I’ve done NaNoWriMo (or NaNo, for shorter) three times so far. I have yet to win. Winning is determined to mean that you have written 50,000 words in November on your book or story. You can get all sorts of details and other information at the official site, www.nanowrimo.org. We here in the Dallas/Fort Worth area have been challenged to a total word war by the Atlanta, Georgia, Pandas. We, the Rhinos, are sure to pound the Pandas into the ground, but we sure could use your help. If you are in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and are interested in writing, please come join us at the NaNoWriMo site, and make DFW your home region, so we can count your words against Atlanta!

So far, today, I’ve written 643 words in my murder story. Only a little over a thousand left to do for today! Woot! I’m actually on track this time! YEAH!

Right now, both of my bosses have the lingering cough, as do I. Also, at home, one of my sisters shares my lingering cough. Our other sister had been doing very well not getting sick, but she picked up some virus the other day, and spent the weekend in bed, coughing. She’ll have that resicual cough for quite some time, too. It makes it rather difficult to sleep at night, with three of us coughing. We can all hear that through our doors.

My sisters generally tend to keep their doors closed at night, but at least one of us (almost always me) has to have their bedroom door open so that the cat, Lucky, will have someone to annoy in the middle of the night. If he doesn’t have a person available to him, even if that person is asleep, he will sit out in the hallway and yowl at the doors until SOMEBODY lets him into their room. Since my youngest sister keeps a lot of wool yarn in her room, which Lucky tends to try to eat and which is not good for him, she keeps her door closed and doesn’t let him into her room unsupervised. My other sister is very much a night-owl, and tends to stay up until dawn, working on her computer. Lucky sees computers as handy little buttwarmers, and his favorite computer game to play is ‘lay on the keyboard and glare at anyone who tries to shift me’. So, she keeps her door closed, as well, until she goes to sleep. Which leaves me as the only one with no real reason to keep Lucky out of her room. He tries to stretch out on my keyboard, but I just shift him and take his nips anyway. He’ll just come back later and try again. Eventually, I’ll stop my computing and let him have his nice, toasty-warm buttwarmer, and he’s happy. Or, he’ll stretch out behind my laptop, where there’s plenty of warm air being expelled, and take a nap, pushing my laptop towards the edge of the desk while he stretches. If I push back too much, he’ll get fed up and leave for a bit, only to come back soon after and love up on me and my laptop some more.

But it really does make a difference in sleeping, having two other people coughing right down the hall all the time. Makes it tough. Makes me wish Lucky could deal with closed doors, so I could hear less of my sisters’ misery, and they could hear less of mine. A few times, my youngest sister has gotten out of her sick bed (behind her closed door) and come in to check on me, because I was coughing so much and she heard it through her door. That really made me feel bad, but what can I do? The cough will only fade with time. Cough drops don’t really help, either. Fisherman’s Friend lozenges do help, but they are foul little beasts, and I can only stomach one or two of them before they start to turn my stomach. In fact, last night, I had half a Fisherman’s Friend too much, and it *did* turn my stomach, all the way inside-out, at 4:00 a.m. in the morning. Awful! Just awful! Fisherman’s Friend taste like someone went and put hot pepper sauce all over your black licorice, and then coated the whole thing in menthol. Sure, it soothes the throat and calms the cough, to a very strong degree, but it tastes. Like. Crap.

And I’m just rambling, here, now. Well, at least I’m actually blogging again, right? That’s an improvement, right?

Right?

Oh, hush, you. Excuse me, I need to go cough some more.

Anyway, while I was half blind, having only one eye to see out of and that one with clusters of blind spots from when they did the same surgery to it a few months ago, I couldn’t really see to read, let alone type anything here on the blog.  But now I’m  able to see again, and I’m back at work again, and able to do things here, too.  Yaaay!  Oh, and driving again, too, so y’all might want to watch out if you’re on my roads. 

I tell you what, though.  After being off work for nearly a month for this surgery, I need a vacation.  Medical leave is exhausting!  No, really, it is.  When you can’t *DO* anything, then doing nothing is NOT a real relaxing way to pass the time.  All I could do was watch movies … kinda, if I wore two sets of glasses for my ‘good’ eye and closed or covered my healing eye.  Wearing two sets of glasses is quite a strain, too, both on the eyes and on the face, since they’re fairly heavy when worn together, and one of them is just a basic generic 3x magnifying pair that doesn’t fit my head and drags the fitted prescription glasses down with them.  I’m sure I look funky, too, with four lenses magnifying my eyes.  Talk about googlie-eyes!

