The Last Day of November

I’m back.  From Outer Space.  I finished NaNoWriMo for the fifth time, sliding over 50,000 words on November 24th.  Just in time to jump in the car for an eleven hour drive to Garland, Texas.  Driving at highway speeds, that trip should, by all accounts, take only about seven hours.  That little stretch, though, from Austin to Waco, woohoo, watch out!  That little stretch of road will suck you into a time vortex on the day before Thanksgiving, making you feel like you’re in that episode of Doctor Who where all of the people are stuck in traffic for their entire lives.  And some of them look like cats! 

But I digress.

This NaNo was my most disorganized.  In previous years, I sort of tried to keep things in reasonable order, sticking the cursor where I thought the new words would fit in best.  This year though, whatever I felt like writing about on any particular day began on the next blank page.  This NaNo was also my first foray into Science Fiction.  Only because it was set on a planet far, far away, and has space cruisers.  It also might have aliens in a future revision.  Who knows.  But I had fun, and I’ll do it again next year.  

The rest of November has been lovely.  South Texas is making the transition to cooler weather (finally).  Today, in fact, is quite cold.  But I won’t bore you with weather talk on the blog.  

Thanksgiving was fun.  I met Robert Kennedy.  He was cute too.  He’ll let you call him Bob Stokes if you want, but don’t confuse him with the guy on The Weather Channel.  Whoops.  More weather.  

Since I’m rambling about nothing in particular here, I should ramble about the Sonars too.  X9 talked Grandma into teaching him how to crochet.  I know how to crochet too, but I hold the hook weird and I’m dead slow.  Grandma is the speediest, most graceful crocheter I know.  And now X9 is following in her footsteps, churning out eight feet of crochet chain in the past two days.  He’s not ready to move on to single crochet yet.  He wants to make chains to put on the Christmas tree first.  X4 has a birthday in three weeks and has decided he likes asparagus and playing outside without his siblings.  X6 now has a social calendar, and has found that he very much enjoys birthday parties, especially ones with gymnastics or bowling.  We’re thinking of putting a piano in the living room and making them all learn to play it. 

Spouse’s garden is growing well.  This weekend we canned eight quarts and eight pints of green tomato salsa.  That’s two-and-a-half gallons.  And there are a lot more vegetables out there!  

I’m not ready for the holidays yet, but I’m ready to get ready.  That means I’m itching to bust out the sewing machine for some handmade gifts I have planned.  I have a piece of finished knitting to show you later this week, and I started a Clapotis.  

Now that NaNoWriMo is finished though, I am really looking forward to reading a lot more.  Reading tends to grind to a standstill when I’m trying to squeeze in writing time.  I have started to read at least six books, and I’m ready to finish them and start some others.  Who’s with me?  

So, in the next week or so, you should watch for some scarf pictures, and the long-ago promised comments on The Sheriff of Yrnameer, as well as talk about my holiday craft plans.  What are you up to?  xox

We Now Interrupt This Blog for NaNoWriMo

Right now I have 34,580 words.  Blogging will resume after I cross 50,000.  

I may have a finished knitting project at about the same time.  Words, stitches, incoherence, Hooray!

xox

I'm a Winner, Baby

Day 25:  50,347

And just in time for me to head out of town to eat too much and watch too much football on television with my in-laws.  Oh, and knit too much.

Here is Sonar X5 and his classmates demonstrating the new post-Thanksgiving fitness craze, the Tootie Ta.  If you don’t know this source of kindergarten hi-larity, check it out on You Tube.   

Day 20 Nano Count and other stuff I've been doing in November

I had 43,336, according to Pages.  Then I used the NaNo word count validator, which tells me that I have 43,118.  Sigh.  Computers are fickle things.  

Anyway, the writing is going well, except for the sore wrists.  I expect to top 45,000 before the end of today.  

Highlights of this November:

—For the first time in memory, I have written at least one-thousand words every day for nineteen days straight.  

—I had a personal best 6,000 word day on Saturday, beating a previous best of something around 5,000.

—I had a personal best weekday of 4,000 words on Tuesday in response to a challenge from my NaNoWriMo Municipal Liason, beating a previous weekday best of something less than 3,000. 

 —I baked a bazillion (48) rolls for a teacher appreciation luncheon, and resisted the temptation to eat a bunch of them by making the self-promise that I would make more for us.  Which I did today.  Yummmmmmy.  Light as a Dream Hot Rolls from Shirley Corriher’s Cookwise.  Fussy but completely awesome.  

—I started cleaning out stuff.  I gave away all of my homemade cloth diapers (I know that no one around here has used them for a great long while, but I invested a lot of my life in the creation and cleaning of those things and what they wrapped around.  Not easy letting them go.).  Yesterday, I challenged the kids to choose ten things to set free this year.  So far they have come up with four, but they are biggies, including furniture.  Yay for less stuff!  As an added bonus, we have freecycled all of these items and and made a couple of new friends.  Good stuff. 

—We are headed to spend Thanksgiving with family next week.  It’ll be about twice as many people as normal, and I’m expecting both a greater degree of joy and a greater degree of tension.  I’m hoping that this increase in all things will be accompanied by an increase in adult beverages.  

—Our grapefruit tree is blessing us with a bazillion grapefruits.  Which we will carry with us like modern-day Johnny Grapefruit-seeds to give to anyone who will take them.  We hope, when juiced, that they will be able to commingle with some of the aforementioned spirits.  

—There has also been singing by my beautiful children (We’ve moved from patriotic Veteran’s Day songs to festive Christmas songs), as well as a surprising amount of reading from unexpected quarters (i.e. Sonar X3), flu shots, fabric dying, an altogether pathetic amount of knitting considering how close Christmas is,  and a little bit of coloring within the lines (by me).   

I’m having a blast.  I hope you are too.  

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