Camp Nanowrimo and crochet armor

Nanowrimo has started a new event that can take place any time of the year. It's called Camp Nanowrimo and it's got a kid's camp sort of theme to it. It's still got all the tracking features, but there's no forums or regions or anything for an ML to do (thank god, honestly- the last two years as ML have been hard).

There's a link to the side if you're interested in looking at it.

I have no idea why but even though my DVR is set to only record new episodes of Ancient Aliens it records ones that are old. But only sometimes. So sometimes I'll come home and there's a new episode, but it's really an old one. Oh well. Sometimes they get confused about actual history in it- I seem to recall some allusion to the crown of Egypt being designed to hide an alien's head- but there's things they bring up that there aren't answers to. Like how the Egyptians built anything when we can't find any of their tools. Or some of the South American monolithic sites that are just preposterously oversized...

I put down Sherlock to read Conan and then wandered off into the horrible sea of trash that is known as Anita Blake. It's so bad in such a... guilt pleasure way. (oh god i can't believe i made that joke) The early evening was so nice I went to sit on the porch and read The Case of the Dancing Men. I didn't quite finish it but the people are dead and Sherlock is hiding behind a door about to capture the main suspect. Sometimes when Sherlock is at his most didactic I just want Professor Snape to show up. Then they could have awesome smart people adventures.

I picked up some kind of spin off Conan novel this morning about a guy named... Anok? I can't wait for the movie to come out. And I keep waiting to get to the story about Sonja- I keep looking at knitting patterns for bikinis and thinking how to modify them with little crochet armor bits into her costume. It's like comics/crochet/fiction madness.

And I accidentally got mom addicted to True Blood. No, not the books. The tv show. "Can we watch it? Are the dvds here yet? What's going to happen to Sookie now?" I'm going straight to hell.

Worst. Nanowrimo. Ever.

This year's Nanowrimo has been a disaster from start to finish. I couldn't think of anything to write til day one- too much school work- no time to plan events- the story I picked up ended halfway through. I started another story as soon as the first finished but by god there's only so many weekly papers and final papers and Livy a person can cope with before defeat happens.

Besides the not winning part- which I've done before, just not in years- the worst part is feeling like I can't write anymore. Nothing is as good as it used to be, I don't think of the story unless I'm sitting at the computer (no time to think up conversations while I'm at work or driving, apparently), everything just feels blah. I looked at last year's Nano which was a romance novel and I swear to god it's brilliant in comparison to anything I wrote recently but it's no For the Glory of Rome.

Sometimes I'm scared I cranked out my Penultimate Life's Work.

I hate feeling like this.

In other, happier, news:

I've talked to my sister about five or six times on the phone. She's really nice. She has two kids. She wants me to visit.

My seamonkeys are doing great.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson is even more awesome than the movie. I cannot put it down. Even though I know what's happening.

In comparison Michael Crichton's Pirate Latitudes is no Jurassic Park. I think he must have still been working on it when he died, like it's draft 1.5 or something. It's just not as long as usual.

My friend Lisa has a bunny that she let me petsit. I've never really seen a bunny up close besides in pet stores. They're not very friendly but they are soft. I guess you just hold it?

New Waterhouse

I thought I knew Waterhouse's paintings pretty well, but apparently there's always at least one more of anything.



Sorry for the crazy hugeness, but it's such a great painting.

Anyway, one of the guy's in this year's Nano, he's a painter. So I poked around online a bit to find things in the style I thought he'd do, found a few good portraits from the era. And right now he's working on a portrait of Ophelia, using the heroine as a model, so I went to look for more art. And I found that, which is pretty astounding. In the book it's Ophelia sitting by the lake, on a bench. As for the real life painting, I really like how Waterhouse did her hair, and expression.

Crazy Success

Nanowrimo is crazy this year. I'm on Day 7, I'm on Day 17's word count. I haven't been able to write much of anything since I finished Rome, and this is just... Going like crazy. I sit down and move the mouse and there's 1,000 words, I get another Diet Pepsi and there's 1,300 more words.

I wrote something like... 9,000 words today. Er. Yesterday. Friday. Whatever.

My hands hurt a little, but other than that this year's Nanowrimo is like cutting butter with a hot knife.

The only thing I'm worried about is how long it'll be in the end. It does not feel like I'm in the middle of the story (I'm at 28,344 right now, if you're reading this in the future) even though I'm in the middle of the words required.

