It’s June and I’m in southern Arizona. It’s hot. It’s been over 110 for more than a week, and predicted to be 113 today, just like it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. I understand it’s supposed to cool down to 108 by early next week. We’re all looking forward to that.<\/p>\n
But then again, we all choose to live here, I suppose, and shouldn’t complain. We’ll be laughing up our other sleeves come January. At least I’m not standing on top of a busted levy watching my house float away down the river.<\/p>\n
One thing we have accomplished is that we finally got our front yard scraped and re-rocked. (Yay!) Yes, Dear Reader, like the majority of homeowners in the Phoenix area, our front yard consists of rocks instead of grass. Trying to grow grass when it’s this hot is water-wasteful in the extreme. For the past twenty years, our yard has been covered with pale gold half-inch granite and ever-more-encroaching weeds. Now, we are weed-free and covered with Apache pink half-inch granite. Good to go for another twenty years.<\/p>\n
What with the heat and the price of gas, I’ve been housebound lately. This enables me to get a lot of writing down, but it’s not good for my mood. I have a lot of words done on the first draft of Book 5, but how many of them will end up in the finished product is anybody’s guess.<\/p>\n
I have plans to upgrade my computer system in the near future, and subsequently to do some major overhauling on this website over the next few months. I’d like to add a few pages and features, and a picture album, as well. I’ve already begun adding a bit of content. I’ve been thinking for a while that it might behoove me to have some excerpts of my books on the site, so I am going to give that a try. Eventually, the excerpts will have their own pages, but for the moment, I’m putting them on the “About This Book” page, which you can click on to the left, under the pictures of the book covers. Thus far, I’ve added the first chapter of The Old Buzzard Had It Coming<\/em>. If you haven’t read my books, Dear Reader, and would like to get an idea of what they’re like, you now have the chance. Of course, the books are copyrighted, so if you’d like to use any content from the excerpts, please contact me first.<\/p>\n An excerpt from Hornswoggled<\/em> should be available any time. I hope you enjoy them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s June and I’m in southern Arizona. It’s hot. It’s been over 110 for more than a week, and predicted to be 113 today, just like it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. I understand it’s supposed to cool down to 108 by early next week. We’re all looking forward to that. But then again, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writer-rant"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2H58s-1N","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.doniscasey.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}