I am, right at this very moment, sitting in a coffee house with Richard. My left wrist is very sore, in part because of all this typing I have been doing on a laptop and not on the ergonomic keyboard I usually use, and in part because I oh-so-cleverly managed to walk straight into the piano this morning and now there is yet another bruise to add to my collection. Hi. My name is Jennifer and I am VERY CLUMSY. Sigh.

In a little while we’ll pack up the laptops and head back home and do some last minute packing, and then head down to San Jose for Thanksgiving dinner with Richard’s family. But right now, I am still here, sitting in the coffee shop, feeling quite pleased with myself (recent bruise acquisition not withstanding).

Gee. I can’t imagine why.

Happy Thanksgiving to all my US readers (and happy regular old Thursday to everyone else).

Nanowrimo update: Um. Really? The above was not enough of a clue?

Originally published at A Cat By Any Other Name. Please leave any comments there.

Today I did exactly two things of note (poking the cats and getting dressed really do not count here).

1) I wrote – for a few hours during the morning at a local coffee shop, just me and my laptop and a large hazelnut hot chocolate, and then this evening, once Richard and I had eaten dinner and the bread came out of the oven, at a second coffee shop, this time with some decaf because I need to start cutting back on the caffeine soon.

2) I baked. My mom-in-law asked if I’d bring dessert for Thanksgiving this year, so this afternoon I headed off to the grocery store and braved the pre-Thanksgiving crowds to stock up on cans of pumpkin and evaporated milk and whipped cream. I made a pumpkin pie (My very first ever, actually, because to be honest I do not actually *like* pumpkin pie – it is the kind of thing that you would think should be good, except that it is squishy and *wrong*. Yes, I know, like you all needed any more reasons why it is that I am odd) and I followed the directions in the recipe very carefully, so it at least looks like it turned out just fine. I guess I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see how it tastes. I also made pumpkin bread, because my older sister mentioned baking it on Facebook and I was suddenly struck with a burning need to go do exactly the same.

Nanowrimo update: I feel like, now that this thing is actually wrapping up, I am finally seeing some direction in my novel. Nice to see that it only took me 40,000+ words to finally figure out that little thing called a plot. Anyway, with the two bouts of writing, I now have just slightly under 2500 words left to go.

Originally published at A Cat By Any Other Name. Please leave any comments there.

The first thing I did when I got up this morning was to can the apple butter. Seven more jars, and this time only one of them didn’t seal. Now I must decide whether I want to turn the jar in the refrigerator into more apple butter cinnamon rolls, or else try making apple butter pie (just like pumpkin pie except you use apple butter instead of the pumpkin pie filling). Hmm. I think the rolls might win, but whatever it is the apple butter becomes, will have to wait until after Thanksgiving.

Anyway, today I’m going to share two videos with you.

This first one is of Rupert and Ingrid. It occurred to me that, while I posted about *getting* the kittens, and have been merrily posting pictures and stories about them to Twitter and Facebook, I never managed to transfer that sort of thing over here. So the first, and most important factoid is that when we took the two little kittens to the vet to get fixed, the vet called to let us know that Orpha was actually a boy. So Orpha (the crazy little tabby) is now Rupert.

They are very busy, very curious, very cute. They get into everything. There is pretty much nowhere in the house that is safe from them anymore. Anything and everything is a fascinating new toy – this includes knitting patterns (Ingrid has snatched papers straight from my hands), raw beets, shelled walnuts, cardboard of any kind, the drain cap for the bathtub, Richard’s sink, and on and on.

I heard noise from the kitchen this morning and came out to find them working industriously on a new project. This, right here, would be why it is that we are thinking that Christmas is going to be extremely…interesting this year.

The second video I wanted to share has nothing whatsoever to do with kittens. I know that most of the people in my generation probably associate Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” with the movie “Wayne’s World”. I, however, will always associate it with when my oldest nephew was a tiny little baby. My sisters and my mom and I were all together – I’m not sure at whose house – and we were all laughing and tired and getting punchy, and Bohemian Rhapsody came on, and my sisters and I started lip-synching and head-banging along. I suspect if someone had had a video camera it would have been one of those marvelous home movies we could have brought out to completely and utterly embarrass the nephew when he’s a teenager trying to look cool – irrefutable proof that his entire maternal side of the family is Just Plain Weird. But alas, such a video does not exist. So you will all have to make do with this version instead. I suspect my oldest nephew will prefer it this way.

Nanowrimo update: 43,010. This time last week I was despairing that I’d even be able to finish. Funny what cranking out more than 11,000 words in one weekend can do for one’s writing morale.

