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.

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).

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Except for a few hundred words I squeaked out this morning, I have done absolutely no writing today. I suspect I probably ought to feel horribly guilty about that, seeing as how this upcoming Sunday marks the halfway point, and I still have about 7,000 words to crank out if I want to remain on track, but…eh. Some days it’s just not going to happen.

I have been trying to get to the library all this week, but every time I’ve gone so far, I’ve always managed to show up before they are open, or when they are closed. So this afternoon I made sure to double-check the branch hours, and finally picked up the stack of a dozen books that have been waiting for me for over a week now. I suspect getting a giant stack of mindless fluff books is probably not exactly conducive to cranking out a whole lot of novel in the next few weeks, but…eh.

I came home from work with a sinus headache, which has been lurking balefully behind my eyes all day, so I was feeling tired and a little cranky. So instead of going to my regular knitting group, I instead elected to stay home and read a few of the aforementioned brainless fluff books, and once the latest round of ibuprofin finally kicked in, I decided it was about time I tackled the mountain of apples that has been sitting in our kitchen for the past two weeks. So now there is a crockpot stuffed as full as I could get it with peeled, cored, and chopped apples, and at some point tomorrow, with a little sugar and spice and some assistance from my immersion blender, they will all magically turn into apple butter.

Nanowrimo update: 17,604 words. You’d think that finally figuring out the right direction for the story would have spurred the creativity, but..ha..you would obviously be wrong.

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.

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.