Does anyone else ever re-read their own old blog archives and think it's entertaining to see what you thought days or weeks or months ago?
I ask because (e:zobar) is doing it right now, because he had like half an hour to kill. I do it when I'm really at a loss for what to do next, and it helps me a lot in remembering long-term goals, and also in sort of keeping me connected to the me of the past.

I don't know, I just think it's kind of funny. But why write it in the first place if you're not going to read it again later? But then, when I'm reading it, I usually feel like kind of a freak. ...
Anyway. Z just looked over and said, "Are you blogging about reading old blogs?"
Ha. Perhaps we know one another too well.

So here's one for you: is it weirder to reread your own old blogs, or to go and reread someone else's? Food for thought.

I must get back to work. I'm stuck around 10,000 words in NaNoWriMo, have about 8 hours of embroidery and 3 hours of stenciling work to do before Sunday, have dishes to do, cooking to do, and laundry to do, and am way sleep deprived on top of that. Bleh!!!

i want to post a video on the Internet. But when I compress the video from iMovie "for Web", it's unwatchable. I mean, you can't tell what's going on; it's just a collection of blurry square pixels in light or dark shades. So I'm bummed. The only better option in iMovie's "export" tab is "Full Quality", which is, oh lordy, over 700 megabytes. I mean really. I've had hard drives smaller than that.
Oy. So I'm trying to figure out what my options are for sharing this thing. Looks like burning it to a DVD is really my only choice. But it's only 4 minutes long so I feel like a tool making a DVD of it.

I was wondering how to post a video on here... but I'm thinking perhaps it's too big for that too. I don't know what to do. It's a bummer.

Anyway.

I did not come here to post about that. I came here to laugh my ass off at the Mormons.

PLEASANT GROVE CITY, Utah - Across the street from City Hall here sits a small park with about a dozen donated buildings and objects - a wishing well, a millstone from the city's first flour mill and an imposing red granite monument inscribed with the Ten Commandments.

Thirty miles to the north, in Salt Lake City, adherents of a religion called Summum gather in a wood and metal pyramid hard by Interstate 15 to meditate on their Seven Aphorisms, fortified by an alcoholic sacramental nectar they produce and surrounded by mummified animals.

In 2003, the president of the Summum church wrote to the mayor here with a proposal: the church wanted to erect a monument inscribed with the Seven Aphorisms in the city park, "similar in size and nature" to the one devoted to the Ten Commandments.

The city declined, a lawsuit followed and a federal appeals court ruled that the First Amendment required the city to display the Summum monument. The Supreme Court on Wednesday will hear arguments in the case, which could produce the most important free speech decision of the term.

Oh, first they hate non-traditional marriages except for their own, and now they hate wacko pseudoChristian sects except for their own! Have fun, you fucking hypocrites.
I hope they're wetting their Magic Underpants right now. Enjoy your mummified animals, Pleasant Grove City.

So. NaNoWriMo is not going so good.
The first day (I started on the 2nd) I wrote like 275 words.
The second day I added another 850 or so to the total. OK.
The third day, I racked up a pretty decent 3000 words or so.
And then I haven't touched the document since. I've been busy as hell. Too much shit to do. And then I got stricken into this awful funk of depression for no reason. (Anyone who says you just got to snap out of it can go snap themselves, man. Sometimes it just hits.) I have depressive tendencies, but they don't last long enough or actually stop me from really functioning, so I haven't needed to seek therapy or pharmaceuticals. I know how bad it could get, and so I'm grateful that in my case it never gets any worse. Family members have had worse problems-- an uncle on one side, the grandma on the other-- but neither needed treatment until later in life, so I know to watch out for that, and to be careful not to become dependent on alcohol because that's also been an extended-family pattern. (Thank God no one in my immediate family has suffered like that.)
Anyway.
So I'm just not getting much done. Gotta clean the house today, have a busy weekend ahead. But I know me. I can do 10,000 words in two days, if I'm in the right mood. So I just need to wait for the mood, and free time, to coincide.

Anyway. And now, for something completely different.
My older sister, the one who was in the Army, is the one who has the baby, who just had heart surgery and is doing very well now thank you.
Her husband is a Good Ol' Boy from Natchez, Mississippi. In the past, he and I have Had Our Differences over politics.
I was sort of looking forward to and sort of dreading Thanksgiving, because I know my father was dead set against Obama, and I knew the brother-in-law has his own set of Differences. I like a good argument, but it can get heated.
So I was totally bowled over when my sister sent this photo, of her husband and child.






HOW CUTE IS THAT.
Baby has decided he wants his momma, hence the face and the gesture, but to me it looks like a gang sign. Like, he's in some secret babies-for-Obama gang and he's throwing the sign. I like my theory better.

edit: Agh! Why isn't it working? Wait, now it is!
OK, let me know if it isn't.

I'm still DOING NaNoWriMo, i'm just way behind schedule. Hey, there's an extra weekend in November just because of the way the calendar fell this year. That's plenty of time to do this. I just gotta find some time. I may be able to catch up tomorrow, if nothing insane comes up.

Here, to inspire y'all, or make you run screaming, I'm going to post an excerpt of my novel-in-progress. This one of the new bits, not the polished bits, so it's not edited or anything, and might have some typos. But there it is. A new novel in the making.
Er, this is kind of as far as I got, too. But I know what's supposed to happen next. I just have to... write it. Which is the hard part.


