Sunday, October 28, 2007

Halloween preparations and Nano news

This weekend actually proved pretty productive, in spite of having to go in and work for four hours.

- At work, in the four hours, I turned in the last of my September P & Ls, got my property mailings done, and was able to box up some of my 2006 files, giving me more room to work with.

- On the halloween front: Bought the pumpkin and candy for the trick-or-treaters and got the last piece of my costume. The yard is now decorated and a lot of leaves raked and swept. Some of them even made it into the yard debris bin!. Decided I'm going to make Peanutty Halloween Cookie Pizza, which is a new twist on this recipe: http://www.pillsbury.com/recipes/ShowRecipe.aspx?rid=15308
It uses chocolate chip dough instead of sugar cookie, and halloween m&ms take the place of candy corn, and it also uses dry roasted peanuts. Today I also finished making a black cat necklace that I bought unassembled at Michaels. I'm currently working on the favors I'm going to give out to my co-workers. Two pencils, and a couple of pieces of candy, tied with orange ribbon. Sadly, it took me three tries to find it. Freddy's doesn't have gift ribbon in either orange or black! Big Lots came through, and most of their Halloween stuff was 50% off. Three are done, seven to go.

And that brings me to something that's very irritating. The stores already have their Christmas stuff out! Grr! Whatever happened to enjoying Halloween and Thanksgiving?

-Nano news: Last week, I took a page from Chris Baty's No Plot, No Problem and cleaned off my desk. One week later, it's still fairly clean. :) I had another idea for a novel. I'm not going to discuss it here, because whenever I've brought the topic up on the net, I wind up having technological issues. Only thing is, I can't see very far past the idea, which is typically not enough for a Nano. So that's on hold for a bit. I also attended the local Nanowrimo kickoff party for the first time ever. That was kind of fun, and we even got a little treat bag to take home with us. :) Portland's got a lot of people doing Nano, it seems, because there were at least 50 people in the US Bank meeting room.

I said I'm going to use dice as part of my novel, so allow me to introduce you to them. It's a Chessex 7 die polyhedral set, frosted teal with white numbers. http://www.chessex.com/Dice/Frosted/Teal.htm I won this set at one of Gamestorm's last GM raffles (they use a different method of giving away swag these days). Oh, yeah, Gamestorm is a local gaming convention. I've been attending it since its very early days. Since most of the games I play now involve the use of only one type of die (6-sided or 10-sided), this is actually the only polyhedral set I own. So why not put it to use for a gaming related novel?

Gotta run...I think I'm getting a cold, so it's off to take some Cold-Ez to ward it off. Zinc lozenges are icky, but they do work!

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