Pawbreakers! Oh my. I think I need to buy some of these!

(With Mabel snoring in the background (literally) I am trying out a new idea I had for the prologue of Heart’s Desire. We’ll see if it works.)

I’ve set up a shop on Etsy for my bears: storybears.etsy.com

I found out about the site while I was browsing through crafty links on Livejournal. It seems to be relatively new, but it looks nice, and I liked what I saw when I browsed through the things for sale.

Well, let’s see.

I think I got a dud battery for my Dana, because every time I hotsync, the battery drains. This happens no matter how low or charged the battery is before I hotsync. I am not happy about this, because these stupid batteries cost $20 each!

Case in point: I charged the battery Thursday evening. I hotsynced Friday night. By Saturday, the battery was low enough to worry me (I maybe used it an hour, tops, no backlight) so I plugged it in. It was plugged in all Friday night and all day yesterday. By late last night it read charged, so I unplugged it this morning, only to have it start to drain again for no apparent reason. I wonder if they’ll give me my money back? This sucks!

Cleome is in the isolation room after peeing on Ethan’s rug last night. I’m not sure what her problem is–she peed and pooped in the litterbox just fine as of this morning. I am thinking that it might have been Cleo, and not Zoey, who was pooping on the same rug earlier this month. That problem vanished after I opened up the upstairs bathroom. Now I’m not sure what’s going on.

Heart’s Desire is going well. But at the moment, I’m trying to work through some issues I’m having with the original flow of the story, and trying to uncover the reasonings behind some character’s actions. This has resulted in a prologue about the chain of events right after Michael summoned the demon and killed fourteen students. It’s definitely interesting. It probably won’t end up in the end draft of the book, but I’m hoping I get some insights out of it.

Yesterday was cleaning day, and today is shaping up to be cleaning day as well. Yesterday, we completely cleaned the bathroom (except for the tub/shower), the living room, the green room, the hallway, the stairs, and the middle upstairs landing. Today my list includes my hallway upstairs, the entry room, the kitchen, and hopefully my room. We’ll see.

Whew. Two late nights in a row and I’m rather weary.

I got off at 3:30pm today, and Jess, Bekah, and I zipped over to Milford to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. There were a couple of mishaps–I ordered the wrong showtime tickets online and had to double order, and two, they both were late, but we made it and sat down to a sold out show.

For what it’s worth, I did like the movie. It was rushed, yes, but it was just as good as the others. Which really says something, since a lot of times continuations aren’t as good at all.

We saw a preview for King Kong that really makes me hope I get to see it, and some other previews that didn’t stick in my mind.

(Had to go yell at Cleo for a moment there–she’s the Bad Cat for the moment for peeing on the rug outside the upstairs bathroom door. Hopefully I scared her enough so she won’t do it again. I don’t want to go through the peeing again!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (She’s also the Bad Cat for refusing to comprehend Zoey’s hisses as “stay away” and so she is getting squirted every time she goes after Zoey and doesn’t leave her alone.)

Earlier, Jess went shopping, where she scored a $10 ($29.99 with a $20 mail in rebate) DVD player for me (and one for her as well, despite the limit 1) and a bunch of other stuff, mostly, it seemed, for Ethan.

After the movie, we headed to Goodwill, where Bekah found me one cashmere sweater and I found another one. Both are blue, and cable knit. I also got a couple of other sweaters, including a nice shrunken one that will make a great brown bear.

But since we didn’t get home until 9pm last night, and almost 9:30 tonight, it’s been two late nights in a row, and poor Mabel wasn’t very happy when we got home. Thank goodness all I have to do tomorrow is drive my craft stuff and some books to the neighbor’s Christmas tree farm, since she invited me to set up at her house this year. But I don’t have to stay, so I should get a lot of stuff done tomorrow. (I hope!)

Happy Thanksgiving!

It’s that time of year again, although we’re only having the immediate family (except for Em who is still in Portland) for Thanksgiving Dinner. Only two stuffings, too–regular and sausage. (Sausage is new this year.) Mom baked Pear Praline pie, Cottage Cheese pie, and Pumpkin pie. (I think that’s all–not sure, though.) Yum. I’m about to go downstairs and start peeling sweet potatoes.

At the moment, it’s snowing and blowing outside. Yesterday, it snowed as well, but it was melted by the time Mabel went to bed last night. I’m not sure if today’s snow will melt so quickly, since it’s also rather cold outside (and bitter from the wind!)

