Scraps (n. ,fem., singular)

Having someone (professional) do my taxes this year. A rather expensive experiment. Granted, I came out ahead by a little bit when all is said and done and I did learn some things from the tax dude and got to ask some questions about the self-employment tax estimates, etc. The system wasn’t set up to prepare those forms so I still have to do that on my own, but he gave me pre-addressed envelopes. (*mutter* for what I paid them they should be pre-stamped and filled with cash */mutter*)

Will I do it again? Not sure. I feel slightly more comfortable about my ability to do it myself but I really do like the fact that someone with WAY more experience than me is the one who scheduled the business deductions, etc. And at least I know now what this sort of thing runs and won’t face the same sticker shock. Not to mention I get to take today’s fee as a deduction NEXT year. I suppose it all washes out in the end.

In other news. Yay for a weekend spend mostly snuggling with Spectrum. Despite the rain we did manage to hit all four comic shops on Saturday along with Word Traffic. A couple of ethnic restaurants and Comedy Zone Saturday nights, some movies at home and dinner Sunday night with Mom and Molly rounded out our long weekend together. Oh, but I hated to see him drive away this afternoon! He did make it home safe and sound, though, so all’s well. And Vegas is only 2.5 weeks away

Because 11pm would actually be the 23rd hour, but that’s neither here nor there at this point. Suffice it to say, it’s rather late in the evening and I’m just now finishing up the stuff for the NaNo Kick-Off tomorrow night. Granted, I got a boat-load of stuff done tonight (tomorrow’s RA…, 4 laps at SLMP, a website, and now the kick-off tickets) but none of it was quick! Oh well, it’s all coming together. The resource page isn’t exactly pretty, but that can be done after the kick-off tomorrow (when I go add the write-in information as well… oops!); the important thing is that it’s up and all of the downloads seem to work (go me!).

Tomorrow is said kick-off, followed by more work on the resource page (change color schemes, add an icon or two, add the write-in information). Maybe try for the Ned-related bit of fluff that I really wanted to do last year but didn’t have time for. Start work on Thursday’s RA… if there’s time.

The party this weekend was unbelievably fun. I mean, I really got lucky with the group that came: everyone really did mesh well together and the last four of us were going strong til just after eleven. I, of course, have enough Spanish Fork Chicken Stew to last me the entire week (good thing, because I go into a no-cooking zone after a party) and some treats and salads, too. But I also need to get the apartment back to normal because I’m going to have a houseguest this weekend and I’d rather the place be more than just presentable.

And, of course, NaNoWriMo 2007 starts in the wee hours of Thursday. How is it November already? I know I probably ask this every year, but seriously, folks, where did the year go??? Anyway, the holidays are in full-swing now that Halloween is almost here. I do love this time of year but I have absolutely no freaking clue how I’m going to survive until New Years! The next two months are looking exceedingly hectic in the best possible way, but still, folks. Come January 1 I think it’ll be time for a complete and total pass out. Seriously.

Really, not bad at all, and I managed to not spend any money today, woot! Though I do have at least one more shopping trip between here and the party. Still, not so bad.

Tonight was mostly inking this week’s strips while listening to an audio book (another perk of working in the office) and while it did take most all evening, it’s done, so there ya go. Plus watched Heroes and knit a few more rows on the Grecian Plait sleeves (I’m in that unfortunate part of any pattern where you have to count rows between increases… ugh! But at least I’m doing them both simultaneously so if one’s wrong, the other will at least match!).

Did some prep work on a slew of props for the party and I think after I shut the computer down for the night I’m going to read a trade magazine to fire up the creative juices for tomorrow night: writing at home! Dun dun da! Now that the office is mainly tidy (there’s still that bit under the desk and all) I think I might actually be able to work in here with fewer distractions. We’ll see. I have two more articles to write to finish out the month so hopefully that’ll be Tuesday and Wednesday night and I can edit and upload them before the weekend’s over (read as: Sunday). Tick-tock, tick-tock.

And a blog post to boot!

