Holiday Meme

Since I'm supposed to be paying bills and preparing invoices and trying to get wrinkles out of a no-iron shirt I need to wear tonight, I will instead do a Holiday Meme. No one tagged me, so I guess that makes me a bit of a loser, but hey, it's December, MY month and it's MY blog so I'll do what I want.

Christmas Meme


1. Egg Nog or Hot Chocolate?
I had a bad Jack Daniels and egg nog incident in the late '80's - I will NEVER touch the stuff again. Hot chocolate definitely. Preferably WITH marshmallows :)

2. Does Santa wrap presents or just set them under the tree?
Wrapped!

3. Colored lights on tree/house or white?
White.

4. Do you hang mistletoe?
No - isn't it poisinous? It's really not that nice-looking either. No idea where that tradition started.


5. When do you put your decorations up?
Normally I would get a real tree the weekend around my b-day Dec 12, but we'll be gone this year and my decorations are still in storage in Plainfield, so we'll be decor-less. Maybe a wreath.

6. What is your favorite holiday dish?
Chcolate gingerbread people hand-decorated to maximize originality and creativity. The sad-face ones with broken limbs are the best.

7. When and how did you learn the truth about Santa?
What do you mean?

8. Snow! Love it or Dread it?
Love it!! I have spiffy new xc skis ready to go this year.

9. Can you ice skate?
I can stay upright and move forward but it isn't pretty.

10. What is your favorite holiday tradition? Getting a good book and spending the afternoon reading it. I know, not really Christmas-related, but it's nice to relax once the hoopla is over.

Ok, I admit I cut this down from 20 to 10, but I think 10 is enough.
I tag Dodi.

December!

I love December - my birthday, holidays, people generally in a good mood, lots of chocolate and wine and cheese up for grabs - it's all good.

E. and I will miss most of the gala events this month because I wanted to do something different for my big 4-0 - remember I got my scuba certification last summer? That was in preparation for the scuba trip in less than a week!! I can't believe it's here. I still need to find a short wetsuit, but otherwise I am ready to go. So no writing, no freelance, just looking at the fish and coral and keeping an eye on my air pressure.

I warned E that I need to finish 4 to 5 books during the vacation, and he swears he can keep himself occupied during my hammock time. I don't even want to try to guess what he has planned - shark wrestling? spear fishing? cigar rolling? whatever - we'll make plans to meet for dinner.

Did I mention I can't wait? : )

10K in one day!!!

Done and done!




mood=ecstatic : )

Purple bar or bust

People at NaNoWriMo are uploading their 50k words and getting a purple WINNER! bar. I wants one... my precious...

I need to clear off my desk (Hefty Bag to the rescue) then it will be full steam ahead.

The only problem is I don't have any 'to do' scenes queued up. I might have to resort to 'shark jumping' to beef up my word count. Whatever it takes!!!

See you when that bar hits PURPLE.

Revenge!

I am trying to plant seeds to let my subconscious come up with a good revenge idea. I think revenge appeals to us because we like to think up ways to smite our enemies, but we never actually move beyond the thinking stage. The idea of actually going through with a revenge plan is irresistible. I recall reading a short story by Stephen King about revenge. The story involved a guy who went to the trouble of moving a road and painting a fake road over a pit and then burying his enemies alive in the pit. good stuff.

Weekend goal: run 15K, write 5K Sat; run 8K, write 5 k Sun. Woe be to anyone who tries to get in my way.

Now I know what a root canal feels like

Not fun. And mine wasn't even that bad - over in one session. Now my jaw is sore, but it only *hurts* when I sneeze. I've been avoiding using the left side of my mouth to chew for a couple of months already, so continuing to do so while the rc heals isn't too tough.

So my NaNo count hasn't moved, and my ToDo list has nothing crossed off. Must rectify this today. The good news is I met an accountant Wednesday, and my finances are all under control. Big sigh of relief. I was dreading finding out that I'd screwed it up and would owe big bags of cash.

