A shacky little home

After San Fran was leveled by the fire which followed the 1906 earthquake the city didn't know what to do with all the refugees living in tents. So they created little green shacks which tenants could pay money towards owning, and then cart away. Below is one of the squares full of shacks, and below that is a photo of a modern house made up of several shacks put together.

printy printy printy part two two two

Here's my little printy-poo, HP F4280. HP and Canon seem to be the best reviewed printers, and this one had good reviews from users on circuit city and amazon. I like consumer reviews better than professional reviews, for electronics, because I want to know how it works after a couple weeks, what are the common annoyances, what people think of the ink cartridges etc. There were cheaper printers (this one is 89) but I'll pay more if the bulk of people seem happy with something. Loves the internet for this sort of thing. Gosh, what did we do before?! I can barely remember Life Before the Nets.

printy printy printy

The reason I increased my work by one shift was cause I needed a few purchase-ahjs... and now the spending begins. I stocked up on winter shirts and work clothes/shoes a couple weeks ago. I still have to make the winter coat trek, but first I need a printer. My old printer doesn't work right anymore and I need it to print CVs for job applications, and query letters etc. for my book.

I'm excited that all the cheap printers these days include scanners. Sharing photos is so much easier with the nets, but my old pics are still sitting around in boxes, being looked at by no one but the dust mites. (And they don't really care.)

...Back to my online shopping...

no sleepies no cryyyyy

I'm working at 8 AM today... and I was unnnable to sleep. I tried and tried as of 2:30 AM onward, but there just wasn't a sleepy bone in my body. Of course, now it's time to get up and get ready and I can feel the droopy sleepiness coming on! But... too late body. You're stuck til 4 or 5 PM.

Oh well. Time to get ready for work.

Getting Ready for the Big Event

Now that I've committed to Nanowrimo, I have to make sure my blogs are filled with enough material to last through November... I guess I'm overdue for a day of sitting and reading the news, cause that's often when things occur to me.

Nanoooo wrimoooo!

I'm a gross old coughee

So I'm heading into week 4 of my bronchitis cough. It's not bacterial cause I'm on antibiotics and nothing has changed (so now I'm stuck finishing a course of antibiotics for nothing. Doh!) There's nothing I can do but wait it out.

I'm sure, now, that it came from the evening I spent at a friend's home--she and her boyfriend chain smoke. I've been around smoking friends before and nothing happened, but you can get a bronchitis from having your lungs irritated. And I remember the cough starting then, I just didn't make the association until enough people asked me if I smoke!

Meep! Bummer. Even though I'm not contagious (I never even had a fever or anything) it's pretty gross for customers when you're trying to serve them and you're hacking up a lung. I cough into my arm, though, which may alleviate some of their worry when I'm handling their money at Cash!

I'm seeing my GP in November, so if it's not gone by then... maybe she can give me an inhaler or something, to get the meds down into the lungs. But really... it's one of those You Can Do Nuthing scenarios. Drink fluids. I bought some Benalyn.

I used to houseclean for a couple who had probably been smoking since WWII. Her voice was all gravelly, and he would sit there in kitchen with the most disgusting cough. That's what I sound like. A 70 year old chain smoker.

To Nano or Not to Nano?

Everytime National Novel Writing Month grows closer I'm tempted to do it a second time. The first time gave me a decent rough draft of something I'd like to rewrite sometime, but that's the problem--you end up with a rough draft of something that needs a bleeding lot of work. And it can seem like as much work to rewrite something as to write it properly from scratch, the first time.

Still... so tempting. So fun! And it's the first time since returning to school that I could do it!

Maybe I could write the back story for my next novel. There's a lot of stuff that happens in the past, which is uncovered by my heroes. It might be fun to write that out as a *book* -- not to publish, but to make the back story real to me. And it would be fun. Fun! Fun!

It's probably because I'm tired of editing my last story that I'm excited by the idea of doing some actual writing. No research, just writing. Well, I have 9 days to decide. And I am finished the editing--just finished in fact. It currently stands at 59 715 words. BUT I still have to rewrite one particular scene which has been bugging and bugging and bugging me. Tweaking hasn't fixed it... it needs surgery.

And... I'd have an excuse to get myself a new Nanowrimo t-shirt (because... of course I would finish on time!) My last one is SO cute, but it's wearing out.

Brother Pablo is probably doing it--he also did Nan. the same month as me last time. I'd better go see what the t-shirts look like this year before I decide...

Apparently in April they also hold Script Frenzy -- 100 pages. Now that sounds coolio.

My cute t-shirt from 2002.

This year's. Eeps! NOT inspiring.

They used to have posters like this. Now this would be a nice t-shirt.

Of course, one could always get a tatoo. But I'm saving that for actual publication.

Here's another cute poster:

Maybe I can just find a t-shirt of Snoopy writing "It was a dark and stormy night."

Or better yet, a t-shirt with my Miss Mabel logo on it. She doesn't give any credits for it, so I might be able to.

As you can see... it really is all about getting the t-shirt.