Beware the wall of text!

I should probably post here more often. But since I haven't posted for a few months, here's a recap!

In October, I got to go to New Mexico for work. I went there several years back, and fell in love with the food there, particularly stuffed sopapillas. So I insisted that we go out to a Mexican place one of the nights we were there, and I got my stuffed sopapillas. Om nom nom.

Also in October, Jeremy's first novella, "Kensei," came out for e-readers! It's bundled with two other novellas as Cobalt City Rookies from Timid Pirate Publishing. All three of the novellas feature teenaged super hero protagonists. I have, of course, read his novella several times, and I finally got started reading the other two recently. So far, super awesome!

We spend November working on our novels for NaNoWriMo. This was the fourth year I attempted it, and once again, I did not finish. This time, it was because my laptop died a week before the end of November. Though I ended up buying a new laptop on Cyber Monday, and had it two days later, it was really a disheartening blow to my potential progress. I'd still like to finish the novel, but I haven't gotten back to it yet.

I also had the big EtsyRain holiday show in November, which was excellent! This was the first year the show was in McCaw Hall, and the new venue was spectacular! My sales were also great, and the new item I debuted, wrist warmers, proved quite popular.

A few weeks later, I sold my crocheted crafts at GeekFest, which was put on by Seattle Browncoat Charities. It was a ton of fun to finally do a show where I didn't have to try to explain things like Cthulhu. :) Also, Jeremy got to see Kirby Krackle, ended up buying all of their music on his phone while listening to their show, and then playing it for me. Yay, nerdy music! (Granted, we had seen the lead singer from Kirby Krackle about a week previous, which was part of the reason that Jeremy went to see them play at GeekFest.)

We spent Christmas proper in Seattle, but then left a couple of days later for a grand tour of the Midwest. We flew to St. Louis and spent one night there. The next morning, we loaded up the car with my mom and youngest sister, and drove to Kansas City, where we spent two nights at my middle sister's brand new house, which I refer to as the mansion. It has an indoor pool. That's really all that you need by way of explanation. I managed to pull a muscle in my leg from either swimming or going up and down the stairs the first day (possibly both), but I still went ice skating on the second day, which really didn't improve my leg any. But it eventually got better. We also got to watch Inception, Return of the Jedi, and Les Miserables while we were there.

After our two nights in Kansas City, we returned to St. Louis for another night, and did karaoke in my mom's living room. Because she found a karaoke machine at a yard sale for like $6, and it worked. The music selection was a bit slim, but that just meant we got to pick out ridiculous songs and sing them. Someone should have taped me and Megan trying to sing all five parts on a Spice Girls song. :)

We drove down to Carbondale for New Years Eve, where we played a ridiculous amount of Cards Against Humanity and hung out with my good friends there (except for Thor, who was sick). We went to lunch with my former boss's widow the next day, after I took Jeremy on a driving tour of Carbondale. I was a little surprised at how well I remembered how to get most places... but I guess I did live there for nine years!

Finally, we drove back up to St. Louis and stayed at my mom's for one more night, where we broke out the wine and played a wine-themed version of Monopoly. Much to his astonishment, Jeremy won the game after Mom and Megan decided to give up.

So now we're in 2013, and though I don't do resolutions or anything of the sort, I do at least have things in mind that I'm trying to do, like trying to budget and spend more carefully this year. I'm also trying to write more frequently (daily would be ideal) and keep my blogs more active. :) On the crafting front, I should probably figure out something new to start making this year. At the moment, I'm doing a bunch of custom work for friends and family, and then I need to restock all of the stuff that sold out at my shows. So it might take a while before I can start on new things. Or, depending on how some of the custom works goes, I might start making these things for my shop!

Ugh...

Well, I had a good weekend overall, but today is rather ugh.

Friday was Aine's birthday, and so we went to dinner with her and a ton of other folks at Marrakesh, which was pretty good. I actually preferred all of the other courses to my main course, but that might have just been a poor choice on the main course on my part.

Saturday, we got up early to walk around Green Lake, and then headed back to Jeremy's to watch movies. Normally it would have been an Exalted day, but the ST for that game was sick, so we actually had a free Saturday. Of course, then I started coming down with a cold, so it worked out alright that we didn't have anywhere to go. So we watched 3 or 4 movies, I cooked dinner, and went to bed early. All in all, a rather nice Valentine's Day.

