Eggnog

So after posting my last entry, I began to have an intense craving for eggnog.  The store is a ten minute walk away and I am still in my PJ's (it's a day off!) so I was trying to psych myself up to get dressed and walk to the store for some.  But then I had a thought: what if I just made my own eggnog?  So I turned to my good friend Google and within minutes I found a recipe for homemade eggnog.  We already had all the ingredients so I decided to have a go at making some. 

We don't have a blender, and it might be easier on your arm with one, but I put the ingredients into a bowl and began to whisk away.  It took less than ten minutes to make and I was a little apprehensive to take my first sip.  But it was delicious! I usually buy the extra thick kind at the store so this wasn't as thick as I'm used to (probably using cream instead of milk would do the trick) and of course the raw eggs carry the risk of salmonella.  But it's somewhat cheaper I think and very yummy! And of course I don't have to go to the store!

Find the recipe I used here.

Christmas in October

So let me just start off by saying that it is way too early for Christmas. I don't really consider it the Christmas season until after Thanksgiving. And yet, since I work in the retail industry, I get exposed to the Christmas hype way, way too early. But I love it. Christmas is my favorite time of the year and I really excited as soon as it starts to feel like Christmas.

So about two weeks ago I walked into Rite Aid by my house and lo and behold, they had Christmas wrapping paper for sale. (For all the overachievers that wrap their Christmas presents in October, I guess.) Since then, more and more Christmas stuff has begun to find it's way into the stores: wrapping paper, decorations, fake Christmas trees. I'm still not sure who buys this stuff before Halloween, but that's not the point.

The icing on the cake was yesterday at work. The week after Halloween, Blockbuster does it's big "Holiday Reset." We move all our product around, change all the signs to Christmas-themed signage, put out tables of novelty gifts (this years it's Snuggies, Star Wars gifts, and, of course, Silly Bandz), and create three full bays of the old, classic Christmas movies on our New Release wall. So yesterday I pulled out the signage from the back office and began to sort through it to prepare myself for the reset starting Sunday. This years signs are light blue with white snowflakes and red ornaments hanging down that look like DVD's. They are so festive and Christmasy and I got very excited and spread them all over the floor in the store and jumped up and down and then had to put them all away again. So I thought it would be appropriate today to share with you my top ten favorite things about Christmas:

1. Lights. I love Christmas lights, especially the white ones. And now that it's getting dark earlier, they'll be even more visible.

2. Snow. Not completely Christmas related, but I love snow. They are predicting a very snowy winter this year and I'm hoping they are right.

3. Cold weather. I love bundling up and going out into the icy weather. I love coming home to a warm apartment and cuddling up with a cup of tea.

4. The bell ringers. I'm like Pavlov's dog in this regard. The Salvation Army bell ringers are such an integral part of Christmas for me that I get excited just to hear them.

5. Buying presents. I love to get things for people and then watch them open them.

6. All the people. I love the hustle and bustle of the city at Christmastime, everyone rushing around in the cold and hurrying in and out of stores.

7. The holiday pay. Christmas, New Years and the second half of New Year's Eve are time and a half pay for us.

8. Business at work. I love it when it's busy at work and people come hurrying in to pick up movies to take home to the family.

9. Egg nog. You didn't think I was going to forget about the food, did you? Egg nog is manna from heaven.

10. Green bean casserole. Thanksgiving and Christmas are usually the only times that I get to have this.

Now I'm just waiting for the Christmas tree to go up on the Space Needle and the first snow and then it will really be Christmas!

Laughing, Gaming and Shooting

First off, a funny story from work. My boss answered the phone the other day and the customer said, "Do you guys have 'Halloweentown'?" so she looked it up and found it was checked out. When the customer found that out, she said "Well, do you have 'Return to Halloweentown'?" That was available and when my boss told her that she then asked "So is 'Return to Halloweentown' the first one or the second one?" Hmmmmm....

On Tuesday Aaron and I were off work and we have been talking about getting the new PlayStation 3 Move since we have a PS3, so we decided to just go downtown and get it since the rainy weather has set in here in Seattle, limiting our repertoire of affordable activities we can do together. So on a break from the weather we headed downtown to Game Stop to pick it up. As we finished at Game Stop Aaron looked at his phone and I remember him saying "It's 4:44." Just as we were leaving Pacific Place, we began to hear sirens and five police cars passed us with their lights on and soon an ambulance went by too. Within a few minutes two news helicopters were hovering over downtown. We were wondering what was going on and Aaron bet that it was an accident. From the number of police cars, I guessed a shooting. When we got home, we turned on the news and found out that I was right. A man had been shot point blank at 2nd and Pine, about five blocks from where we were, at 4:41, just minutes before we walked out of Game Stop. It was a little weird to be that close to something like that.

But on a lighter note, the PS3 Move is really fun. It comes with a bundle of sports games, including disc golf, archery and ping pong. We played it for a while on Tuesday night and again last night and I have to say, my arm is a bit sore. Unlike the Wii, where you can flick your wrist and it is just as affective as moving your whole arm, the Move tracks the motion of your whole body with a camera, so you really have to do the whole motion. I tried doing it sitting down and just about threw out my shoulder trying to get the necessary power behind it. It just doesn't work. The initial charge on the controller was a little annoying as it took over 3 hours and we were impatient to play. But definitely worth the 100 dollars it costs to get the bundle add-on to an existing PS3.

P.S. I'd also like to shout out to my international readers, a few of which I seem to have gained! Thanks for stopping by!

Time Traveler caught on Video?