Originally published at A Cat By Any Other Name. Please leave any comments there.

I already had today off – in fact, faced with a vacation balance that’s getting too high, I’ve taken the whole week off – but Richard took today off as well. It was a good thing, since we both knew we’d likely be tired and sleep deprived from the night before.

So today we’ve focused on having a quiet and slowish sort of day. He made a quick grocery store run while I stayed home and peeled and cored and chopped another small pile of apples and stuffed them into the crockpot to turn into more apple butter. One of our fellow Nanowrimoers gave me a recipe for apple walnut cake, since he knew I was looking for ways to use up lots of apples (note to self – next year, do not buy two huge cases of apples at one time), so I made a half batch of that. We had spaghetti and homemade meatballs for lunch, and then ate slices of the apple cake and oh wow is it good. That recipe’s definitely a keeper.

I didn’t do any writing while at home, but I did manage to get some work done when we packed up our laptops and headed off to Coffee Works (the new-to-us place) again for a few hours of writing time. I’m not sure why it never occurred to us to check this place out before, since it’s not that far away, but I’m glad we found it now. Lots of seating, plenty of electric outlets, and they make a wonderful hazelnut hot chocolate.

Nanowrimo update: Despite feeling kind of sluggish and unmotivated due to residual donut/pizza/caffeine hangover from last night, I still managed to keep myself on track – 39,165 words. Just a little over 10,000 more to go.

Originally published at A Cat By Any Other Name. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve done Nanowrimo twice before – once I finished; the second time I got about 3000 words in and then gave up because life got in the way. Richard’s done it almost every year since 2001, and every year we’ve donated money to the cause. But this year we decided to aim a little bit higher, and try to raise enough money to attend the Night of Writing Dangerously. Last weekend we finally hit our goal ($300 – the minimum needed so we could both attend), and we’ve been looking forward to tonight ever since.

Richard’s co-municipal liason for the region drove down to our house, and then the three of us continued on to Davis to pick up another Nanowriter, and then off we set for San Francisco. We gave ourselves plenty of time because even though it was a Sunday afternoon, you can never be sure what you will encounter on the freeway between here and the Bay Area. If you allot out only about the amount of time it *should* take to drive, you will inevitably hit traffic / accident / rush hour / something, and be late. If you give yourself lots of extra time, it will be smooth sailing all the way, and you will be early. Naturally, since we gave ourselves nearly an hour to spare, we didn’t hit a single snag. Heck, we even found street parking less than 3 blocks away from the venue, which is pretty unheard of for San Francisco. It felt a little silly to be there so early, but it turned out to have been worth it; as we were leaving later we talked to a couple who’d left Sacramento just a little after us, and didn’t make it down until two hours after the event started.

Luckily there was a nice, comfy lobby for us to lurk in until the doors opened, and as it turned out, we weren’t the only ones who had erred on the side of caution for driving time, so there was quite a crowd gathered by the time 5pm rolled around and they finally opened the doors and let us all go inside.

The six-hour long event was an absolute blast. There were about 200 people all clustered around tables, typing furiously away on laptops. Every once in a while someone would go up to the front to ring a giant bell, indicating that they’d just reached their 50,000 word goal (one of those was the other ML for our region). They had word sprints where people tried to see how many words they could crank out in a set amount of time. Chris Baty (the guy who started the whole Nanowrimo thing in the first place) gave a talk. They had a room in the back where you could have your ‘author picture’ taken (Richard wore a Viking helmet for his. I did not). There was food and drink galore – a candy buffet to start us off, a full dinner, and then later on someone showed up with a mountain of pizza and a massive amount of crazy, giant donuts. Since this was a thing for writers, there was plenty of coffee and soda and anything else people wanted to drink. They had even set up free WiFi for us, which came in extra handy because I’m doing my novel in Google docs, which is all online.

The six hours flew by, and admittedly I did not manage to do as much writing as I did yesterday. But all I wanted to do was get a little ahead of the game, and I did. I’m not sure we’ll be able to do this every year (since I know Richard will keep on doing Nano, and I think maybe I’ll try it again next year too), but I’m really glad that we had a chance to do this at least once.

Nanowrimo update: 37,565 words, which means that not only am I ever so slightly *ahead* of the game for the next, oh, four minutes (until tomorrow hits), but that with all the coffee shop hopping we did yesterday, I managed to crank out about 11,400 words in the course of two days, and all on the laptop. Only one teensy side to all that crazy writing for the weekend: hello there, wrist pain, we meet again!

