Treking through the lost month, burried in work. Please send knitting and novels.

I think I lost October. And my camera. So I can't take any pictures for you of my beautiful sweater back that is now about three inches from finished, or of the stack of dishclothes I'm crocheting, or the socks I'm knitting. I also can't coerce mom into modeling her sweater for the camera, though I don't think she'd let me post it online even if she did. It shall have to wait until the weather warms up again, since I finished it just in time to start scraping frost off my windows.

I've been working like crazy on the CFM for the past week, but it's about to go on the back burner for a few days because I have 4 chapters (roughly 100 pages) of reading, plus 12 quizzes for my anthropology class due this week, on top of a bunch of make up work for French (I swear I did my homework. The website ate it. I can show you the teeth marks and everything!) and two quizzes next week...well, let's just say I might camp out at the library and just save myself the trouble. (By the way, if you are interested in contributing to the Steampunk issue of the CFM, we are still looking for 2 works of fiction. Deadline is December 15. You can find the details over here.

I have not had any more time for reading or writing, and it's starting to make me crazy. I've had so much reading to do for school that I just haven't wanted to sit down and read a novel, and I'm sort of ADD right now which makes writing hard. Harder than usual. Since it is November now, and I'm not taking part in NaNo, I'm going to set my own writing goal for myself: I want to have all of the edits for Fortune's Fight done by December 1. So far I think I've added about 3,000 words to the original draft, and it's only going to get longer since I'm condensing two novellas into a single volume. I'm hoping that once I do that it will hit 80,000 words (I'm a hair's breadth away from 50k at the moment.

My one bit of non-knitting recreation has been watching Star Trek (the original one, which I'd never seen). I am LOVING it. I got the boxed set from the library, and managed to get through four disks before I had to return them. I have the next six waiting in my Netflix queue. I remember coming across a few random episodes when I was little and trying to watch them, and they were just too far over my head at the time. I have so much more appreciation for them now, especially after the anthropology classes I've taken.

And Spock rocks my socks. Seriously.

Arrival

We're here: Arlington, VA. No pictures so far because most of it has involved getting lost on the wrong side of the river (and the wrong side of the tracks).

If you plan on going to DC, here are my suggestions:

~Avoid Martin Luther King Blvd south of 295 (I think; like I said, we got lost) unless you plug "where white boys go to die" into the GPS.
~Drive a car that has both GPS and cruise control. Trust me, seven hours without it is NOT my idea of fun.
~If you think it will take you six hours, or less, or whatever time you think it will take, add an extra hour for getting lost. And stop for food BEFORE you get lost.
~If you are coming to DC for the first time, don't try to navigate it in the dark. I swear, our nation's capital took a leaf out of medieval cities of old and made it as hard to get around as possible. Maybe they think it will keep the protesters out?

At this point, I would normally insert a picture, but I was too busy concentrating on not dying and trying to get un-lost to whip out the camera. Also, I left the card reader at home. So conjure up a fitting romantic, patriotic image in your head. While you do that, I'm going to see if I can't sleep on this couch, because apparently, $2100/mo only gets you a one bed, one bath apartment that would fit in my parents livingroom. I'll stick with my $250/mo victorian and it's drafty windows, thankyouverymuch.