Thankfulness #31: Google
Yesterday I was pretty blah.I finished NaNoWriMo, but in doing so I’ve hurt my neck, and I think I’ve come down with Jonathan’s superflu, so…I didn’t do much. I did manage to get Habi Makeover done – the theme was decorating:
Quickness decorates his first apartment while wearing his hamster kigurami/jammies
Clucky helps decorate the office
Which brings me to what I am thankful for. Now this may seem odd, but I am thankful to Google for closing Superpoke Pets when it did. Why? Because we were the FIRST big money game to shut down. We got lots of press, and to try to appease people, they made a very cool SPP Lite program that let us export and save all of our habitats. Using this program, Neil managed to engineer and editing program called HabiMakeOver, and created a community around it, so we can continue to decorate our pets habitats literally forever.
Other games have since ended- games people had big money invested in – like Sims Social, Pet City, on and on,and the players of those games got nothing. No downloads, no cool programs, no way to keep going after the developers quit on it. So, if SuperPoke Pets hadn;t been the first, we wouldn’t have gotten any of that either. And that’s why. though it was horrible at the time, I am grateful to Google for closing it when they did so that we could get to keep playing forever.
If you don’t know what HabiMakeover is, you can check out all the details here, and join the community here.You no longer need to install any items- they are all stored online now – you just need to install the program. Heck, you technically don’t even need to join the community, but you should!
Still not convinced? Here are some more of Clucky’s great habitats! Click the thumbnails to make them bigger!
I think I’ll post some more tomorrow – won’t that be fun? Also, I did say that I wanted NaBloPoMo Badge? Well Green Embers made one!
How cool is that?
Have a tiny pepper badge kinda day!
Jo 🙂
Thankfulness #30: Completion
Today I am thankful that it is the last day of November, which marks the end of both National Novel Writing Month and National Blog Posting month.
So how did I do?
I finished both, baby!
This is blog post number thirty, and two minutes ago I bypassed my 50,000 word goal.
I don’t know if there is a little winners badge for NaBloPoMo, or if I’d even get one. They had a very cool community going on over at Cheer Peppers, but I barely participated because I couldn’t blog, do NaNo, participate in real life AND read a bazillion blogs (in fact, I’m behind on my regularly subscribed blogs) and if I can’t read their blogs, I’m not going to ask them to read mine. But even if I don’t get a cool little badge, I have the satisfaction of knowing I did it, and that’s really what is supposed to matter, not cool little badges. Right?
Right?
And now I need to sleep for a day straight.
Have a winning kind of day (you can even be a rockstar from mars if you want to.)
Jo 🙂
Thankfulness #29: Words
Today I am thankful for words. To be specific, 10,853 words. That’s how many I managed to write today – wOOt! – which leaves just 7,859 to reach the 50,000 required by NaNoWriMo, and I have two days to do it in. This should be gravy.
I thought I was farther behind than I was. The last word count I remembered was 28,000, but apparently I got it up to 31,000 the other night (who knew). So I started 3,000 ahead today, which helped a lot.
As to the writing itself, sadly a lot of those 50,000 words will get deleted come December first, but I’m on chapter six, maybe chapter seven. I have a bit more of the plot, and then I have to figure out what to do. I know where they are going to go for the big climax, but I don’t have much planned to fill the middle. I think they need to run into the bad guys a couple times – I might go back and add that into one of the previous chapters in fact, so we can start “meeting” them. But I don’t know. As usual, it’s all up in the air.
I did promise Christmas decoration pics yesterday, so here they are.
First, the cute hat ornaments we made:
And now for decorations:
We’re mid scraping on the frontroom, so the tree had to go in the dining room this year. Because of the in flux nature of those rooms, we barely did anything else to them, so the bathroom is crammed with lots of Christmas stuff, as is the kitchen. Someday I am going to have this house done and really do it up.
I tried to stick to a themed tree this year, as I’ve been discussing, but I didn’t make it. We ended up having to add several ornaments that are sentimental. I mean, what is Christmas without a zombie on your tree?
And I leave you with a squishy chicken in a santa hat!
Have a three-thousand-extra-words kinda day!
