Today I am grateful for a cozy townhouse and lots of candles.  Actually, I think I'll go get a few more candles to light in the living room when I'm done with this.

I am also grateful for another Husker football win yesterday.  And for the possibility of a Husker game in San Diego after Christmas, even though that would mean we will lose a game between now and then.

I am thankful for days that feel like holidays.  Such as yesterday, when I woke up and spent five minutes trying to figure out why none of the TV stations were showing the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, only to realize that Thanksgiving isn't until Thursday.

I am also thankful for family and family dinners at my uncle's house.  (This includes Lauren's fabulous cheese ball and Susan's stuffing.)  And I am thankful for the gift of laughter, especially when the laughter is because all of the oldest generation are trying to figure out what is going on in the videos that my cousin is playing for us on YouTube.

Which reminds me that I am also thankful for people who are willing to give furniture to my roommate and I, who have little and no money to buy more.

And finally, I am thankful that I am still interested in the novel that I'm writing!

I added a fun little Word Count Widget to the top of my blog so that anyone who stumbled across this site would be able to follow my NaNoWriMo progress, but it doesn't seem to be working right now.  I'll try to update regularly from now on, just in case it has more issues...

And yes, I am almost at 15,000 words in my novel, after a little over a week of writing.  It's crazy and a little scary and so much fun!  I started out with a first sentence and absolutely no idea what the novel would be about, and now I'm at 15,00 words and more than 20 single-spaced pages.  Crazy!

I still don't really know what the story is about, so I can't share much with my faithful readers, but I can tell you that it is a fantasy, set in a world sort of like the world of the Princess Bride movie, and it centers around a fifteen-year-old girl who becomes a lady-in-waiting to a princess.  I have little tidbits of ideas, so I know that there will be some interesting things going down in it, but I really couldn't say what the main plot point is...  But I'm having fun figuring it out, and that's the important thing, right?

Meanwhile, I was trying to make a list of the things that I am thankful for today - since it's November - and this is what I came up with:

I am thankful for autumn sunsets in southern California, even if I'm watching them because I am stuck in traffic on the way home from work.

I am also thankful for cheesy movie soundtracks to sing along with while stuck in traffic on the way home for work.

And right now I'm also very thankful for popcorn.

Our seasonal winds kicked in yesterday, bringing dry, cool air and much lower temperatures, so I'm listening to Christmas music right now.

I guess that's not really unusual for me, is it?  I listen to Christmas music all autumn...  But today I'm listening to Aaron Espe's Christmas EP.  If you've never heard it, you should.  He's a mellow, folksy singer/songwriter from the Colorado area, and his Christmas music is perfect for those cool evenings indoors with candles and hot chocolate.  And right now, he's offering all of his music as free downloads through his website.  I'm not sure why he is doing this, and when I try to imagine why he might give it all away, most of the possibilities make me sad.  So instead of thinking about it, I will just enjoy his generosity and donate my thanks to him after payday.

God bless Aaron Espe.

Actually, I don't think it is so awful that I'm listening to Christmas music.  It's almost November, after all.  Practically the holiday season.  And Christmas music is so full of hope and celebration and contemplation - and so refreshingly free of the self-consciousness of the majority of our "regular" music.  And it sounds like home and light and children laughing and people singing.  How can you not enjoy it?

And speaking of November, I start writing my novel in three days.  I'm getting excited - it's going to be a hard, fun and very interesting month!  I decided to reward myself if I make the 50k mark by November 30th.  If I do it, I will buy myself a poster that I have wanted for about a year...  (To be honest, I might not get the poster.  I intend to, but I reserve the right to buy a different poster from allposters.com instead, if I find one that I like better.)

My roommate has a theory about me.  She says that people like to talk to me.

When she first said it, I laughed and thought, “Well, duh!  It’s because I try to be a good listener!”

After just a few weeks, though, I’ve realized that she means that random people like to talk to me.  Not that people tend to spill their guts to me.  No, she means that total strangers like to start random conversations with me.

