Nanowrimo's got me busy

Between working almost full days and doing Nanowrimo in my free time, I don't have much time to write here. Not that things having been happening, just that I don't have time to report them. I'm now at over 18,000 words, so I'm creeping slowly up to the halfway point.

Today, Angel #2 got a new cat. She's been missing Mouschi, her cat who was hit by a car last month. I ran into my friend DeAnne at the bank today and she told me that they had renters for their house and needed to do something about their cats and asked if #2 might be interested. So we now have a little, half feral cat that I've been calling Emo, since it's freaked out, won't come out of it's box and is all black, kind of like a certain Emo daughter I have. She started calling it Emo too, but I don't know if that's going to be it's official name now or not. She says no, but hasn't come up with anything better yet.

Are any of you familiar with the Missing Leprechaun puzzle? It is currently driving our entire family crazy trying to figure out where the 15th leprechaun goes and which lep is it that disappears anyway? We've got the puzzle and it's sitting on the kitchen counter and various members of the family will sit there and stare at the puzzle. At the moment, Angel #1 is sitting there counting the noses and yelling, where did the nose go? Now he's giving me a theory about body parts morphing onto other leprechauns. It's a real head scratcher, let me tell ya.

dumpster adventures

Today, as I was going past the "do not pee" dumpster, I said hi to Eb, whose real name is Terry, which makes for 3 Terry's in the same building, the building manager Terry, one of the guys I work with Terry and Terry, the homeless guy who sleeps in a van with his friend Larry. Anyway, I said hi to Eb/Terry, then noticed what he was doing -- spraying the dumpster with disinfectant. So, not only can you not pee on it, it's also germ-free. We've got the cleanest garbage in town, folks. Sadly, our parking lot is not so clean, because hubby lost his lunch on it. Literally. We were eating lunch together and he just unwrapped his hamburger when he dropped it and it fell apart on the ground. He reached over to pick it up and dumped his smoothie over in the process. There was purple smoothie goo running down the side of the lawn tractor he was sitting on. Yes, we were sitting side by side on a couple of lawn tractors (in the small engine repair world, you have to use what's available if you want to sit while eating lunch). It's very romantic, trust me. At least until you end up covered in deluxe cheeseburger and berry smoothie.

what a day!

Whew, I need to sit down and take a breath after the day I had today. The guy I do bookkeeping for, Tony, moved to a new shop over the weekend. Because of the chaos that's involved in a move, he asked if I could put in more hours working the service counter so he had time to get things organized at the new place. One of his guys didn't show up today, which really put things in a jumble. Of course, as expected, the phone company screwed things up. When we called them last week, we were told that all we had to do was call on the day of the move and they'd have the line switched within an hour. So, this morning I call and am told that they're scheduling a week out for line connecting. After some stern talking and a discussion with the supervisor, we finally got it hooked up in about 5 hours. I do not exaggerate when I say we have NEVER had dealings with the local phone company here without them screwing something up. They once disconnected our phone, on purpose, 5 times in one weekend. They went bankrupt last year and the government bailed them out - I think they just should have let them go down.

While I was working at the new shop, I went outside for something and passed the dumpster and noticed a sign taped on the side of it. It said: No Peeing Allowed. Now, of course, this makes me wonder why someone felt the need to have that particular rule posted on the side of the dumpster. I also met, as hubby calls them, a whole new cast of characters. There's this guy hubby calls Eb who's like the caretaker of the property. He made sure that all of us involved in moving into the new place were up to speed on the bathroom situation, including the brand of toilet paper he supplies (Scott's 1000 sheets, in case you were wondering) and the paper towels provided for drying off hands (Viva). Then there's Chuck, the 84 year old former tenant of the shop. Chuck hadn't gotten around to moving all his accumulated stuff out before the end of the month, so if we wanted to move our stuff in, we had to help Chuck move his stuff out. Chuck has a LOT of stuff. They're hoping that after another full day of hauling like they had today, the rest of his stuff should be out by tomorrow night. Then there's Terry - the homeless guy who lives somewhere in the vicinity of the shop. We're suspecting that he's the reason for the no peeing sign on the dumpster. Something the guys hadn't noticed when they originally checked the building out and signed the lease, is that it's right next door to Pacific Waste Removal. Yep, we're next door to a garbage truck parking lot. It's not too bad during the day, but when all the trucks come back by the late afternoon, things get pretty ripe. Fortunately, Tony closes at 5 and I'm usually out of there earlier, so it might only cause major problems on Saturdays when Tony is open and the trash company isn't.

In addition to my exciting day working at the new shop, I also had parent teacher conferences, a safety inspection scheduled for my van and bread to make because we ran out on Saturday and I hadn't gotten around to making any until today. I also found out that I committed myself to post an entry at the Unusual Historicals blog, which I'd forgotten about and still haven't done. This has to be in by tomorrow afternoon at the very latest. Don't even ask me about my Nano project - I don't wanna talk about it.