Jo 🙂
Thankfulness #25: Thanksgiving
Today I was grateful for Thanksgiving with family. As I mentioned last night, ti was at my aunt and uncle’s house down the street, so not far to go (only half a block), so traveling was pretty easy. We had a nice time visiting with everyone, though I was too busy doing that to take very many photos (crazy, right??) So you only get three:
Incidentally, the orange in the first pic is the same orange we’re going to paint our living room.
We stayed there until into the evening, when we came home and hubby and I spent some quality time with the dog/wizard, who was channeling his human side today:
sitting up in the middle like a hoo-man
I say he is a wizard because we have a running gag that he is really an animagus (ala Harry Potter) who is in hiding, and that the reason he chews his paw/leg is because he is trying to chew off his dark mark, lest he get discovered. We say that when no one is home he turns into a pot bellied, gray haired, wizard and sits around the house naked (I never bought into the whole clothes transforming with the thing) and that is how food disappears, items go missing, and things gets moved around. Who knows, it might even be true.
And now, after catching up to 30,000 words on NaNoWriMo (I am only 11,600 behind now!) I must head for bed. Tomorrow we have Thanksgiving II with friends, hopefully the menfolk will go chop down the Christmas tree, and I hope to get some more words in.
Have a turkey and stuffing kind of day!
Jo 🙂
PS I leave you with Shelob, who is not an animagus, but rather an immortal being, as old as time itself, who sucks our life energy to stay alive. Yeah, we have interesting pets.
Thankfulness #24: Holiday Crafty-ness
Happy Thanksgiving! Today we’re celebrating thankfulness, but I have been doing it all month on my blog. To continue the streak, yesterday I was thankful for some Christmas Crafty-ness.
I think I mentioned before about our Christmas theme this year – we’re doing an “old fashioned” tree – and today I got a lot of the ornaments put made (or at least started.) Like the “gingerbread” cookies:
I say that because they are really made with 2 cups of cinnamon, a cup and a half of apple sauce, and elmer’s glue. After they baked for forever, we used puffy t-shirt paint to “frost them” a little. We didn’t have a lot of it, but it got the job done.
I also started drying the orange slices in the dehumidifier because they take four hours in the oven, and I needed it for the cookies. A few of them are done, but the rest will get finished tomorrow:
And I “frosted” some pinecones. I couldn’t figure out to get the ribbon to stay on them, so I hit google and someone had posted a brilliant idea of using eye bolts. So, eye bolts it is.
And while I was at it, I finally got around to painting the spice jars I have had sitting here for over a year. I know. Laziness. Only I just now found a fifth that hubby snagged to put screws in, so I may need to buy some more white paint to do it.
The goal is to imitate milk glass. Then I have a little wooden holder I am going to fix and paint, and some cherry decals to put on the jars and they will look quite cute. I got the idea from an antique set that was selling for 80$. (this is not the exact one, but it is close enough.)
While I did that, the brother and hubby started stripping wallpaper off in the front room (that will later be the dining room, and made it probably halfway.
So that was pretty awesome.
Tomorrow we have Thanksgiving at my aunt and uncle’s house, and then I get to come home and spray paint red beads red… I’ve been looking for a cheap string of berries for the tree (well, fake berries) but alas they do not exist in my price range, so tonight we gave up and picked up some of those gaudy metallic beads and some silk finish spray paint for plastic. I’m going to spray paint them red, then sponge on a little yellow here and there for variation, and then give it a coat of spray poly. I also have a few toilet paper rolls saved to start working on the santas.
And that’s my day. Hope yours was just as good!
Have a cinnamon cookie kinda day!
Jo 🙂
Thankfulness #22: Game Time
Today I was grateful for getting to play Final Fantasy XIII-2 with hubby for awhile. We finished Lake Bresha (the second area) and are ready to head to the third. So far this has been a lot of fun. It feels a lot more RP game than XIII did. There are more people to talk to, more side missions, more chocobos, and a moogle. That right there makes it a winner.
Past that I got the short story Road to Darkness formatted and made a cover for it:
I’d actually like to redo all the series covers to match this format BUT I think people would have a fit. They already refuse to commit to the “new” style covers over the hand drawn ones. imagine throwing a third cover out there. Hee-hee! Chaos!
Anyway, the short story is free – it goes with the new Patrick book brothers of darkness (though you can read it without reading Patrick), and was in the Blood Moon anthology. I;d call this one straight up horror.
While I am on Amaranthine news, I got some more entries today, including one who bought the brothers of darkness and so earned the six points. Boom! Happy dance time.