I heard an intriguing story on the news this morning and I had to do some more research once I got home from work. Apparently a filmmaker in Ireland was watching the behind-the-scenes DVD extra on the 1928 Charlie Chaplin movie "The Circus" when he spotted a woman off to one side who appears to be talking on a cell phone. On the video, which was shot at the Chinese Theater at the premiere of "The Circus" the larger woman wearing a black hat walks alone to one side of the video. She appears to be talking and is holding her hand up to the side of her face like people do when they are on a cell phone. As she turns a few seconds later, it appears that there is a black thing in her hand. This Irish filmmaker, George Clarke, is convinced that she is a time traveler.

Although I admit it looks very much like a woman talking on a cell phone, the conclusion of time traveler begs many questions, the most obvious one being the questions of who she would be talking to, considering there were no cell towers in 1928. I believe that time travel could very well become a reality in the future, and while I maintain that it is possible that she could be a real time traveler, I am very skeptical. Another question that I have is, if she is concentrating on blending in to her surroundings, considering that she is dressed appropriately for the time, then wouldn't talking into a mysterious black box attract some attention? As one blogger suggested, perhaps she was shielding her face from the camera, and the "black box" was just a shadow, a makeup compact or something else in her hand. Others have said that perhaps she was holding an ear trumpet, which was common at the time.

Watch the video for yourself here: http://www.youtube.com/user/yellowfeverbelfast. Feel free to skip George Clarke's intro and skip straight to 2:42 when he shows the actual video. Although his Irish accent is pretty cute so I'd watch the intro anyway. ;-) So check it out and tell me what you think. Time traveler or not? Either way, it's intriguing to me! Perhaps it would make a good novel idea?

The Final Countdown!

Well it is officially one week until NaNoWriMo starts! I am more than ready for it to begin and already have figured out where I am going to be at midnight on Halloween. I'll be at the local pizza place, which is open late, with my laptop and a slice of pizza and at the stroke of midnight I will furiously type out the first 1,667 words (the daily quota for NaNoWriMo) before bed. Now I'll probably have to work the following morning at nine o'clock or so, so I may not be the happiest camper in the world, but it's all worth it in pursuit of literary mediocrity.

On a somewhat side note, I came up with an idea for a fabulous short story which I will probably write after NaNo. Now I am taking a sort of risk, I suppose, by putting my idea out here, so NO TOUCHY TOUCHY! HANDS OFF MY IDEA!

Anyway, now that that official admonition has been issued, the idea is to write an Old West rendition of the Shakespeare play Much Ado about Nothing. It's my favorite of all of his plays and I feel it could be perfectly set on a cattle ranch in Montana. The only thing I have to figure out is if I can actually get it published/enter it in contests, or if it is plagiarism since it's a rendition of a separate work. I know Shakespeare is public property or whatever the legal terms is, but since I didn't come up with the idea myself, is it still ok? I think it is, since books like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies basically do the same thing. But I'll have to look into that some more. Either way, it would be fun to write.

NOTE: After doing a big more research on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, it appears that that book has Jane Austin credited as co-author. I wonder if that makes it ok?

Short Stories

So when I was a kid I always always wanted to be a writer. I loved writing short stories and hated writing anything longer than that. From before I could even write, I would dictate stories to my mom (usually about a girl named Rose who incidentally had the exact same things happen to her as happened to me, only with way cooler outcomes. Like instead of simply stubbing her toe falling off the swing, she would break her arm. Etc.) Then when I was about nineteen I suddenly had an urge to write a real novel, "The Great American Novel" in fact, so I sat down with my laptop and no outline whatsoever and wrote the first few chapters of what would later become Runaway Train. (Sort of. My computer crashed and I lost those first few chapters and then later started over and rewrote them with a few details changed). Then I discovered NaNo and wrote my first NaNo novel in 2008 which was pretty much a load of crap with a horribly Mary Sue main character and no conflict whatsoever. Then I rewrote Runaway Train as I mentioned above in June of this year and now I'm going into NaNo prepared for a third novel.

So all in all, it's been several years since I've written anything other than journal and blog entries, novels, and an occasional poem. I used to really enjoy short stories because they can be so intense, so real. Also, one technique I used to use all the time when I was a kid, which I would still love to really pull off successfully, is to write a short story with no names. Only a couple of characters, maybe as few as two, and not name any of them. I did it a couple of times as a teenager with varying degrees of success.

So anyway, I've had a couple of novel ideas that would probably either need to be a short story, or would need some serious subplots to really pull off as a novel, so I was thinking about trying my hand at some short stories after NaNo. By that point, I'll have two hopefully halfway decent novels, which I will be revising, editing and hopefully querying some agents about, so getting some short stories under my belt might be good. Also, I've heard that having some published work is useful when querying agents which I hope to be doing by next summer or so, and I currently have none (well, except for a poem which I published in the Highlights for Children's reader section when I was 12).

So I found a few short story contests with no entry fees that have deadlines in the late winter, early spring, so I think I'm going to write a few short stories after NaNo. Wish me luck!

Maps, Trees and other projects

So a good chunk of the novel I will be writing in November takes place in the small, isolated town of Innisburg, so naturally I felt that I should make a map of the town to ensure that I won't confuse myself come November. And of course, being a NaNoer, I was not content to simply sketch one up on a piece of notebook paper. So I got a big piece of foam poster board stuff and some Sharpies and drew up a map of the whole town.

And then, of course, there were two sides to the board so I had to come up with something to decorate the other side. So since my town of fifty has been living in isolation for three generations, they have a complicated family tree, and I was determined that no one should be married to siblings or first cousins, so that made it a little bit more complicated. But with some colorful Sharpies to keep it from being too confusing, I managed to get the whole family tree mapped out on the other side.

It was fun and challenging but it's done now, so I'm all ready for November to start!