Saturday, November 24, 2007

Tryptophan-induced lethargy

Turkey is supposed to be loaded with tryptophan, a chemical known to produce sleepiness.

I didn't have a lot of turkey at dinner last night and even less of it on my sandwich for lunch today, but I'm sticking with the tryptophan defense for my lethargy today. The very last thing I wanted to do was to hit the stores at 4 a.m. on Black Friday.

Until about 11 a.m., I worked on photos and video. Not a lot of photos, and not a lot of video, but a lot of breaks.

Then at 11, I went to a friend's house and helped her put together a video greeting which I helped upload to YouTube. It really was kind of fun doing the project, and even more fun watching her run outside to stalk a tree squirrel with a water-uzi during the course of the morning!

They had apparently had a riotous Thanksgiving with the grandchildren, including extensively decorating the house. Most of the decorations were gone by the time I got there, but they still had the "flamerky" standing in the living room greeting the guests.

Back home to catch up on more computer stuff. It had been my honest intent to do a couple of telephone interviews for my upcoming article, but it was nearly 11 p.m. before I remembered that, so they never got done after all. There's always tomorrow, right?

In the late afternoon, Luna's foster family came to pick her up. I think they really hoped that we would bond with her and agree to keep her, but in the past couple of days she has wreaked so much havoc around here, the more comfortable she became, that I was counting the minutes until she left. She tore up a large size box of kleenex, knocked everything from the end table onto the floor more than once, tore up a bag of dog food (fortunately a nearly empty one), had begun devouring my copy of "The Thunderbolt Kid," among other things.

She's a very sweet, very loving little puppy, but needs a very active lifestyle and very firm hand and I am not good at either of those qualities.

After Luna left, we all relaxed. The dogs went back to their old places and slept more soundly than they had in awhile. We closed the back door so that we could turn on the heat, finally. I could open the living room again and, I'm sad to say that we didn't miss her. Doesn't mean we didn't love her--how could you not? But we love her more from afar than up close and personal!

The evening was dedicated to watching several of the shows on DVR. I'm caught up on "Journeyman" and "House," for example and watched a Biography of Patrick Dempsey, Dr. McDreamy on Grey's Anatomy. Fascinating history he has!

I should also mention that I have thrown in the towel on NaNoWriMo. I started out going great guns on writing another novel in a month, but what with Walt's broken wrist necessitating lots of trips to various places, Michele's death and both the emotional trauma that caused, as well as the work involved in getting ready for her memorial, Thanksgiving, and an upcoming Cousins Day (yay!!!!!), a week from today, plus a couple of stories to write for the newspaper and a show or two to review, there just was no time to fit in a 50,000 word novel too.

I would like to have seen if the plot I had would have stretched to fill a whole novel. I think I'm going to shelve the idea and try the same thing again next year. What I did was actually turning out better than I had expected it to, but then I got so very little written. It might easily have petered out halfway through the book.

So I've had one year as a successful NaNoWriMo author and now one year as a NaNoWriMo dropout. Owell...there's always next year, right?

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