What’s Hot + What’s Not

Jeepers  – this is quickly turning into a Wednesday only, what’s hot + What’s not blog. Nanowrimo is really not leaving much time for blogging. Never mind! Here’s the spiel if you want to play along:

It’s as easy as writing up your own hot/not list on your blog and then linking back to me here at loobylu.com and then adding your url to the widget below.

Here’s mine:

Hot

Days – the days are hot. I am not a fan of Summer (at least not of the Antipodean kind – Summer in Canada was really very pleasant) and it’s not even officially Summer yet and still we are sweltering. Climate change, will you be the cause of a mass family migration to cooler climes? Perhaps.

Frosty fruits. Oh yeah – a basic necessity.

NaNoWriMo – I am getting words down. Not very good words, but words none-the-less. almost 21,000 at last count. Chris Baty’s advice to get as many down in the first few days was very good advice indeed. I need to keep up the momentum however, because I feel myself getting bogged down with the second week blues. Startling questions like “What is this book actually about?” are starting to flare up at the most inconvenient times – like all the time. It’s making me a bit grumpy actually. I think that I should save the rest of this for the Not column.

The house is tidy and I still don’t quite believe it. Most nights we even manage to get the clean laundry foldedand put away in drawers. This is previously unheard of! The home organisation system I mentioned last week isn’t exactly easy – and I have to say the novelty wears thin very quickly – but I have managed to keep things under control around here despite the 21,000 words. If I manage to keep it for another fortnight  I promise to let you in on all the secrets.

New artwork (top photo). We have been very, very bad in our No Spend Year and bought some artwork. It’s number 8 in our yearly wedding anniversary artwork buying – and it’s a goodie. We found it Byron Bay, but it’s by Melbourne artist Timba. Love it.

Not

Chadstone Shopping Centre – I went on a little Chrissy shopping reconnaissance trip yesterday and I got LOST – inside the mall! I have been going out to Chadstone a couple of times a year (at the very least) for the last 20 or so years. I have seen it go from a dinky little shopping mall to an out of control temple to the gods of consumerism… and I feel like I know the place quite well… but honestly, it is so big and only getting bigger. I got lost somewhere down in the bowels of the place and in a state of confusion ended up buying a bath mat and a packet of flavoured lip gloss – neither of which I needed.

Grumpiness and disgruntlement due to my lack of plot focus (see Nanowrimo notes above). I am projecting my NaNoWriAnxMo (anx is for “anxiety”) onto other things, like what to get people for christmas, and why isn’t the playroom clean? and what am I doing with my life? and do I really need to bake for the school fair?

Not baking for the school fair. I did huge amounts last year – gingerbread and biscuits and so on… this year I left it until 7pm Friday night and then had a “argh, stuff it” moment. Not hot. I did, however, serve sno-cones and ice creams to the overheated crowds on Saturday afternoon. The sno-cone stall was one of the best to be assigned to as we were down underground in the very shady equipment storage area, and the medieval sno-cone machine tended to shower bits of ice all over us as it crushed lumps into “sno”. Did you know that people will pay $2 for a tiny scoop of crushed ice in a paper cone with a little bit of highly coloured and flavoured syrup squirted on top? They really do! Some even paid $2 for a tiny scoop of ice with NO syrup! I was stunned, but our stall made the most money of the day – and all for a good cause. Amazing.

Hot weather. Hot is not hot. I think I already mentioned that.

See you at your place, hotters and notters. xx