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”).

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.

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.

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?

Today was not the very best of days.

They laid off 13 more people across the company, on top of the 11 that they laid off earlier in the year. One of those people was from our office, and since we’re a very tiny office, and we’re all very good friends, that was particularly hard to handle. But along with the layoffs, they’ve also instituted some reductions in hours for some of the staff – and that includes me.

The pay cut / furloughs for Richard’s company kicked in last month, so we’d already been seeing a slight reduction in our total take-home pay, but this one’s going to be a much bigger hit. Tomorrow we’ll sit down with a big spreadsheet and take a good, hard look at our finances – what comes in versus what we owe – and figure out ways to make this work, while still continuing to keep our 401k contributions and the regular transfers to savings at the level they currently are.

I am telling myself that it is important to look for the silver lining. I’ve been toying with the idea of putting in a winter garden, so I guess this is the little kick in the pants that I needed to make that happen. Plus, hey, an extra free day each week, at least through the month of November, means plenty more time to write. And I am sure the cats won’t mind in the slightest having one extra day a week with someone home to give them all the attention they feel they deserve.

I came home from work and I set my stuff down and went immediately into the kitchen. I peeled and chopped the last of the (slightly rubbery) carrots and the last onion and a pile of potatoes and tossed them into a pot with some water and simmered them until they were soft, and then pulled out my immersion blender (I LOVE MY IMMERSION BLENDER!!) and blended it all until it was creamy, and then stirred in a little cheddar cheese and let that sit on the stove on low. And I did all this *before* I pulled out butter and brown sugar and peanut butter and eggs and chocolate chips and made cookies, because I knew that if it was done, then we would eat something healthy for dinner, but if I waited until after I made cookies, the soup just would not happen.

Richard, coming in the door and sniffing the air: “Are those stress cookies I smell?”

Me: “Yes. Yes, they ARE.”

He knows me so well.

Nanowrimo update: Just a bit over 7,000 words. Not even a nasty financial upset can keep me from writing. Go me.

On the list of things that I want to see when I wake up in the morning, items which fall on the side of ‘oh, yes please’ are a distinct lack of anything horked up / shredded / otherwise mauled by cats (two very rambunctious kittens in particular), the coffee maker all set up and ready to go, and enough time for me to whip up some delicious baked goods for breakfast (yesterday I made cinnamon rolls with apple butter and walnut filling, just as an example). High on the side of ‘would really rather live without’ would be finding a great big puddle of water directly in front of the refrigerator. The still fairly new, extremely expensive, built-in-so-it’s-not-like-we-can-just-pull-it-out-from-the-wall refrigerator.

I said some colorful words, rather loudly, and then hollered for Richard. Between the two of us we managed to get most of the water sopped up, and then I rummaged in the drawer and tracked down the user manual and called the support line. In some kind of bizarre twist of the universe, the support person to whom I spoke was actually helpful (likely because it had nothing whatsoever to do with either computers or the phone, since I have become quite convinced that part of the training for support staff for both of those industries is how to be as unhelpful as humanly – or unhumanly, as the case may be – as possible), and she walked me through a list of things to check. In the meantime, Richard sat on the floor and took off the kick-plate so we could take a look underneath; or rather, he tried to take it off, but one of the four screws refused to turn. After I got off the phone, there were a few more of those colorful words being muttered as the two of us prodded and pulled, pounded with hammers, and gouged with screwdrivers, but could not get that screw to budget. I pried the kickplate back as best I could, despite the still-attached and stubborn screw, and was able to at least ascertain that 1) we really need to be vacuuming under there because holy dust bunnies from hell, Batman, 2) the drip pan was not overflowing, and 3) worse yet, the water appeared to be collecting *under* the drip pan, so where the heck was it coming from?

So today Richard stayed home and called around until he could find someone who could come out and take a look, while I went to work and occasionally googled ‘strange leaks from fridge’ just for fun.

The verdict – a leaky hose. Luckily it was covered under warranty. Richard says that the service guys had no trouble at all getting that stupid screw to come out, so all that tugging and prodding was apparently just enough to finally work it loose. I know it wasn’t that we are just weak, because we were both fighting with it, and the reason we eventually stopped was because all we were accomplishing was to begin to strip the screw, but it is still annoying when it takes a stranger to come into your house to do something as idiotic as removing one damn screw.

Anyway. I am now staring fixedly at the floor around the refrigerator every time I walk into the kitchen, just to make sure it doesn’t start to flood again, and finding humor in the fact that this sort of thing is *exactly* why I prefer to can things instead of just freezing them (all my jams and jellies and sauces and pickles would cheerfully survive a flood that might require me to shut off the freezer for an indeterminate amount of time).

And since it is November, and I am doing this silly novel thing, I took advantage of this morning’s excitement and wrote it right into my story. Granted, in my little fictional world the cause is something far more sinister than just a leaky tube, but the point here is that in order to get 50,000 words, I must take advantage of anything that might pop up.

Although, you know, I still think I would prefer putting more mornings involving hot coffee and fresh-from-the-oven baked goods than dysfunctional appliances. Just in case the universe was thinking of trying this sort of thing again.

Nanowrimo progress: 6,742 words, now with exciting Appliance Malfunction Drama. Fun times, fun times.