Originally published at A Cat By Any Other Name. Please leave any comments there.

Okay. Enough is enough with this whole piddling around, not getting any writing done. We had a lot of chores we really should have been doing today, but…it is November, and the end of the month is approaching at a fast clip.

So today was all about the writing. Literally. We got up and ate bagels for breakfast and finished off the pot of coffee. And then we packed up our laptops and headed off to a coffee shop and found some tables near electric outlets (more of an issue for me than for Richard because my old clunker laptop no longer likes to hold a charge) and we drank coffee and we wrote.

We went home and ate lunch, and I swapped out the laundry between washer and dryer and got another load started, and then we grabbed our laptops and headed back out again, this time to a new-to-us coffee shop a bit closer to home. We’ve driven by this place umpteen times, but never when we’ve been thinking ‘coffee’, and prior to this we’ve usually just gone to either the places with scheduled write-ins, or to more familiar locations. But I’m very glad we finally thought to try this place, because it’s large and has lots of seating and the coffee was good, and I found a table with an outlet right away, and we got a lot of work done.

Back home, this time for another laundry swap over, and dinner, and then we decided to give it one more whirl and headed back out again. Took a few tries to find somewhere with open tables, but we eventually ended up at a Peets and we drank hot chocolate and wrote and wrote and wrote.

Nanowrimo update: Apparently spending all day coffee shop hopping was what I needed to get the creativity back in gear. Wrote about 7,000 words today, which means that even though I’m not completely caught up, I’m a lot closer. Phew.

Originally published at A Cat By Any Other Name. Please leave any comments there.

Today was the start of ten days off of work. I suppose I really ought to have tried to do some writing, shouldn’t I? Ha, we all know how well that went.

I did, however, get some important shopping done, spending several hours camped out on my computer, pinned down by a slowly revolving cast of sleepy kittens and cats, working my way through wishlists and spreadsheets of ideas, firing emails off to people to double-check and confirm. The end result – a majority of the December holiday/birthday shopping is now done. It’s not complete, of course, because alas, my very favorite online shopping site does not yet offer *everything* (personal note to Amazon.com, please hurry up and finish taking over the online retail world, m’kay?), but considering that prior to today we hadn’t done a single bit of Christmas shopping, today counts as a success.

Aside from the shopping, mostly today I just read books and knit. And then, just about one minute after Richard walked in the door, I finally headed out, off to a friend’s house for another Buffy marathon. She had made pizza dough from scratch and we all stood around in her kitchen and chopped veggies and rolled out dough and assembled dinner. The pizzas and the bread salad were absolutely delicious (also, I now need to get the recipe for the salad!) and there was much talking and laughing, and by the time we finally all migrated to the living room to knit and watch Buffy, several hours had passed. So for a Buffy ‘marathon’, we actually only made it through two more episodes (we’re working our way through season 2 now). But it was a whole lot of fun, hanging out with friends new and old, eating delicious food, doing a little knitting and sharing the Whedon love.

Nanowrimo update: La la la I can’t hear you.

Originally published at A Cat By Any Other Name. Please leave any comments there.

I know that I have been stressing all week about how I was going to get everything done, so maybe that is the key – the more I stress, the more that eventually gets accomplished. Who knows.

There was a write-in planned for tonight, but Thursday nights are knitting nights for me, and lately I’ve had this tendency to skip them more and more because I’m so tired by this point in the week, and I need to stop doing that. So Richard brought his laptop and I brought my knitting (since conveniently both groups meet in exactly the same coffee house, which means there is occasionally some competition for chairs when things get busy), and I had an absolutely lovely time. I worked on some mindless garter stitch gift knitting, which was about all I figured my brain could cope with at this point in the month. I will admit that I did bring along a lace project but tired brain + low lighting + dark yarn and fiddly pattern do not a happy knitter make, so…garter stitch it was.

Nanowrimo update: Ha ha nothing to see here, move along.

Originally published at A Cat By Any Other Name. Please leave any comments there.

I could probably come up with something completely pithy to say about today, except that I really can’t find the motivation. I have one more day before I am off from work for over a week and I am starting to panic ever so slightly about the possibility that I might not be able to finish everything that I need to get done. I keep eying my total word count and feeling a bit overwhelmed by how much is still to be written, even though I know I should be glad that I’ve even gotten as far as I am, considering how long I’ve been out of practice. I am at least glad that we spent some time this past weekend stocking the freezer with meals, because this week has been kind of insane, and tonight is the only night this week when I had absolutely nothing planned. Although that wouldn’t have mattered because even if I’d cooked something, Richard had a writers group to go to, so there still wouldn’t have been enough time.