Meh. Sleepytimes.

Nanowrimo Starts in... Ten days!

I'm totally psyched! Except about all the school work I need to get done between now and then. *sigh*

Ok, well, I was poking around the Nanowrimo website and I found this thing about sponsorship. If anyone wants to help the organization out, just click on the link. Thanks!

(And the Kennesaw region is at war with the Cornwall region and the war is counted by word count and donations)

In other news I can't seem to get any writing for school done. I have two papers that need fixing before tomorrow and I just keep staring at them and the teacher's assignments wondering what exactly needs fixing. They're kind of horrible. Blah. One of them, the assignment he gave us has about three different topics in one paragraph and I don't think he wants ten pages to cover the entire thing.

And we're having our first Nanowrimo meeting tonight at the Woodstock Coffee House. My excitement over that might explain the lack of huzzah over Grendel's Mother. Or Charlemagne. Or the Secret History.

Eager

So, I put up a bunch of Nano fliers around campus Tuesday, and by the time I was heading off campus there were a few of the little tear off bits missing.

I come back Thursday and the one in the Parking Garage has zero tear offs left!

AWESOME!

So I replaced it with a fresh one and checked the others around campus. In a about two days about twenty people took little tear offs. And there's still a month until the contest starts.

Fall Semester

Oh man, second day of fall semester tomorrow.

The first day was kind of a bust- my cell phone has this battery saving feature that if it's plugged in long enough it shuts off, which is really great when it's your alarm clock. All my favorite coffee mugs were in the wash. Parking was a nightmare, and when I got to class it was so full there were no seats so I had to sit on the floor. Some guy showed up about five minutes after I did and the teacher laughed and told him to "pull up some carpet and start taking notes".

However, the classes themselves were great, whatever snags there were. Medieval Europe, Gender in Media (it's a Gender and Women's Studies class- sort of on interpreting books and tv shows), British Literature until the 1600s, and Latin. I've got the BritLit one with a teacher I had a few semesters ago, so it's good seeing her again.

The other thing that was really great? I'm sure some of you have heard how angry I was about the meal plan business the school started up- it's mandatory even if you live off campus and expensive and I don't really like the campus food. Well, they built us a new dining hall which is named the Culinary Center or something pompous sounding like that. To get in you walk under this roof that looks like Lady Liberty's crown, and swipe your school ID card and you're let loose in this mall sized open space that has all these kiosk restaurants. The only thing I can think to compare it to is a really good Vegas buffet, minus the high end seafood. There's a place that does southern food, a coffee bar, breakfast bar, international food (THERE WAS GOAT ON THE MENU ON TUESDAY CAN YOU BELIEVE IT), a diner type place, Italian, and a salad bar... Oh, and a Chinese place. I'm probably forgetting about half the places in there. And there's a bazillion tables and booths and lots of windows and some sort of space age robot dishwasher where you put your plates on a conveyor belt and they disappear to the future to be cleaned.

Only con: I think I saw TWO power outlets in the place. They designed it to keep you from camping. Which isn't really a con, I guess. I donno. While I was eating in there I wanted to work on a story and couldn't.

ALSO THEY HAVE CHEESECAKE.

CHEESECAKE. OMG.

Anyway, I only get to go there eleven more times this semester... Unless I want to buy more visits or something... So I'm going to try and save mine til November, and remember to bring a powerstrip.

Speaking of November, I already put up two Nano fliers on campus. Yay!

My Knitting Birthday

Sometime in April last year was when I started knitting. I can sort of pinpoint the date because the November before I met this super awesome girl and her boyfriend at a Nanowrimo event. Or it might have been the year before's Nano, but we didn't really get to be friends until the 2007 Nano. Her name was Amanda, her boyfriend was Owen. We all sat around at WriteIns talking about our books or his plays, and eventually I was like you guys have to come over and watch Torchwood or Doctor Who or Garth Marenghi's Dark Place- whatever it was, they did and we all started hanging out here and while we'd watch TV Amanda would knit, and I'd ask what she was working on, and she'd offer to teach me, and I'd say, nah, I'm good.

And then they got engaged and he got a job in Chicago and in March she was gone. And as soon as she was gone, I was like, actually, I do want to knit.



That's Amanda and Me at my birthday party, which is why I'm so tarted up.

