Skip to the end of the post for the pretty landscape pics from the cruise. This isn’t the Full Cruise Report because editing my travelogue is proving more daunting than expected. Also, I’m doing a bit of reality avoidance because welp, surgery Monday.

{Aside for those who’ve missed my admittedly vague posts about surgery before now: this all started in May with discovery of polyp lurking around the entrance to my appendix. After consultations and delays, I am going the Get-it-out-get-it-out-eek-get-it-out surgical removal route rather than the fancified colonoscopy with extra finesse option that would be less complicated but comes with no guarantee of getting rid of all the polyp, no way to tell if something’s lurking in the appendix quietly turning cancerous, and a non-zero chance of needing a future get-it-out operation anyhow.}

ANYway. Did y’all know you have to pass two physicals and do two other meetings before hospitals let you get operated on these days? I somehow did not know this. I got my medical clearance before going on the cruise, got the first Pre-op phone call last Monday, and today passed my first of 2 Pre-operative check-ins. The phone version.

I go into the hospital on Thursday to get my vitals checked in person, answer more questions, and—assuming as expected that I am deemed Healthy enough To Have Parts Removed—then I’ll receive Yet Moar Instructions and get a scheduled time on Monday. I do not foresee any roadblocks, but then I didn’t foresee my appendix turning traitor in the first place, so.

I am not counting on the surgery HAPPENING until it’s actually DONE, if that makes sense. Which is, in a word, stressy.

Between those goings-on, moving all my stuff back into my office & getting the rest of the house re-organized, I’ve been a bit pre-occupied and distracted. Shocker, eh?

Distracted and stressed is a great frame of mind for playing Cats & Soup: Fluffy Town, but not a great frame of mind for editing my maundering observations of the cruise week. (Teaser: I did a lot of bitching about the neighbors who were smoking on their stateroom balcony, which, it turns out, is Very Much Verboten in a “you can get your ass kicked off the ship if caught” way. But no one got kicked this trip.)

I’ll stop rambling there and provide you with pretty sunsets and some cat pics, because Pippin is very glad we’re home, and even more glad the furniture is all rearranged in new and interesting places.

Or! OR! if you like your local library, you could request a purchase. Free for you, sale for me, everyone wins.

Most libraries need the following info for ordering print books:

• Title: Relics From A Traveling Show

• Author: K. M. Herkes

• ISBN: 9781945745201 (paperback)

  Every library system does things a little differently, but most want their collections to serve their communities, so most of them are very responsive to patron requests.

If you like novels more than short stories, I recommend my series The Rollover Files for hopepunk tales of about an alternate world where moms with midlife crisis superpowers have been saving the world and making the military nervous since 1943.

I also have a completed, quirky slow-burn science fiction thriller duology with a romance chaser: The Stories Of The Restoration.

All my titles are available from Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Hoopla, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Overdrive and many other fine booksellers.

Support your favorite independent bookseller! Find a local shop via Indiebound