We Who Are About to Write Salute You...

It's T-minus thirty minutes till NaNoWriMo starts on the East coast. I have a plotline, but my characters have no names and no personalities. None. Nada. Zip.

I feel ill.

Is it December yet?

Medieval Instruments of Torture in My Hallway

I was driving home from work today -- well, to the Barnes & Noble, really, since I have a ton of writing to do -- and I started to think randomly about things I have in my house, especially the things that have no real purpose. My mind immediately leapt to the crossbow sitting in the hallway near our downstairs bathroom.



Yes, dear reader, I have a crossbow in the hallway. Yes, one of those zany weapons that looks like the bastard lovechild of a bow and a rifle. It's in a cardboard box, properly labeled with a color picture and "Crossbow" and all that good stuff, and it's leaning up against the treadmill. The slogan under the photo of a man with the crossbow is: "The Adventure Starts Here." Well, the adventure might start in the woods, or the gamelands in the neighboring county ... but I assure you the adventure doesn't start here. Not in my hallway.

Anyway, if that's not one of the weirder items in my house at the moment, I don't know what is. I'm not quite sure why this medieval apparatus is leaning against the treadmill in the hallway, but there it is. When I stumble to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I walk right by this thing as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Perhaps other women meander past guillotines in bubble wrap at 2 a.m., or saunter by wooden catapults in Tyvek envelopes near dawn ... but I walk by a crossbow in a cardboard box. One day I'm going to accidentally bump into the box, setting off the crossbow and having to explain to my husband the next morning why there is a T-shaped hole in the drop ceiling in the hallway.

He should understand, though. He's the one who put it there in the first place.

Not that any of you were surprised to hear that.

Cheap, used technology is FUN!

I'm not sure what I would do without eBay. If you are patient, do your homework, research used tech toys and watch to see what a good eBay price is, you can find some incredible deals. For instance, I just received a used one of these ...



... and I only paid $59.99 for it. It's a NEC MobilePro 770, and it's teeny.

It works fine (so far), and, aside from some minor scratches on the outside and a little wear and tear on the touch screen, it's all functional and it's all there. With AC adapter, stylus, battery pack, and unit itself. And, it's so TEENY. Did I already mention that?

If the battery has any kind of juice in it, I should be able to carry this little baby in my purse and work remotely with over a dozen lines of text on the screen. Plus other functions the Neo doesn't have. I admit the keyboard takes a bit of getting used to (and the Neo's is a DREAM), but in a pinch this device will be a nice addition to my writing tools. I just need a CompactFlash card to transfer data more easily.

In other news ...

I'm exhausted, and it's only 9:30 p.m. on a Monday. Last Thursday Addie and Gracie came over a day early, so we could get groceries for our gaming weekend. Jeremy and Christopher were scheduled to come up for the weekend so we could game, eat, bowl, eat some more, and generally not sleep very much. It was a load of fun, but I'm officially middle-aged, I suppose, because it was stupendously difficult for me to stay awake at work today, despite two cups of coffee and a can of Diet Coke.

We did have fun, though. Gracie decided on the early arrival to set up this, which came in the mail on Thursday:



Just our luck, it took her only an hour to put the whole set together. We survived our first weekend with a drum set in the house, but I think my ears are bleeding. And, I think I found another use for my green foamy earplugs ...

( http://austruck.blogspot.com/2003_10_01_austruck_archive.html )

Today is Jeremy's birthday. One thing we did this weekend was to play Myst 5: End of Ages together. We didn't get very far as a team, with all five of us crowded around my computer in my office, but we played for a total of three hours, so I think we did very well. Now Jeremy will probably finish the whole rest of the game in one sitting, knowing him. We're hoping to do more of these gaming weekends. They're tiring in some ways (we're going-going-going and staying up half the night, missing sleep), but too much fun not to do regularly.

And today it's quiet here. The kitchen is still recovering. I still have to run a load of dishes and two loads of laundry to catch up. Ahhh, excitement that is my life never ends. But, at least I'll be able to keep reading The Historian in the evenings. Need to finish that book, so I can get started on this:



Yeah, in all my spare time.
Let's not even mention that National Novel Writing Month is about four weeks away. Sleep? I'm not seeing much in my future. But, it's all for a good cause.

Linda