Would you forgive me love / If I danced in your shower So I suck at updating. Welcome to my life, dears.
Brianna is walking. And has a tooth. Both of these things are awesome and also scary. The good news? we mostly weaned before the appearance of said tooth.
Also, she has given up on formula. She weaned her own sweet self onto cows milk, which is early, earlier than I had intended, but I'm rolling with it. I'm just trying to make sure she gets enough iron - and we'll all be good.
And she's eating table food like it's going out of style. She took down an entire happy meal Sunday night, while we were killing time waiting to see if Chad was going to get admitted to the hospital overnight - long story. The point is, she's only 10-months old, and ate 4 chicken nuggets and all her fries. And drank 8 oz of milk. There is no way a child that small should be able to hold that much, lol.
I did NaNoWriMo this year. I didn't win, but i came really close - 43000 words or so. I blame my being sick, and out of town for the last weekend in Nov for not winning. But it was a pretty good experience overall, at any rate.
Getting ready for the Great Christmas Tour - with an added complication of a 10-month-old added to the already crazy 12+-hour drive with dog and cat and presents. If you want to get together whilst we are back home - let me know, and we'll see what we can do.
Also, Brianna will have a new little cousin (on her Daddy's side) sometime this month. Probably sooner rather than later. We're looking forward to meeting him!
There are other things, but my mind is mushy. Being sick (all the time) sucks, and I'm hopping to be done with it soon. (Probably just in time to create another germ carrier to make us sick all the time, lol).
Went to RenFest last weekend. Going again this weekend. It's awesome. :-)
I didn't buy the like, eight Egyptian statues they were selling that I didn't have... But I did buy a cool Egypt dagger. And a shirt. And a ring. But not a jingly ankle bracelet. I'm gonna hafta make that one.
It's still really hot in Houston. For some reason, this is upsetting me less and less the longer I stay here :-) Although it is a bit weird to wear shorts and tank tops out Christmas shopping.
Family drama is always interesting, and kind of odd. Christmas will be fun, all around. I'm just sayin'.
I am hopelessly behind in my writing. But I caught up a little yesterday. Sort of. We'll see how it goes this week, as we'll have house-guests from Thursday until Tuesday.
I hate NetBeans. With the fiery passion of a thousand suns. No really, I hate it that much. Even more than I hate Internet Explorer. Which is amazing.
It's true, we're all a little insane... Just so as you know, I totally suck at writing. (Not that I'm giving up, I'm just saying is all). The chances that anyone will ever get to read the novel? Practically zero. I mean, really. I'm hesitant to even post an excerpt on my NaNoWriMo profile, it's *that bad*. ~Disclaimer: I know there are worse writers out there, but I've also read enough to know that I wouldn't read anything that was as poorly written as what I write. I might not be entirely objective about this. But it's how I see it.~
Odd issues with writing... I feel the need to write an abstract. Too many journal papers. Sheesh.
Also, I have this weird desire to "get things right", and instead of making a note to look something up, I have to drop my story and spend time in Google trying to determine which is more correct - shawabti? or shabti? Or, how far is the Valley of the Kings from Giza? How long does it take to fly from a US hub (say, Houston) to Cairo? Does it take longer if you're on a budget?
Blah. Research.
I'm hoping to make my target word count today... somewhere around 3400 words. I'm sitting just shy of 2300 now. And I'm going out tonight, won't be back until after 10pm.
Here I come back from the dead! (holy craaaap) I'm not dead. Seriously. I mean, I could have died, from the head cold I had, but I didn't. I have just been way busy and stuff. (and by way busy, I mostly mean lazy).
