What a Surprise!

 I had a dental appointment to get my teeth cleaned this morning and the dentist said that I need two crowns and showed me the ratty looking teeth she was talking about. Not great news. I think my Medicare Part B is changing after the first of the year and will include some dental insurance coverage. That would be good. I'll have to reread the brochure that P&G sent last month.  Or maybe I'll just call them.

Anyway, on the way home I was headed to ALDI for some fruit and my favorite crackers when I realized that I could stop at the local educational toy store on the way to see what they had in their sale. (I got a flyer.) I found a little scribble screen that looks like a bug for IT and scored the last Spiderman Duplo set in the store for him too. Hooray! It was a good thing I talked to his mom last night and asked what he'd like for Christmas. I picked up a couple other things for other small people in my life and came home and made an order for a few things from Amazon. I think that means that I'm almost done Christmas shopping. Surprise, surprise!

I saw the Cardinal on the feeder this morning. It was up to its old antics of chasing away any other birds that wanted to share the feeder with him.

And the white-bellied squirrel had a long turn on the suet pellets. You can see behind him that the snow was still up to the retaining wall but it was a sunny day so by sundown the snow had melted halfway down the slope. It's supposed to get up into the mid-40s tomorrow so maybe the rest of the snow will vamoose.

I got most of the first segment of NaNoWriMo written before I had to go to the dentist this morning and then finished it after lunch. Then I swung right into the second segment because I had an idea while I was lying in the dental chair getting my teeth scraped. (Man, I kind of hate that.) I decided to print off what I had written and put it into a binder to have a visible reminder of all of my hard work this week.  Fifty pages so far!

Once the writing was done I pulled out the You Can Draw It In 30 Seconds book and finished up the challenges from the previous lesson. I was supposed to write my name using "tables" but my name is seven letters long and only three different letters so I decided to write my initials instead. It was a fun challenge.

Then I went on to the next lesson which was the "can." For some reason that one was much easier to conquer than the "box" or the "table" or maybe I'm improving. I got through the first five challenges, most of them timed, before I ran out of steam.

But I decided it would be fun to copy a few of the Embellishments! examples on the next page. So I did. I'm still better at copying than original work but I am confident that I'll get there eventually.

Today's toss was a stack of old greeting cards.

The prompt today asked how you relax. Right now I relax by drawing. For awhile it was stress-making but it has become relaxing over the last week or so. I'm having fun.

I realized this afternoon how much happier I have been these last five days since I started NaNoWriMo on Thursday and fiction started to come out my fingers. I knew that I was sad about not having ideas and was afraid I was broken but the story is coming out hot and heavy. It isn't the great American novel but it's fiction and I like it. Good enough for now.

--Barbara