The brother and dad are gone overnight, so I had planned to really catch up on NaNoWriMo. Instead, because game time ran long, I finished formatting and doing the cover, and then Mom was in a chatty mood, so she caught me and… well, I did something like 2,000 words. Yeouch.
I did take a moment while things were slowly saving (the laptop needs restarted as everything is lagging badly) and took a look at my stats from other years of participating. there’s no data saved for the first time (2005), but the others…
2011
2013
2015
I think the plateaus show that i am pretty NOT constant about writing every day. Is it any wonder that this year’s looks like this:
I know it looks bleak, but I WILL catch up. i am not going to have a year that does not have that little winner badge on it, even if I have to skip sleep for the last week of the month. That’s the kind of competitive b**** I am.
In the meantime, I need to go to bed so i can get up and crack at this again tomorrow. I am going to dig my headphones up so I can write, even if dad is watching TV. That should help.
Have a moogle kinda day, Kupo!
Jo 🙂
A moogle, for the uninitiated.
Thankfulness #21: Entries!
Yesterday I was grateful for contest entries. After the expo in Des Moines, I had left over stuff; a poster that I won’t be able to reuse (by the Book Born Expo I’ll have book 9 out), some leftover books no one bought, and like 50 bags of swag. I sent some of the swag off to I SMell Sheep review blog and the Book Born group, but what to do with the rest of it?
Initially I had planned to do a raffle and try to recoup some of my expo losses, but a quick google search of “Raffle Legal” proved that impossible. (Hint: Raffles are gambling, and gambling is not legal. Non Profits can get away with it in some states, but since I’m hardly a non-profit…*sigh*) Yes, I’ve seen other authors do it, but my luck would be I’d be the one who got smacked for it, so instead I just have to do a giveaway. I’ve tried to offset this by giving people six entries for proving they purchased Brothers of Darkness, but so far no one has done that. I have gotten 15 “freebie” entries, and 4 “website celebration” entries, and that’s waaaaay more than I figured I’d have on day 2. Usually I do things like this and get maybe 10 by the end of the week.
Want to enter? You can check out the giveaway and find links to enter on my author blog.
Aside from that, we went pokemoning in Red Oak for a couple of hours and, despite the cold, I did walk enough to get the final candy I needed to complete the 400 Magicarp candies and create:
TA DA!! It’s taken me months to get this thing! I finally had to put magicarp as my buddy and walk with him to get the last candies. Now I need to work on evolving a Pikachu.
We also watched WWE Survivor Series. Some of the outcomes were quite surprising, and some weren’t. I knew poor Kalisto wouldn’t get the win, though I was rooting for him, and I thought if they were doing it the smart way they’d let Goldberg have it, though everyone else in the house thought it would be Lesner, so I got to bask in my rightness and a lot of “Pfffft. Told you so!” I was surprised about Cesaro and Sheamus being the final winners in the Tag Team match, though that meant with the wins/loses so far that I knew which team would win the the big match, but that was okay. Ellsworth taking Stroman out was a lot of fun, and Jericho is always good and… well, I was surprised that they let Bray make the final pin. They’ve kind of under utilized him for a long time. They build him up in promos as the eater of worlds and such, and then he always loses. So while I love Roman, I did enjoy seeing him victorious. Truth be told, I had a hard time picking who I wanted to win, so as long as it was either Bray or Roman that made the final pin, I would have been happy.
And that was my exciting day. i need to get some writing done today if I can figure out how to get some quiet.
Have a 400 magicarp candy kind of day!
Jo 🙂
Thankfulness #19: Website Done-ness
Today I am grateful for two website items. First, I’m grateful for all the hard work hubby has done on my website at http://JoleeneNaylor.com, which is now 100% mobile and tablet friendly:
Browser version
Mobile version
Seriously, go check it out! (I’m going to do an author giveaway via my author blog and facebook to celebrate in the next few days, so look for that, too!)
My other website thankfulness is to Book Born for letting me play with their blog:
I rather enjoyed making all the graphics and all the organizational stuff – maybe I am weird, but that stuff is more fun than the actual blogging is. If You want to go check it out – and you should – you can do that here, https://bookbornblog.wordpress.com/ .