Must work on ToDo list.

Would rather curl up with a book and pretend that my tooth hurts more than it does. Oh the agony...

Blame it on the Weather

I am completely lethargic.

The book is still getting written - see word count: 27,668. I need to keep up the pressure this week because next week I have a lot of freelance work booked.

Tomorrow I have to meet with an accountant to review my tax strategy. I am dreading it. Almost as much as going back to the dentist Thursday to find out if I need a root canal. ugh.
I hope it is just the weather - 3 sunless grey rainy and/or overcast days in a row, or else I am spiralling into a funk about turning 40 in less than a month.

Tug of war in my head:

My teeth are rotting because I'm getting old.
or
My teeth are rotting because I snack on licorice.

I can't believe I don't have my tax issues under control and I'm embarassed to show how much/little I earned.
or
I have zero debt and I'm doing ok.

You know, my first book wasn't that bad - I should send it to more people.
or
It completely sucks. I should shove it under my desk and focus on #2

Please please let it be sunny soon. One more grey day and the evil, pessimistic side will win.

Tomorrow: winter tires, prepare for tax man, mapquest taxman's office, meet with tax man. Oh boy can't wait. Also need to crank out more NaNo words that have nothing to do with root canal, winter tires or tax.

re: chick flick film festival. There were 8 of us total and it was actually fun -well, I had fun - I hope the others had fun. We watched Failure to Launch - cute, funny. ShopGirl - gets a thumbs down from me - too dark, and then Pretty in Pink - some things are just best left in the 80's.

Tonight I watched Friends with Money - can someone please explain it to me? I'm lost. Maybe I'm just too borderline cranky to appreciate it. At least explain why Jennifer Aniston gave that idiot personal trainer money.

HALFWAY DONE!

I hit 25K tonight. This rocks. Chick lit film festival was also a success. Details tomorrow. E is waiting with Felix & Norton and a fire. : )

Distraction/Procrastination

Just spent 3 days doing some freelance verification (proofreading plus). It's draining. Now I have time to get back on the NaNo track, but I've produced ZERO words this morning. Instead, I monkeyed around on the Internet, looking at my new favorite comic strips: LIO and Rhymes with Orange. Spent quite a bit of time daydreaming about being able to draw and being able to produce funny comics. Wasted more time trying to explain to E that e-mail from him is arriving blank. I think he's doing it on purpose to mess with me.

Going running now - must burn off beer, nachos, chicken wings and potato skins consumed at happy hour yesterday. The bikini for my upcoming Cuba trip is morphing into a one-piece with a big skirt : (

Must get back on the NaNo track. Looking for moving horror stories - pls post as comments. Thank you.

15,135 NaNo words

Woo-hoo, that's pretty damn good. I don't know if I'll hit 20k before my hunter-gatherer returns because I have a full day of freelance work tomorrow, but never say never.
I added a little Nano graph to the right so you can see my progress. Not sure how they're calculating goal. Today's should be 6*1667 = 10,002. I'm over, but not by as much as they say.

Shifting Position

That's my new NaNo working title: Shifting Position

I'm currently at 5085 which makes me caught up as of yesterday's target, with time to reach today's: 6668.

NaNo Update 8pm: 8,125 words. yeah, baby!

Now it's off to go running, plant tulips and possibly rake some leaves.

As for the deer-hunters, one of their friends who didn't go this weekend just called to get the phone number at the cottage because he found one guy's ammo under the seat of his car. Hmm, I wonder if Mr. no-ammo plans to just jump out of his tree stand with a knife. It's more sporting than using ammo, I guess.

It sounds like I am surrounded by colourful, interesting characters, but honestly, they're too bizarre for fiction. Must find more believable friends.

Freelance update: my designer has finished my business card and sent me a draft of my profile sheet. I LOVE my new card : ) and can't wait to have a thousand of them on my desk : ) :)

Introverted, anti-social, or just lazy?

