Trying to Write

I am trying to not spend all my time sewing right now. I am splitting my time between reading/writing and sewing, so the Fire Dance quilt is taking a bit longer than usual. I have 17 blocks left to make.

We are really enjoying Habitica. It has been fantastic for getting us to do daily/weekly tasks that we should do but often didn't (things like change the bird cage, scrub the bathroom).

And we have turned more of our attention to reading and writing. I finally got my library access restored (my sign-in stopped working last year) and I have started downloading audiobooks/ebooks again.

I am currently trying to slog my way through Moby Dick. It's a book I've heard about so many times throughout my life, it seemed like I should have read it. I am trying, but it is written in 1850s English. We shall see if I make it.

NaNoWriMo Fail

We'd decided we should spend November writing, but we were way too distracted to stay focused for very long. It didn't help that I was still in quilt mode at the beginning of the month and I never really managed to set that obsession aside. So, while we did spend several days in November writing, we fell far short of our goal.

We did finish cleaning up the yard and we're hoping the plants survive the severe winter that's been forecasted.

We spent some time working on the interior of the garden shed. Hopefully, we'll find the motivation sometime this winter to continue the work, but I don't expect to really resume work outdoors until next spring.

We've continued to focus on our health. Jeff spends a lot of time cooking throughout the week. He lost 60 pounds this year and is currently maintaining his weight. I'm on a much longer trek, but I've lost more than 40 pounds and as my health improves, I've been able to add more walking and other exercises.

I made plans for 4 more quilts so hopefully, I'll return to sewing soon.

At Loose Ends

We've lost our way. We had planned to prepare our house for sale and put it on the market this summer, but after a strong start in January our motivation eventually sputtered out. We've had a few spurts of energy where we worked on some difficult projects—like the day I managed to mostly finish sifting through the boxes in my closet—but invariably we crash back down to our comfy recliners.

It hasn't helped our motivation to read reports that house sales and prices are down in Portland and houses are taking longer to sell, especially given that our house will be near the top of the market price-wise. The thought that we could spend months dealing with real estate agents and potential buyers and still end up pulling the house off the market at the end of the season pretty much erased my motivation. And honestly, once the Prineville house was rented out, it took off quite a bit of financial pressure.

At this point, I think there's a good chance we'll end up staying in this house for another couple of years.

There are worse ways to spend a late-spring afternoon

On the bright side, Jeff has gotten really preoccupied with our diet. We'd gotten pretty bad about eating junk food and we'd both gained too much weight. In April, Jeff joined a nutrition website that has really helped keep him (and therefore us, because he does the cooking) on track. It's been over a month since I've had a soda and my weight is very slowly trending down. Exercise would speed my progress but I've been having some knee problems. Right now, I'm trying to do the best I can with just limiting my intake.

I've also been trying to get back into writing. I thought I'd try and write a cozy mystery, but after a couple of false starts, I decided I should first spend a month reading some mysteries (both cozies and other light mysteries) to get a feel for how they work. After only a week, where I started 14 mystery novels and finished only 9 (I ditched the worst of them) I realized I don't enjoy most of the stories with amateur sleuths. They require too much suspension of disbelief. The books I did manage to finish invariably had a detective or other investigator as the protagonist. So, now I'm exploring some other options. I'm still spending quite a lot of time reading. I subscribed to Kindle Unlimited in March and I'm trying to read as much as I can before I cancel it later this month.

Leftover Tile Gone

I know it's a pretty minor accomplishment, but to me it feels a bit like an end of an era. I've been selling the dregs of that massive tile purchase for a while now and we finally got it down to a somewhat reasonable amount and I just listed everything left in one ad on craigslist at a liquidation price. This morning the last of it finally left our house and our lives.

Oops, sorry it's blurry. Too late to take another.

This was everything that was left. I only kept one partial box for repairs.

Oh, and about National Novel Writing Month. I finished before Thanksgiving. I got really motivated to finish before the holiday and did a big push to hit the 50K words last Wednesday. Jeff is currently at 44K words and I'm hoping he can stay motivated to pull in a finish. He has time to finish, but he's hit a rough patch in the writing process.

Now that we've mostly emerged from our video game addiction, and we're more engaged in real life, I think I may put up a tree this year. I don't have many holiday decorations as we got rid of most of them in 2006 when we moved down to California, but we do have a few things, especially all those ornaments I made in 2012. I'd enjoy having a tree with lights in our long, gray, rainy season.

Write, Sew, Write, Sew

I'm enjoying November. It's nice to take a break from our overconsumption of news. We've fallen into a bit of a pattern of writing during the day and then consuming news/TV in the evening. I have taken to listening to videos in my sewing room while I'm sewing. So I am back to work making squares for my sewing room curtains; I've made about a dozen more purple squares in the past couple of days.

This is what the squares look like

I'm hoping to get the squares done this month, though maybe not assembled into curtains by then. Honestly, I'm just happy to have my sewing room cleared and usable and to be making some progress again.

Our light hasn't been good, but here is a picture of the Morris chair I finished recovering earlier this week. (Maybe someday I'll invest in better photo-taking gear.)

It seems like the cushion is a little too wide for the chair. I guess I should have also measured the chair and not just copied the cushion I removed. Yes, it's the same size.

Dry Basement

Despite record rain over the last few days, I am happy to report our basement is dry!! Obviously, the French drain the guys installed last spring did its job. October was Portland's wettest winter in the last 100 years. There was widespread flooding throughout the city yesterday. So, if our recent rainfall is any indication of what we can expect this winter, I'm glad the guys took the time to install it.

Jeff and I spent a lot of time writing this month. We're working on a science fiction story. It's about 160 pages so far. I'm hoping we'll finish it by the end of the year.

The weather has been pretty uncooperative to finish the bathroom. We need a sunny day to clear space in the garage and use the table saw. It seems like every time we have a sunbreak, the dogs are bouncing off the walls and Jeff takes them to the park for some run time, then by the time he gets back it's raining again. I have faith we'll get to it soon.