people and spend time interacting.

I can also see how all the moral panic over this in the 80s obviously involved people who’d only vaguely heard of the game. From what I saw, it’s a lot of math and statistics. There’s nothing about how you do spells that you could take away from the game to try to use to do magic, just a description of what they might do in the game, and you roll dice to see how effective your spell is based on the statistics of the creature you’re using it on. I can’t see how you could go from this to summoning demons or worshipping Satan. I guess it might look like an obsession just because of how long it can take to get through a game and how much you need to learn to be able to play well, but it probably takes less time than playing golf. It all comes back to the geeks vs. jocks thing, where dressing up like a player on your favorite team to go to watch a sports game is cool, but dressing up like a character to go see a movie is weird. Spending an afternoon with friends hitting a little ball around is “normal,” but spending the afternoon playing D&D is geeky.

Since I’m hoping to buy a house in the next few months and since I got rid of a lot of my stuff before moving, so I’ll be starting with a clean slate, I’ve been checking books on home decor/interior design out of the library to get ideas. I’ve found a couple of books about decor for a cozy home. That’s what I want to create, so I checked them out.

Given what I’m currently writing, it’s no surprise that the idea of cozy appeals to me. I have a sense of how I want my home to feel, but not a great visual for what that should look like. Thus the decor books. I want to see pictures to see if any of them fit what I have in mind. What does cozy look like to me?

And it seems I’m on a very different wavelength from these authors. Both books turned out to be by “influencers” (I really hate that concept) who had blogs about their homes, so the books were only about their homes. There weren’t a lot of pictures of a variety of homes to show how design principles work. There were just pictures of their homes.

Weirdly, their idea of “cozy” involves lots of white. White slipcovers on the furniture, white walls, exposed brick painted white, white wood, etc. I do like white walls, and my comforter cover on my bed is white with blue embroidery around the edges, but the amount of white in those homes was anything but cozy to me. It looked cold. They both talked about having a lot of natural light, but I tend to think of cozy in dark terms, with candles and lamps to create a glow. Some sunlight during the day is okay, but I don’t like a lot of harsh direct light.

One of the books had some good advice about starting a room with a blank slate, then getting the sofa in the position you want it first. After that, position any other seating, then the horizontal surfaces (tables). Then choose and position rugs, then drapes, lamps, and then art and accessories. That made sense. However, in all her pictures, I liked the “don’t” pictures better than the “do” pictures. She said that it’s better to have one big statement piece than a bunch of smaller pieces, and while I agree in not liking a cluttered look with a ton of stuff, it all depends on what the big piece is.

Over her sofa, the “don’t” picture (I guess it was a “before” from before she came up with her new design philosophy) had a gallery wall of a number of smaller prints. The “do” was a giant rack of antlers looming over the sofa. If you were sitting on the sofa and looked up, the prongs of the antlers would be right over your head. The “don’t” for the fireplace mantel was a couple of botanic prints, some small baskets, and some candlesticks. Not entirely my taste, but it didn’t look too busy to be restful. The “do” picture had a big, black sign with the word “Relax” on it in white, scrolling script (what I think of as the “live, laugh, love” font). This was on a white brick (or painted white) fireplace.

Between the giant rack of antlers and the huge black sign ordering me to relax, I’d have to flee that room. Nothing about it was what I’d consider cozy. It was oppressive, especially the “Relax” sign, which would have the effect on me of someone telling me to calm down during a fight. I wouldn’t be able to relax in that room. The antlers might have worked in a more rustic setting with darker colors, and possibly over the fireplace rather than over the sofa, but in a stark white room the look was like something out of Scandinavian horror.

I don’t have a ton of decorative accessories. Most of what I have is stuff I either got as a gift or bought as a souvenir when I traveled. I have a lot of interesting candle-related things, like lanterns, candlesticks, or a candle garden. I have framed pictures of family or places I’ve visited. I mostly fill my walls with bookcases, but the artwork I have is watercolor prints of places I’ve visited. Everything I have means something to me.

I’ll have to see what other books the library has, especially if I drive to the library. I usually walk, and I have to go up a steep hill to get home, so I’ve been choosing the smaller books. A lot of the interior design books are too big for my backpack or for the small collapsible shopping bag I carry with me if I’m running errands around downtown before going to the library. I’ll want to drive up the hill with some of the decor books. I hope they have something written by a real interior decorator with training rather than by self-taught bloggers, especially those who think huge racks of antlers on stark white walls are “cozy.”

My decorating style would probably best be described as “eccentric professor’s study.” I like cushy chairs with soft upholstery, lots of books, dark wood, plenty of soft throws, pillows, and blankets on the chairs/sofa, an antique-looking rug on wood floors. I even have a mini suit of armor. I’ll need to get a rug and a sofa, and I’ll eventually want to replace my wood furniture. Everything except the big bookcases was Bombay Company stuff that I put together myself. I’ll be starting from scratch for my office. I’ve got a chair that I may or may not end up keeping, but I need a desk, bookcases, and any other office furniture, and I have no idea what look I want, whether bright and airy with light-colored furniture and white bookcases that blend with the walls or keeping with the eccentric professor’s study in a castle look from my living room.