Woke up on Sunday feeling a bit worse, so I slept late and tried to get to feeling well enough to help out with the kids' game. I managed to succeed, though I was feeling pretty out of it at times. I had discovered on Saturday, while Jeremy was reading some of the Great Book of Amber to me, that my brain glosses over combat entirely. Since the kids' game had a higher than normal percentage of combat, it's no real wonder that I was spacing out throughout the game. But it was still a blast, especially when I was getting EVERY plot hint that Jeremy was tossing out, while the kids ran off on random tangents. This is apparently par for the course. :)

I'm finding that I rather enjoy the co-GMing idea, though. Granted, I'm mostly only contributing little things to the plot, scooping up random unplanned NPCs, and other little helpful tasks. I've only really worked with co-GMing in LARPS prior to this, but the benefit of two table top STs with a slightly large group (there were 6 players for one session, so not HUGE, but slightly large) is apparent. Now, if I only knew the cosmology of the system a little better, I'd be set. :)

Oh, and today is ugh because the cold isn't gone yet. Everyone I know has been sick for the past week or so. I thought I was getting out of this plague easy. Not so much.

And a weekend recap (with some extra!)

It's gotten to the point where I really don't post nearly as often as I should. So that's why you get big recaps. :)

Friday night was the Abney Park show, which was a blast as always. We didn't stay there as late as I might have been inclined to do if we hadn't had early Saturday morning plans. But the merch booth ceased to be a zoo, so it seemed like a good time to escape. Now Jeremy has seen the madness that is working merch for Abney Park. I think we'll do it again. :)

Saturday kicked off with walking around Green Lake, which I had not done previously, despite living probably close enough to walk TO Green Lake. :) Headed to Beth's Cafe after that, which probably negated any benefits from walking around the lake. But it was tasty. :) Then it was off to run a handful of errands, including dropping off my bottle cap belts with Marlo so that they can go to Happy Delusions. Then we headed over to The Dreaming, which is Jeremy's comic shop of choice.

However, the owner was running late, which meant we ended up in a record store where I mostly behaved myself (only bought a 2-CD set of old NIN and a CD of Cure covers), and also got to check out the tattoo shop that one of Jeremy's friends recommended to me a while back. It seems like the sort of place I could deal with being tattooed at (read: not pretentious and the people there will speak to me as though I'm a human being even though I have no visible mods), and at least two of the artists seem to do work that I like.

Since we had gotten all of about 4 hours of sleep previous to walking, we decided to take a nap before going out for the evening. Someone was misinformed about when the Rat City Roller Girls bout was, but getting there early meant we got good seats. And holy crap, am I a fan of roller derby! I got a new, limited edition Krysztof shirt, and have learned how to make some sense of what's going on while they play. I'm still a little fuzzy on scoring, but it seems that's not entirely unusual, as it usually takes a bit before the score is updated. :)

Sunday would have been a lovely day for sleeping, but oh no. We'll sleep when we're dead. :) Instead, we headed to Denny's for breakfast with Jeremy's friend Darrin, who is a player in the big LARP that I briefly played. He gave me hope that I might be able to go back to the Changeling game, at least when I want something to do on the nights Jeremy has D&D. After breakfast was my turn to run One Hit Wonders, where I ran Star Wars after forgetting to really read the rules and not quite finishing my plot. :) Nonetheless, it was fun.

I spent yesterday at home, recovering both from lack of sleep and the edges of a migraine, which may, in fact, have been related. So I slept late, worked on some crochet, and did thrilling things like cancel my old cell phone and do my taxes. I also got some quality Rock Band time in before heading downtown for dinner and Coraline with Jeremy. I'll talk more about Coraline another day, but for now, I was mostly pleased with the movie. Mostly.

Wow...

It's been a crazy week, and I haven't managed to carve out any time to sit down and blog. At all. Hopefully next week will be much more productive in terms of writing. :)

So let's see here... recap of my week.

Monday sucked like only Mondays can suck. Basically everything I wanted and needed to do ended up getting deferred when my microwave crapped out right as I went to reheat my leftover pizza. Ugh.

Tuesday evening was spent getting Jerome moved into his new place, and necessitated a lot of carrying heavy stuff. No fun!

Wednesday involved moving more stuff (and no, it's still not completely done) and playing phone tag with Jeremy so that he could cook me dinner. :)

Thursday, I had a work trip to Olympia for the day. Got home nice and early and discovered that my vacuum cleaner really can't deal with long hair on slighly plush carpet. *sigh* Then I made dinner, and Jeremy and I went out shopping for my new PS3 and TV. Expensive shopping trip, but TOTALLY worth it. Rock Band 2 looks amazing on my new TV. :) (Yeah, most of what I bought was so that I could feed the addiction... I am the ridiculous person who buys a PS3 because of one game that I can't live without. :) )

And today, we have End of the Work Week Wisdom from a new source, who has been getting a lot of mention in this blog. :)

"History is written by the victor. Have the historians beat the crap out of each other, and then base your facts off of that."
--Jeremy's suggestion on how I should decide which historian had the facts correct.

I like the way he thinks. :)