I have determined that, at least for the first week or two of this whole “write every day” double whammy project of mine, that I need to get out of the house more often. When I am home in the evenings, it is far too easy to be side-tracked by anything and everything – kittens playing around my feet, adult cats demanding attention and lap time, a new recipe I want to try, chores to be done, books to be read, and on and on. Last time I did Nanowrimo, I can’t recall if I ever actually went to any of the write-ins (or, for that matter, if there were even write-ins to attend in the first place), and normally I am not the sort of person who is comfortable showing up at a gathering of strangers. But the nice thing about doing it this month is that it’s a group of strangers who are all staring fixedly at their laptop screens, so social graces aren’t a requirement.

I went to a write-in tonight, at the same coffee shop in midtown where Good Day Sacramento came to film us. Luckily I recognized a few of the people there, both from Richard’s regular writers group, and from this year’s Nano kickoff party, which is good because coffee shops have this tendency to be filled with people determinedly poking at their laptops pretty much year round, so it’s not a guarantee that picking out the Nano people will be easy.

So tonight I attended my second write-in for the month, although I have to confess that I showed up late, because I started reading the latest Terry Pratchett book two mornings ago, and was tired of only getting five or ten minutes at a stretch to read, so had no other choice but to sit down as soon as I got home from work and finish it off in one go. See my earlier comment about how writing + me + staying home to do it has been failing so spectacularly in recent past.

Other than the writing, though, it’s been the usual sort of day. I had an eye check-up appointment this afternoon, which I completely flaked on because I made the mistake of relying on the Outlook calendar pop-up reminders – except that lately my pop-up reminders at work no longer grab the focus, but instead will sit there behind all my active windows until I notice that there’s a little flashing box on the task bar at the bottom of the screen. This wouldn’t be a problem, except that I do not make it a happy of obsessively monitoring my task bar, so my pop-up reminders tend to languish, ignored, sometimes for hours at a time. Luckily they were very understanding and rescheduled me for later in the day. Now all I have to do is remember to go get allergy shots at some point this week and I’ll be all set.

Nanowrimo progress report: 5,691 words. Despite getting a late start to the write-in, I’m still keeping up. Phew.

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.

This has certainly been the year of lax blogging on my part. And it’s not like I haven’t had things to write about. It’s just that I put off writing an entry, and then more things happen that I want to write about, except I can’t write about those things until I write about the first thing, and the list of topics I really should have covered keeps growing and growing and then…then something bad happens in my life and it all just gets overwhelming. I wanted to write about losing Sebastian here but every time I thought about it, my brain just froze, and then one week passed, and a second, and bang, without warning, another cat gone, and how the hell do I backtrack for all the good, happy things I’ve been doing this summer when there is this double loss to deal with instead. I wrote about one; how is it that I cannot seem to write about the other?

I miss writing. Any kind of writing. When I was in school I used to carry spiral bound notebooks with me everywhere and I was always scribbling stories. My head used to be full of so many stories that I could barely get them all down, and then one day I woke up and discovered that they were gone. How does a person lose something that should never be capable of being lost? And I miss writing here, sharing pictures and stories and being able to look back, years later, to remind myself of things I want to never forget. There are ten years of my life recorded on this little corner of the web; why is it now so hard to do what used to come so naturally?

Today is the first day of wiping the slate clean; of finding my way back. Not only have I signed up for Nanowrimo again, after an eight year hiatus comprised of writer’s block on an epic scale; I have committed myself to NaBloPoMo for the month of November as well. I’m doing this on the theory that if one doesn’t get me over my writing malaise, the other will.

I did no planning for Nanowrimo this time. I deliberately avoided any thinking about plot or characters or genre, because I’ve tried that before, and oh my goodness, how spectacularly that failed. My plan was to simply wait until the stroke of midnight on October 31st, and then sit down in front of my computer and start to write. And I will admit that ever since I signed up for this again, a very large part of me has been afraid that I would stare at that blank screen and nothing would come out.

Total word count for Nanowrimo so far: 4,222. Only 45,782 words to go.

We started having this conversation after we had to put Sebastian to sleep. At some point in the future, we knew we would need to get kittens. If it weren’t for Rosie, we’d get another cat like Checkers who would need people who can be patient and who are willing to work to bring a kitty out of its shell, but as long as we have Rosemary, that isn’t going to happen.

And then, after Tangerine was at the vet, and we both noticed how empty the house felt, the idea was brought up again. After everything we have been through recently – the weeks of worrying and trying so hard with Sebastian, and this past week of hell with Tangerine – we knew what we needed to do.

Meet Orpha and Ingrid. We found them on Petfinders and made an appointment with the rescue group this morning to go meet them. I’m sure it comes as no surprise that it didn’t take much before we were both completely smitten.

They are siblings, and about 8 weeks old. Orpha (the little grey tabby) has pretty much no fear. We have set them up in the guest room upstairs and she careens madly around the space, exploring and pouncing on everything she sees. Ingrid (the tuxedo) is a bit more reserved and prefers to let her sister test the waters first to make sure it’s safe before she’ll venture over to investigate.

They are not meant to replace, because of course nothing can ever replace what we have lost. But they help fill the void Sebastian and Tangerine left behind. And right now, that’s the thing this house needed most.