Let’s see, I’ve managed to shop (I really need to wrap up these party plans, y’all), pencil a comic and a half, do laundry, start decorating/arranging for the party, draft a NaNo email, create a survey, watch a movie uninterrupted while only knitting, upload two articles, and I’m not done yet! But I will be soon. Gotta get better at this whole bedtime thing before NaNo really rolls around so I can write in the mornings again.I think that really made the difference last year to getting me to 50K in fine form.

And the Abyss is still clean and totally blowing my mind.

Not as much as I would have liked at work, but in general it was a productive day.

On the BYOP front, I ordered the necessary items for one of the decoration displays as well as the prizes and some additional entertainment items. Plus I’ve finally completed the invitations and have them in their envelopes all ready to go out tomorrow! Whew! I swear that is probably the single-most time-consuming part of the process.

As for eHow, I edited the last two articles I drafted. Thanks to the new contracts I now know exactly how long is too long. The first article I wrote last week only needed 12 words shaved off (though I did edit it down a bit more). That was the easy part. The second article I wrote was almost DOUBLE the limit. Whoops! I pared and pared and still had an article and half when it hit me: I really did have two articles!

So I cut the xtra bits from that article and pasted them into a new document to expand for, essentially, a follow-up article on the same theme. The draft of which I actually got fleshed out abour 2/3 before packing it in. The weather was really starting to get nasty, it was already after 7pm, and it looked like someone was about to throw a party on the back porch so I made myself scarce.

And now we’re scarely two days from the weekend. Score!

Not that I was all that chatty before my minibreak nor will I be tonight… but I didn’t fall off the edge of the world, just got sidetracked with the minutiae of life (different from the ephemera of life) and the results thereof.

Let’s see. Palmie got moved this weekend (mucho thanks to the Bard for answering the distress call and lending us a hand Saturday morning). I’m almost finished with the BYOP invitations (hit a few snags, mostly with wording), did a bit of writing on Sunday (at *$, felt like I was cheating on All Saints, lol) which I get to pare down to about half tomorrow. Comic is perking along. Skipped Knit Night tonight because of the crankies and other things. Bought some books. That’s pretty much it for the last several days.

No, seriously. This morning, shortly after arriving at the office, it hit me: I have OnStar.

So I went back OUT to the car, cranked up the engine, and pushed that little blue button and had a nice chat with a diagnostician was able to tell me that the vent solenoid was reading as broken. Mystery solved, and I have scheduled it for service on Thursday. Made me feel a lot better knowing it was actually something off rather than a loose fuel cap or water on the emissions sensor.

After work it was a quick trip to Target Copy to make up the packets for the teacher meeting tomorrow. I made 30. I’m optimistic. Usually I’d just stay late at work and use our office copier for this sort of thing but there was a slight hitch there: it died. Hellacious noise turned out to be the equivalent of an engine seizing and there’s no hope for it. Play taps and donate it to OAR. Of course, this was beneficial, because for under $20 and under 10 minutes I had the packets not only collated but stapled. The usual way would have had me collating by hand and stapling myself. This was much better.

The BYOP(5) invitations are about half assembled. Or, well, the cover bit is. This is turning out to be a slightly more involved project than I thought, but the hard part (well, it wasn’t even that hard, just tedious from the necessary trial and error) is done. I should be on schedule to send them out on the first. I’m really liking the interactivity of this years invitation, it should be more obvious than last year’s black bar and the mechanism is so very simple in reality… Thank goodness I went through all those old craft magaziens otherwise I wouldn’t have found the answer to my dilemma

This has been an incredibly busy and productive weekend.

Friday night Palmie and I went out for sushi and then back to her place to pack pack pac. She’s moving in a week and still had a lot to go. We made a dent and then she kept on during the weekend.

Saturday the to-do list was long and included shopping for a few things. Turned out to be a stellar shopping day as I came across one sale after another. Including a pair of free shoes! I was at Bealls Outlet and saw some cute ankle-strap pumps for 16.99 but they had a little discount code sticker on them that I thought was 70% off. Nope. It rang up as 95% off! Eighty-five cents, people, for shoes that originally retailed for $44!