Case in point:  My friend Noelle came to visit me last weekend with her friend Courtney.  They arrived on Wednesday night and I picked them up at LAX.  There I was, standing behind the line of Suits With Signs, watching lines of people walk out of the concourse and sipping water out of a clear plastic MickeyD’s iced coffee cup.  Totally and completely minding my own business.  Ignoring the twenty or so people around me as equally as they were ignoring me.

…Until one of the Suits With Signs suddenly turned around, smiled at me and asked if I had brought water for him, too.

I looked at my cup and then at him and said the first thing that came out of my head.  “Well, I thought about it, but decided not to.  Sorry!”

He shook his head.  “Thinking about it doesn’t do me any good, you know.”  Then he proceeded tell me a joke about Obama.  I politely laughed and he turned away.

And then turned back and told me a joke about Ted Kennedy.  (I got the feeling he was a die-hard Republican.  Either that or someone who really enjoys political jokes.)  I polite-laughed again.  He asked if I was waiting for New York.  I said no, Milwaukee, and I was pretty sure that my friend had just walked past without seeing me, so I hoped he would have a good evening.  And then I chased down Noelle and Courtney and we left.

Fast forward to Friday.  Rachel (my roommate) got permission to bring all three of us onto the Warner Brothers studio lot during her lunch hour.  She walked us all over the campus, showing us offices and soundstages and stores and the Gilmore Girls town square and the New York City street and everything in between (including Leonard from The Big Bang Theory reading over his script outside of the set), and when she left us, she told us that we could stay there for the rest of the afternoon if we wanted.  We decided to visit the Warner Brothers Museum to see actual costumes from movies – including an entire floor of costumes and props from the Harry Potter movies.  While we were browsing the HP props, one of the museum volunteers decided to start following me around, spouting information about the things I was viewing.  He was actually very helpful and interesting and he talked to all three of us, but I thought it was funny that he approached me first.

Moving on to Saturday.  We wandered around the LA Farmer’s Market and The Grove shopping mall for a few hours and then headed off to Santa Monica.  While watching the sunset from the park above the beach, a man walked up to the fence next to us, gesturing to the sky and talking about blessings from God.  He sounded kind of crazy, so we all ignored him.

And yet . . . I still managed to wind up talking to him for at least five minutes.  Or listening to him with an occasional “Mm-hmm” thrown in.  He was ranting about how the Jews control the media and they always portray couples with one white woman and one black man and it’s not right because it’s ruining the self-esteem of black women…  And he somehow got the idea that the three of us were Jewish, and I let him believe that.  It was pretty entertaining, and Courtney got most of it on video.

And then on Sunday, we picked up my childhood friend Ann from her hotel in Anaheim and went to Disneyland.  It was a beautiful day, and at the end of it, Ann and Noelle were waiting in line at the Stage Door Café for funnel cakes while Courtney and I watched the crowds gather for the Fantasmic show.  We were waiting right next to a roped-off area.  A man walked up to the rope, about to step over it, and then stopped and asked us if he could unhook the rope for us to go through.   (Courtney was in a wheelchair for the second half of the day.)  I said no thanks.  He asked us not to laugh if he tripped over the rope and then stepped over it and disappeared into the crowd.

Courtney turned to me and said, “Rachel’s right – they really do talk to you!”

And that was just one weekend…

I apologize for my lack of writing lately.  Apparently my life got in the way of my blog.  You know how it goes...

I don't have much to say today.  I'm doing more tired-staring over the top of my monitor than I am staring at the monitor.  That's always a sign that I should take a nap.  I don't really like intentional napping, though.  I'd rather stretch out with a good book or movie and relax that way . . . but right now I have too many things that I either need or want to do to allow me to sit down for a couple of hours.

Of course, I'm not really getting any of them done because I keep getting distracted by the fact that I'm tired.  And really, none of them have to be done today.  They could all be done later.

But I don't want to put them all off until later.  "So, Christine, what did you do this weekend?"

"Me?  Oh, nothing much.  I just procrastinated."

I mean, really.  Who wants to give that kind of report for their weekend?

Maybe what I should do is give myself an hour to relax and set an alarm to be sure I get up at the end of the hour.  Then I will still have at least an hour to be a little productive before I have to go off to church to grill paninis for hungry twenty-somethings.

Sounds like a plan, Stan.