November is deer-hunting season. E will be gone every weekend trying to kill Bambi, I mean take a clean shot at a trophy buck, thus providing valuable meat for the long cold winter ahead.

Anyhoo - that leaves me free to do as I please in the house each weekend. Of course there's NaNoWriMo, which will take up a good amount of time, but E is encouraging me to have the chicks over for a chick flick film festival. This is something I threaten to do each time he has the guys over for a war movie film festival. The thing is - I'm not really good at ' having people over' I get too nervous that people are bored, hungry, thirsty/whatever, and I can't relax. Plus, I don't have 'a gang' - I'd be inviting chicks in 1's and 2's who I know from different places and who don't know each other. I'm not skilled at keeping the small talk ball rolling, so I'd have to worry about lack of chit chat, too.

Is this a good reason to not have people over? No. Is socializing a skill that can be learned? Probably. What's the worst that can happen?
1- no one shows up, leaving me and a pile of movies. hmmm, not too bad.
2 - a few people show up, don't get along, are bored and never want to see me again. I can live with that.

Is it laziness? I dread the stream of reply e-mails of peope not availble on whatever day I pick, last-minute cancellations, "what can I bring?" etc. etc., but I suppose that's just laziness. These are times I wish L (my sister) were here. She's better at this stuff, and worst-case, at least it would be the 2 of us, and Em (my niece, who LOVES chick flicks) of course.

sigh

Plan-less in Ile-Perrot

I'm a Walking Psychology Experiment

The bad news: word count 452, target: 3334

The good news: I completely cleared my ToDo list!
-wrapped and mailed Nate's birthday gift
-wrote and sent a query letter
-went to a walk-in clinic to get a tetanus shot and a prescription for Hep A/B shots for my upcoming trip (this required a 2-hour wait, but I had a notebook with me and the NoPlot NoProblem book, so all was not lost)
-paid bills
-cancelled a credit card
-contacted a tax accountant
-cleaned desk and found medical insurance card
-found medical insurance forms and receipts from the last 6 months, filled in paperwork
-made a dentist appointment
-made a haircut appointment

All of these things have been lingering on my ToDo list for weeks, if not months. Why today? Because I'm supposed to be writing my freaking book, that's why. Apparently I'm insane.
I've officially run out of other things to do because I am not desperate enough to start organizing or cleaning. yuk. NaNo it is....

update 6 p.m. : word count 2,304. Not on target yet, but back in the game : )

Oh no, November!!

I talked the talk, now can I write the pages? So far, so bad -- I don't have my outline quite at the level I wanted it to be and my character sketches aren't written down, but hey- that's what the deadline is for, right? To force me to forget the excuses and get going.

Now.

ok now.

ok, maybe after a cappucino - did I mention I bought one of those snappy machines last weekend? I got a cheap one, but it seems to do the trick. Should come in handy for NaNo. I even have a NaNo buddy - someone I met at the MidWest lit fest.

Reasons why I haven't started yet:
1. Must clean desk. No, really, my arms are resting on a pile of papers as I type. I was up against a freelance deadline yesterday, and there are printouts and notes EVERYWHERE.
2. I could use a nice cuppa...

That's really it. If I quit monkeying around on the Internet, I could be writing in the next 20 min.

NaNoNaNo

Work hard, achieve greatness

I like the message this article sends. It disputes the idea of innate talent and says that greatness is achieved through hard work. I'd like to believe that it's true, because it leaves each of us with a world of choices and opportunities to be good, even great at whatever we choose. Pay attention to the article's definition of hard work - it's not just mindless hour clocking. Practice must be deliberate to have an effect.

I need to structure my writing time with this in mind. Less mindless blogging...