But first I have to find a house. There’s nothing on the market right now. I have to hope something will come up between now and May.

I’m still snowed in. School here has been cancelled all week. We’re supposed to get more snow tonight, but then it’ll get above freezing over the weekend, so I may be able to get rid of the wall of ice surrounding my car, and I might be able to venture out. I don’t really need anything, but I might need some groceries next week.

Apparently, this is unusual here. It’s been interesting reading the town Facebook group to see how people are reacting. Half are acting like it’s all an overreaction and half are freaking out because the roads are icy. The hills in this town are really steep, so I can see why they wouldn’t want to run school buses full of kids on possibly icy hills.

Meanwhile, they got ice and snow back in Texas, so it’s not as though I’d have avoided this if I hadn’t moved. And I haven’t lost power.

It’s been a good week for work since there wasn’t much else to do. I re-read all of the book I just finished writing, made a revision plan, and did the major surgery revisions. I did the major rewriting midway through when I realized something was wrong and went back to fix it. That meant I didn’t have a lot to rewrite. Mostly, it involved deleting a couple of paragraphs so that a piece of information got revealed later. I didn’t have to add that info later because it turned out it was discussed a couple of times. I then had to fix who knew it later in the book.

Next up, I’ll do the fixing the words edit. That’s the nitpicky part when I read out loud to make sure the words flow well and the character voices sound right. I also find where I use the same words too frequently.

I’m not going to try to put a release date on this book until I get with the cover designer and see how this round of edits goes, but February seems doable unless the designer is really backed up.

In other news, if you like the idea of an all-you-can-read subscription service but aren’t keen on giving Amazon money for Kindle Unlimited, Kobo has a similar service called Kobo Plus. This one’s a bit more author-friendly, in that they don’t require exclusivity. Amazon doesn’t let authors sell their e-books anywhere else if they’re in Kindle Unlimited, but with Kobo Plus you can sell your books wherever you want. I put all my independently published books in Kobo Plus. Here’s a group of cozy mysteries that are available in Kobo Plus, including mine. (And it would help me get credit for this promo if you click on the link, even if you aren’t interested in Kobo Plus.)

I had grand plans to get off to a serious start to the year on Monday — and then we got hit with about 6 inches of snow Sunday night.

This really shouldn’t make any difference to me. I work at home. But there’s something about a snow day that takes over the brain. It’s a mental state that says normal operations have ceased. I’ve actually managed to hit my work quotas, but it’s been a struggle because all I want to do is bake and curl up under a blanket with a book.

I’m glad I went out for groceries on Sunday because otherwise I’d have been in trouble. As much as people in more northern states tease Texans about shutting down at a hint of ice or snow, I can’t tell that it’s much better here. The entire area shut down on Monday. City offices and some businesses opened part of the day on Tuesday. Schools have been out all week. They do plow the streets. My street is cleared of snow, but I bet it’s icy today because we got a lot of sun and were around 30 degrees yesterday, and now today it’s really cold, so there was probably melting and re-freezing. The thing about the snowplow is that it cleared the street, but it left a wall of ice and snow on the sides of the street, so my car is pretty much walled-up. I tried clearing out some of it yesterday, but my plastic snow shovel wasn’t up to the task. I may need a jackhammer. So, I could drive on the roads to get somewhere, especially since I have all-wheel drive and even a special setting for driving on snow, but I can’t get to the road.

One thing that’s better than in Texas, aside from snowplows, is that I haven’t lost power. The last time I was in weather this cold, I had no electricity — and no heat. I’m nice and warm inside, and it didn’t even feel all that cold when I went out yesterday to shovel.

The original forecast, up until Friday evening, was that we’d get a light snow and then it would be above freezing later Monday and on Tuesday, so it would all melt. So I didn’t go grocery shopping since I wasn’t close to running out of anything. Tuesday would be a good day to go shopping. Then they changed the forecast to say it could be bad, and I decided to head out Sunday morning, just in case. That was when I bought the snow shovel and I stocked up on milk, bread, and some things I could eat in case we lost power, like cheese and crackers. I’d have run out of milk today, and we haven’t made it above freezing, so the snow and ice aren’t going anywhere. We might make it above freezing on Sunday. Then I may be able to dig my car out.

I’ve learned that off-street parking would be really nice when I get a permanent house, so I might have to clear a driveway but my car won’t be buried by the snowplow. I need some boots that will work in snow (my waterproof hiking boots do okay, but aren’t tall enough to do much good in deep snow — fortunately there’s a crust of ice on top of the snow, and I’ve managed to walk on top of the snow, only sinking in a little). I need a metal snow shovel. And if they forecast any kind of winter weather, go to the grocery store, even if they’re saying it’s no big deal.

I’m home again after more than a week away and after two long days of driving. I can’t make that drive too often, but I enjoy the thinking time along the way.

