What’s hot + what’s not

Hello! It’s What’s hot + What’s not time *again*! Luckily my interests are so fleeting and fickle I have enough stuff to manage to get these lists together weekly. Are you taking part with your own list this week? If so, don’t forget to leave you link in the widget below. I will come and say hello!

HOT

Zinc – my favourite store this side of my parent’s house. While sometimes I feel a little like I am living in a shopper’s desert, a quick visit to Zinc in Toorak Road, Burwood (or is it Glen Iris around there?) to use a gift certificate and to dream of Christmases to come  always restores my faith in the Eastern suburbs. Yesterday I finally replaced my (exploding sunscreen filled) wallet with a gorgeous thing from Elk. Very nice.

Halloween! This year we have a cindy-lauper-style rockstar and a bottom-of-the-dress-up-basket fairy princess.

Count down to NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month. Are you taking part this year? The first year I signed up was 2000 and it was a complete failure. I look back and think to myself… what was my problem? I had all that TIME! This year time *will* be my biggest problem, but I want to get back into my daily writing again and this is as good an excuse as any. I have a new book to start so it seems like perfect timing.

Related – The NaNoWriMo Young Writer’s Program. Just like NaNoWriMo but for kids under 17 years and with the opportunity to set reasonable word count goals. The word count recommended for Amelia’s age group is 300-3000 words. Hmm. Wonder if she’d be into it too.

Related – the Office of Light and Letters is hot. I loved reading the history of NaNoWriMo and am so impressed with the vision and the energy and the passion of the people involved in running it and their charitable organisation, the Office of Light and Letters. Donate to a great cause, or if that’s a stretch, use GoodSearch for all your NaNoWriMo searching and choose the Office of Light and Letters as your charity – GoodSearch is a brilliant idea – 50% of the company’s revenue is donated to designated charities.

What I wore today in drawings – the blog and the flickr pool. Gemma Correll is one of my favourite illustrators and she has started such a great meme. I think I might have to get in on the action. Also, just for fun – today is an All Gemma Correll day in my etsy faves over there in my sidebar.

NOT

My energy levels are not hot. My immune system is not hot. It’s boring, and annoying.

Sleepless nights – so, when do kids start sleeping through the night? I was hoping 7 would be the magic number but it seems not.

Forgetting to take snaps for my “life long project” of dinner photography. I missed every dinner while we were away and then there was the gastro so now am out of the habit enough to only keep up sporadically.

Smug Pumpkin

This is our ridiculously over priced Halloween pumpkin. This will be the last year I buy a ridiculously over priced pumpkin. I am going to save the seeds and attempt to grow my own. If that doesn’t work, next year we will carve into a completely affordable pumpkin, which we can also eat the insides of, and be done with it. Those with Canadian blood running in their veins will spend some time tomorrow carving this into something spooky. As in previous years, it will sit on our front verandah in the warmish weather and attract a bazillion little black flies for a truly hideous Halloween display.

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Congratulations to Aleece who was the lucky winner of this past week’s give away. She submitted a link to a delicious looking recipe for Mushroom Barley Bake which I am most definitely going to make the next time we do baked chicken. Thank you for all your comments – what a fabulous stash of good things. Just in case you were wondering, to keep it fair, I deleted any duplicate comments. Stay tuned for another give away next week.