Lost in the Woods

I wish it were a metaphor, but it's my plan for the weekend. E and I are signed up for four hours of orienteering (navigating your way through forest and trails using a map and compass to earn points by finding checkpoints), and we're having a side competition with friends of ours: the chicks (me and other chick L) have to be the ones doing the map reading/using the compass. The guys just follow. This should be interesting. If you don't hear from me for a looong time, you'll know why - I'll be still bumbling around Gatineau Park.

IronGirl is in

I just signed up for NaNoWriMo, and I need to put an image of myself online, so here it is. I don't actually look like that; I had my hair 'done' straight to try to look professional. My hair usually looks uncontrollably curly. Not sure why I'm so shiny, either. Odd. Look for me as IronGirl.

For the month of November, I'll have crazy ponytail hair, no makeup and glasses. Nice. Hopefully compared to E's deer-hunting compadres I'll still look good. If I don't, I'm in trouble.

Ha ha - just saw this: www.willwriteforchocolate.com/

I'm skimming through my 'how to' books before plunging in again with book 2. I'm enjoying Sol Stein's books. Here are a couple of quotes from How to Grow a Novel:

"Open your mind to the possibilites your imagination could generate."

"In our not-yet-acknowledged secret garden lie the seeds of our best not-yet-written stories."

To take the edge off the touchy-feeliness, here is the inspiring message E posted on my wall: Analyse,
Improvise,
Adapt (crossed out), Exfoliate and
Overcome (crossed out), Moisturize.

Survey

I notice that sometimes I have a prejudice against age gap (10 yrs+) couples. I know there is no reason for it, and once people are in their 30's, age becomes much less of an issue than attitude.
I am trying to gather information that I can use to create believable fiction, so I am conducting an informal survey to find out if others share this prejudice or have been exposed to it, particularly in the workplace. I am interested in older woman/younger man relationships - not pickups. If you wouldn't mind sharing your opinions/stories with me, I'd appreciate hearing them.

Questions:
1-Are you prejudiced against older women/younger men? Why?
2-Have you witnessed older woman/younger man prejudice at work or in your circle of friends/family?
3-Do you think a woman who has a younger man as her significant other is judged negatively by her work peers? At what kinds of corporate events would this be apparent?
4-Do you think a woman who has a younger man as her significant other would be held back from being promoted to a management position in the workplace?

You can be completely anonymous - create a fake hotmail account and send me your story, or say it happened to a friend, or change names/personal details to protect the innocent. Work the older women/younger men issue into conversation with your friends and let me know what they say.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Road Trip

If you have never gone for a drive through Vermont in the fall, you are missing out! The colors are amazing. Making the drive in E's freshly repainted RX made it that much more fun : )

For my first Thanksgiving as a Canadian, I went to Boston to run the Tufts 10K for women. It's a tradition! Canadians don't do Thanksgivng all out the way Americans do, so it's not like E's parents had a big feast ready with two empty chairs waiting for us.

The 10K went pretty well, considering that there were 7,000 women running and it was HOT, not warm, but HOT. Smart women has support people running to the water table, then running cups of water back to them. If only I'd known, I could have put E to better use. I had to stand in line for cups of water, losing valuable minutes. Too hot to skip the hydration stations. E and Aunt N were my support system and cheered me on to the finish in style : )

Now it's back to... reality? rain? I need to get myself in gear to be ready for NaNo Wri Mo. I have a 3/4 baked plan of my next book, but I need to get it fully outlined and planned so I can start writing Nov 1.

Back to the Routine

Now that the LitFest is over and the summer freelancing feast is over it's time to get back to my normal routine.
1-Send e. off to the train with his lunch bag and Shooter book (hey, at least he's reading. E. claims that reading a sniper book on the train guarantees that no one sits next to him.)
2-Eat healthy breakfast and drink pot of coffee
3-Go to office, check e-mail
4-Realize I have no routine
5-Search for time organization strategy from financial planner
6-Try to create agenda using Word; hit roadblock requiring the original Word CD. Try to download agenda from Internet; hit roadblock requiring Explorer instead of Firefox.
Maybe I'm not cut out for a 'routine'.