Note to self: coffee after a luscious Italian meal in the evening is bad. It’s past two in the morning and I’m still awake. I’ll be dragging myself around the house tomorrow when I finally get up. (I wonder if I’ll be up by the time my father reads my blog?)

General holiday weekend updates:

The husband and I are miffed. Someone somewhere switched the weather that we had specifically requested, and that the weatherpersons had even confirmed. We were supposed to have sun with cloudy periods here this weekend. Instead, we’re getting cloud, and rain tomorrow (today? oh, drat). Not that weatherpersons have any sort of reliable record to their credit.

I had my hair cut on Friday after we got here, and as usual, my hair feels lighter and cleaner and it’s certainly bouncier than it ever gets at home. It’s the water; Oakville water is soft, as opposed to the hard stuff we get out of our taps in Montreal. Makes me want to fill jugs and jugs with it and bring it home, just to wash my hair.

Seamus O’Malley has finally decided we’re pretty darned okay after checking us out carefully without committing himself to actual interaction for twenty-four hours. Even though I helped give him a bath this afternoon, he ended up on my lap before dinner allowing my husband to scratch his head. He’s very intelligent, and absolutely beautiful and silky. He’s smaller than I expected; my parents were describing him as a full-grown cat size, so I was envisioning the bulk of an adult cat as well as the length. Seamus is actually more like a year-old cat in build (that long and lanky sort of look), although I can only imagine his ultimate size, since he’s a mere four months old! He appears quite mature in behaviour as well, and he’s quiet; I’ve only heard him meow once since we arrived. Apparently this is typical of Maine Coons.

Ye gods, it’s actually approaching three.

I did the embroidery on my costume this afternoon, and I’m simultaenously pleased and disappointed. The effect is great. Anyone who has ever embroidered is going to look at my work and turn up his/her nose. It’s not my best, that’s for sure. It was a tough call: do I go for the look with the least amount of effort?, or do I do it right every step of the way and invest even more time in this outfit? I’m getting near the “taking this too seriously” label when I look at the hours I’ve racked up, so I went for the look rather than the perfect needlework. I’m starting to get nervous about this costume now for a completely different reason. After all this work and planning and energy, am I going to enjoy it, or will I have invested too much in it for the return? I must finish it quickly and put it away so I can work myself back into a state of being plain ol’ excited about dressing up.

Arts and Letters Daily has had to pack up its toys and go home, alas, alas. I am deeply saddened. I loved A&LD; I could wander around it for hours and hours, waste lovely bushels of time, and still feel virtuous.

I am amazed at how awake I am. This is not good at all…

I was tremendously disappointed in the roast beef we had last night. I removed it after the calculated time, my husband decided it was too rare (there is no such state, in my world) and put it back in the oven. Beef roasts have a tendency to keep on self-cooking after you remove them from the oven, and that fact combined with the extra ten minutes under the heat turned the tiny little roast well-done, a meat state I detest because I have to chew, chew, chew it and it loses most of its flavour. The excellent gravy and the bread right out of the oven almost made up for it, though.

In two more days, I will be able to enjoy my mother’s fine cuisine instead, however, and the well-done roast beef will be a thing of faint memory. I will meet the ever-increasingly charming Seamus O’Malley, the new Maine Coon kitten in residence at my parents’ house. In general, I will feel serene and trouble-free. For me, there’s something about being in the abode of your progenitors that instills a sense of “Everything’s okay again,” no matter how old I’ll get, I think. I wonder if other people feel the same way.

Now I have Opera on my laptop too.

Ho ho ho.

Thought-provoking stuff I’ve seen around but didn’t blog till today:

A sticker seen on a jeans ad that doesn’t look like it’s selling jeans at all. You know the kind of ad I mean: supermodel leaning forward, lots of skin, pouty shiny lips, the half-closed come-hither eyes… jeans? What jeans?

I was impressed. Some sort of sticker-wielding vigilante had slapped this, bold unadorned black text on a white background, right across the image. It was gone the next day. I hope enough people saw it; I hope the vigilante hits many other ads. Even more, I hope people get the message.

