That’s my belief. Trick or Treating on any other day didn’t make sense barring a weather related disaster.
There are cities and towns around me that have moved their Trick or Treating to either Thursday or Saturday, with since even having it a week early on the 25th and 26th, instead of actually being on Halloween this year, which falls on Friday.
The reason…. There are high school football games on Friday.
Continue reading “Halloween on Halloween”
Did I ever mention that Angelo is a Vampire Kitty?
I snapped the picture below yesterday as proof. It does explain why he sleeps so much during the day.
Of course he sleeps a lot at night as well.
So I saw this challenge on Twitter. #500WED. 500 Words Every Day. It looks intriguing. Everyday you get a writing prompt and have to write 500 words based around that.
I’ve tried things like this in the past. I’ve started NaNoWriMo several times, never completing it. But I do like blogging and really like have prompts such as Rory’s Story Cubes. I’ve even used Rory’s Story Cubes with students at work to draft stories and inspire creativity.
So yeah. When I saw something like 500 WED I decided I should try it on my blog. I’m a storyteller by nature. I can make up stories on the spot, reasons behind different things, and various lies. Plus I have a ton of different stories from my own past that I love telling to anyone who will listen. So yeah, #500WED.
Writing doesn’t come as natural to me as drawing or doodling does. Writing my blog entries take time. I usually do them in the mornings when I have some spare sitting time (although lately I’ve preferred to sleep in as oppose to get up and write… but that has to do as much with work stress versus productivity at home).
As someone who likes to create things writing is something I’ve always wanted to do but never been too successful at. In college I kept a few journals. I found these unrolled composition notebooks at the college campus store and took a few as journals to write down my dreams and thoughts. Sadly after my sophomore year they stopped carrying them and I stopped keeping a journal…. although I always kept trying to get back into it.
My blog is my writing tool now. Even this I do on and off spurts though. I’m not too good on following through on things over the long run. I’ve tried NaNoWriMo, P90x, Daily Drawings (although that one lasted the longest, just over 3 years strong before I stopped), and others. But this, maybe with daily prompts I can manage to keep it up.
Arggg. 337 words and I still need to keep going.
So I guess this will be a good stress reliever from work as well. Work has been long and stressful lately, certainly more than last year at this time. I leave for work at 6:45am and leave from work at 5pm or later on a daily basis. It leaves me beat at the end of the day.
So that’s why I’ll be trying 500WED (damn… if only I spelled out Words Every Day I’d have more words here). Hopefully the writing prompts are slightly better than this one. Day 1: Write your story: Who are you? What brings you here? That is, write what makes you want to say, And so I write.
I’m looking through previous writing prompts, because they do these writing prompts every month, and I’m not sure they are going to be motivating enough to stick at it, so maybe I’ll mix the writing prompts with Rory’s Story Cubes when I get stuck. Some of the prompts would kill me to have to spend 500 words on. “Apologies and Forgiveness.” “How do you feel about mixing memoir and fiction?” “Branding.”. They might make me struggle.
“What’s your theme song?” That’s a prompt I could write a lot on. I’d have fun with that one.
But I guess the goal is to have fun with all of them.
I’ll work on it.
On Thursday, September 25th, Sam turned 30. I got a plan going in my mind a few weeks ago to celebrate.
I took a personal day and didn’t go to work, but didn’t tell Sam I was taking the day off. I got up at 5:45am, like any other work day, showered, got dressed and left for work. I picked up a slew of pictures I had printed at CVS, drove to the Giant Eagle to pick up some ingredients for birthday cookies and cake, hit Target and Staples for some tri-fold board, a card and markers, and hit up a florist for some flowers.
After about two hours of driving around Sam had left for work and I returned home. I got right to work on cookie dough (using our awesome Kitchenaid Mixer). After putting the dough in the fridge, I started on the apples for the cake. I sautéed up some apples on the stove with sugar and butter, hand mixed some dough up (since the Kitchenaid bowl was in the refrigerator) and put the dough in the oven.
Next I got to work on her card. This idea didn’t hit me until I was actually at Target (hence the trip to Staples). I cleaned off the kitchen table and laid the tri-fold board out. I decorated it, threw some pictures on it and added a nice birthday message. Wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it, but thought it was a good idea.