Hopefully tomorrow goes a little smoother.

exciting bonus entry

I wanted to write this down because I'll forget it otherwise. Tonight at supper, WE asked hubby if he could steal a billion dollars without anyone knowing about it, would you? Hubby said no, because someone WOULD know about it, him and he wouldn't want to live with himself if he knew he stole it from people. WE with his typical logic said, "with that kind of money, you could pay someone to erase that memory from your brain." How do you argue with something like that?

It's November, let the craziness begin

Tanya, that's too funny about your hubcap. Isn't it handy to have kids so you can send them on errands you're too embarrassed to do yourself?

Today is the first day of National Novel Writing Month, aka Nanowrimo. This is my 4th year doing Nano and I've managed to finish the previous 3 times I've done it. The idea is to write 50,000 words in the month of November. If you figure about 250 words per page, that's 200 pages of writing or about 1667 words written per day. I usually shoot for 2000 words a day so I'm done in plenty of time before the end of the month. This worked great last month when I finished by the 25th, but not so much the year before when I finally hit 50K at 11:45pm on November 30th. I don't recommend doing this as it causes horrible hand cramps when you have to write 10,000 words in about 12 hours. Anyway, I'm off to a good start with over 2200 words written today. Hopefully I can keep it up. My very first published book, It Takes Moxie, was also my very first Nanowrimo project. So good things DO come out of Nano.

We now short one wild pig in our yard, but it wasn't my guys who got it. Our landlord must have given a bunch of guys permission to go hunting out there and they're now parked at the end of our driveway in a pickup truck with a big ol' pig lying in the back. One down, who knows how many left to go. Hubby and the boys saw at least 5 of them the night they caught the piglet last week.

Angel #2's cell phone fell out of her bag this morning when she was getting in the van to go to church. She didn't notice it until later and assumed she set it down someplace. Well, we found it after we got home, the van tire went right over it. Amazingly enough, all it did was crack the glass front screen, but not even enough to mess the screen itself up. So everything on it works just fine, it's just not so purdy anymore. For a hot pink telephone, it's a pretty tough little bugger.

that didn't last long

The pig the kids caught on Tuesday night lasted about 6 hours. About 1am I woke up hearing the strangest noise and it took me a while to figure out what it was. Once I was awake and cognizant enough, I realized it was the piglet squealing like it was next in line at the slaughterhouse. Since I prefer sleeping to listening to pigs at 1am (or just about any time, if you want to know the truth) I gave hubby a helpful little nudge and told him he had to 'do something about that stupid pig'. He crawled out of bed sounding none too enthusiastic and 20 minutes later, he was back and all was quiet. I asked him what he did and he said he let it go, but he had to catch it first, which was no easy feat, those little buggers are fast. I guess I should have pulled myself out of bed and made use of the video camera, because I'm sure watching hubby running around in his underwear with a flashlight trying to catch a squealing baby pig at 1am would make for some wonderful viewing.

I don't think the guys who put on my tires on Tuesday did a good job putting my hubcaps back on. Last night we were driving to Bible Study and we heard an odd noise like something plastic hitting the gravel then rolling down the road. Angel #1 said, that sounded like a hubcap. I hadn't seen one on the side of the road as I was driving, though that's not to say there wasn't. The road is a narrow, twisty one perched on the side of a mountain with very few guardrails, so I spend most of my time trying to keep between the lines and not doing much looking around. Problem is, I'm not sure how many hubcaps were on my van in the first place but it won't be an issue any more, since now there aren't any on it. My van is a mess.

oink

After a couple weeks of trying, we have success at the Daydreamer household. Well, I don't think of it as success, exactly, but many people in this house do. They (they being hubby, the boys and angel #4) have caught a baby wild pig. They have it penned up and I'm not sure what they're planning on doing with it. Is this something we're going to be eating eventually? I think so. But it's such a little bugger right now that we're going to be feeding it for quite a while before it'll make a decent pan of pork chops.

I got new back tire for my mini-van today. It so very seldom gets new things that I think it's over the top with happiness right now. The only new thing it usually gets is a new quart of oil every couple weeks because it leaks so badly. I know I feel more comfortable driving on our twisty, mountain roads on tires that don't have the steel belts poking out. Now, if we could only figure out why the brake light never goes off, we'd be golden.

Sunday we stopped by Costco on the way home from church to pick up a pizza for lunch. There is a sale on pizzas this month, so technically, we're supposedly saving money. But, as usually happens at Costco, our $7 pizza ended up costing us $109 at the register. You'd think after hitting the Costco buffet (aka free samples) pretty hard we'd be so full we wouldn't even be tempted by all those huge cartons of food. Not so! And, of course, since everything does come supersized, it doesn't take long to spend $100 at Costco anyway. The one redeeming thing when you spend a fortune on groceries is that they're groceries. You're going to eat them eventually. It's not like you dropped a wad on electronics or dvds or something that in the long run have no positive features like food. You need food to live, you can (usually) live without the boxed set of the 2nd season of Desperate Housewives. Then again, you can watch Desperate Housewives over and over again, you only get one go-round with a bag of cheese stuffed ravioli.