Well, at last, though, I’m coming out of the woods with this, and will soon be able to get my new prescription in frames that fit.  Yaaaay!!!  I’m very excited about that. 

More later, when there’s more to tell.

Steven Moffatt, of course, is the brilliant show-runner of the current run of ‘Doctor Who’ on BBC.  Mark Gatiss has written several episodes, several ‘Doctor Who’ novels, and has played in at least one episode (‘The Lazarus Experiment’, 2008 season).  It seems that, on their many train trips back and forth between London and Cardiff while working on ‘Doctor Who’, they compared notes and discovered they both were Holmes nuts.  And they figured it was inevitable that somebody would bring Holmes into the 21st century, so why couldn’t they do it?  And they did.  And it’s brilliant!  I may have mentioned some posts ago how enjoyable it was, and how I need to buy it when the DVDs are released.  I think I’ll be ordering it from the UK and paying the extra shipping, because then I’ll get them earlier and without cuts.  I dread thinking of what my parents will get to see when the shows air on PBS.  How much will they be missing?

The series consists of three episodes, each one 90 minutes long.  Basically, you’re watching a full-length, feature film trilogy.  And while the second episode is not quite as good as the first one, and the third one is — never mind, wait until you see it, don’t want to spoil anything for anyone.  Umm, just remember how often the middle part of an extended story feels a little slower than other parts, while in actual fact the story’s still moving along just fine.  That’s what happened here, I think.  The second show, the characters are still finding their stride in what is becoming (but isn’t quite yet) an established relationship, and it’s a somewhat awkward time.  Still, extremely enjoyable.

I would love to see these shows up on the big screen, so they’d be easier for people like me with eye problems to see and enjoy.  But until then (or at least, until we can go to Mom and Dad’s and see their Blue-Ray versions on their huge plasma screen after Christmas), I am happy to have them at all, even in compressed, glitchy computer files.  <sigh>

I’ve been losing pounds and inches slowly for the past four years, more quickly over the last two years, and keeping them off nicely. All I’ve been doing is eating more wisely, too. My sisters, also, have been losing inches (I do most of the cooking, muahahaha!), and they are starting to dread the inevitable clothes shopping trip that they’lll have to make soon, as they ease down to the next size. Of course, it helps a little bit that our apartment has two floors and we’re always traipsing up and down the stairs. Michelle is actually working out at the gym at work most days, too, so she’s reducing even faster! There’s a gym in the complex where I work now, too. I wonder what they charge? It might be worth paying for ….

Anyway, as I said, my pants fell off of me as I was getting ready to do a bit of shopping on Saturday morning. All my other pants were in the wash, so I cinched up my belt and went out anyway, but I decided that it was high time to get some new pants, at least. So, I picked up a pair of blue jeans, a pair of black jeans, a pair of black slacks, and a pair of navy capris, all in my new size – 16! I need to hem them, of course — the drawback of having short legs. I could wear my capris to work if I had to, but it really doesn’t look professional. In the next week or two, I need to get a few tops to go with the new pants, and maybe some new underthings, since I’ve lost inches everywhere (*aherm*). Plus, of course, I have to go through my closet and get rid of all the clothes that don’t fit me anymore. Wow, I’ll have so much room there after that! I am really looking forward to that! All I *don’t* need are new socks!

I have got to learn how to post pictures on this thing. I have so much to show off, lately!

I *would* give some thoughts on the show, but Tracy already yelled at me for being about to give them to Shelly before Shelly has seen the show (Tracy watched it with me, but Shelly was sleeping), so I will only say this right now:  If and when you get the chance to see it, like when it airs over here in several months, SEE IT.  It is brilliant!  See it in a quiet room, if possible, though, because there is a LOT of fast talking, and no subtitles on broadcast (I love my internet!) and it takes a practiced ear to catch everything.  And record it, because you will WANT to see it again, just for the ‘wa-hey, what was that again?’ factor.  Purists will not be happy with it, as the creative team took Holmes and Watson out of Victorian London and set them down right at home in the London of 2010.  But then again, the stories were never ABOUT Victorian Londan, were they?  They were always ABOUT Holmes and Watson, and the adventures they had together, and their friendship, and the cases they solved.  The trappings that are so strongly identified with Holmes (the fog, the gas-light, the hansom cabs, the deerstalker hat, the frock coat, even the pipe) were all very much products of the time in which Doyle wrote the stories, but they really were never integral parts of the stories.  However, almost nobody has ever tried to bring Sherlock Holmes out of the time of his origin, and few of those have done it successfully.

This one works beautifully, though, and if I say anything more right now, Tracy will stomp me.

Anyone need a lawyer? Anyone?

Beuller? Beuller?