One of the nicest things about hosting a party is that it creates a very good reason to clean the house. I realize that few people are the sort of guests who would go to a party and wander the house with a critical eye, looking to see if the hosts remembered to dust in all the obscure places, but sometimes all I need is an excuse for giving the house a good going over, and a party is just the thing. And one of the best parts about after the party is that I get to savor how sparkly clean our house is, for at least another few days, until one of the cats shreds something, or horks a big giant hairball in the middle of a room, or I get a yen to bake and spill flour all over the kitchen floor.
The party, in this case, was the Nanowrimo kick-off party. We held it at our house because Richard is one of the co-municipal liasons for the Sacramento Nanowrimo region, and despite the fact that our nearly 100 year old house is not exactly sporting that ‘open floor plan’ that everyone seems to want these days, it somehow works surprisingly well for large groups of people.
It was a good crowd for the kick-off. I think by the time midnight hit and everyone was typing furiously into their laptops, we had somewhere around 20 people camped out anywhere they could find space in the living room, dining room, guest room and kitchen – not the largest group we’ve hosted, but plenty big enough when you factor in laptops and other writing paraphernalia. We dragged the breakfast nook table and all the extra chairs down from the attic where they spend pretty much the rest of the year, and we put out a call for people to bring any extra folding chairs they could scrounge, and somehow ended up with enough seating for everyone. It was a potluck, so the kitchen island and counters were overflowing with food. I set up the crockpot with cider for mulling and the ice machine in the freezer did its best to keep up.
The party started at 9pm, and at midnight everyone started writing. People started drifting away by 1am. I gave up and went to bed around 2, because I wasn’t able to keep my eyes open any longer. The party was scheduled to last until 3am if necessary, but Richard said the last person left at about 2:30. The nice thing about Daylight Savings kicking in on the same day as the start of Nanowrimo is that we all get an extra hour of writing to start off the month. The downside is that staying up until 2 in the morning ends up later than the clock suggests.
It would have been nice to have been able to sleep in on Sunday morning to try to recover from the late night, but…ha. No such luck. Since one of the hosts of the local morning news program is also doing Nano this year, they contacted Richard to see if he could get a group together to be on TV. So at 8:30 Sunday morning fifteen Nanowrimoers – some more bleary-eyed than others – were seated around a long series of tables in the back room of a very accommodating coffee shop, and by 9am, the cameras were rolling.
Richard and I headed up to Apple Hill after we were done with the TV spot, because we’ve both been wanting to get up there, and this weekend has traditionally been a great one for avoiding the crowds, and after the jolt of coffee at the coffee shop, we were feeling a little bit less like a pair of zombies. Except that this year, it was far more crowded than we’d experienced previously, for the weekend after Halloween, and we were a bit puzzled until we noticed that there were a lot of people wearing marathon numbers on their shirts. Note to self – there is a reason why you usually go much *earlier* in the day.
Anyway. This weekend was kind of crazy and I am still definitely feeling the effects of mucking about with my sleep schedule. Even when I was in college I could never manage to pull an all-nighter, and now that I am 40, staying up that late definitely has its consequences.
Nanowrimo status: same word count as yesterday. But I expected this to happen; in fact I expect it’s going to be an issue with pretty much every Monday for the month. There is work, and then I come home and deal with dinner and chores around the house, and spend an hour or two going through music, and then it is time for rehearsal, and after several hours of singing, I come home exhausted and usually not in the mood to do much more than collapse in front of the TV and watch the latest episode of House. This week, no new episode of House, but the very last disk of the very last season of Scrubs (sigh) arrived in the mail, so…yeah. No new words for the novel. That will just have to wait until tomorrow.