So, April comes and I... don't actually remember how I learned to knit. I think I looked at some sites on the internet, or checked a book out of the library, and wasn't entirely sure what I was getting myself into, so I didn't want to buy a bunch of stuff and find out I didn't like knitting, so I posted a want ad on FreeCycle for knitting... anything. And someone behind the Marietta Square was like, I have a bag of yarn you could take, and someone near Roswell behind Sandy Plains was like, I have some needles.

I go to the Square, pull up at their house, and I'm looking for the bag, only all I see is this hugenormous yard bag- like for fall leaves, and I'm like, no way is that my bag. Only I peek in the top and it is. It's so much bag-of-yarn that I have to lay it down in the backseat because it won't fit in the trunk. And over in Roswell there's a freezer bag of needles- mismatched dual points, cables, circulars, straight. Enough needles that for a while I had about five matching sets in each size.

So, I start learning to knit from a book or whatever, and it just all constantly goes wrong. Casting on is a nightmare and everything I try knitting just gets wider instead of going straight up like it should...

Which is where I get to my first teacher, my best friend Kevin's Mom, who's from Germany and knits really fast, so at first you're always like "wait, how did you do that?". She showed me how to do a long tail single hand cast on, which is so easy- and what I was doing wrong- the book wasn't clear about what happens at the end of the row, so I kept adding a stitch. So, she sets me straight on what I'm doing and I'm so excited about being able to knit without the thing getting wider that I just start knitting a four or five stitch wide scarf and it's about ten feet long before I realize I don't know how you finish it.



Anyway, around this time Mom has to go to some doctor appointment down at Perimeter so I go with her because there's a knitting store there, and it's really the first place I've ever been to for yarn besides seeing it at JoAnn's or where-ever. We go to Strings and Strands which has so much yarn stacked up you sort of feel as soon as you open the door it's all falling in on you. I find a couple of nice skeins there, and ask what I do to get the scarf off the needles, and she's like it's called a bind off, and this is how you do it. And then I'm able to get the long thin scarf done and move on to something else.

I do a scarf with two colors all at once, a pair of armwarmers in July which I was so proud of I actually wore them right then, and Kevin's Mom shows me how dual point needles work, and I start a pair of gloves.



And you know what pattern I used for those? I didn't. I totally made that up in my head, based off what I learned from Kevin's Mom. I mean, yeah, they're totally shapeless and not formfitting, but I made that up. I didn't know anything about increases and decreases then or cables or anything.

So, I go to Italy which is where really nice wool comes from but no one knits there and I was living in what might have been the only city in all of Italy to have a place that sold yarn and needles. You hiked out of the town, down a hill, turned down a neighborhood street, and next to a Laundromat there was a store that was sometimes open and it sold buttons and pantyhose and beads and they had about twenty skeins of wool there and a few boxes of needles.



I finished those handwarmers the same day I dislocated my knee in Florence. So at least my hands were warm while I huddled miserably in the Florence McDonalds while everyone else went and saw the museums and I had to wait for the bus home so I could lay in our flat's front room and watch Doctor Who on my laptop all weekend.

The only other place to get yarn there was the weekly market- I still have some of it, and boy is it loud. And strange.

I got home and hadn't really gained any new knitting knowledge since I'd learned to use dual points. But while I was in Italy I'd fallen in love with Anticraft's Swamp Witch pattern, and I'd never done a pattern before. I decided not to buy the yarn for it until I had a job, and so it wasn't until late November, mid December that I finally got all the things I needed. Started the project, was super proud of it, took it up to my Uncle's, got done with it and started putting the tassels on. Which is where it all went terribly awry.

I'd screwed up counting the pattern somewhere and one side was about six inches wider and I didn't have enough tassels for it. And Mom was convinced that even though I couldn't finish it and it was lopsided and lacking tassels it was the greatest. thing. ever. Which only made it worse, because... well. I mean, it's broken. I didn't have more tassels. I had to hide it in the garage to get her to stop talking about it.

And it wasn't for... Oh, four or five months before I took it out, used something else for the tassels, and wore it. And everyone was like OMG THIS IS GREAT WHERE DID YOU BUY IT. Which is sort of a riot. One of the guys in my History class was talking to me about it and I admitted the screw up and he was like *rolls eyes* oh, well, I noticed that, I just didn't want to embarrass you in front of everyone by pointing it out. And then everyone at our table laughed.



That's sort of an extreme close up of when I started it.