I did do a little bit of writing though, at home by myself while he was out. It’s still so hard to work when I am at home, and it is so frustrating that everything and anything can distract me from something that I know needs to be done, and that I *want* to do.

Nanowrimo update: 26,096 Hey, look at that, I’m only 2 days behind (gah).

Originally published at A Cat By Any Other Name. Please leave any comments there.

I finished off one half of one of the big projects that must be finished at work before the end of the week this morning, but didn’t really feel like I could heave any metaphorical sense of relief because despite everything I’ve done so far, I have yet to check a single thing off the entire list. Maybe I should have broken the list down into sub-tasks, just so I could cross off the little bits and feel like I am making progress. Hmm.

Tonight after work instead of heading directly home, I headed off to Dixon to pick up my mom, and then the two of us continued on to Vacaville to a hardware store. This is because tonight was another of Meek’s Ladies Nights, and since they were going to talk about windows, we both wanted to attend.

It was a smaller crowd than in years past (I’ve talked about going to these things before but am feeling too lazy to go digging around for previous entry links), and instead of providing a buffet type meal of snacky sort of food, this time they had set up a bunch of tables (which amusingly turned out to be huge rectangles of plywood balanced on stacks of giant paint buckets, covered with tablecloths) and as the various speakers came out to talk, they served us dinner.

It’s always kind of fun to go to these and see the wide range of women who attend. There are the tiny little elderly ones who look as if merely the thought of wielding a power tool might knock them off their feet, who still will raise their hands and ask questions that make it quite clear that they are more than comfortable around the workshop. There are the obvious mother and daughter pairings – a few with younger daughters still in school, but most closer to the ages of my mom and me. And then, strangely, there were two women who had brought along their husbands. Despite the fact that this is meant specifically for women only, these two always bring the men. One of them always remains very quiet in the background, as if he, at least, understands that no one else came here to listen to him, but the other is the sort of obnoxious, full-of-himself old fart who constantly interrupts the speakers in a way that makes it obvious that he thinks he is ever so clever, and surely all the rest of us should think so too. He showed up last year, and it was obvious that a lot of the women there were annoyed, and it amused me that when he showed up this year, my mom and I weren’t the only ones who made pointed comments (loud) about this being just for women.

Regardless of the obnoxious old fart, it was still a fun night. I picked up some information on another possible decking material for when we finally get around to replacing our back porch (something we will hopefully be able to do *before* it crumbles apart completely all on its own), and also now know how to completely disassemble our windows, should I at some point have a burning desire to do so. Plus, like last year, I also won one of the raffle prizes, and picked out some kind of nifty gadget that should come in extremely useful when we eventually get around to tackling the crown molding downstairs.

Nanowrimo update: Hey look, over there! A bird! (what, you’re not distracted? Um. Darn).

Originally published at A Cat By Any Other Name. Please leave any comments there.

Today was one of those crazy-busy days at work, where I sat down and made myself a list of every single thing that has to be done by end of week (or rather, every single thing that I currently know about, because the very nature of what I do means that I am never entirely sure what someone is going to need me to write up, or track down next). I came home with just about enough time to inhale some dinner, and then it was off to rehearsal, where I managed to somehow get there early so that I could run through some of the songs with a few of the other singers. I am very much looking forward to our upcoming concerts, since some of the music we are singing is absolutely gorgeous, but also because they are the weekend after the end of November, and once November and the concerts are over, life should start to feel a bit more normal again.

Nanowrimo update: Still the same as it was yesterday, and the way this week is shaping up, I suspect that’s going to be a common refrain. It is possible that I might be getting ever so slightly nervous about having taken this thing on.

Originally published at A Cat By Any Other Name. Please leave any comments there.

Today was a little bit more relaxing than yesterday. Mostly, today, we puttered. We did laundry. We lounged around and read books. We poked at the cats. We ate leftover apple butter cinnamon rolls that I made yesterday morning (because what else am I supposed to do when two jars of apple butter don’t seal and are now sitting in the fridge?). I dragged out the pretzel dough I’d put in the refrigerator on Friday and we rolled those out, and then ate several, straight from the oven, for lunch.

It was nice and relaxing, except for the fact that we just were not getting any writing done. So at about 4, we loaded up our laptops and then drove from coffee shop to coffee shop until we found one that had open tables near an electric outlet (because my giant, ancient laptop no longer reliably holds a charge). I don’t know why it is that we are both having such a hard time getting writing done at home, but I suppose a cup of peppermint hot chocolate is a small price to pay for lurking at a coffee shop if that is what it takes to get the brain rolling.