Today we (Q, myself, along with T&C) tromped all over Maclay Gardens where Q took tons of pictures of the three of us. I had decided it would be a good idea to have a decent headshot done for my profile over at eHow and just to have some shots for general use. It’s been years since I’ve had photos done anyway and let me tell you: working with a photographer who’s also a friend is a far different experience than going to some studio who just moves you through. I can’t wait to see the pictures.

With a couple more hours to go before bed I’m going to try for one more project at least started. This one will be for the pumpkin party. I thought about whether I should cancel it, whether I would have the time to put it together, but since the canopy and favor containers have already come in, I have all the basic supplies already and the party almost plans itself there was really no reason to forgo it this year. While I may not be able to do such extensive decorating as I’d planned, I think it will still go off well and not interfere with the increasing writing demands.

This week, though, is going to be a smidge crazy. I’ve got a follow-up visit with Dr Z tomorrow at 10am, Wednesday we have a Q&A meeting at 3:45 for the teachers participating in NaNo and I may very well have to take Electra into the dealership because the engine light came on Friday. Granted, I’d splashed through a puddle on the way into the parking lot that morning, at if the water splashed onto the emission control that could cause the light, but I really think it should have dried out by now and the light it still on. If it hasn’t gone off by the time I get back from the dr’s tomorrow I’ll call and let them know I’m bringing her in. Hey, I didn’t get around to getting the oil changed this weekend so they can do that, too, and it’ll only cost me $10. Probably have them rotate the tires as well. But that’ll be all that gets paid for since she’s well under the bumper to bumper warranty.

Did Tom Hanks every play an editor?

Ugh, I just had my first real clash of artistic temperament meets editorial review. Sigh… It’s fixed (and so much for the media black-out at 10pm… I’d already invoiced for the article so I really needed to get it revised [read as: shell of its former self] so I wouldn’t be short of my contract this month) but I’m spent.

And, wow, I was so jazzed up this evening until I got that email. I was all high on thoughts of planning the next party, had gone out on a recon mission to the party store, jammed out to the radio on the way home, then get hit with: ‘it’s too long, confusing, and too creative’ Seriously, that was the basics. Of course, the editors really didn’t ‘get’ what I was going for (I know all writers probably say that, but there was a serious lack of communication on just what I’m ‘expert’ in and what that had to do with the lamb recipe) and they kept calling it two recipes. No. It’s one recipe, two preparation methods. And not even two full-on methods, it was more of a then vs now with the now being the actual instructions.

Have you ever noticed that the higher emotionally you are the more dangerous the precipice that you dance upon? I mean, seriously, I just about lost it because I took it way too personally at first. Of course, it’s not meant that way, and I knew that, but still at that moment they weren’t telling me the article was broken, they were telling me ‘I’ was broken. Which is stupid because I’m not (though cracked probably wouldn’t be wrong, lol), but I guess I was just lulled into a false sense of security when my other articles breezed through.

The other part really was the timing. We’re supposed to have our articles submitted 4 days before the end of the month. This particular one went in on the 21st (plenty of time) but due to one of the editors having a family emergency (it happens, not much you can do about it) they were backlogged. Still, the article went on “Writer Hold” at least yesterday (if not Sunday… I don’t remember if I checked the status window after I submitted the webcomic article Sat.night) and if I hadn’t asked about it both yesterday and today I still might not know that there were issues that I needed to fix. That didn’t hurt: it pissed me off. I’m still a little irritated but more than that, I’m tired. It took an hour and a half of editing and then moving to the laptop from the desktop because that’s where the image files were that needed to be reassigned.

It was not the ending I wanted for this day and I still have one thing to do before bed if I can get back into proper head-space for it.

I’ll have to see if I can resurrect the euphoria I was operating on before the editing issue arose tomorrow. But relived is never as good as the first time.

The Oldenfeld.net forum is free of spammer accounts. Not that they could do anything but artificially inflate the member count and cause me grief since I have all accounts set to admin activation only, but still… they were there and now they are not. Hah!

Of course, that was the total of my efforts on the site today. Not so hot. Tomorrow I’ll do some content work for a little while. Chipping away is pretty much all I can do.