And somewhere around that time I learned to cable, too, which is so much easier than it looks.



The funny thing is how many guys are interested in knitting. I mean, yeah, knitting. I've met guy knitters, but this time I mean like, oh hey what are you doing? that's neat looking, kind of stuff. I was working on this pink and brown shawl in class during a movie and the guys at my table kept reaching over to sort of pet the fabric. At the end of class they were all asking if I was going to put tassels on it, and maybe they should be bright red, and shaped like this...



That's the shawl. No, it doesn't have red tassels. But then again JoAnn's ran out of the yarn and can't get more at the moment so I'm kind of screwed until I get more.

And here's a hat I made.



And in that year of knitting I've had a bunch of teachers. Kevin's Mom. Jean. The nice lady at Strings and Strands. People at The Whole Nine Yards. And I actually taught people how to knit, too, which is the most astounding to me. Kayla, while we were in Italy, Mom when I got back. I've even gotten to the point where I'm planning knitted Christmas presents this year, and some for birthdays, too.

One of the other things that gets me as a history student is the strange and mysterious history of knitting. Egyptians knitted, only it was more like advanced knot tying. No one is entirely certain where knitting came from, other than probably the Mediterranean, since it's found in every place that had a port that shipped to, from, or through there. It's even in the Bible- the part about the soldiers dicing for Jesus' seamless garment. I always kind of thought that was a metaphor- that Mary was so badass she could sew something without seams, but it's actually dual point knitting.



Basically I am super happy to be a knitter.

A Novel Solution

So, I was talking to Kevin at lunch today, telling him where I am in the novel, whats going on with the characters... Right now there's the making of lots of tension and drama amongst three of the main ones that'll play out through the rest of the book. One character doesn't like that his lover is spending time with his ward, because he's jealous, only (at the moment) he doesn't know which one he's jealous of-

And Kevin says "Why don't they all just have a polygamist relationship? Then they won't have to be jealous of each other. I mean, if they're all happy with that."

I told Kayla about it, and she pretty much asked "...then what's the rest of the novel about?"

Blah

Despite the June 1st deadline coming up I can't seem to muster any sort of get-to-it for my novel. I know how it goes but I feel like blah when I think about opening the file. Even after finding Sophie's actress finally...



Started reading Orphans of Chaos finally... But there's a point where there's just too much... It's cool when you've got a private school full of children with mysterious pasts who don't know who they really are and have various reality altering powers... but the story started to feel caked on after you find out the school governors are Grendle and Ares and some Kitsune Japanese Gods...

At least my knitting is coming along well. I learned to cable! Which is that braided stuff on sweaters, not CAT5 cable. Which people keep getting confused about.

Recap Stats

Currently I'm at 200,036 words, and 409 pages. Which means for November I wrote about 52k and just under a hundred pages. Which is pretty compact for me; I usually hit the 50k mark once I've written more than a hundred pages. There's been a lot of good parts, a lot of parts where the characters have felt awkward or been lazy and I had to force the words onto the pages. But on the whole I'm really proud of it.

And still not done. This November also marks the novel's third birthday. Which makes it the longest I've ever worked on something, and the longest document I've ever written on a computer (I've got something longer handwritten, isn't that scary?). But now that I've looked at it and about how long all the sections are, if the section length holds out I think there's about another 90k.

I don't have Hyena Moon in front of me (my first Nano project) but I'm thinking it was shorter than the wordcount I have left. I think, once this is over, that I'll go back to working on the sequel to that. Or one of the 500 million new ideas that came to me over the last month, begging to be written.

Also, this year's winner's certificate has a Viking longship on it. Because writing is hardcore like that.

Another Milestone

I've got over 200k right now. Yay!

What Bentochan has been doing the last three days

1. Not working on her novel much.
2. Working like a slave in a salt mine on Black Friday.
3. Learning that she cannot do a YO or a k2tog by herself.
4. Making chocolate cloud cake.
5. Drinking coffee out of the Vampire Knight EGL teacup Allison gave her. (LOVE IT!!)
6. Climbing shelves farther than corporate would like.
7. Aching.
8. Cutting her hair.
9. Looking at the girl on the Aeropostale winter ad and feeling like a house.
10. Getting up before god intended.

When Backing Up Goes Wrong

Not in the Jean-in-a-car sense, but in the USB-and-novel sense.

