Done.

And another Halloween has come and gone. My favourite day of the year, and it's not even a holiday. Damn. I failed pretty epically this year with my costume, and to a lesser extent, the decorations. I had a great costume idea earlier this year and I procrastinated like a boss until I ran out of time to put it together.

Fall back costume: The devil-in-pleather.

I think I missed my A-game on the decorations for two reasons: Idiot#1 didn’t bring the decorations up from the basement until two weeks after I asked for them, and somewhere in that timeframe it decided to snow and turn cold outside. Not encouraging for decorating. Still, I did get some trick-or-treaters:

Joe (aka. Idiot#3) as Robin and Madd-man as Batman!

And it wasn’t a total holiday failure:

Work Pumpkins. Mine is a rendition of George, my boss’s dad. Scary, yes.

Halloween Sugar Cookies, for knit club last week.

And roasted pumpkin seeds!

If I ever decide to run for Prime Minister of this country, just know that I will in fact make Halloween a national holiday. Perhaps even a week-long holiday.

Anyway, NaNoWriMo starts in less than three hours. Plus the Epic Month of Blog Posts, so you’ll see me again real soon... you’ve been warned.

S.

Saving the Random Crap for Later

So this might be kinda like cheating, but the content for my last few posts in October is gonna be WEAK! I'm saving all the good stuff for November. I'm going to try (and more than likely, fail...) to post at least 50 words every day in November—progress updates on NaNoWriMo when possible. But as I'm sure I won't have enough to say about my progress for 30 straight days, I'm saving any other random crap for November too >. >

This is all part of the Epic Month of Blog Posts: #epicnanoblogs on Twitter, if you're there. And I'm not just making crap up for my own amusement. This madness is the brainchild of greater minds:

The Writings and Musings of B.A. Matthews

Epic Robot

Kat Kommentary

Eric Andrew Satchwill

CLV Ayaella7

Disposable Tea

a Coffee, a Camera & a Creative Dream

The Manchild Monologues

Keely Dunn

Random Musings in Time

Yeah. Fifty words a day. I'm such a sporadic blogger that sometimes I'm lucky to have posted fifty words in a month. Hm. As if 50K words for NaNoWriMo wasn't enough of a challenge... Damn.
But enough of my rambling—gotta save the rest for November!

S.

Been Busy.

Confession: I haven't decorated for Halloween yet. And it's my favourite holiday of them all.

Worse: I don't have a costume ready. And I had a sweet costume planned for this year, but it's too late to get it done now. Sigh. Maybe next year.

My excuse?

I've been busy. Really busy. Perhaps I just have too many hobbies or something. Anyway, part of what's been keeping me busy is Knit Club. Which is exactly as dorky as it sounds. The people that know me best always give me the arched-eyebrow-open-mouthed "Huh?" when I tell them I teach knitting every Sunday. It's not really a hobby that seems to fit with me—most of my friends wonder if it's actually a cover for something much more sinister—but I love knitting. Go figure. So the past couple of weeks I've been teaching the girls how to knit a sweater. I whipped up one in grey so they could see exactly what we were doing, and to make sure there were no problems in the pattern before we started. Like this:

The first few rows. Switching needles.

The reversing rib pattern.

The finished product.

And Idiot#1 models the infant sweater.

Round 2.

And I'm working alongside the girls while they knit their own kids' sweaters—the little kiddy confetti thing on the last pic. So... been busy knitting & planning classes!

That's it for now. Off to write for a few hours and then knit the sleeves!
S.

Tuesday Tunes: Shred Kelly

This past week of writing—or plotting for NaNoWriMo, as it were—has been mostly accompanied by Shred Kelly's 2012 album, In The Hills. On repeat.

If you've never heard of them, check out their album at shredkelly.bandcamp.com. It's most excellent. For this Tuesday Tune, here's one of my faves:


At first listen it seems to be a song about a bear. My theory is that it's actually about Sage being the stalker-girl she was born to be. What do you think?

That's all for today. Off to do some more NaNo plotting...
S.

A month?!

I can't believe it's been a month since I last posted! It only feels like a week. Guess that's a sign I'm getting old...

I've been busy. Lots of knitting and reading, but I also lost a week when I was laid out by a nasty head cold, and I've been getting out of the city to do some bird hunting with Idiot#1 on Saturdays. Sundays means knit class, so I've been spending a chunk of time prepping for that too. Maybe if I can get my life in order I'll post some pix... but that's a big maybe.

Work has been busy too. Usually is in September and October, but I'm already starting to see the slow down that's fairly standard for November & December.

Which is a good thing, because I've also started outlining a new novel for NaNoWriMo. Pretty excited about it. Don't know exactly what genre you'd call it—maybe you guys can help me? Characters are older teens, but it's not exactly a coming-of-age story, so maybe not typically classed YA. The main character is a regular teen, but the opening chapter is the beginning of the apocalypse and the people he falls in with are time travelers—a bit of a sci-fi element, yeah. Current world, current time. No fantasy beings, just people who seem normal but are actually time travelers. A bunch of teens trying to get from point A to point B in time, because they're being chased by other time travelers that want them dead. Fighting, yes. Killing, yes. End of the world, happening around them.

Any ideas?