And now we are back home, to a house that is full of wonderful smells. There is the faint lingering aroma of the pretzels baked earlier this afternoon, and when we got back from the coffee shop I put together a huge batch of meatballs with ground turkey and spinach and cheese, while Richard assembled a pair of tuna pies. With all the cooking and baking I did on Friday, the freezer and the refrigerator are now nicely stocked with enough to get us through the next week without requiring any trips to restaurants or grocery stores. Hopefully that will leave the evenings wide open for more writing. November is starting to feel like a very, very long month.

Nanowrimo: 25,096 words, which means I’m halfway there! Now if I could just managed to stop randomly switching between past and present tense when typing, I’d be all set.

Originally published at A Cat By Any Other Name. Please leave any comments there.

Today was, amusingly, all about the writing. Well, it was sort of all about the writing, in that it was all about people getting together and talking about writing, laughing about writing, eating food and avoiding writing, and then finally doing the actual writing.

Since tomorrow’s the 15th, that means we’re about halfway through November. So today was the Halfway Hootenany at our house, which was really just an excuse for people to get together and bring food and laptops and pretend to do some writing.

Richard and I did some cursory cleaning, and decided to see how it would go if we did not lock the kittens away this time around. As long as they were monitored in the beginning of the gathering, it turned out just fine – as the first group arrived, we all gathered in the kitchen, nibbling food and taking turns plucking kittens off the kitchen island and depositing them on the floor. By the time everyone else had shown up, the kittens were finally wearing down, and ended up crashing on Richard’s chair in the computer room (although there were a few of us who made extra sure all food was covered and kitten-proofed, just in case.

There was another write-in scheduled up in Roseville for the evening and originally Richard and I had not planned on going. But as the Halfway Hootenany was winding down, we looked at each other and both agreed that we were more likely to get more writing done if we didn’t just stay home. So we did a hasty post-party clean-up, grabbed our laptops, and like I said, this is why today has been all about the writing.

Nanowrimo update: Two back-to-back write-ins and a looming deadline (the halfway point) were apparently what I needed to get back into the swing of writing. I managed to crank out about 3500 words today, putting me at just a hair under 23,000 total. Somehow, knowing I’ve only got about 2,000 words left to get to that halfway goal is a lot easier to think about than the 6,000 I was facing on Friday night.

Originally published at A Cat By Any Other Name. Please leave any comments there.

I am writing this, sitting at coffee shop in midtown Sacramento, sipping some kind of cold, blended coffee concoction, and listening gleefully as the music system plays a whole bunch of songs from the 80’s. It’s like I’ve time-traveled back to high school, except that back then I would never have been caught dead lurking in a coffee shop, and back then I was doing all my writing in spiral-bound five-subject notebooks, scribbling all my stories down by hand. Considering the state of my handwriting (possibly I should have gone into medicine, is what I’m saying here), it’s probably a good thing that eventually I switched over to typing. Much better to be able to read what I wrote when I look back at it later.

This was the first week of my reduced work schedule, and today was my first of several months of every Friday off. So Richard went off to work and I stayed home and kicked off my first ‘furlough Friday’ by curling up under the comforter in bed, with a stack of books and some sleepy kittens and a fresh cup of coffee, and spending several blissful hours doing nothing remotely productive. Lovely!

Ever since I got that notice at work last week I’ve been slowly building up a list of Things To Do, now that I am going to have all this extra spare time. This list includes all kinds of exciting (ha) things, like cleaning the baseboards downstairs, and going outside and yanking out all the old, dead cherry tomato plants and putting in some onions and garlic, or finally getting around to organizing the barely contained disaster zone that is the random storage and yarn closet. So naturally, today, I did not do a single one of those things. Instead, after I polished off two paperbacks and the last of my coffee, I dragged out my recipe folder and lined up the flour and sugar and eggs and my trusty Kitchenaid mixer, and spent the majority of the day having myself a little baking orgy. I made double chocolate chip scones, and dough for pretzels, and one and a half dozen French rolls. I made a pizza with homemade white whole wheat dough and some of the tomato sauce I canned this summer. I took another reading break and worked my way through one more paperback (and people wonder why I take out books from the library a dozen at a time), and then went back into the kitchen and sterilized some jars and lids and canned seven pints of apple butter. And then I finished it all off by whipping up a lasagna, because I have been wanting one for quite some time now, but never had quite enough energy (or time) to get it all together until today.