Last night I went to Aryeh and Gina's house to play Rock Band, and after a bit it was time for Aryeh to watch Heroes and Chuck, so I asked if I could use their desktop to work on my novel for a bit, since I'm still behind. It went pretty well.

Two hours later and their copy of OpenOffice is giving me an off the wall word count (all the programs give different wordcounts, isn't that funny?) so I just save the novel to my flash drive, play some more Rock Band and head home.

Check the wordcount, did pretty good, save the file again, get some kind of save message about "am i sure i want to save over a larger file?" because Word and OpenOffice documents are vastly different in size, with Word being smaller, and I click yes. Do it again to my other back up, and I'm off to bed.

Get up this morning and those pages I wrote last night are gone. I check the wordcount and I'm down by 2k or so. Woe and misery prevail for about twenty minutes until I figure out what went wrong/check all my back up copies/give up all purpose to live. Apparently the computer went with the larger file rather than the more recent version in the save, which is pretty infuriating, especially since I wrote over both of my backups. And I didn't email it to myself from their house because their internet was being a bit pokey and my novel is over a megabyte.

I should have waited that out, or brought my laptop to work off of. That's the lesson here. Or instead of using two backups I should have used three, but that leads to the slippery slope of when is enough flash drives and backups enough.

In the middle of contemplating if I could drown in my cup of coffee I called Kevin to demand a pep talk. Which he was happy enough to give even though he was at work. I love Kevin. GREATEST BEST FRIEND EVER! It was a pretty good pep talk too. Made me laugh. And feel a lot better about having a set back, even if I'm nervously eying where I'm supposed to be on my word count calendar. Still behind. And after the saving fiasco even behinder.

EPIC WRITING POWER

The file for my novel is now over a megabyte. I feel so awesome about that. YES!!!!!!!

Things and Stuff

The last few days have been more busy and annoying than anything else. Filling out job applications has to be one of the most tedious activities ever. But hey, money.

I've got a big knitting project I really want to get started on, but I need one more yarn for it, and I don't think I'm going to give in and splurge on that until I've got money coming in.

Because of all the paperwork I've been playing with I haven't sat down and written much on my novel this week, which is really... agrivating... some days. The first few days of the event it was hack hack hack and thousands of words seemed to appear like magic and now I'm lucky if I get to sit down and open the document. There was supposed to be a write in today at the Sandy Plains Daily Grind but I don't see anyone else here (why are there so many teenagers? don't they have school? and the men in suits- go to work!) and it's been sort of hit or miss on me actually getting anything done. I'm closing on being half way to the word count, though. I just wish the novel was more done.

The new Twilight commercials look awesome. Just like the Quantum of Solace ones. I swear I saw one for Transporter 3 but it was all flashy stuff and noise- I figure as long as something blows up that movie will be alright. In Italy they were showing previews for something called Babylon AD with Vin Diesel, but I'm not seeing anything about it here.

Lego has some new Pirate sets out. They look incredibly, fantastically like the ones my friend Michael used to have when we were in elementary school. No big single wall pieces like I've seen in some of their more recent sets (like Harry Potter- especially the Hogwarts set) which make them so flimsy and pointless to build. And apparently we're going back to the good old days of an animal in every set. So far I've seen fish, a kraken (*cough cough* octopus *cough*), a monkey, OMG A MERMAID, a shark... See them all here.

Day 9

There's nothing quite as awesome as writing a novel with your new favorite coffee mug brim full of hot chocolate and marshmallows.

Day Two

Last night I crashed so hard. I was so tired after my marathon typing session... It was a bit silly how tired that can make you some days, since you spend the entire day sitting in a chair and then you get up and you just feel like every bit of energy went into what you were writing and there's nothing left to keep you concious.

I slept, I woke up late, wandered into the kitchen where there's almost nothing left to eat since I stopped buying groceries last week so I'm not wasting anything. All I've got left at this point is the last of some spaghetti sauce and some noodles so I had that for breakfast, and some cookies for lunch, before heading out to look for real food and finding all the shops are closed for Sunday.

That's going to be one thing I won't miss when I come home.

At least there's going to be a big, healthy, three course dinner in about two hours.

I haven't been able to get into the Nano site today- the servers are taking a beating- so I haven't updated my word count yet but I'm a bit slower today. There's still time later to make up for it though... The faster I plow through the novel the closer I get to that event horizon of not exactly knowing what comes next.

