My Civic Duty

I had jury duty today.
I got picked for a trial.
It starts tomorrow.
Shoot me now.

Playing Catch-Up

I lived through NaNoWriMo, and even managed to win the challenge, although I only had about five hours to spare on the very last day. How I lived through most of November is still a mystery to me. It's a blur now. I hope to finish and edit that novel -- called Black Soul Choir -- starting in January.

And now December is nearly half over. I'm scurrying around trying to finish the mammoth Christmas card list (which I always find particularly fun, for some strange reason), and the Christmas shopping, which includes making at least one major gift this year (can't say what, in case the recipient reads this).

Let me rapidly catch up with things around here:

-- The Steelers won on Sunday. (Whew, finally!)

-- I was accepted into the Christian Writers Guild's Journeyman program for fiction. I'll be starting my first assignment this month. In all my spare time. My mentor/instructor has had 29 novels published. I've probably started that many, but somehow I don't think that's the same thing.

-- We had a great Thanksgiving weekend with my brother and his family here for a visit. They live east of here in Bethlehem. Twelve of us went bowling, and my dad hadn't bowled in 35 years. He still beat me. Go figure.

-- Wayne started his new job with First Energy at the Shippingport power plant. Now he speaks technical jargon again, and I can't understand half of what he says at dinner when I ask, "How was your day, dear?" But he's so good at what he does that it makes me giddy to listen to him anyway.

-- Got a new adventure game called Indigo Prophecy. I keep getting arrested in the snow outside the diner in the first scene. I think I still have a learning curve with this game. There has to be more to it than that. I hope.

-- I finally caught up on all the available episodes of "Lost," including downloading nine episodes of Season 2 from iTunes. After being able to glut myself on episodes one after the other any time I wished, I'm now exhibiting withdrawal symptoms, including but not limited to shortness of breath, sweaty palms, sleeplessness, narcolepsy, panic attacks, indigestion, projectile vomiting, hives, and the heartbreak of psoriasis. Only to find out the show is on hiatus until January.

Kill me now.