Something occurred to me as I got closer to home: I’ve now made that drive three times. The first time, I was on a vacation/recon mission to a place I’d been reading about but that I’d never visited to see if I liked it. The second time, I’d uprooted my whole life and was moving to an apartment I’d only seen online on a street I’d only seen online. This time, I was coming home, and it really felt like home, even though I was coming from a place I’ve considered home (though I’ve never actually lived in the house where my parents live now). I missed my mountains.

With Christmas coming so soon after Thanksgiving this year, it’s a good thing I got my fill of fall. We started getting fall-like weather and color in mid-August, and there were still a lot of pockets of red and gold leaves along the journey. But on the way back I got a real transition to Christmas mode, since it started snowing soon after I stopped for the night outside Nashville on day 1. It was a light snow, mostly just flakes dancing in the air, and the ground was warm, so it wasn’t sticking. The roads were clear the next morning, but there was a light dusting of snow on the hills facing the road. In spots, it was a heavier dusting, while in others there was just snow in the nooks and crannies. I’d made a playlist for the trip that mixed Christmas music in with other music, and the occasional Christmas song made a nice accompaniment to the scenery. It seems to have been a narrow band across northern Tennessee and southern Kentucky, reaching into southern Virginia. I dipped below it when the road went south to Knoxville, then came back into the snow when I turned north in far eastern Tennessee and headed for Virginia. There were some flurries there, but the roads were still clear and I never had to use my windshield wipers because the flakes were so light and my car is apparently so aerodynamic that the flakes just went up and over my car instead of hitting the windshield. It was a best-case scenario for snowy driving, just enough to make it pretty without affecting the roads or visibility. As I got farther north, I made it above the band of snow, and it was just green around my area. We’re supposed to get some snow tomorrow morning, though.

I’ve done my holiday travel for the year, and I already got my shopping done, gifts wrapped and left with my parents, so now I get to have a no-pressure holiday season. I’m not in a choir now, so there are no rehearsals or performances. I don’t have any parties I have to attend. There are a lot of local events that I can do, so I won’t be bored or lonely, but there’s nothing I must do. I can choose the things I want, or I can stay home in my pajamas, drink cocoa, and watch Christmas movies.

Among the activities are multiple Christmas markets, a group getting together to do caroling in the downtown shopping district on Saturdays, a couple of holiday teas in historic homes, a tour of historic homes, multiple church services and concerts, and a Christmas dinner at a church for anyone who might be alone (I plan to help out and eat with them). I could probably fill up all the weekend days and nights between now and Christmas, plus the week of Christmas, but I imagine there will be a few quiet days or nights at home, especially depending on the weather. It doesn’t feel as cold here for the temperature as it does back in Texas — I felt colder in the 40s in Texas than I did in the 30s in Virginia — but we’re going to have some days that are really cold. Right now, I’m waiting for it to go above freezing before I run some errands. One errand in the next couple of weeks may involve buying a new winter coat. I’m not sure my Texas “heavy” coats will be heavy enough for the weather here.

I’ve loved the autumn here, but we got our first taste of winter yesterday. I was making dinner, looked out the kitchen window, and I thought I saw snow. A moment later, it was snowing so hard that I couldn’t see the houses a block away. It only lasted about five minutes and it was still above freezing, so we only got a light dusting and it didn’t stick for long.

The term they used on the TV weather report was “flurry squall,” which is apparently what you get when it snows hard enough to create limited visibility, but it’s for a very short time. It’s like a mini blizzard. To be a true blizzard, it has to snow long enough for there to be accumulation on the ground. If you’re caught in one of these while driving, it can be dangerous, but you’ll be out of it very quickly. If you’re not driving, it’s just pretty to look at for a few minutes.

We’re supposed to get more of those this afternoon. I already have bread rising to bake because it’s definitely the kind of day for that sort of thing. I hope to get some good writing done, if I’m not spending all day looking out the window for snow. My inner child definitely comes out the first moment I see a flake in the sky. From what I understand from people who’ve lived here a long time, they do get snow here, but it doesn’t stay around all winter. Most winter days it gets above freezing during the daytime, aside from occasional cold spells, so anything that falls only lasts a day or two. I’ll need to get a snow shovel to clear off my walk and dig out my car if I need to go anywhere, but I should be able to stock up on supplies based on the forecast and wait it out or else walk to get anything I need. I’ll have to see if I need to get snow boots or if my waterproof hiking boots will suffice. So far, I haven’t needed a heavier winter coat. I haven’t even used my existing winter coats, just lighter lined jackets or sweatshirts. It seems to feel warmer here than I’d expect based on the thermometer. I’ve walked downtown to go to church in just a light sweater with a lined suit coat over it when it was 39 degrees. I went out to look at the snow yesterday while wearing a sweater over a sweatshirt.

It’s supposed to warm up tomorrow and be windy enough that anything that falls today will be gone by tomorrow night. Which is good because I’m heading out for my Thanksgiving travel on Sunday. I’ll be heading over several rivers, through a lot of woods and over a couple of mountain ranges. I won’t be posting my blog next week, as I will be enjoying time with my family. I might post updates on social media, if you follow me on Facebook or BlueSky.