The madness that was November

I figured I should get at least one more blog post in before November ended. As I predicted, this month was crazy busy! I admire the people who blog every day, no matter what, but I just don't have that kind of stamina. Anyway, here's a short run down of my life the past few weeks.

Writing: Lots of it, in fact. NaNoWriMo ends on tomorrow. My word count is nowhere near the target 50,000, but I'd definitely consider this a good experience (although, if I ever do NaNo again, I'm going to outline my story ahead of time). Writing class fired up mid-November and it's really good. The beginning was a bit heavy on the "rules of how to write correctly," which is not my style, but I got over it. I really like being a part of a class with homework again (yes, I am fully aware of how ridiculous that sounds). I was even a bit bummed yesterday when I got all caught up, knowing I'd have to wait till tomorrow for the next lesson.

"Cabinning": Jon and I stayed at a cabin in Ricketts Glen National Park a few days before Thanksgiving. We pretty much had the park to ourselves, which I loved. We went on a hike, saw way too many waterfalls, explored a lake, read books, burned junk mail (it made the prettiest colors!!) and still found time to just do nothing. I also activated my inner photographer and took a ton of pictures, most of which wouldn't be interesting to anyone but me.

Thanksgiving: After our lazy vacation, we came home and made 5 pies plus dinner rolls for Thanksgiving! Fortunately, someone else took care of the rest of the meal, which ended up being the most exotic Thanksgiving I've ever had. One type of stuffing had truffles, those crazy expensive mushrooms no normal person dares to cook with. Needless to say, I felt pretty fancy.

Visiting Family: The Saturday after Thanksgiving, Jon and I went to see his cousin Lauren, who also happens to be one of my best friends, and her family. She lives pretty far away, which makes spending time with her difficult. We had a lot of fun hanging out together and I survived a somewhat traumatizing arcade experience. And, one of the dishes I ate for dinner had saffron in it; fancy food item number two!! Then Lauren got engaged on Sunday, which was the most epic finale possible for this over-the-top week!

Wow, that turned into quite a ramble! I think I'll be done for now.

sincerely,
me

NaNoWriMo and other adventures

Welcome to November everyone! Hope your Halloween was fun. Ours turned out to be pretty low key, due to laziness and Hurricane Sandy (which thankfully we weathered just fine.) Jon and I started replaying the Legend of Zelda series, starting with Ocarina of Time, which, in my opinion, is the first real Zelda game. But enough about that.

With the coming of this month, I decided to unofficially participate in NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. The goal of this program is to write a novel of 50,000 words in 30 days, averaging around 2,000 words per day. I've already begun my story and am up to 5,227 words!

And, since NaNoWriMo is clearly not insane enough on its own, I also signed up for a writing course that starts on the 14th. There's also an art show I should submit to, a mini vacation I'll be taking with Jon and Thanksgiving. Yeah, I'm probably a bit crazy.

Now, to go fill my world quota of the day!

sincerely,
me