That Novel I’ve Been Working On

I think I’ve mentioned in this space before (perhaps repeatedly) that I tend to have some very weird dreams.  This problem has intensified somewhat with pregnancy, possibly due to the fact that I never seem to sleep for longer than 45 minutes to an hour at a time, although thankfully the dreams have mellowed a little and I haven’t had a “trapped in an elevator” nightmare in quite a while.

Right before I woke up this morning, I was dreaming about being in a business meeting with all the members of a company that primarily made and sold craft beer.  The company owner was my boss from my university summer job, and one of the other participants was someone I haven’t seen or thought about since high school (plus her boyfriend), with the rest being generic placeholder people, with the exception of an older man who we found out later in the meeting was writing a memoir about his time travelling around the United States in a covered wagon during the frontier days.  (Which makes absolutely no sense, but whatever.)  Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago, I took an afternoon off and went with my friend Bethany and her little dude Dominic to a pumpkin patch, where we wandered around and admired the pumpkins and ate samples of apple crisp from the little bakery.  At some point, I apparently lost my mind, because I picked out a rather large pumpkin and then purchased it, in spite of the fact that I had no real end game in mind.  At various points later that same day, the pumpkin fell out of Bethany’s car and rolled down her driveway, and then smacked repeatedly into various parts of the back of my car every time I stopped at a stoplight on the 30-minute drive home.  Read the rest of this entry »

I mentioned a few weeks ago that Mike had agreed to participate in Movember, and I shared my reluctance to look at his goofy face for the entire month in spite of my theoretical support of the really good cause Movember was created to support.  His moustache-growing is now well underway, and it looks like there is the perfect framework for a truly inspirational handlebar lurking amongst his follicles, and I have grown somewhat accustomed to his de-bearded face, so I am pleased to report that I am now fully behind this initiative, BOTH in spirit AND in practice.  If you’re interested in supporting his fundraising efforts (all funds raised go toward research for prostate cancer, something I’m sure we can all agree is a very worthy cause) you can visit his Mo Space page and click a link or two to contribute.  (In case you’re motivated more by pettiness than by generosity, I just discovered that our friend Andrew is currently totally schooling Mike in terms of fundraising, and THAT WILL NOT STAND.)

And because my motto is why ask for contributions to ONE fundraising effort when you can ask for contributions to a MULTITUDE of fundraising efforts, I also want to bring your attention to a project I recently worked on with a client:  this lovely Christmas catalogue, wherein you can contribute a wide range of dollar amounts to a wide range of really cool projects, including everything from buying ice cream for some orphans or making sure kids in developing countries get basic literacy training or malaria treatment, to providing the means for oppressed women to develop marketable skills or the tools needed for refugee communities to have clean drinking water available.  It’s a cool project, it was just launched this week, and it might be the perfect answer to the festive questions of “What do I buy for the person who has everything?” or “If I seriously have to park my car at the mall and then wade through endless throngs of people in the middle of December I will probably kill someone, do you understand me?”