A little marker of sorts

nanowrimo_ftw

I just passed the 50,000 word mark on my awful manuscript!

Here’s a little screen shot of the word counter sitting on top of my 50k word file just to show you that it’s all true. I really did do it.

Thank you NaNoWriMo! I am going to shut down my first draft and not look at it again until January. After that I am going to donate some money to The Office of Light and Letters and then tomorrow I start something new (I’m going with Jerry Seinfeld’s philosophy of “don’t break the chain“).

Hooray!

And yes, that does say “chicken dance”.

What’s Hot + Not today!

jamfancy01

hotnnot

Still writing like crazy at the NaNoWriMo game. I have around 4000 words left, so unless I am suddenly struck with overpowering, debilitating ennui, I should be fine. Blog posts are taking a bit of a back seat but here’s what’s been going on around here since last Wednesday.

(Here’s the game plan:
To play along, it’s as easy as writing up your own hot/not list on your blog and then linking back to me here at loobylu.com and then adding your url to the widget below.)

Hot

Delicious roast chicken and then cold roast potatoes the next day.

Hello Kitty Stamps – -  Thank you to Miss Pilgrim! I spied a package of hers that she linked to from Twitter and I thought… Hmmm… there’s no harm in asking if she’s going to keep those stamps because I know Amelia has a little penchant for Hello Kitty and has also got into stamp collecting this last year (in a funny kind of way)… so I offered to do a swap… and what a nice girl she is. They were so pretty soaking in their bowl.

Christina’s new blog and her etsy shop - – so, so good! Lots of gorgeous reproductions for sale, and Christina always finds such good things on her adventures around the web that I am looking forward to keeping up with her interesting obsessions on her blog.

Pip’s blog anniversary – - Pip’s been blogging for three years this week, and is celebrating with a week of happy things over at Meet me at Mikes. Pip has had such a big impact on the Australian Craft Blogging world (oh yes! it’s a niche within a niche within a niche!) and it’s no secret that I am a huge fan of her site and her daily good spirit, her tireless work, and her passion for life. If you haven’t got Mikes in your life yet, then now might be a very good time to start. I am looking forward to checking in over there for the next three years and beyond!

Angry Chicken’s cardboard puppet theatre – - When I was small I inherited a wooden theatre from my Mum which my Grandpa had made for her when she was small. It was a funny old thing – a simple wooden frame made from plywood, with wings and bits and pieces to hang hand drawn scenery and move cardboard cutout actors about the stage. It was called the Eclipse Theatre, the name mum had given it when she was little, and it absorbed me for hours and hours. I think it’s long gone now, probably warped or split with age, but seeing Amy’s beautiful cardboard theatre reminded me of how much fun we used to have with ours. I think I have found a summer holiday project.

Karen O and the Kids “All is Love” from the Where the Wild Things Are soundtrack – - This song blasts from our iPod about… hmm… 60 times a day.

Melbourne Museum – - we’ve been twice in the last couple of weeks and the kids love it so much. The new Wild exhibition is a cool way of displaying all the old taxidermed animals along with some nice touch screen technology… but it’s busy in there on a rainy day.

Not so hot

Not much this week, which is good. I’m cranky… and my children seem to have ears that repel all requests to tidy up their unbelievable messes. It’s driving me nuts. But then, I’m always cranky so that’s not really anything unusual.

Besides the crank, there’s studio dust – - unbelievable fluffy dust bunnies gone wild. The studio is slowly but surely getting whipped into order, but the resulting allergy attacks are crazy.

See you next week!

What’s Hot + What’s Not

umbrellaplant

Hello Wednesday! My hot + not blog entries are measuring the speed of time for me right now. Obviously NaNoWriMo is swallowing huge globs of my free time so everything else has come to a grinding halt (Including a notion that I might have made entirely homemade christmas presents -Pah! Ridiculous!).

Here’s the game plan:
To play along, it’s as easy as writing up your own hot/not list on your blog and then linking back to me here at loobylu.com and then adding your url to the widget below.