I got another panel of the Christmas quilt done, which means I have three more to do and then the quilt top is finished! Yay! I’m expecting to be done with that by the end of this weekend. I’m bringing Mom’s late Christmas present from last year (still unfinished) to work on today, since we’re supposed to be watching The Polar Express after we eat and I will need something to do with my hands.

I hope everyone who reads this has a Happy Thanksgiving! I am thankful for a lot this year, but the top six are: My family, my friends, my health, my house, my job, and my four-footed kids.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving! Yay!

I am making sweet potato casserole, Bekah is making honey glazed carrots, and Mom and Dad are making everything else. Hmm. That’s not quite fair, is it? But I know they like to do Thanksgiving, and we had to wrestle two side dishes away from them in the first place! (Dad will read this and probably not agree with me.

At the moment, Mabel’s snoring (literally) on the folded up quilt I’ve let her lay on while she’s up here in the office with me. It’s bedtime, after all, so I probably should take her out and officially put her to bed soon. But I wanted to update first, just so you all didn’t think I’d dropped off the face of the map.

One of these days, I’m going to try letting her sleep in my room. I don’t know how that will work, though. We’ll see.

I’ve been writing this week. I have someone interested in Heart’s Desire, and willing to wait for me to finish it, so I’ve been working on that. I do want to finish it, because I keep getting flashes of The Seventh Secret, and I really want to write that as well.

I did work on the quilt a bit tonight, and will work on it some more tomorrow. Friday afternoon after work, I’m going to see the new Harry Potter movie. Yay again!

Anyway, I’ll write a more, in-depth entry later on. I have one brewing about why I never want my books to be as popular as Harry Potter, but it’s still not done yet.

I finally updated by bibliography.

The second craft show was today. I made $102.25. Again, a normal year. And I realized at the very end of the craft show that I forgot to take pictures of the booth this year! Argh!

But I might be setting up at one more (okay, probably will) on December 4th at the fairgrounds. It’s only five hours long, and one day. No sweat, right?

Heart’s Desire is going well.

I now know something I didn’t know this morning. Or perhaps I already knew it, and just had to think about it a bit before it bobbed to the surface of my mind.

I know, now, why Gabriel is so uptight about the upcoming extinction of the binding. I know why he feels so guilty about Michael Elliott, and I know why he tried to kill Malachi twenty years ago.

It’s amazing what your subconscious will give you when you wait long enough.

It’s funny how productive I am with an office/studio to work out of. When I don’t have to use my bed as a place to cut fabric (and how many times have I cut a hole in my bedsheets?) When I’ve got a table for my sewing machine, extra space for works-in-progress, and an entire room to play in.

You won’t get how I feel unless you’ve been in the same situation I’ve been in most of my life. I went from a smallish bedroom packed full of stuff to a townhouse in Columbus where my stuff ended up in the basement, back to the smallish bedroom, and now I have a whole house. And a whole big house, at that.

Christmas present Quilt #1 is half done. Not too shabby! And I found a sweater at Goodwill for Ethan’s bear (a request, from Ethan, so that will be for Christmas too.) I am also buying Ethan a sewing machine for Christmas, since he wouldn’t leave mine alone the other night while I was watching him, and it’s never too early to learn how to sew. (It’s green, of course, which is his favorite color.)

Mabel’s been up here all day, pretty much, except for when I went down the road to run some errands and stop at the Williamsburg Goodwill. No sewing machines this time–but I did pick up the one Mom and Dad got for me–but I found a throw from Target for $6, the sweater for Ethan’s bear, and a clock that I thought Dad would have bought anyway. (And some cat toys. And a ball for Mabel. But she, of course, wanted the cat toys.)

The guy from the sewing machine place called and I did decide to go ahead and get my machine fixed. It wasn’t going to cost any extra anyway, so I’ll be picking it up tomorrow. (After much more thought, I decided that if it costs me $70 every 15 years for a well-used machine, that’s really not all that bad.

And I’m in the process of trying to fix my treadle machine. It’s out of the case for the moment, because the gears to lower it into the bottom aren’t working right. And it needs a new belt, but that’s no surprise. I think, however, I can manage to get it to work. We’ll see.

“This is too embarrassing. The cat takes up more space than I do! And I refuse to sleep on the floor!”