Hmmm...

A lot to recap, so let's just dive in.

1) Gabe, one of our two elderly cats, spent nearly a week at the vet. He was meowing a lot on Monday night, but he does that occasionally, so we thought little of it. By Tuesday, he was having enough intestinal issues (as evidenced by the litterbox) that we thought it wise to get him to the emergency vet. They weren't able to find anything for certain, but advised us to keep an eye on him. As I was feeling poorly on Wednesday, I stayed home, and tried in vain to feed him several appealing dishes. Since he wasn't eating, and since we were getting ready to go out of town, we decided to take him to his regular vet, which also offers boarding for cats. So they checked him out and agreed to board him, while running some tests as well. The tests ultimately ended up being fairly inconclusive, but Jeremy picked Gabe up from the vet last night with a shaved belly and a bag full of medicine. Gabe seems to be mostly back to his usual self now, except that he slept the entire night curled up by my side. Jeremy is off work today, so he's going to keep a close eye on Gabe's eating and litterbox habits. We're hoping he is over his sickness, whatever it was.

2) We spent Thursday through Monday at the Edgefield in Troutdale, Oregon, for Ambercon NW. The Edgefield is super awesome--we made spa appointments for shortly after our arrival, so we were nice and relaxed by the time the gaming began. I got to meet a lot of people I had thus far only heard stories about, as well as a lot of other cool people. I ran three games and played in four games, and was generally exhausted by the time my head hit my pillow every night. In related news, soaking in a hot tub-like pool apparently causes fingernail polish to unadhere from your fingernails. What I didn't lose in the pool proper came off in CHUNKS yesterday morning. :(

3) As a result of the above two factors (the cat and the convention, not the nail polish falling off), I've fallen a bit behind on my NaNoWriMo word count. I had a few hours to write yesterday morning, and I finally think I know where my story is going. Now I just have to actually write it all out. I did discover this morning that I can write (by hand) on the bus, so long as I don't have a big backpack on my lap. Time to switch back to my usual purse, I guess. :)

4) I've got a craft show on Saturday at the home of Kay, along with several other local artisans. If you're interested in attending, drop me a line, and I'll get you the evite. I'm surprisingly well-stocked already, though I do have a bag of catnip eyeballs to finish up before the show. Sometime...

5) Awaiting word on whether I'm traveling for work next week. If I am, having my weekend compressed means I'm going to be running around like a madwoman all weekend. If I'm not, I might actually manage to squeeze in a night at the studio next week. Ooooooh. :)

Weekend update and more!

So Friday night was karaoke, and Jeremy and I had agreed in advance that we would sing "A Whole New World" from Aladdin together. It was apparently very good, as he had several people come up to him afterwards and tell him it was great. One person told me the same. :) I also had a lot of people tell me that I did "Stupid Girl" by Garbage really well, which is funny, because I signed up for it, and then googled the lyrics because I couldn't remember how it went. (Yeah, they put the lyrics up when you do karaoke, but if I don't have some vague sense of the lyrics before I start singing, I do miserably. Rock Band is proof of this. :) )

Saturday, we watched a couple of horror movies with part of our usual D&D group, in lieu of actually gaming. The first movie was Phantasm, which was pretty laughable to me. I find that I'm just really not that impressed with older horror movies, and they don't tend to scare me much. We followed that with Slither, which I had seen before, but no one else had. I love that movie, mainly because it stars Nathan Fillion. It's also spectacular as a comedy-horror.

From there, we headed to Denny's for the NaNoWriMo kick off, where I proceeded to write 2,200 words in about 75 minutes, a fact which stunned Jeremy and Nate. Apparently, I write fast. :) Of course, I make no claims as to how good it was, and I'm probably scrapping over 2/3 of it when editing time rolls around.

After sleeping like a rock, I had I Heart Rummage on Sunday afternoon, which was a good show for me. I sat next to Susan of This Charming Candy, and ended up trading a pair of arm warmers for two bags of her lollipops. So far, I've tried tangerine-clove and coconut-caramel, and I'm definitely loving the slightly more grown-up flavor combinations. In my bag for today: vanilla cardamom. I don't even know what cardamom tastes like. :)

My current NaNo word count is now up to 5,424, which is about 424 words ahead of where I need to be. Rock on! :) The story is shaping up pretty well, though it keeps going in directions I wasn't quite expecting. I wrote a ridiculously overdramatic scene between a father being sent to fight in the Great War and his thirteen year old daughter last night. Truly over the top. I love it. :)

Now if I can just kick this cold in the next, oh, 48 hours, I'll be set. :) We're off to AmberCon NW on Thursday morning, and I do not want to be sick at the convention!

Lollipops by thischarmingcandy.etsy.com.

Blergh...

So the headache on Sunday and Monday turned out to be a sinus headache (as best as I can fathom), which was the prelude to the accursed cold coming back. Just when I thought it was all done, I get smacked with it yet again.

The timing is horrid, too, since I have to get on a plane at o'dark thirty Sunday morning to head back to Kansas for another week. I hate flying when I'm sick, because my ears never quite pop correctly. And since I have a chemical sensitivity to several artificial sweeteners (and am not willing to risk the migraine that they might cause), my gum options are pretty limited. So I'm going to try to find some sort of gum with real sugar tonight, and if that fails, I'll have some chips or something to try to keep my ears from feeling like they want to explode on the plane.

(If anyone has any good tips on how to get your ears to pop on a plane other than yawning and chewing gum, please share them! Yawning doesn't work for me when my sinuses are already messed up. :( )

In other news, I'm slowly but surely hammering my games for ACNW into shape. Not sure if I posted what I'm running here, but it's a steampunk game, a weird Deadlands/Scion knock-off, and a Firefly game. I'm homebrewing all of the systems, which makes this a double challenge, since I have to write up game systems and work on plot stuff. Jeremy helped me with the steampunk game a bit, so I'm hoping I can get some done on the other games next week. I don't technically NEED the systems done till the end of the month, and the games until November, but it's still nice to get them out of the way.

Luggage tags by maluhia.etsy.com

Monday again!

So coming off of a great weekend, some Mondays seem really dreary. I think the sunshine today is helping today to feel much better than an average Monday. Either that, or I'm just enjoying the calm before the inevitable storm. We're having dinner with Jeremy's grandparents tonight, and then we have a free night tomorrow. Then there are only 7 days in July with nothing on the calendar. Goodbye, free time! :)

The weekend was Go Play Northwest, which was a gaming convention for indie games. I got to play in some okay games, and I got to play in some really wonderful games. It's hard to pick a single one as my favorite game, and nearly all of the games had at least some elements that were a whole lot of fun for me. I also know I missed out on getting to try some games that I would have liked to have played, but there just wasn't enough time to play them all. I'm sure we'll go back next year, though, since it's local. :)

Of course, it's got me amped for working on my games for Ambercon Northwest, which is just another thing I've got to figure out how to plug into my incredibly ridiculous schedule. I only need game write-ups by the end of August, and then the actual games by the beginning of November, so that's helpful. I also need to kitbash together a couple of systems to end up with systems that I like... ah, the joys of diceless gaming for someone who's always used dice. :)