Hot

The umbrella plant in the kitchen (above).

Writing break through: So hot! 35000 words and still going. I have had a bit of a fraidy-cat block about the 30k mark as that was my bomb-out point back when I tried NaNoWriMo in 2001… I blasted past that point on Monday morning in a furious 2 hour writing session. And suddenly my book is a YA (middle reader) Fantasy book. I don’t know how that happened. My spunky little heroine literally took a wrong turn in a tunnel and all of a sudden there’s time travel and talking foxes and ancient shape-shifting Scandanavian mountain trolls… oh well. At least the words are flowing thick and fast even if I do have to edit out around 40k in December.

The kids ever changing breakfast cereal mix: Cocopops (very small amount mainly for the excitement factor), cornflakes, puffed rice, shreaded coconut, cut up dried fruit, almonds… it changes every few days as I stir through new things to top up the container.

Kirsty’s beautiful new house… and my mate Lizzie’s awesome new kitchen. Suffering from serious nice house envy, girls!

Good people making good stuff for Christmas:
Ward’s fantastic rubber stamps , Amber’s Kids Craft Weekly Christmas Craft and Card books and Cookies new wall decals.

Lily’s Kinder orientation. She was such a star – all confidence and cheer. I was quite taken aback (and impressed) when she was the child on the mat needing to be gently reminded that this was “listening time” as she tried to share all her stories right away.

NaNoWriMo Pep talks – they arrive in my inbox when I need them most.

Amazing enormous wall decals - my kids are keen on the little guy falling down the stairs with the broken skateboard by Darcel.

Not

Finally getting off my butt and doing some baking – made a banana cake and didn’t realise I had used salt instead of sugar until I was putting it into the oven and happened to lick my finger to get rid of a tiny blob of batter.  Argh.

Taking dad (and his station wagon) all the way down to Ikea to pick up two chairs for $99 each. Bargain! And with acorns… can you spot my mistake? Apart from not being as cute as I hoped in person and a little more like camouflage material, as my dad pointed out… they were also not $99.

Home organisation meltdown… my system needs work. The main flaw with my home organisation system is that it’s not just about a pretty set of index cards. It’s also about doing what the little cards say – like housework – and cooking! Never mind. I’ll get to that after I hit 50k.

My blog! December will be all about a redesign for my poor neglected blog which is terribly neglected and literally falling apart at the seams.

And you?

What’s Hot + What’s Not

samesame_timba

Jeepers  - this is quickly turning into a Wednesday only, what’s hot + What’s not blog. Nanowrimo is really not leaving much time for blogging. Never mind! Here’s the spiel if you want to play along:

It’s as easy as writing up your own hot/not list on your blog and then linking back to me here at loobylu.com and then adding your url to the widget below.

Here’s mine:

Hot

Days – the days are hot. I am not a fan of Summer (at least not of the Antipodean kind – Summer in Canada was really very pleasant) and it’s not even officially Summer yet and still we are sweltering. Climate change, will you be the cause of a mass family migration to cooler climes? Perhaps.

Frosty fruits. Oh yeah – a basic necessity.

NaNoWriMo – I am getting words down. Not very good words, but words none-the-less. almost 21,000 at last count. Chris Baty’s advice to get as many down in the first few days was very good advice indeed. I need to keep up the momentum however, because I feel myself getting bogged down with the second week blues. Startling questions like “What is this book actually about?” are starting to flare up at the most inconvenient times – like all the time. It’s making me a bit grumpy actually. I think that I should save the rest of this for the Not column.

The house is tidy and I still don’t quite believe it. Most nights we even manage to get the clean laundry foldedand put away in drawers. This is previously unheard of! The home organisation system I mentioned last week isn’t exactly easy – and I have to say the novelty wears thin very quickly – but I have managed to keep things under control around here despite the 21,000 words. If I manage to keep it for another fortnight  I promise to let you in on all the secrets.