The weather turned miserable in the afternoon, and we stopped to set up camp, rigging as weatherproof a shelter as we could manage and pulling the blankets, packs, and tack off the horses to keep it all dry. Their coats, unencumbered, would shed water well enough in the steady drenching rain.
I seized my opportunity to test Feliks's leadership, which was part of my mission on this particular patrol: he was to be groomed to replace me in these southward territories, and free me to return to the capital, my martial training complete, to become my brother's Protector, as he in turn was groomed to take our father's place as King. It would not be long now until Galjis grew old enough to turn over the more active pursuits of kingship to his heir, and in these more active pursuits Talus would need a god-touched bodyguard, ready to make that final blood sacrifice. I had not been born yet when my precedessor, my paternal uncle, had spilled his heart's blood in a great fountain down the steps of the king's feasting hall, and with his dying breath had put a knife in the eye of his brother's would-be assassin. Three years older than I was now, and my father a new-crowned king.
So I put Feliks in charge of the evening's sentry rota, and put myself on the afternoon watch of the southward road. I rigged myself a nice windbreak of pine boughs and had settled in for a nice meditative reflection, only to have the wind shift and the skies open, drenching me thoroughly. By the time I managed to re-rig the windbreak, I had been soaked through my second-best cloak, and had cause to thoroughly regret not retrieving my best one from Callonia.
My relief arrived at dark, just as I had given up on ever feeling my toes again, and I gratefully limped back toward the encampment. They had made a lean-to and were all squeezed under it, with a good fire going at the opening of the shelter. The wagon stood off a little ways, serving as a wind-break for the horses, who huddled together with their heads down, unconcerned but not contented either.
Feliks met me before I passed the wagon, and the look on his face was grim. "You an idiot," he said, the dialect so thick in his speech I could barely understand him. This was always a bad sign.
"Well?" I said, exasperated. It was nothing I hadn't already called myself, and worse. "What's to be done about it?"
"Don't be such an idiot," he suggested.
"I can't exactly help it," I snapped, and went to move past him.
He grabbed my arm. "You could make an attempt," he said.
"I am what I am," I said. He'd always been on my side, in any previous altercation, so I didn't know what to make of this.
"You don't have to be rude about it," he said. "You've got her all ashamed like, she don't know if what she done is really wrong, and thinks maybe you think she dirty."
"I never said that," I protested.
"You ain't said nothing," Feliks said darkly, and let go of my arm to stalk away. But he stopped short, his demeanor changing, and with my neck prickling I turned to look at what he had fixed his gaze upon so blankly.
There was a man standing there, a tall yellow-haired man, taller than I was, and thinner, his narrow shoulders held in an awkward position that suggested perhaps he was injured. He wasn't looking at us. The rain wasn't wetting him. His lips moved urgently; I couldn't understand him. I had seen him before. He had spoken words I didn't hear, had touched my face with bloody fingers in my sleep.
"You see that," Feliks whispered to me.
"Liv," I whispered. A ghost.
"Not just any Liv," Feliks whispered. I started to turn my head to look at him, but then I saw the second ghost.
It was my red-haired woman, the one who haunted my dreams every morning. She wasn't injured, she was holding out her arms as though there were an infant or small child in them, hip tilted to support the weight, but there was nothing visible there. She was speaking to him, looking distraught. He shook his head, answered her; his face was stern and grim.
She looked stricken. He leaned forward, touching her face, kissed her efficiently and pulled back as if to go, but paused. He was looking at her arms, where the child should be. Feliks's hand found my arm again, gripping tightly just above my elbow, as if he thought I would turn away. The man put his hand to the empty place in her arms, his expression softer, but then he turned away. I stared fixedly at that empty space; there had been blood on his hand.
I couldn't look away. The woman pulled her cloak up, covering the empty space, and vanished. I stood staring at the space where she had been, where the child she had moved too convincingly to pantomime should have been. Feliks did not let go of my arm for some minutes, and when he did, he shook my shoulder.
"Captain," he said.
"What," I whispered, staring at the same space. A smear of blood, I thought, on my face.
"You saw all that," Feliks said.
"Did you see a child?" I asked.
"What?"
"A child," I said. "Was there a child in her arms, or not?"
"Yes," Feliks said hesitantly. "A little one. Yellow hair."
"I couldn't see it," I said. "She was holding nothing-- but like there was something there." I still couldn't take my eyes off the spot. "What does that mean?" I demanded, shaking my head and tearing myself away to stare at Feliks. I was unnerved, and that made me angry, a strange little panicky anger fluttering in my gut. "What does that mean?"
Feliks's eyebrows were raised, his face much too calm. "I don't think I can answer that," he said.

This is from the blog of an author whose books I don't read, but whose blog is the kind of haunting, poignant beautiful kick-in-the-gut stuff that make me believe in the Internet again.

"An American novelist who won the Prix de Rome and is spending the year at the American Academy in Rome sent this report of American election night, Italian style:

"We stayed up all night. The first returns weren't due until one in the morning, but no one could sleep, or some people slept for an hour or two and woke around midnight and came downstairs where some other fellows had set up a party in the high-ceilinged Salone. Popcorn, chocolate chip cookies, chianti, olives, vodka, beer. The TV was set to CNN. People wandered down in their pajamas; others wore suits. Pennsylvania was called around two in the morning and the room broke into cautious cheers. A few of us drank café correto (espresso with grappa) to stay awake; others played pool to pass the still-nervous hours. The president of the academy came in--Carmela Franklin lives next door--wearing slippers and pajamas. The sky was just turning light outside when Obama came on the stage in Chicago. We ran upstairs and woke up the kitchen's executive chef. Everyone in the salone sat glued to the TV. A lot of us were crying. Outside seagulls were flying over Gianicolo in the dawn. It was a beautiful morning, marbled blue skies. The Tiber a grey ribbon. Even the armed guards across the street who protect the US embassy to the Holy See said, buon giorno, and then added an enthusiastic "Obama!""