measi's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Winter is coming... I'm preparing for nights of chugging chai and writing my ass off The first freeze is supposed to happen tomorrow night, which means that I have begun planning to get everything settled outside on the deck. I brought my three surviving ivy geraniums into the office today and have scattered them among co-workers with sunny office windows, hoping they'll survive the winter. Two asked (and of course I said yes) if they can make clippings off the plants in their office for next year, since they'd never seen ivy geraniums before. Hopefully all three will do well, and I'll have large, pretty plants to put back on the deck next spring. Being that they are still geraniums, though-- I have a smattering of flower leaves EVERYWHERE trailing around the hall here at the office. It's amazing how the things shed. (goo) The rest of the deck plants will fall victim to the frost, though. As much as I'd like to save the Martha Washington geraniums... they were struggling by the end of the summer and just didn't flower again after early August. The rest of the deck pots are filled with impatiens and petunias, which would get too leggy and ugly anyway if they were in a window sill. And the tomatoes... well... *shrug* I'll see about more next year, maybe. I want to toss the dirt out of the pots this year-- half of my pots had serious croaking issues this summer. Plants that looked great would just up and die the day after I watered. I don't get it. So I'm worried that there's something in the soil that's causing a problem, or maybe the Miracle Grow plant food had something wrong with it. I'll just buy new potting soil next spring-- I want to improve the drainage in the pots anyway. Needless to say, at least part of my Saturday morning will be spent emptying pots on my deck and just getting everything ready for the long winter season. ~~~~~~~~~~ They fixed the text color over on NaNoWriMo. I'm still not thrilled with light blue on red, but at least it has black text so I can read things now. It's do-able. It looks like I already have a great small group of NaNo'ers in Massachusetts that want to get involved-- a couple have offered to help co-ML in various parts of the state so we can have more events. I want to make sure I have at least ONE event in each general region of my area-- but it's just too difficult for me to drive, for example, to Cape Cod and then drive back up past home, through Boston and go up to the Beverly area for an event on the same day-- 60-80 miles one-way, depending on traffic routing. I have to write a novel too, of course. So to have some other people interested in coordinating weekly gatherings, write-ins, etc. will be awsome. And hopefully we won't repeat the car accident of last year. That would be a major, major plus. As for my novel? I had an idea to write a history of my grandparents' lives from Poland to the USA, but I've decided that I'm actually going to work on that one long-term and try to get it ready for submission for publication. It will require me to spend a lot of time talking with my grandfather-- I just don't see that as practical for NaNoWriMo, especially since I won't see him next month (except maybe Thanksgiving). So I'm back to no idea for the moment... I'm leaning toward another story using my character from my first NaNo attempt, working through another Pagan-based murder/suspense/etc. type novel. Something that's modern day so that I "write what I know" and have an easy way of traveling to get description details. But that allows me to also put some supernatural/mystical/etc. slant in it if I'd like and be able to play a bit. Raven's been screaming for me to let her out of the box again. She kept thumping on my head during last year's NaNo attempt, making me wish I'd picked to write another story about her than to flesh out my character's history from D&D (which I needed to do, but was REALLY tough to do when I had to write a history to make sense with the present). In any case, this year I'm writing to have a good time. I'm not going to stress out about the 50,000 words. Been there, done that twice. This time I'm gearing to write a story from beginning to end in November. Wherever my word count ends, cool. But I want to finish a story and work on crafting a story during the NaNo period. And I imagine that I will be sucking down so much chai on weekday evenings at Borders or Starbucks that I'll have a perpetual smell of nutmeg around me. (because NaNo is, after all, an excuse to go sip chai for a few hours). ~~~~~~~~~~ I had wanted to get up to Boston last night to attend the sorority meeting, but Erich's dad was at the house and we went out to grab dinner together. We'll be helping him move up to New Hampshire in a couple of weeks for his new job up there. The sisters will be down in my mom's neighborhood this weekend (in Allentown, PA) for a band competition. I'll have to catch up with them sometime next week. I need to get addresses from all of the officers to link on the website in case anyone emails asking questions. And I found a graphic artist who has music-themed websets and wanted to get their feedback on it.
4:28 p.m. - 04 October 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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