My passion right now is on research for Wedding Tarot. I’d be more judicious of the time spent only I’ve put this project down for months in the past without a thought so I’m sort of stuck in this ’seize the moment’ thing. Maybe it’s the waning moon pushing me to complete this leg of the research (because heaven knows this will not be the end of it), maybe it’s procrastinatory serendipity (finding desire for a wayward project when I should be working on others), or maybe it’s just that whole ’should’ issue: it’s my time and I’ll be damned if someone else is going to tell me how to spend it. Not that anyone really is, it’s me reminding myself that there are other items on the to-do list. Ahh, internal dialogue, gotta love it.

Today was a bit slow at work. The last two days were spent tidying up random loose ends (i.e. the stacks of low-priority paperwork and filing on my desk) and fighting the urge to plan my next party. I have the ground-work layed in my mind, I just have to nail down a few more details and execute the invitation design (which came to me in a flash of inspiration this morning).

But for now, back to the Wedding Tarot research. *shuffle*

I suppose I could warn you when I’m going to do that. If only I knew in advance myself!

So, let’s see, where did we leave off? Cousin M was in town and I played hookie (with permission) half a day to take her to lunch and show her around T-town on Wednesday. It was the Loop for lunch, five hours of driving around Tallahassee (I’m still a little uneasy about looking at a map and trying to see what sort of screwed-up loops I made), then dinner with Mom, J & K at Marie Livingston’s. Yum! Since Cousin M’s hosts were the early-to-bed type we got her home just after seven and I ran a couple of party-related errands before going home, myself.

Since it was only just eight o’clock I figured there was no sense in wasting time so I started draping the walls. Wow. Somehow I did not expect to have to move one wall of furniture and–should I ever be crazy enough to try this again–that so many trips up and down the step-ladder would be needed. My thighs are still protesting all of the steps but hey, it’s a great glut workout! Three hours and a quart of sweat later I had drapedthe four walls I was going to (because I ran out of sheeting), hung up the silver stars with their kick-ass mini lights, and draped caution tape over the bookcases and vertical-blind valance.

And wouldn’t you know I came home Thursday to a note on the door saying Pest Control was coming by on Friday.

Thankfully I did not get a call from the office on Friday, so I can only presume that the decorated table and prominent bar-cart convinced whomever not to report strange activity.

Would you believe that on Saturday I was actually 2 hours ahead of schedule??? I know, totally unheard of for one of my parties. Usually I’m waiting on at least one appetizer to finish when the first guest arrives right on time. Instead, I was cooling my jets at two o’clock (having already showered and primped and changed my shirt four different times) just waiting out the clock until I could reheat the final appetizer and start the popcorn popper.

This turned out to be a good thing, though, as just as I was getting ready to start the popcorn there was a knock on the door: the Bard was 45 minutes early! See, I must have known something like that was going to happen, but it was actually fine (though I did tease him about it for a little while), but it gave me a chance to give him his birthday present before the party started and he kept me company while I finished up the last-minute preparations.

‘It’s a Disaster!’ Movie Night was a rousing success. All of the food went over wonderfully, there was plenty of it (which means I don’t have to cook for a few more days! yay, leftovers!), the guests mixed as wonderfully as I thought they would, and the movies provided ample mocking factor. Here was the rundown for those that might be interested:

4pm: Dante’s Peak and Spicy Appetizers (cheeses with pepper jellies, jalapeno and ham corn muffins, black bean dip, salsa, guacamole and chips, and–even though it’s not spicy–bacon wrapped artichoke hearts or, as Palmie refers to them, Crack)
6pm: Twister and Tasty Cow (’nother cow/same cow) Roulade (with garlicky green beans and red potatoes)
8pm: Posiedon (2007) and Pineapple Upside Down Boat Cake (with blue jell-o sea!)
9:45pm: Armageddon with S’mores and Rumballs

And the house drink was a Mudslide, though I do try to keep my bar fairly well stocked in case someone wanted something different. I also provided a pleathora of popcorn toppings, both sweet and spicy, though I think most people preferred it merely salted.