Nanowrimo update: 18,244 words so far, but I took a break to do a bit of blogging, and I suspect we’ll be here at the coffee shop for another hour or so. I am going to err on the side of optimism and say that while I doubt I will be caught up completely to where I should be, there is a very good chance I could actually break 20,000 words before I go home tonight. We shall see.

Originally published at A Cat By Any Other Name. Please leave any comments there.

I have been feeling a bit adrift in my novel lately. It’s not that I don’t have any words left to type, a fact which means I’m doing significantly better than the last time I tried this (back in 2003) when I am not sure I even managed to crack 5,000 words before I gave up. No, the problem is exactly what I was worried about – that if I try to write at home, it is too easy to get distracted by all the other things I’d rather be doing.

Luckily, I’m not the only one feeling this way. One of the other Sacramento Nanowrimoers posted a note to the forums, wondering if anyone else wanted to get together for an impromptu write-in. I checked with Richard to see if he was interested, and then posted a quick “Me, me!” reply. So after we both got home from work and had dinner, we packed up our laptops and headed off to the Peet’s coffee shop in midtown. If I have gained nothing else from this month, I have at least significantly increased my familiarity with WiFi enabled coffee houses within a few miles from the house.

It turned out to be only four of us, but it was a nice group to be sitting and typing with. We chatted and drank coffee and compared word counts, and then it was time for Richard and I to leave because I finally got the text message I had been waiting for, and needed to go drop off some music to a string quartet. So off we went, awkwardly, since in the process of packing up, one of the others accidentally spilled his coffee and lots of it landed on me. Luckily it had had time to cool, and no coffee landed on laptops or coats or bags, and it was getting time for me to wash some clothes anyway, so it was actually kind of an amusing way to exit.

Music delivered, it was then time to go back home and watch Glee, a show for which we have both developed a deep and abiding love, if for no other reasons than to hear young performers with amazing voices perform things like this

Nanowrimo update: 16,832 words. I’m still a little behind, but I am not too concerned, mainly because I have come to two important realizations about my novel. The first is that it turns out that I started my story in the middle, and not at the beginning, which is not entirely surprising since I deliberately avoided any notion of plot or outline beforehand. And the second is that my main character is going to have to have a lot more horrible things happen to her, in the real beginning of the story, so that the place where the story is, right now, makes sense. Fun times, fun times.

Originally published at A Cat By Any Other Name. Please leave any comments there.

It occurred to me, a few months ago, that I only possess one pair of glasses. And frankly, considering Murphy’s law, and my own special brand of clumsiness, the fact that I have so far had nothing more disastrous happen to them than a broken nose pad, I was getting dangerously overdue for some kind of horrible glasses-related catastrophe. So the next time I had to get my glasses repaired (one of the lenses started popping out – no idea why) I had them check to see if I was due for a check-up and oops, apparently it’s been more than two years. And as long as I *have* all this lovely vision insurance, I really ought to be taking advantage of it.

I had my check-up last week, and my prescription is exactly the same as it was the last time I did this, so the whole ‘do this to get a back-up pair of glasses’ plan worked out nicely in my favor. I picked up the new pair this afternoon, and can now breathe a sigh of relief. Simply *having* an extra pair to fall back on means that this new pair will never, ever break. Now all I have to do is somehow avoid having my vision ever change again (do not speak to me of inevitable age-related presbyopia, I am not listening LA LA LA LA LA).

Nanowrimo update: Went to a write-in, drank Mexican hot chocolate, churned out a few thousand words. Still about 1000 behind where I really ought to be at this point in the month, and am starting to feel like writing this thing is kind of the same as slogging uphill through several feet of mud. However, according to all the cheerful pep-talk-emails the main Nanowrimo organization keeps sending out, this is perfectly normal for the second week of the project, and if I just keep at it, this, too, shall pass.

Originally published at A Cat By Any Other Name. Please leave any comments there.

As I was driving to work this morning, and I turned onto the approach lane for the freeway, I caught sight of a bumper sticker on the SUV in front of me. It read “bad ass girl’s drive bad ass trucks”.

Naturally, the inappropriate use of an apostrophe to denote a plural amused me, so much that I even *cut someone off* in order to position myself directly behind the unsuspecting SUV driver (who, by the way, was male. Not that that’s relevant to the story, except that it just added to the hilarity I was feeling at that moment), and then I started to rummage in my purse in the hopes that somehow I could pull out my camera and snap a quick picture of the gross error in punctuation before the SUV driver and I both had to merge onto the freeway. Yes, yes, I know, distracted driving is wrong, but so is the inappropriate use of apostrophes!

