Chairs

Someone wrote the other day and said that I had been remiss in not putting up pictures of the kitties lately, and I wrote back that I just hadn't been taking any pictures lately, that it seemed like a lot of work to take them, then resize/crop them, adjust the brightness or whatever, upload them, etc.

But she was right, I hadn't put any up in a long time, so here they are, Pyewacket enjoying the afghan that Barbara Bretton sent us last year for Christmas:

And Dinah, having claimed my computer chair when I got up to take Pye's picture. Every time I get up, it seems like I come back to a cat having taken over the space.

I wish I'd taken the time to clean up my desk first! Let's see, there's the empty leather PDA case--the PDA itself in the cradle is behind the chair back; a lynx Beanie Baby on top of the books; books, CDs, ZIP disks, miscellaneous paper junk; a Silly Putty egg (metallic silver); an evian mister; a Diet Coke in a red Coleman holder; the corner of my bulletin board; etc.

Dinah's shoestring is on the floor, and the corner of some other toy--a stuffed bat, I think.

I've been struggling with whether or not to actually do NaNoWriMo this year; I go back and forth. But tonight I decided to go ahead and do it. I don't know if I have a story or not, I don't know if I can write 50,000 words this month or not, but I'm going to give it a shot. I colored in the first eye of another Daruma tonight; we'll see if I can color in his other eye in a month or not.

I started re-reading The Artist's Way on Monday, and did my morning pages all week. The "morning pages" are three pages handwritten each morning before you do anything else--the theory is that by doing this, you dump the junk out of your head and make room for creativity. Kind of. At least that's the way I interpret it. Sometimes something interesting comes out, but that's not really the point.

You don't worry about what you're writing, you don't worry about how you're writing, you just write. I usually write them with a cat on my lap.

I'm not going to post what I'm writing this month, or at least not at first. I decided it's just WAY too much pressure. I enjoyed doing it last year, but I'm not as certain this time that I actually have a story (oh, who am I kidding, I wasn't certain then!), and I just don't want to put that much pressure on myself going forward. If it starts to work out okay, then I will. I'm just saying. :)

I probably will, I just want to give myself that space to back out if I decide I need to.

Why yes, there are four books in my "Reading" list in the sidebar. I'm reading Maeve Binchy's London Transports very slowly, and absolutely loving it. I'm trying to make it last--it's a book of short stories, and I'm about halfway through it.

When I went to the library yesterday, I found Charlaine Harris's Poppy Done to Death, which is a "cozy" starring Aurora Teagarden, librarian and amateur sleuth, and I picked that up while I ate my dinner tonight (salad from the grocery store salad bar) and started it.

I installed Spirits in the Wires on my PDA tonight--I bought it a couple of weeks ago because Fictionwise had a 20% rebate on it. It will probably take me a year to read it . . . I read much slower on the PDA screen, which is fine--I seem to absorb better, too, because I'm reading slower, so if it's a book I love, it's an even better experience. If it's something I'm not enjoying, it becomes torture. I adore Charles de Lint, so this one should be great.

And the fourth one is The Artist's Way, which I'm reading in installments, mostly in the mornings, as an adjunct to my morning pages.