Friday, December 5, 2014

Three things that have rocked my world

I'm an exceptionally boring person. If a camera followed me on a day where I did absolutely anything I wanted, I would like choose to stay in bed and watch Netflix documentaries interspersed with bursts of reading. If I got really wild and crazy, I'd eat buttered popcorn while watching documentaries (don't want to get butter on the books/e-reader). I don't even aspire to wild and crazy. I aspire to fulfilling my fantasy of spending the day in bed ... alone ... with movies and books. But my child needs to be ferried around, I have to do chores, or any number of other reasons that prevent me from fulfilling my boring fantasy.

That's just to tell you where my excitement bar is to have some context. Low bar, very low.

I'm no shopper. I just don't have that gene that most women do. I took that Facebook quiz about how girly I am, and I scored 18%. I'm apparently a fraction of an inch away from wearing a fanny pack and Birkenstocks.

While I'm not a good consumer,  I have bought three things within the past few months that have rocked my world.

1. Fleece sheets. I think it's part of the Pacific Northwest culture that you have to love Starbucks, Amazon, Microsoft and fleece. Of those, I really only love fleece. But goodness I love it, and I have bought an amazing amount of fleece over the years. And now, fleece sheets. Why are fleece sheets so amazing? They're not cold. They're always warm to the touch and cuddly and a little slice of heaven.

2. A digital food thermometer. We had a really, really old thermometer that was huge and unreliable and hard to read. It wasn't digital. It would fog up and you couldn't read it. Well, I tend to make a lot of candy that has precise temperature requirements. And meat around the holidays. Being able to know the exact moment your candy reaches 250 degrees or the turkey reaches 166 degrees is awesome!

3. A peppermill and the matching salt shaker that spews the chunky salt. What will we do without our McDonalds-like salt and pepper shaker? We'll be ADULTS? Fascinating.

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Nano Compeleted

Nanowrimo is over! I think I already said this, but I cheated and started in October. I think the point of Nano is to write an amount equivalent to a book each year, and I know how hard it is to write 50,000 cohesive words in one month on top of working full-time and having a child & husband. So, yeah, I started in October to make sure I had enough time.


I am still most proud of my first Nano in 2011. I'm not sure if it's because it was my first or if it was the best of the four. I think both perhaps. It definitely had the most structure of the four.


I know I'm supposed to go back and rewrite/edit after completing each one, but I never seem to do that. I just go full-force back into reading for enjoyment until the next Nano comes around. More than likely, none of my Nanos will ever see the light of day. And that's okay. I wrote four (piss poor) novels! :)


In other news, there's not much news. Plodding along.


My daughter got her first report card of first grade yesterday. It reads more like a horoscope than a report card. I do see a theme through kindergarten and first grade. She's doing well socially by being respectful and kind to others (YAY!), except her one sad spot: "articulating own needs." Much like her father and me, she's not good at asking for help. She's the type to suffer in silence. There are those kids who will give you a litany of twelve things that they are irritated about (it's cold out, hungry, someone was "mean" to them, etc.), but she's not one of those. I didn't want to raise a kid like that, and I was raised to suck it up. But be careful what you try to cultivate because there's a downside.


The horoscope part of her report card: "She is a gentle spirit with a kind heart and steel core." In the next sentence, she's "serious" and "easy-going." My husband said his interpretation was that she's serious about school but easy-going to work with. Not sure.


Overall, quite please with Little J's progress. I wonder if she will harness some Rage Against the Machine soon. Just a little, not a lot.


In other news, it's been as cold as a witch's tit here (my grandfather used to say that all the time!).