Alas, by the time I had finally gotten my camera out and I inched my car a bit closer…and that’s when I finally could see that it wasn’t a punctuation error at all; it was simply that the ‘l’ in ‘girls’ had been partially scraped off.

So…bah. Photographic mockery denied. Sigh. Stupid reality, taking away all the fun.

Nanowrimo update: Same as yesterday (see last week’s entry regarding “writing” and “Mondays”).

Originally published at A Cat By Any Other Name. Please leave any comments there.

This morning I woke up with a yen for bagels.

No, scratch that. Yesterday morning I woke up with a yen for bagels, but because I’d slept in, and going out to get bagels would have required me to shower and get dressed, and going out to get bagels wasn’t really a good idea anyway (see Thursday’s post regarding unexpected and significant drop in income for the next few months), so instead we ate pie and cookies for breakfast. And then yesterday I sent out a plea on Twitter for someone to share with me bagel recipes that would actually work, and my sister-in-law came through. So this morning when I got up, I made bagels.

I have attempted to make bagels several times before, but all of those attempts have usually not been very successful. I’ve been doing quite a bit of baking, ever since the kitchen was redone (I even took a class at the local Kitchen Academy this summer with a friend – we spent three hours in a room with a baker from France and learned all kinds of wonderful things about yeast and gluten and dough, and when we left we were overloaded with huge piles of baguettes and breadsticks and foccacia and dinner rolls we had made ourselves, and it was So Much Fun), and while I am very, very good at rolls, and very mediocre at bread (it never rises as much as it’s supposed to), I have so far been completely unsuccessful at bagels. Despite doing all the correct steps (mixing, rising, boiling, baking), all previous attempts at bagels have always come out flat. No, I mean literally – the bagels emerge from the oven flat.

The recipe my sister-in-law sent me was an improvement on all the others I’ve tried, in that the bagels were much less flat than before. But they still do not possess that quality of ‘bagelness’ that I associate with a good, true bagel. Those round things you can purchase in stores, wrapped in plastic, have no business calling themselves bagels, because it’s obvious they missed out on that crucial ‘boiling’ step. But the bagels we used to get at the little local bagel place (before they closed down) and the bagels we now occasionally pick up at Noah’s, all have a dense, chewy consistency that I am so far unable to replicate.

This is not to say, of course, that they were not tasty. Because the bagels that I made this morning were certainly delicious. They just aren’t quite…bagels. Yet.

I also made a loaf of whole wheat walnut bread from a recipe on the back of the King Arthur White Whole Wheat Flour bag, mainly because it caught my eye. Naturally (see earlier comment regarding my continued mediocrity at creating pretty loaves), the bread that won’t really work for sandwiches turned out rounded and perfect. Bah.

After a morning spent playing with flour and yeast, it was nice to get out of the house and spend an afternoon up in the hills with some friends. We’ve been trying to coordinate a trip to Apple Hill with them for a few weeks now, but illness or work schedules kept getting in the way, so when we finally all had a free day, we grabbed it. This time, Richard and I did not buy any more apples (most of the apples we bought last week are still sitting on the counter because I have yet to drag out the apple corer/peeler/slicer gadget and get busy), but we did take advantage of the chance for more of the very best caramel apples, and apple pie, steaming fresh from the oven and drizzled with cider sauce. It was a perfectly lovely day to be outside, wandering around, looking at crafts and eating apples, and catching up with good friends.

Back home, a little more baking (I’d put dough for pretzels in the refrigerator yesterday morning), this time with Richard’s help (since rolling out all the pretzels goes faster with four hands than it does with two), and then we caught up on a few of our favorite shows on the DVR. And then we realized that the day was almost over and neither of us had cranked out a single word on our novels, so off to the computer room with us, for a few hours of furious typing, or at least in my case, not so furious, but enough short bursts of something resembling creativity to keep my word count just a bit ahead of the game.

Nanowrimo update: 13,562 words, some of which would be a lot easier if I wasn’t making them up out of thin air and then having to remember exactly how to *spell* them the next time they came into play.

Originally published at A Cat By Any Other Name. Please leave any comments there.

