Alive.

Believe it or not, I'm still rewriting my novel. Now that's just embarrassing. Sometimes as I work on it, I'm very encouraged, and other times not so much. For the most part, though, I'm happy. I'm making little connections (a bit like a developing brain sending connections back and forth between the hemispheres), ironing out inconsistencies, and trashing useless scenes. I suppose if I devoted a little more time to it, things would go faster. And I think I'm at the point where I need to do that now, because having it unpolished is bottling up other stories that want to come out.

In the meantime, look for upcoming pics of knitting and soaping projects - my excellent timewasters! (Or not wasters, since it's stuff I enjoy doing.) I made a batch of salt soap today, and it's AWESOME! I think it's going to be an excellent shaving bar.

Great Things

I was going to call this "Good Things" but then I rethought the title, because I realised that Martha Stewart probably owns that phrase, and the last thing I need is to get sued by her. I mean, the woman is impossibly well-organised, whereas I would be lucky to even remember to show up for the court date, let alone bring along my list of paltry excuses ("blonde", "4 children", "kicked in the head one (or two) too many times". . .) So I decided to one-up her instead. Take that, Marfa.

In light of the fact that I've not written a blog entry for over a month, I thought of making an excuse list for that as well ("homeschooling", "holiday season", "4 children", "writing like a madwoman", um. . . "blonde". . .)

And then I realised that your time would be more profitably spent elsewhere, so here are some yummy links for you:

a fantastic book, called "Homespun Gifts from the Heart"

another stupendous book called Making Doll's House Miniatures From Polymer Clay

and, er, Google. (OK, I admit it. It was a trick to get you to look at those beautiful graphics and listen to that beautiful music.)

We've been having way too much fun watching (and re-watching) Iron Man, reading good books, and working on holiday projects, some of which I may someday get organised enough to show you. In the meantime, I believe that Martha Stewart has a website you can go to that probably has real, fake pictures of impossibly neat children wearing impossibly clean clothing, capering around an impossibly beautifully decorated tree before eating their artistically sculpted yule log cake, decorated with real $600 truffles. And that can only be a Good -- well, you know.

A Day of No Pics

~I'm working on a disappearing nine patch quilt for a friend's baby.

~I'm reading one of Kevin J. Anderson's new books for review and have another of his coming to me in the mail. Yay! He's a great writer, and dorky as it may be, I feel a little bit of a connection cuz he and MuNKi were friends in high school. I know that's weird. *shrug*

~One of my friends got to touch the Stanley Cup the other day. I think he may have licked it. I certainly would have. And then his sister went to visit it last night. I would like to go visit it it, too. Or at least some of those sweaty hockey players. ;-)

~I saved a snake from the neighbour cat a couple of days ago. Neither of them were too thrilled about that. Well, I think the snake may have been in the long run. I don't think I've ever been struck at by a snake before.

~And then I found a dead mole. This was the day after reading a blog from Somerset England (which I found by doing a search on quilt squares) which had a pic of a dead mole that the woman's cats had left in the yard. And then Mollusc came downstairs and told me she'd dreamed about finding a dead mole in the yard, so I told her about it. She dreams about stuff that's going to happen all the time.

~I think we're going to the beach today. Everyone else is in school. ^_^

If

If I were to get off my lazy ass (well, ON it, I guess would be more appropriate) and make a new post, it would go right here.

And if I were to post pics, they would probably be about here.

And here (but further down.)

But I'm too lazy.

My soap is curing in the kitchen. The whole place smells like spearmint and it's just lovely.

I made more cookies from the Martha book and chive vinegar (for consumption) and lemon/orange vinegar for the laundry. What a shame I'm too lazy to post.

No Pictures!

I took some today, but as I'm worn out and in bed, I'm not posting them 'til tomorrow. Instead, you get this random smattering of stuff.

Emmett has to get a chest x-ray tomorrow because he needs to have his teeth cleaned and he has (most likely) asthma, so the vet has to figure out how to safely knock him out. In the meantime, Enya is in the early stages of kidney disease, so she needs prescription food. Sigh.

