Am headed to LA for Turkey week, that should be fun. I will be paying a big chunk of Stupid tax to the local Apple store during that time, where my Mac shall sit for that duration having it’s keyboard repaired. Though it means NaNoing on my teeny netbook, I’m looking forward to not having a laptop for awhile, as it will make it near impossible to do work for my job. Considering I haven’t had a sick day where I didn’t have to still work, and I was crouched in the corner at the HP theme park in FL last spring, supposedly on vacation, doing work, it’ll be nice to have absolutely no way to do work. I am struggling with some serious burnout issues, and am really hoping that this break (along with my upcoming week in Richmond) will help.

Speaking of that week in Richmond, I’m not going to insanely plan it like I have other trips. This is because I want to be lazy, and it’s not like I have a car to use (not really looking to rent a car for the week, and the trips mostly to see my parents, who I haven’t seen since last September, anyhow).

Not too much else going on. Now that I’m writing more, I find that I’m reading more. Which is a good thing. Am kinda cracked out on sleep, which sucks. I look at this laptop and my phone too close to bed, which messes me up. So I’m trying to shut them off earlier, and read before bed. But now I’m waking up an hour before I need to, and then dozing off again 10 minutes before my alarm. I just want a decent night of sleep, but that’s been proving challenging. It’s even more frustrating when my body doesn’t cooperate on the weekends as well, as I super depend on weekends to try catching up. Oh well.

I need more time. I want to learn Ruby, and then rails. Possibly Python as well. Every day I am reminded of how many things I don’t know, and it drives me maaaaaaad. I mean, I guess it’s good, if I knew everything what would be the point of getting up. I just feel like unless I’m actively learning new things and producing new things, I fall behind, which is super stressful.

I need to go skiing or snowboarding. I got pants to do so, and have yet to experience either. If needed, I’ll look for a Meetup group that’s doing the beginner’s version of one or the other, with hopefully a carpool involved. I’ve been rear-ended once up in those mountains, and my little car is mountain-shy still!

On a final note, I ate all of the chocolates and now have none. Dang!

It’s weird, too – I stalled out earlier this month at around 15,000 words, stopped writing for 4 days, and then in a glorious burst of the English language tapped out a bunch and leapt ahead. And, uh, then Thanksgiving vacation happened. And working full-time (I was fortunate (?) to be underemployed these 2 years past). I am sorry, snarky vampire story, you will have to stay at 35,000 words for the time being. It’s been fun to write, and I’d like to keep going with it, but not at the crankin’ nano pace, I’m afraid. I’ve also spend the last month itching to finish a painting, but not feeling justified in spending the time to work on it when I have all this writing to do. D’oh!

I really do like Nanowrimo, though. The write-ins are great, they make me almost feel like I have a social life! I feel like a lot of the people that go to them are of the “creative and weird people who Get Stuff Done” types, who I need more of in my life. I also think Nanowrimo as an exercise is really useful and productive as well. It helps to blast away that idea that there’s something wrong with writing crap, or something wrong with trying to write without the inspiration. If nothing else, it teaches you that one’s writing muse is most likely to visit when one is *gasp* writing! I know I had plenty of times when I sat down and had a hard time getting into what I was working on, and so my characters just chatted trivially back and forth and did trivial things, and then all of the sudden these things were leading to plot-affecting things that were interesting and tied into other things and ultimately felt like quality writing. And there’s also the fact that even if no quality writing occurs, crap writing does, and crap writing is so much better then no writing. It’s a whole lot easier to edit an awful novel then no novel at all. And even if it is a giant pile of dung, who’s to say it can’t be sculpted into an adorable poo-pet and sold for millions?

Hmm, other things going on…I decorated for Xmas! Woo! As I continue to rock the purple $1 Target tree. I’d like to find some caroling to do this year, as I am a sucker for singing badly. I’ve got shopping about 1/2 done at this point, was hoping to be done by now but that would require more effort than I am capable of. I’m super tired lately, but I’ll just blame that on my mild tendencies toward seasonal affective disorder. Must remember to make more attempts to go hike and walk and stuff on the weekends, so I can absorb sweet delicious sunlight.

