Get Elfed

I Elfed myself this morning :)

Check it out by clicking here. You can elf yourself too.

By the way, I'm loving all the private emails and comments about your messes! Keep telling me in the comments or via email about the big messes in your life and I'll be adding your name to the Dec. 1st draw for a copy of Remains.

RT Review

I finally got around to picking up this month's Romantic Times magazine. Here is the review for The Remains of the Dead:

"Roberts has a unique gift: She makes talking to the dead as natural as talking to your neighbor over a cup of coffee. Sadie Novak, who cleans up crime scenes for a living, is a charming new heroine with a great deal of heart who helps stranded spirits and solves crimes. Sadie and hunky ex-cop Zack make a delightful odd couple. Here's hoping she comes back soon."

They gave the book 4 1/2 stars out of 5. Great way to start off the week :)

Reminder: All posts to my blog as well as all who join my mailing list will be entered to win a copy of Remains in my Life's Messy contest. Draw is on December 1st. Oh and in answer to a couple email questions, yes, if you want you can email me to tell me about your big messes privately instead of posting them to the blog!

Something Stinks

As you can see, we had an unwelcome visitor take up residency under our front step. After much discussion I convinced the children that a skunk would NOT make an ideal pet and also could not be trained to fire stink at their friends or enemies on command.

I called an exterminator and he set a trap using an egg as bait. Apparently using anything else would catch us a neighbourhood cat. It took a few days but finally Mr. Skunk got hungry enough and wandered into the cage to grab the egg. I took the above picture of him from the safety of my living room window. Hey, I'm not stupid.

The exterminator came and picked up the cage and took the little guy off to a forested area far enough away that he won't find his way back. I hope he's very happy there. I thought he would spray once he was trapped but he just curled up into a ball and went to sleep. If he had sprayed I'm not sure what I would've done to remove the smell.

In light of my Life's Messy contest, I thought it only fitting I deal with the smelliness of our messy life. When there's a particularly nasty smell around, I rely on Vicks Vaporub. A tiny dab of that under your nose and it's hard to smell anything else. I was told that a lot of crime scene investigators use that trick when they're dealing with the smell of decomp. I haven't verified that tidbit but it seems like if it works on other pungent smells, it could have some usefulness there.

If you celebrated Thanksgiving yesterday, I hope all the smells were pleasant. But how about other times? Do you have any tricks for dealing with bad smells?