We finished up the movies just after midnight with a mass exodus for the door. We were all exhausted, but that’s a great way to end a party. I made sure everyone had their favors (small boxed sets of Worst Case Scenario cards, compass/carabiner clip and emergency whistle) and was safe to drive home before starting the clean-up. It actually only took about an hour to put away all of the food, load the dishwasher and clear the table of it’s debris. In fact, the only thing waiting for me Sunday morning was to take down the draping, rehang the pictures on two walls and clean out the rented popcorn machine for it’s return today. Otherwise I vegged out and did some reasearch for Wedding Tarot.

Thankfully I had this week’s Random Acts… in the can already so I didn’t have to worry about that tonight. Instead I wandered through StumbleUpon for a while, flipped through some old music books, and fiddled with a story that might end up on New Bard’s Press. Tomorrow I forsee spending a lot of time clearing out the Oldenfeld.net forums of the rest of their flotsam and making some content changes. One of these days (someday soon, hopefully) I’m going to overhaul this site, add some pages for the different long-term projects (like Random Acts… and Wedding Tarot) and make a space for I-Friday submissions, too. It’s still on my to-do list to get back into that habit.

I feel like, right now, I’m in a planning stage. I have a lot of big ideas that I want to see through, if I can, but I need to figure out how to balance them with the things already on my plate. Do I need to let go of some projects, again, decide which are more feasible first, or do I just need to find some stronger internal motivation? It’s probably a strong case for of the latter, so if I can keep the ball rolling I might just pull it off!

I cleared out almost 200 spam accounts on the Oldenfeld forum then made out the master to-do list for the party, Saturday, and got to work. I’ve moved furniture, cleared side tables, started the basic decorating, packaged the favors, and verified the disposable items. I’m in pretty good shape, I think.

I also managed to tidy up one of the hall closets in the process of digging out the party supplies, as well as the floor of the pantry (I’m still not sure exactly what happened in there, but it involved some non-perishables, a gallon of emergency water that decided it didn’t want to live, and a bag of what might have been, at one point in time, potatoes. They were unrecognizable, despite what the label said, and had formed a rather strong attachment to a partial box of citronella candles. I decided it was the better part of valor to bury them as one…

Anyway!

The largest part of the decorating is still to be done and almost all the food but Thursday will be soon enough for all of that. Wednesday afternoon and evening I’ll be hanging out with my cousin who is interviewing at FSU this week so not much will get done tomorrow night. But I have until 3:30pm on Saturday to have everything finished, so I anticipate that will be sufficient time (the party doesn’t start ’til 4, but I want to give myself a few moments to chill and collect before guests arrive).

To do my damnedest not to let my inbox get /that/ out of hand again. Seriously, folks, we’re talking 13,000+ among my actual email inboxes plus another 5,000+ automatically shunted off to Junk Mail. It’s not that I never check my mail, it’s that a lot of it I skim during the day but they don’t actually come off the server until I download them at home. A decent system as it means I don’t accidentally delete something important, but then I put off actually going through them at home and deleting that which I do not need. Sigh…

A lot of the issues are yahoogroups I’m on. I’d go digest but I detest reading them that way, so I’ll delete them rather than read anything. Some I will be adjusting to special notices or no mail in an effort to save myself the headache of nights like tonight where I pretty much glue myself to the computer ’til it’s done. But now that everything in there is read and saved on purpose I’m going to do my best to keep up with it. Honest.

But I did manage to get two weeks of RA… scanned, edited and uploaded so I’m good there. Yay for a teeny bit of a buffer. I’ve got another week about 3/4 sketched, but that really is the longest part. Inking is quick and the editing is merely a matter of dropping out the bits of blue pencil that the scanner picks up, resizing it and saving it for web. I admit the current family vacation storyline is dragging out a bit, but we’re almost through it so this is a good thing. Truly random stuff for a month or so then I can start with the Major Deviation for a few weeks.

But now, with the inbox overhauled, I can actually /find/ the messages that require action on some of the otehr web-properties so that I can get those done and such. Tomorrow night will be split between Oldenfeld updates (mostly mucking out the would-be forum spammers from the member list) and beginning to decorate the apartment for the party. Maybe some advance food prep while I’m at it.