Back for another run down of the good and the bad around here.

And don’t forget 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 Dover Design Sampler: Free royalty free images to download for your personal use every week. I am slowly building up a folder of great and highly diverse images including this great samurai guy.

Christmas tree decorating day! It all started with croissants and high excitement.  I did lots of deep breathing and letting go of my control-freak nature and let the kids decorate the tree in the way they saw fit. It has big empty patches and highly intense clusters but the kids had a lot of fun. Ok… so I might do a bit of sneaking about at night and rearranging… I just can’t help myself.

Finishing Nanowrimo and starting new work. My manuscript got very earnest by the last week so as a antidote to earnestness I am writing a zombie book … for now. Because, well, why not?

Sloppy Joes – this is my all time favourite “can’t be bothered” dinner. It’s pretty yum – Phil calls it Candied Meat because there’s a lot of sugar in it and it’s sweet as sweet. We use red capsicum instead of green and I use my mum’s totally delicious tomato sauce so it’s kind of “healthy” and a dash of worcestershire sauce is mandatory.

Hanging art work. Oh my goodness. Phil hung our Timba piece and any guilt about buying art has been completely overpowered by how flipping good the artwork looks hanging in our rather odd lounge room. It makes us feel a lot happier about where we live.

Dan Zanes and friends – always pretty hot, but they’ve made a little resurgence in our house this week. They make me happy and the kids are doing a lot of dancing. Oh look, you can follow Dan Zanes on twitter.

Christina’s prints: I know they were on my Hot list last week, but after dropping in to visit on Saturday afternoon and scoring a couple of my very own prints, I am so impressed with how they came out. The printer and the paper she is using seem to bring out the oil paint quality so well. She’s put even more up this week. So many good ones to choose from.

Cleaning the studio: I am pulling fabric out of cupboards and folding, sorting and purging. My paper recycling bin is stacked full. Dust bunnies have been captured and tamed. My big goal is to get the room ready for a new year of work. I think it may take the rest of December to get there. Studio inspiration at share some candy.

Not

Head lice – blerg.

Lily’s asthma – but getting better again. There haven’t been so many nights of lying awake listening to her cough this time around.

And that’s it! What’s happening with you?

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!

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?