So. New things (and some old ones):
Finally doing NaNoWriMo this year. At least attempting. Since I always said I would when I got out of school, and hey, I’m not in school any more. No more excuses! As such, I spent I don’t know, maybe a hour today trying to figure out how to friend people on the NaNoWriMo site… I mean, there’s no search or anything. Turns out, they disable the search during high traffic times (like you know, two days before the thing kicks off. Yikes, the site was slow), so as to make the site faster. So, those of you WriMo’ers out there, friend me if you like… I’m lydaaleaxander (bet you wouldn’t have guessed that one). Funny note: WriMo’ers, in my head, sounds like Rye Mowers. Which brings to mind images of lawn mowers mowing a lawn made up of loaves of bread. Which, in my head, is funny.
I have a bread machine. And, I managed to make a loaf of bread, which turned out pretty nicely, considering I tried to screw it up at least a dozen times in the process (who knew it would be so difficult?). Now that I’m over the learning curve, I might have to make another loaf… but that would require finishing off the loaf I made last night, which will take a couple of days (in theory). The greatest part? I only paid $15 for the machine. At a yard sale. About two hours after I told Chad I was going to put one on my Christmas list.
I have fallen on and off the “good habits” bandwagon so many times that I think I’m going to install a spring on my behind. It would make things easier. Plus, I could sing Tigger songs, which would be fun. At any rate, I’ll be jumping back into Smart Habit Saturday this week (that’s the plan). My new habit will be to write every day (bet you didn’t see that one coming, either).
I’m working on cleaning out my feed reader. See, when I started with feed readers, I said, omg! This is the best thing eVar!, and promptly subscribed to the whole internet. Or, at least, 20% of it. As such, if you suddenly start getting a million emails from me, linking to sites that you saw on Digg about two months ago…. That’s why. I have like 200 things starred to go back and read/watch. But, I have reduced the number of total feeds I subscribe to by an order of magnitude (and still reducing). So it might get better.
I think we have nailed down our Christmas plans, so if you want to know when we’ll be in Huntsville or Memphis, ask and I’ll let you know. I do not, however, know when Family is going to take up our time in either city, although it’s a safe bet that Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are taken. Also, while in Huntsville, we’ll be staying at my brother’s, in case that matters to anyone.
Angleton, TX<, isn’t a particularly interesting place to kill 3.5 hours. I mean, they have a Walmart, and a Kroger, but not much else. (Why was I killing time? I had to report to Jury Duty at 8:30am, and once they sorted everything out (around 10am) they asked my panel to come back for a case at 1:30pm. But at about 1:29pm, the case settled, so they never got around to picking a jury/going to trial. It took them another 20 minutes to figure out that we weren’t really needed there. Awesome stuff).
New things: I am now in possesion of one 4gb black iPod nano. Yay for me! (Been waiting on it for like, a month).
I cut all of my hair off. Well... to be fair, not all of it, I guess. I was just tired of getting my hair stuck in doors and accidentally setting it on fire and stuff... so I cut like, 11" off it and am sending the cut-off hair to Locks Of Love. I wasn't sure how I would adjust to short hair again, or how Chad would like it, but all seems to have turned out well. :-) Yeah. New hair length: just almost to my shoulders.
The server where lydaalexander.com resides is apparently back up. ANd has been for like a week, but no one (including Chad) bothered to tell me, so I haven't done anything about it. That being said... until we get possesion of the site (read: January at the earliest), I think I'll leave it here, and just post a redirect from lydaalexander. Or maybe a mirror or something. I don't know. This webspace will be deleted in January, so I have to figure something out before then. I'll let you know.
Chad and I are like the only two people in the world not doing NaNoWriMo. But that is fine... we always have next year to jump on the bandwagon, I guess.
We still have no idea where we are going to live when we get to Houston... although we now know we will *not* be buying a house in Clearlake proper... although renting there is certainly still an option. I've interviewed for some jobs, all in like, central Houston... but no word back yet. And I decided to apply to Rice for a psychology degree... no idea if they'll accept me, or anything like that. We'll see, I guess.
Anyway... That is all I really have to say, I guess. I'm so counting the days until graduation....
This is my brain..... in part, at least.
