I Love A Parade

I went to the holiday parade this morning with OJ. LC marched in the parade with her Brownie troop so she went with her troop mates. DS and DIL1 had a bridal shower to host at Zambaldi Beer so they needed someone to step in. I was glad to have an excuse to go the parade.

The loudest float in the parade was an old steam engine tarted up to look like Thomas the Train. We were right at the start of the parade and so it stopped near us and the old guy running it was heavy on the whistle. Yow! It was loud.

But at the end there was the Jolly Old Elf himself in a wagon drawn by two gorgeous black draft horses. I think they were Friesian horses and they were enormous. OJ talked on the way home about those horses, how they wouldn't fit in Meemaw's duplex but they would fit in the taproom. There might have been an extensive discussion of horse apples and what shape a horse's toilet would have to be.

We did a lot of drawing. Before OJ arrived I started drawing some of the Embellishments! from yesterday's Tube lesson that I dashed off before bedtime. He gave his approval but asked me to color them. So I did.

Then after we got home from the parade we drew some more. He drew a picture from his imagination of a blue whale, a scuba diver, and a seahorse. The picture's on my fridge. He's a very good artist. I copied a picture of the Fox in Socks out of the Dr. Seuss book of the same name. He's good at original art, I'm good at copying art, but I'm improving and getting braver.

In the afternoon I went over to Michaels and found a skein of red yarn and one of purple super bulky yarn to crochet some more snowballs for our next fun snowball fight. And the mailman delivered two sets of circular knitting needles. I thought I had every size known to knitter-kind but as I said last week I discovered a gap in my needles that only metric ones could fill so I ordered some online. They came today. Now I can knit another version of the Rainbow Bulky Beanie using the needle sizes I wanted to use to start with. I will, however, finish the version I'm working on first.

Then I chained myself to my desk and pounded out two NaNoWriMo segments. It was a struggle because I was writing a courtroom scene and had to really think about what I was doing. Nineteen segments written, 32,789 words on the pages. Woohoo!

After I got finished writing for the day I got back into drawing the Tube lesson out of You Can Draw In 30 Seconds. None of what I drew is half as interesting as the Fox in Socks or the tubular dolphin and dog on skis above so I won't inflict them on you.

Today's toss was a basket of moldy blueberries. Ish.

The prompt today said to write a plot synopsis of a novel you think would appeal to 11-16 year olds. How do I know what kids that age would like? So I wrote about a girl going through a mirror into an alternate universe and teaming up with a talking tree to save the environment.  I kind of got lost after that.

I've had fun the last couple days with small people and fun activities but I'm kind of looking forward to tomorrow when I won't have to wake up to an alarm and can spend my day at my own pace. I'm kind of spoiled like that. However if someone texted me to go out for knitting and a beer I wouldn't say no. Just sayin'.

--Barbara