New artwork (top photo). We have been very, very bad in our No Spend Year and bought some artwork. It’s number 8 in our yearly wedding anniversary artwork buying – and it’s a goodie. We found it Byron Bay, but it’s by Melbourne artist Timba. Love it.

Not

Chadstone Shopping Centre – I went on a little Chrissy shopping reconnaissance trip yesterday and I got LOST – inside the mall! I have been going out to Chadstone a couple of times a year (at the very least) for the last 20 or so years. I have seen it go from a dinky little shopping mall to an out of control temple to the gods of consumerism… and I feel like I know the place quite well… but honestly, it is so big and only getting bigger. I got lost somewhere down in the bowels of the place and in a state of confusion ended up buying a bath mat and a packet of flavoured lip gloss – neither of which I needed.

Grumpiness and disgruntlement due to my lack of plot focus (see Nanowrimo notes above). I am projecting my NaNoWriAnxMo (anx is for “anxiety”) onto other things, like what to get people for christmas, and why isn’t the playroom clean? and what am I doing with my life? and do I really need to bake for the school fair?

Not baking for the school fair. I did huge amounts last year – gingerbread and biscuits and so on… this year I left it until 7pm Friday night and then had a “argh, stuff it” moment. Not hot. I did, however, serve sno-cones and ice creams to the overheated crowds on Saturday afternoon. The sno-cone stall was one of the best to be assigned to as we were down underground in the very shady equipment storage area, and the medieval sno-cone machine tended to shower bits of ice all over us as it crushed lumps into “sno”. Did you know that people will pay $2 for a tiny scoop of crushed ice in a paper cone with a little bit of highly coloured and flavoured syrup squirted on top? They really do! Some even paid $2 for a tiny scoop of ice with NO syrup! I was stunned, but our stall made the most money of the day – and all for a good cause. Amazing.

Hot weather. Hot is not hot. I think I already mentioned that.

See you at your place, hotters and notters. xx

What’s Hot + What’s Not this week

organised

pollynme02

pollynme01

How did it get to be Wednesday again so soon?

What’s hot and what’s not at your place? The weather is getting hotter around here and so is my frame of mind. Bonza. I had a few people asking me how to play along – it’s as easy as writing up your own hot/not list on your blog and then linking back to me and then adding your url to the widget below. Simple! So hot!

Hot

Home organisation – brilliant! I am actually making a difference around the house. What will be totally hot is if I keep it up for more than a fortnight. The house looks pretty fine at the moment and I am still managing to get some parenting and some NaNoWriMo-ing in.

Polly&Me handbags… (images above) so gorgeous. I saw a couple of these bags in a gorgeous shop in Bangalow last month and came home to look up the website. “Polly&me is an Australian sister team working in Pakistan. Cath Braid, a fashion designer who trained at Central St. Martins, London, started working in Chitral on a womenwear label “Caravana” and has been working in Chitral for six years. Now she and her sister Ange run the business Polly&Me with over 400 women across eight centers in and around Chitral town, producing textiles for women’s accessories.” (from Fashion Windows). The top two bags are from their current collection Sugar and Spice (how much I love that beautiful bag with songbirds and laundry – top right) and the bottom two bags are from the new range, Gup Shup, coming out soon. (images reproduced with permission).

Bored to Death – love it. It makes me laugh out loud.

We have a big gap in our yard and I keen to fill it with a cubby house. I am super keen on this Roulotte in a garden in the Netherlands- -see what I mean? Who wouldn’t want such a cute playhouse? I have serious playhouse inspiration every time I visit Mikodesign.

Lemsip, echinacea, blueberry & pomegranite juice, vitamins, fruit and lots of water. Coaxing my immune system back into a more enthusiastic approach to life.

Not Hot

Arguing kids. Is this how it’s going to be for the next 15 plus years? Perhaps when they get to the age when they plug themselves into individual sound systems and cease communicating all together will be when we have some peace. Sad!

Not hot is not getting around to visit all the What’s Hot + What’s Not participants from last week. I’ll definitely come by and visit this week now that I have everything so neatly written on index cards and am totally organised! Thanks for playing along again. xx