This is the sub-header on a blog I tripped across (sorry, no, I didn’t take down the URL, duh):

It made me think about how we self-censor as we blog, how we (some consciously, some unconsciously) take the time to choose the exact words we want used to describe our lives, our beliefs, our thoughts. It’s all about how you paint an image. It’s all about audience, and our sense of self. It’s about communication.

(Inter)National Novel Writing Month. 50 000 words in 30 days.

Hmm.

Art for art’s sake does wonderful things to you. It makes you laugh. It makes you cry. It makes you want to take naps and go places wearing funny pants. Doing something just for the hell of it is a wonderful antidote to all the chores and “must-dos” of daily life. Writing a novel in a month is both exhilarating and stupid, and we would all do well to invite a little more spontaneous stupidity into our lives.

It sounds like a heck of a lot of fun. Insane, yes, but fun.

The other reason we do NaNoWriMo is because the glow from making big, messy art, and watching others make big, messy art, lasts for a long, long time. The act of sustained creation does bizarre, wonderful things to you. It changes the way you read. And changes, a little bit, your sense of self. We like that.

I’d cheerfully throw myself into it, except… well… then I’d have to put aside the Great Canadian Novel for a whole month. And I really don’t want to do that, because as we all know, putting something aside means the likelihood of getting back to it decreases dramatically.

I could always write two novels concurrently, I suppose.

I am insane.

November is such a dreary month, though, with no holidays, dark skies, and chill and damp and depression. Naming it National Novel Writing Month is a great way to make it special. (Even more special that our annual November Sucks party.) I have no commitments in November, no holidays planned… nothng to get in the way.

I’d have to have a really good idea to start off with, before November begins. I’ve kind of had a young adult story kicking around in the back of my mind since I began the Great Canadian Novel, but it’s still nebulous. I’d have a couple of weeks to clarify it, though.

I think what attracts me about this project is that fact that it’s pure personal discipline. You aim for word count; you aim for doing it, pure and simple. No one reads it; no one evaluates it; it’s yours. You do it for the joy of writing. And to stick your tongue out at the omnipresent Internal Editor that criticises your choice of word, your attempts at style and tone.

And, face it; it’s insane. It’s a personal kind of insane, though, not the rifleman-in-the-clock-tower kind of insane. A glorious way to treat your inner child. Let’s write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together says the home page.

This requires serious thought.

Three days until the special edition of Beauty and the Beast comes out on DVD! (Home theatre – it’s the way to go, honestly!)

Hmm. From the small flurry of concerned e-mails that landed in my in-box this morning, I appear to have mis-communicated my feelings in my entry on stress yesterday.

No, I’m not currently stressed (well, except about the bath thing no longer being relaxing); I’m just sympathising with Kate about her general stressed-ness, because I’ve been there, and been there often. Although I’ve had a nasty sinus headache for three days now, which I am dealing with by taking Excedrin Extra-Strength and using lavender oil; thank you for asking.

Work proceeds apace on the Hallowe’en costume. I dug out the pattern again to create a second layer, kit-bashed a bit more, and came up with an ingenious way to attach it to the first layer. I’m a better sewing engineer than I thought! We took pictures of the costume last night so that I will have a record of how good it looked before I sink my nice shiny shears into it. You know, in case my idea doesn’t work. It will, of course. I’m just covering all my bases.

However, I’m on the verge of running out of thread, which amazes me since I bought two spools at the outset to be extra-sure I’d have enough. This makes me wonder how long I’ve actually spent on the outfit so far, and after calculation I’ve come up with the following:

Eep! And I still have a few to go, including embroidery and those two slashes. I didn’t factor in shopping time (of which Ceri and I invested a few hours) or the anticipated time to be spent tracking down the right colour of hose, embroidery thread, and other little finishing touches. (I can always dye them – hmm.)

Hallowe’en party/due date for costume: 24 days, and counting. Go me!