Perhaps because of these things, I dreamt that MuNKi got a new, super-high-paying job (that he actually liked) and we were moving to Boston. Additionally, I had to strangle to death a woman who was trying to kill us all. (I think.) It didn't work very well. I could tell, because she was talking to me while I was trying to strangle her. I was pretty squeamish about the whole thing, so that may be why I did such a poor job. It would be nice to be able to say that she had a very telling name, such as "Housework" or "Vet Bills" but she didn't. I'm just a weird person with weird dreams, I guess.

And now, Ear Candy.


This song should be the anthem for the current (or perhaps any) Presidential Race. I ignore the vid and just listen.




And this one is just fun in a totally geeky way. I'm not generally a rap fan, but this partly musical and partly bad rap with some fun lyrics.

Meh.

Life is What Happens. . .

. . .when you're making blog posts. :-P

Like Amanda, I've been devoting a little more time to life than blogging, but I'm still alive. :-)


I missed Picture Book Thursday, but that doesn't mean I wasn't thinking about it. My earliest bookstore memories revolve around the hours I spent standing in Swindon's, reading the Mr. Men books. I'm sure a lot of you English types will remember those. :-) I remember looking repeatedly at the Tintin books and wanting to like them, but just not being able to get into them (though of course now we have almost all of them :-) ) I always ended up defaulting to the Mr. Mens. Yesterday I tried to buy one for Prawn at Borders, but they're out of print again. I think my favourites were Mr. Bump and Mr. Tickle. We have a pretty decent collection of the books, and some of the Little Misses as well, since they were available in bookstores up until last year, but several of them have fallen apart from too much love.

We're almost through the audio version of Peter Pan in Scarlet and in spite of my fear of hoping for too much from this book, it has turned out to be one that I wish I had written myself. It's fantastic! I can't believe something this delightful and imaginitive got published. I know that sounds snooty, but if you check it out for yourself and see some of the very nontraditional concepts and turns of phrase, I think you'll understand what I mean.

Speaking of scarlet, last night our Red Belt (and up) class consisted of forms, and Feats of Tae Kwon Do. My favourite kind of class. ^_^ For some reason, though, I could kick a bottle hanging from the ceiling when I ran and jumped off the floor, but not when I ran and jumped off a chair. Go figure.

I've been listening to the BBC radio dramatisation of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and loving it. And I took a bunch of pictures over the week that I'll try to post.

Have a great weekend!

Done! Maybe. . .

I finished the sashing today. I was a little worried that it was going to come out all trapezoidal, but it seems to be reasonably rectangular. I may end up adding a couple of strips to the sides just to widen it. Not sure yet. Perhaps I will ask the quilting maven (BG's mom) for her opinion.

Tomorrow is Bake Something Or Else Day. For me, anyway. I haven't yet decided what I will do to myself as the "Or Else" part if I fail. Probably break out the Manilow or something. ;-)

Still trying to find time for everything when there just isn't.

Filler

The kids are on the computer I need to use for uploading my latest pics, so you get this in the meantime. I love this song. It's kinda quiet in this version, so you might have to crank it. Can't believe I didn't think to look for it on YouTube until now.



I really need to finish the latest in the Outlander series. I'm just so uninspired. Too much of the same thing, I think -- I just want to move on to the next book already. :-P I guess that means I'm probably about to hit another fascinating part. That usually happens in these books right about the time I get fed up with them. Here's hoping.

Mishmash

I'm doing the chicken-with-its-head-cut-off thing this week. After I teach this morning, I'll likely be getting ready for our big garage sale until class and sparring tonight. We're making good headway, but I wish we had another week or two. But since we're doing this in conjunction with some other families in the sub and they're putting out the big sign, we're trying to take advantage of the higher traffic.

I took what I think were some interesting birth photos last night, so I'll try to share those soon.

In the meantime, please discuss the most random things you can dredge up. ^_^

It's Late

Pictures tomorrow.

What can I say? The new Avatar DVD is out and I was watching the last 2 episodes with MuNKi and the kids. ^_^