That’s pretty much what I spent my day doing, though I did get to wear my hedgehog kigurami and enjoy a hot cup of cocoa while it sort of snowed (it didn’t stick, but I saw it coming down), and I also made the plans for our Christmas tree – we’re doing an old fashioned (or “green”) christmas this year. I’m going to dry orange slices, and make some “gingerbread” cookies (they’re not really cookies, but made with glue, but they look like cookies), as well as glittering some pinecones, and making some paper snowflakes. We bought fake popcorn and berry garland, as well (sorry, old fashioned or not I don’t have to time to really string that stuff!), and if I can find some red paper I have some cute santas out of toilet paper rolls that look fun. Anyway, I think it’s going to be pretty cool. next year we’re going to go for a British Christmas, plum pudding and all. Hopefully.
And now it’s bed time, so I leave you with a pic of me buried under two cats and a dog. Shows how well they can get along when they want to suck my heat:
Have a cocoa kinda day!
Jo 🙂
Thankfulness #18:TV Time
Despite all the things I need to to do, today I am thankful for taking some time and finishing the last three episodes of LAST season’s Supernatural. We also broke in our Pennsylvania potato chips:
They were pretty good. I still have three bottle of Vernor’s left from michigan that I have been saving, but we may break into soon. I love getting weird food from other states!
I didn’t get any writing done today, but I did get the weekly Terrible Turtles page done – and we got some pokemoning in:
That was tonight’s ax murder house shot. There were people staying in it, and either they were taking lots of pictures, or there was a lightning storm going on inside, as we could see the flashes through the windows.
We did find something odd in a tree on the boulevard, though:
Our first thought was voodoo hex bag (the brother thought there might be a chicken tongue in the middle!) but Facebook says it is a “nest material offering” for birds. Either is possible, so just in case we didn’t hang around. We have enough trouble.
And now I am going to bed, but I leave you with the poster stuck in the armory window:
Have a no-hex-bag kinda day!
Jo 🙂
Thankfulness #16: Wikipedia
Today I am grateful for wikipedia that allowed me to hunt down the song from the Chase commercial that has been driving me crazy, and then from there to buy it from Amazon for $.99. What song is it? This one:
I also enjoyed Jonathan’s live videos in Book Born for Turtle Tuesday – and speaking of turtle Tuesday, did I mention we’re selling hoodies? I didn’t think so, but we are. We won;t be making any profit off of them – they’re 25$ each and all the money goes to buying the hoodie and then to S&H, but that’s okay because we just want to spread Terrible Turtle love.
As I mentioned, they are 25$ a piece, sizes S-3XL, and they are HIGHLY collectible as this will be the only run of them – ever. They will never exist again. That has to make you anxious for one. And of you have no idea what it’s “adveritising”, check out the webcomic at http://terribleturtles.com
So how do you get a hoodie? Send 25$ via paypal to Jissilly@yahoo.com along with a note telling us the size(s) and a mailing address to ship the hoodie(s) to. Or you can message me or Jonathan on facebook. Simple, huh?
I am also grateful today that Mom and Chris’ collector versions of Patrick came in.
Though I dislike the hand drawn covers, this one is not too bad. The dislike I mentioned is why *I* don’t have copies of the collector’s versions, even though they are my books. I suppose someday I may break down and get them…
And now, what I am NOT grateful for. Yesterday I was grateful for those crunchy leaf stacks? Well, today they turned those trails of leaves into huge piles on the corners:
And then they brought in front loaders and a dump truck and STOLE THEM!!
Yes! They stole all the leaves that I crunch through when I walk the dog, or when I go pokemoning or… you get the idea. Now when I walk through the street there is no pleasing happy crunch. There is nothing because they stole my leaves to “burn” – I overheard them talking. Boo, I say! Boo!
And so I end this on a positive note, I did get some writing done today. I am up to over 18,000 words now. Still behind, but that went a long way towards catching up. Oh, and remember those covers I shared yesterday? The two on the end with the blue glowy letters got approved. The jury is out on the first, and dude did not like the one with the purple letters – at all. *sigh* So back to the drawing board on it – and it was the one that took the longest because there is all that space to fill up! I’ll give it another go tomorrow.
And now I am outta here to go to bed. I already stayed up too late searching through free video stock sites for clips to make an Amaranthine series trailer from…
Have a “they didn’t steal MY leaves” kinda day!
Jo 🙂
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