Blessings

I've had a couple of blessings lately.

There's a new dollar store about five minutes from where I live. The size is a little larger than usual. It's almost a miniature version of Walmart and carries all kinds of things with shelves so tall they have signs on them saying to get an employee for help. The cheapest "grocery store" here is Walmart, which is about 30 minutes away. Even if the dollar store is 5 or 10 cents higher on some things, the $4+ savings on gas covers it. Some items area actually cheaper. It doesn't make sense to grocery shop there, but for certain things it saves a trip and makes life a little easier.

I've mentioned my cell phone woes before. I finally have a new cell phone that works indoors at home. I was with someone at the new dollar store who insisted I look at cell phones. They don't carry phones for my cell phone company. It seemed like a waste of time, but I looked anyway. Apparently they were dumping inventory, because they had an LG Optimus Fuel for $9. I didn't know if my company would let me use, but I took the chance and it worked. Though not uber, the stats are decent. Android 4.4, 1.2GHz dual-core cpu, 3.5" screen, 1.79GB internal storage, camera. For $9 it's awesome.

I've been a little sidetracked doing some genealogy. I had my DNA tested a while back and have discovered several branches of Jenkins that didn't know about each other. At first it was two of us. The others slowly showed up over time. A researcher from a newly found branch in the Ohio/Indiana area made a breakthrough on the Kentucky/Tennessee branch that puts them living the same place on the South Carolina/North Carolina border as my family around 1800. Based on that and the DNA results we already had, I was able to infer that my Jenkins were much more Jewish back then than I thought, although I'd feel more confident if the paper trail would catch up to the DNA. DNA's nice, but sometimes you have to see it in writing.

Despite the sidetrack, I've combined the chapters I wrote while the computer was down to the rest of the book. The minor character's name in the beginning of the book that I couldn't remember to save my life? Vicky. That was bugging me so much. I've gone through the whole thing now and am ready to push on to the end.

All my books are exclusive to Amazon right now. I don't know if this is a big announcement, but that's got to stop. It's getting me nowhere. I made a Smashwords account. If I can get the books converted to how they like it, that would put me on Apple, Barnes and Noble, etc., and I'd still be on Amazon. My exclusivity period ends in November. I have plenty of time to learn what I have to do, get the books formatted and think about what I'm doing without rushing into it. Once that happens, I'll talk more about it.