Oh yeah, we went to Santa Fe for Thanksgiving break. It was dry and fabulous and we looked at art and ate things and hiked and I rocked the continental breakfast waffle machine and such.

And I am super tired, I hear beds are all the rage for sleeping now.

I’m doing Nanowrimo again this year (whereupon I try to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days). This is my 3rd year – the first was successful, and the second still sits untouched since Dec 1st. That fact that I churned out 50,000 words doesn’t matter so much if the vast majority of it is pure drivel! Anyhow, I’ve got a vague idea for this year, was hoping to get an outline done but we’ll see about my level of ambition.

You know what makes me super sad? The fact that there are no Lindt stores out here. Even when the one in Richmond disappeared, I could still head to DC or Charlottesville to get my fix. But alas, no such solution here. On a related note, I’ve been trying to get all my Christmas shopping done by Thanksgiving. Last year, we wound up at a mall the day before Xmas, and it was seriously traumatizing, so I’m trying desperately to make sure that never happens again!

And on a final note, I have a super sweet new phone! I’ve had one of those “Upgrade your phone for free!” coupons from AT&T for awhile, and decided that, rather then get one of the free phones, I’d throw in some money and get an Iphone. Was gonna just get an Iphone 3 at first, but then I got swayed by the fact that I could get a refurbished Iphone 4 for $150. After doing some research and discovering that there’s not difference between new and refurbished Apple products (and the fact that 4 hasn’t been out that long anyhow), I got it, and it is shiny indeed! At this point, it’s functioning mostly as a game system for me. Angry Birds and Plants VS Zombies are helping me through my period of sickness! And I love the fact that there are so many games for just $.99. My next step will be to figure out how I can make some Iphone apps. This is mostly because I want to get my first Nanowrimo novel, a Choose Your Own Adventure type book, playable on an Iphone. I am a sucker for having as many markets for my products as possible!

Oh yeah, and on a final note, this is me as a zombie in the Denver Zombie Crawl this year!

Andrew just hijacked this post, but I’m leaving it there for posterity.

Anyhow, I made sushi the other night. It was awesome. If you are interested in such things, go read about it and see pictures here! I also made mesir wat, which is essentially a giant vat of lentils. It’s really good and really cheap and lasts forever (and makes you regular to boot!) No pictures up for that, yet.

So I’m back to square one for social time. We’ve been moved in here a total of two months now. The first bit of that was occupied with the basics of unpacking and locating furniture. Then came the need of “need to be social!”, so I signed up for approximately one gazillion Meetup groups. Went to two different hiking meetups, and while the hiking was fun and the people were nice, the groups seemed a.) mostly of people a bit older then us, b.) mostly of people who were far more interested in expensive equipment and less so in “I just wanna walk up this mountain for awhile”, and c.) caused my car to get rear-ended. In an ideal world, none of these should be an issue. But, in any case, I think we might need to seek out people with more parallel interests then just the shared one of enjoying wandering up large hills. Especially since winter encroaches, meaning my car is much more likely to go sliding off a hill into a ditch whereupon I freeze to death.

November was convenient for social time, because of Nanowrimo. There were writeins everywhere, and did one every Thurs. at the library near us as well as every Sat, at random locations around Denver. Number of common interests was definitely much higher then the hiking meetups, but now Nano is over, along with the writeins. Mind you, I could still certainly use them, as the book I’m working on is far from done. Anyhow, I suppose it’s back to Meetups. Debating going to a Drupal users group. Or maybe a Harry Potter fan meetup, could be exciting. Gainful employment would also help things along as well, but then again my OWP experience, where there were lots of neat people, is not exactly representative of all of my employment experiences. In any case, I suspect this is a common experience for anyone that moves to a new location, and I’m confidant that time + getting settled in with help expand social opportunities.

As for job stuff? Still in the air. Have spent last week rooting around in Drupal. I need to learn how to make patches, as Ubercart is littered with inline CSS, which is simply not appropriate for anyone that wishes to design the checkout process without hacking up code they really shouldn’t have to hack up. I’d heard that Drupal was better for developers then for designers, this might be why. Of course, first I need to learn how to use CVS, in order to check out files to make changes to be able to make a patch. Which is good, in that I shall learn things and can put things on a resume, but still, it can be a bit aggravating when I have a simple little change in mind and I have to plow through 23489389423 processes to make that change happen. However, it would be super cool to be a Drupal contributor, so plow I must.

