Gearing Up For 2013

Today's my birthday, and my roommates have given me the best gift possible - they're leaving me alone! I get to spend the entire day (except for the trip to the gym) planning for Round 1 of 2013!!

I haven't got a goal plan yet, but I know it's going to include some exercise, and trying to live in awareness of what I'm doing and what's going on. There are certain things I do on autopilot - like eat while I'm doing other things - so I often eat more than I want to or need to. Time to change that!

I hope everyone's had a wonderful, happy and safe holiday season.

See you soon!

Wandering in the Fog

I'm feeling a little vague right now, and my work is reflecting it. I think I've had something of a mental breakdown after Nano, probably to look for energy.

I haven't gotten a lot accomplished on Immortal Blood. The only progress I've made, in fact, is finding out the approximate age of Akhenaten when he died. A little known piece of information that would have a negative impact on my manuscript if I didn't know it. So, I guess that's good.

On the upside, I actually walked through the doors of the gym on Saturday. Wow, I'm more out of shape than I thought! Motivation or despair - I'm not sure yet. I'm hoping for the former. I also, on the way home from a Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert yesterday, got an idea for a book of short stories/novellas that all link together, with a vaguely Christmas theme. Right now, in Scrivener, I'm calling it "Three Wishes."

My food goals are so-so. I didn't have fried chicken this past week, although I was craving it and it would have been REALLY convenient. The guys begged for pizza one night, so I ordered it. I got a veggie pizza for me with light cheese, and they got their sausage pizza. Papa John's has a special going on with a 5-sausage pizza. Blech. I tasted it, but it was way too...meaty...for me. I need my veg.

Holiday shopping? Not finished. But a good deal of it is in my Amazon cart, waiting to be shipped when I get paid on Thursday at midnight. How's that for cutting it close??

I hope you and your families have a wonderful, safe, and happy holiday!

Why Negative Coffee Times Negative Coffee Equals Positive Evil

The end of the semester is winding down here at the college. I didn't have a lot of students Monday, and when afternoon rolled around, I was fading fast. I'd only slept a few hours on Sunday night, and not well. My  coffee addiction tried to send me to the coffee stand downstairs, but my logical mind prevailed, reminding me that if I had coffee in the middle of the afternoon, I'd face another sleepless night. Oh, bother.

So, Kris, who was in the lab with me and studying for a Calculus final, began sketching my babbling on the board, in the form of a graph with a cracked coffee mug. The mug was slowly dripping coffee into the negative quadrant of the graph (any value here will be negative). We all know that, in algebra, a negative multiplied with another negative will give you a positive; in physics, we'd need to determine how fast we'd have to drink the coffee. (A linear function -- f(x) = x -- was drawn through the graph, bisecting the coffee mug and giving us an arbitrary line from which to determine how much coffee we had available to drink. Once it dripped below the line, we'd be * outta luck.)

So, by extrapolation, here are the parameters of the graph:

coffee = good
-coffee = bad
(-coffee)(-coffee) = +evil.

Makes sense, right? (Yes, and I agree, we should have had more work to do that afternoon!)

Goals? Oh, right, let's talk about that.

Pages: Met, thanks to Nano.

Exercise: Nope. I've been tutoring or dealing with pre-Christmas stuff whenever I've not been working.

Planning: Yes. So much so that around 4:30 this morning I woke up, realizing that I needed to find out the age of the "death" of Akhenaten so I could reasonably determine whether he had grey hair or not. Nothing like obsessing, right?

Food: Managed to stay away from the fried chicken still. Pizza, though, I ordered some because the guys asked me to. And since there was a new pizza on the menu, I tried it. I didn't like it. Yay! I did order a vegetarian pizza with light cheese, just so I could feel a bit better about my bad behavior.

How's everyone else doing?

Welcome to December!

Before anything, I'd like to take a moment to say "Congratulations!" to all the winners of Nano 2012 - and that includes everyone who participated. Even if you didn't get to 50,000, it was an incredible effort. Nano provided the impetus to get more words out than may otherwise have been achieved. That's always a win!

I won Nano, but I sure didn't win on any other fronts over the past week.

Exercise was negligible at best. I worked late on Monday, so fried chicken ended up on the menu. Much to my shame, I indulged. The good news is that I didn't like it as much as I normally do. Maybe I'm getting over my addiction? I'm hopeful.

My very small writing group elected to keep going throughout December, too. So, I'm plowing ahead with the rough draft of Immortal Blood, hoping to make significant progress during the holidays. That should be kind of easy, because my college will be shut down for three weeks between semesters, so I have hope.

Is everyone else as wrung out at I am?

See everyone on Wednesday.