Day One

And I'm at 5,194 words already! Yay!

Details...

Sorry I haven't posted much. Things have been... Well.

Since our trip to Venice there's been a lot of drama in our house which I don't really want to bore you guys with. But it's been very tiring, and I think we're all very, very quickly reaching the limits of our patience with each other.

I've been writing a lot which also affords me the ability to hide in my room with my headphones on. The novel is coming along really well and my roomie has very kindly offered to paint from it- she wants to do portraits of the characters, I think. This year Nanowrimo has a sponsor who's offering to print a paperback of everyone who finishes work so it might make a good cover. At the very least I can hang them on the walls and they can glare at me until I get the thing done. (I'm closing on 300 pages! EEEEEEEEEEEE!!)

I've taught my roomie how to knit, too. She's making a scarf that alternates sections of knits and purls to keep it from rolling and it's made of this fluffy cotton candy looking yarn. The colorway sort of makes a zig-zaggy thing across it. It's cute and a good first project.

Hrm. What else...

Allison has taken over Nanowrimo ML duties for me since I'm here. She's already come up with what sounds like a really awesome Kick-Off party and a great first event where people are meeting up that first Saturday of November to write like madmen for most of the day. I'm really proud of her. Apparently she's working on a novel version of that webcomic of her's that I linked to months ago. I hope she finishes so I can read the thing. I mean, it has mermaids in it, right? At least the webcomic did, so it's got to be good, right? That'd be cool if they were rebel freedom fighter mermaids or something... But I think I've got a guess as to the storyline and that's not it.

Speaking of mermaids... There were all these steps in Venice that went down into the water that I know were there to let you get in and out of boats during high tide and low tide but gave me the fantastic impression that all the Venetians were secretly merpeople or selkies.



Other than that I didn't get a lot of good pictures of Venice. The lighting was a nightmare. Everything was either too close or too far away or you're standing in an alley with four stories of buildings on either side trying to get a picture of a church facade at two in the afternoon but you might as well be shooting in dusk.

I just got an email from Mom telling me that she was walking the dogs this weekend and fell off a curb and hit her head. I'm freaking out about it even though it's three days later. First of all head injuries are just horrible. Secondly I watch too much House and Bones and someone is always getting some kind of blood thing in their head or being hit with a stapler and my inner hypochondriac is going at full force right now.

How did we get this injured and this sick in the space of two and a half months?

Now for some questions... (hopefully there'll be replies)

What does everyone think of Fringe? My Own Worst Enemy? True Blood? Who's watching what?

Kayla and I just adore Walter. The chick is pretty cool too especially with how well she just sort of accepts the fringe science stuff, and I like that Peter is basically Scully up until this last episode. (He's a clone right? He is, isn't he? Didn't Walter say something about that when the chick asked about his medical history) (You can tell who my favorites are being that I can remember their names)

My Own Worst Enemy was just incredible. From the commercials I thought it was going to be more like (SPOILERS) he actually was the soccer dad and the spy was the programed personality, not the other way around. But I thought that really worked. I really like both of them, though I'm not sure about the boss lady who plays chess alone and exactly who he works for. I especially liked the last scene where (oh, god, which one is which? I know the names are Henry and Edward) (hee, from Jeckyll and Hyde) the spy was watching the soccer dad on the video, and from the spy's side it's all just his facial expressions and attitude as he smokes.

True Blood is...amusing. I don't know if I want to call it good. Anna Paquin looks funny to me, there's just something about her face... There's parts of it I really adore, like LaFayette's attitude, and they've picked some good looking actors and actresses for the show, and there's parts that really just... Make me not want to watch. I know in film class we learned about 'male gaze' where things are filmed with the intent of pleasing some generic adult white male somewhere but I swear to god if I have to see one more pair of tits in that show... I mean, seriously. The first episode was off-putting just for that. And could they please find Anna Paquin something that covers more? Half the time it's like-

Anyway, you see what my problem is with True Blood.

Aaaaaaand, since we're getting to the last weeks of my being here, please let me know if there's something specific you want as a souvenir. Postcard of something, coins, tie, whatever.

Oh, right. I put a little ticker thing on the side of the page for Nano- it's supposed to change images from a stack of paper to coffee to pens and whatnot during the day. I haven't seen it do that, but can someone let me know if it does? I'm not expecting it to right now, since the nano servers are down this morning...