After the cake was set aside to cool I put the cookies in and cleaned the apartment. By this time it was getting close to 11. My original plan was to surprise Sam as they were walking out of the office to head to lunch but that wasn’t going to happen. It was a 30 minute drive out to Sam’s work and cookies hadn’t finished yet and I still needed for finished the glaze of for the Toffee Apple Cake. So the new plan was to surprise Sam where they were for lunch. I finished up the cookies and took the flowers out of the water I had set them in and packed everything up to go surprise Sam.
I drove out to the east side of Cleveland, and I knew Sam was going out to lunch with her co-workers at Olive Garden, so I looked up the closest one to Sam’s work and headed out there. I parked right out in front of Olive Garden and gave Same a call. She didn’t answer, instead sending an auto-text back ‘Can’t talk right now.’ I wasn’t deterred. I sent her a picture of the front of Olive Garden and a text that said “You should at least come out and kiss me since I’m outside right now.”
About ten minutes later I got a “Wait… Are you here?” text back and she came out. I opened up the card and gave a her a big kiss. Ate lunch with her co-workers and hung out at work with her for a bit before coming back home.
It’s her 30th Birthday. She deserved something special. When she got back from work we went out to eat at a Mexican restaurant, came back and caught up on some Doctor Who while eating birthday cake and opening her last present (a gift subscription to LootCrate). That was in addition to some Daniel Closes books, a candy thermometer and one more thing that hasn’t arrived yet… although that might become a Christmas present depending on when it arrives.
Sam was amazingly surprised. The right amount of surprise she says. She not a big surprise person, which made me debate whether showing up with flowers, a giant card and White and Milk Chocolate cookies would be too much or not. But it wasn’t, and I scored boyfriend points with all her coworkers (woo boyfriend points).
I love my dreams. They are weird, vivid, and usually have a storyline that runs through them.
Sam says her dreams are never as coherent as mine. When I was in middle school I used to try and tell myself what I wanted to dream about as I was falling asleep. I do recall it worked sometimes. Just a random experiment.
So last night, I had this dream that I was an astronaut on the first mission to the moon. Not NASA – Neil Armstrong mission to the moon, but something different. We were in a big, huge, massive auditorium. Pack with people, press and all the equipment for the mission to the moon. We were launching from right there on stage.
Everything in the dream was modern too. This wasn’t a 1960’s dream, it was modern day.
In the auditorium the lights were down. The rest of the crew and I were laughing and talking with all the fans and press about how great this was. There were four of us going on this mission. We were treating it lightly even though everyone kept saying how historic it was. As lift off was closing in, we all went our separate ways to get prepared. I kept looking for my spacesuit and couldn’t find it. The rest of the crew were all dressed up in their clear bubble headed spacesuits and ready for lift off. I was the only one not prepared.
I ran around the dressing room searching for my spacesuit. I tore clothes off racks, ripped through drawers that were way to small to fit the suit, and was screaming at the top of my lungs. Someone told me it could be in the coat rack and I ran to the back of the auditorium, a spot light following me the whole way, but my suit wasn’t there. I eventually accepted that the mission had to go one without me. That everyone else was ready, I was preventing launch and had to just give up, which I did.
I didn’t watch the launch. I went back to my dressing room and collapsed on the bed in there arms splayed out to my sides exhausted. All I was saying was “Someone hide it” while really thinking I just wasn’t ready for it. Didn’t prepare for launch the right way. Everyone else was ready way before me and I took it too lightly. That’s why I wasn’t on the launch. It was my fault.
Someone came in to fight me. Really. This was part of my dream. Someone came in the dressing room wanting to fight me. One of the launch crew on the ground said “You really don’t want to fight with him right now. He’s pretty mad,” and I was. I was mad and angry and blaming myself for not being on the something as historic as the first mission to the moon.
_________
And that’s how I woke up. Not sure how, why, or where this dream came from but there it is. A solid tale of randomness and fiction that my brain created to entertain me last night.
Everyone has had it.
Where you get a pebble or something small in your sock that irritates your foot with every step.
That was this morning.
I spent about 4 minutes taking on and off my sock trying to locate whatever it was that irritating my heel.
I didn’t locate it, but after taking the sock on and off three times it was gone.
I had to turn the sock inside out and sweep the whole of it with my hand before it felt fine when I wore it.
Robots did not help.