Despite the very best efforts of the kittens (and trust me, they gave their all), I was able to sleep in until almost 9 in the morning. Usually the kittens start romping, which means that invariably they either stomp on, or near, one of the two torties, both of whom tend to prefer to lurk underneath the covers and thus provide prime under-cover-moving-target-monsters that, if you are a kitten and feeling frisky, must be pounced on Right This Moment. And then, once pounced upon, the tortie in question (and despite their extreme personal distaste of each other, in this both torties are perfectly in synch) must throw a hissy fit of epic proportions, launching out from underneath the covers to holler at the offending kittens to quit it, and since one of the very definitions of kittenhood is to be completely oblivious to all consequences of one’s actions (a personality trait that Rupert in particular has taken to heart), this response only invariably leads to more pouncing, and the end result is usually the human in the middle finally gives up in disgust and instead gets out of bed and goes upstairs to make coffee.

Anyway. The point of that long ramble was that this morning, this did *not* happen, so I took advantage of it to have a rare morning of sleeping in. There was leftover pie brought home from last night’s birthday dinner at my parents’ house, so Richard had some of that for breakfast, while I had leftover cookies instead, because the pie in question was cherry and long-term readers know of my aversion to all things berry/cherry related.

There was brief talk about maybe going grocery shopping, or some other sort of useful outing. But instead Richard went off to a write-in after lunch while I stayed home and made pretzel dough and started yogurt and pet the cats and also occasionally poked at my novel. And then later we both headed off to yet another write-in. I thought briefly about skipping it and staying home to either bake something, or try to put a dent in the two huge cases of apples still sitting on the kitchen counter, but I knew that my chances of getting a significant chunk of writing done would be markedly higher if I was somewhere other than home, so off we went.

And it turned out that going was a good thing because over the course of the day (despite distractions of the cat/kitten/baking variety), but mostly during the few hours at the write-in, I managed to churn out almost 5,000 words, which not only means I’ve once again caught up to where I needed to be by end of day (according to the official Nanowrimo Progress Chart), but also puts me a little over. Plus, I got to use the phrase “you are the harbinger of doom” in a writing project for the very first time in my life, so really, it’s a win-win all around.

Nanowrimo update: 12,0008 words total. Still not entirely sure what my overall plot is, but the story is progressing nonetheless, so I am thinking that this whole ‘avoid all semblance of pre-plot-planning’ concept might be working out better than I’d hoped.

Originally published at A Cat By Any Other Name. Please leave any comments there.

The cookies that I made yesterday, while not bad for a chocolate chip cookie, should never have included the words ‘peanut butter’ in their title. There simply wasn’t enough peanut butter in the recipe to even really taste it.

Nevertheless, they made a good breakfast.

No one seemed to be entirely clear yesterday on how this furlough thing was supposed to be happening, since it kicked in in the middle of a week. So I decided that the best thing to do was hedge my bets and come in to work today, but only work a half day. It was about as hard a decision to make as I am sure you can imagine (hint – not remotely hard at all). And then I went and dropped off some overdue library books, and I got my allergy shots (and had a lovely chat with the nurse there about the dismal state of the economy – one thing you can say about this recession is that at least it’s a nice conversational change than the state of the weather), and then I came home. I suppose I ought to have sat down and worked on my novel, but instead I plopped down in a chair in the living room (where I was promptly piled upon by a constantly rotating pile of up to four cats/kittens) and finished up the book I started this morning. I suspect that I would enjoy “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters” far more if I had tracked down a copy of the original novel and read that first, but I had a good enough recollection of the general plot to find humor in how the author managed to weave tales of sea monsters and pirates and also vague references to Lovecraftian creatures surprisingly seamlessly into a story about repressed Victorian love affairs (or whatever time period it is – I admit to being a little vague on the details).

Richard had dropped off his car to get the required smog check (so that we can renew its registration) and also to have some sort of recall notice dealt with (props to Honda for being willing to fix faulty parts in cars even when they are nearly ten years old), so after I was done reading my book and emptying / refilling the dishwasher and setting up a load of laundry, I picked him up, and off we headed to my parents’ house for a (very early) birthday celebration for my brother-in-law. There was a lot of chatter and laughter, and we played games and we ate homemade pie, and it was very nice.

Nanowrimo update: Sadly, I have no excuse. I really ought to have done some writing today, but….it did not happen, and now I am about a day and a half behind. We’ve nothing planned this weekend, however, except another trip to Apple Hill with friends, and some general cleaning and baking (well, admittedly, the only one who will be baking is me), so I have every intention of catching up on word count.

Oh, and if you’ve got a few extra bucks to spare, please consider donating them to a good cause. Instead of both of us doing separate donation pages, we’re doing just Richard’s (that way we don’t have to raise as much for both of us to attend the Night of Writing Dangerously, because he can bring me as his guest). And, if you donate, Richard will name a character after you in his novel, so really, what more incentive do you need?

Originally published at A Cat By Any Other Name. Please leave any comments there.