Oh yeah, Job stuff. Meeting tomorrow with a cousin (the relation is more complicated, but cousin works for now) to build a few University health websites. We’ll see how that goes. I may or may not be hired by someone in North Boulder, but the communication hasn’t been steady so we’ll see. That would involve some commuting and some working from home. Pay is a bit less then I could hope for, but definitely more then I was afraid I’d have to settle for. Anyhow, I’ll just see how things go. The router site is coming along, still some bugs but it all seems manageable enough at this point.

Oh yeah, $3.50 theatre nearby. Gonna go see Zombieland (finally) sometime this week. Yay!

Quest for the Fountain of Life can also be read online for free! This way, people can preview the book first, and hopefully share the link with their friends.

I’m still trying to figure out how to market this thing, so I appreciate any suggestions on that, as well as any feedback on the book itself. Thanks!

I’ve recently discovered the joys of a magical manga series about cooking called Oishinbo. I don’t generally get into manga for some reason, but this one is particularly exciting. Probably because it makes me really hungry, the food in it is drawn particularly well. Apparently they made it into an anime back in the 80s, but it was never translated into English. The manga started being published again this year, so maybe enough American types will get into the manga to make it financially viable to translate the anime into English (I’d be happy with either dub or sub).

Watched the Passion of Joan of Arc, which was made back in the late 20′s, complete with intertitles and orchestra for sound. It was really good, and caused me to sit and read the entire Joan of Arc wikipedia entry afterwards. It also caused me to look up the history of breastfeeding. See, I found it interesting that, in the film at one point, there is a closeup of a baby being breastfed, nipple and all. And I’m not too knowledgeable about older movies, but as far as I knew, they didn’t go in for nudity and such back then. So after a cursory glance on the internet, it seems that breastfeeding in public was pretty normal up through the 1940s or so, and then at some point after that it became seen as scandalous or something. It’s generally considered legal to do now, but you can still get harassed by random people and asked to cover up and such. My brief poking encountered a case where someone was asked to leave a theme park for doing it in public, and another commented on the fact that she was breastfeeding in an area where children are present. Which is weird, since as children and all, it wasn’t that long since they themselves were probably breastfed. And if you’re gonna have your kids exposed to nudity, wouldn’t that be a good way to do it? Since the kids are more likely then not already learning via semi-nudity from advertising and media and such that breasts are sexual, it seems good to also include opportunities for your kids to learn that they’re functional?

And speaking of breasts, I’ve been having a fabulous last several months, in that the vast majority of my bras fit. As long as I don’t get glued to the front of this computer for the duration of the winter, I will hopefully continue that trend. It’s kinda useful to be really new to a place and not know much of anyone, well, useful in the lack of Christmas junk food being slogged at me, which I am generally more then happy to eat because it is delicious.

And on a final note, Nanowrimo is going more or less ok. Am at 13126 words right now, need to get to 15,000 by tomorrow night.

Drew was spectacular as a vampire: he wore khakis and gobs of glitter.

We went to the Nanowrimo pre-party in someone’s basement, which was fun. Lots of niblets plus socializing and such. It took me most of the night to figure out I had “Harry Potter” stuck to my back. Started on the book at midnight, only to lose battery power at 1:00 or so (silly me didn’t bring my cord). At just under 4000 words now, am a little closer to having a plot even if not all the way there yet.

Oh yeah, and we have a ginormous number of burritos. You know how Chipotle was doing their “Dress like a burrito, get a free burrito” deal on Halloween evening? We hit four Chipotles. Thus, 8 burritos. Unfortunately, they’re not as good reheated, but they’re still pretty tasty.

NaNoWriMo is coming up in less then 10 days now, and both Drew and I are gonna do it this time around. I wanted book #1 to be out of the way before book #2 got started on, and I’m just waiting on proof copy #3 (the final one, at least it better be) to come in the mail. Assuming that’s perfect, I can set the book for sale on Createspace and Amazon. Then comes the fun part of figuring out how to market one of these babies.