Okay, so ~ I am alive. I am getting better.  There have been no more instances involving the cops and my mother.  That is a good thing.

I know I recapped the DFW Writer's Convention via my writing blog, but I thought I'd talk about the non-professional aspects over here too, since I haven't posted and well, I feel like it.  I meant to get all ready on Friday but wound up piddling around with Linda, shopping and getting lunch and stuff until mid-afternoon when there was a whole trip back and forth to Ross to return a laptop bag and dig around for another.  See, I found this perfect blue and black laptop purse, but it's made for a 15"ish laptop.  Lappy is a 17is" laptop.  Two inches.  Two friggen inches kept me from having the coolest laptop bag.  I'm upset.  I also had to just accept that most stuff is made for 15" laptops apparently!  Insert a very unhappy Cidly  :(  I did get two really nice shell-shirts to wear under sweaters for work and stuff, so that was a win!

Saturday Linda came to my place and we took Jeepie to the convention where we met up with Suzan and Criss - yea!!!  Haven't seen Criss recently since she got prego on us.  I miss her face!  I was really surprised by the lack of technology.  I assumed more of the people there would have laptops and all, but apparently our group was in the minority.  In most of the classes we were the only people clustering around outlets and taking notes on laptops.  And I'm the one in our group that brings a power-strip.  NaNoWrimo taught me well.

There was much fun to be had at my expense because I went to the romance/sex writing workshops.  This included twittering about me being in these with the con's hash-tag.  I also saw people sitting in front of me pulling up my twitter profile as SOMEONE twittered yet another silly thing at me.  Oh well.  Good thing I like to laugh at myself, right?

My amazing friend Linda got a partial request from an agent, so uber congrats and well wishes her way.  (I have yet to hear back on the short story I sent in, but I shouldn't hear back until end of next month)

Saturday night was the cocktail party in which I played dress-up with Suzan and *gasp* MADE HER WEAR A DRESS!  This included a really funny Marylin Monroe moment while Suzan took a smoke break.  We also met a really cool recent transplant to Texas who will be joining our online critiquing.  Super jazzed about this.

Sunday.... Linda and I - without talking about it - both automatically assumed that the conference would also be starting at 8am.  She showed up at my place same time as the day before - without us deciding that's what we were doing, we both just assumed the same thing!  And we arrived at the convention center... and realized our mistake!  LoL!!  I had about an hour long conversation with an author who is trying to understand twitter and so we sat on some benches and I pulled up my TweetDeck and we discussed twittering, retweeting, hash-tags, and the benefits and uses of twitter.  We also got the guy leading the twitter workshop to come over and join us and then there were four of us talking about twitter.  It was really fun.

During a session with one author, the author stopped speaking for a few moments and then asked the full room if anyone had any Claritin - allergies are really bad this year.  Well, when I'm sick and I need to be in public sans-medicine-head, I take Claritin.  Yes, it's expensive but it leaves me clear headed and functioning.  I pop'd up with the medicine and this author said she'd read my first ten pages of a manuscript and critique it.  I needed to have gotten it out last night in all honesty but I got blocked with web hosting issues on godaddy.com

So I'm excited about that!

I also hate godaddy.com  If anyone is better with internetz than I, I would love helps.  Otherwise I'm going to corner Suzan and beg her to help me, though it might not take begging, it could just take some Dr Pepper....

There were also some really nifty writerly threads available.  Sometime this week two shirts I bought will be here and I'm sure there will be pictures. I can't figure out if they have a website so I'll just have to tell you that both shirts are funny and one is semi-sexually funny, but writerly, both are girly.... yeah.

Ho-hum...  I'm rather certain I don't like staying at home.  I don't think I ever realized how little time I spend in my apartment some times until I had someone living with me.  I'm sorry world, I make a terrible roommate.

The Epic Closet Cull is .... still underway in the way that I mean there's a huge freaking pile of STUFF at the foot of my bed.

My apartment is a wreck.  Tonight will officially be Cid-cleans-stuff night; bathroom, bedroom, chin cage, dishes, trash - you're all going down!!!!!!

And my garden is officially beyond resuscitation and is dead.  Dead.  Dead.  Dead.  I'm sad.  I also don't know if I have the willpower to start over again.

I think this covers it.... yes, it should, if not, well, I'll say it next time!

Okay, so I'm going to get back into blogging regularly. 

I was all hooked on the Darkyn books.

Then I was doing revision-hell.

Today I submitted my short story to a publication.

Now I will hopefully resume my normal pace of life.

Unfortunatly the garden has died.

I also need to do my monthly review. 

I'll do it tomorrow.

I should go to sleep soon.

Yup.

Okay, so yesterday I was uber, uber, uber productive - and I got pictures of the Chinnies!

You have NO idea how hard it was to get these pictures!  They dart around and try to investigate the camera and are just generally uncooperative when cameras appear.  That's always the exact moment they MUST bounce around the cage.

Speaking of the cage, the chins spent a good deal of time sitting on the patio last night while I scrubbed at their drop tray and cleaned it uber good and sprayed it with cleaners and scrubbed it again.  Hopefully that faint, strange odor I smell will leave.  No one else smells it, they just smell their hay, but I can smell some other dirty-cage smell and it drives me nuts!

The plants, which I meant to take pictures of, are shooting up and up and up.  The beans are the worst ones - as far as shooting UP goes.  I'm thinking I might plant some this weekend, the others will probably be kept in the little green house a while longer.  If the beans weren't so much farther along I would still have the cover on the greenhouse but the beans were getting tall enough they were growing sideways by several inches.

Righteo, headed to critique group tonight and I'm taking my new, shiny "short" story.  :D

Okay, so this has been a very bad week.  Thus the no blogging because I didn't really want to talk about all this depressing stuff via the blogsphere and some of it is work-related - which is off limits.  Today, however, I have a ton of pictures to share.  The first is one of me this morning.  Just look at that mop on my head! Some days it just looks awesome, LoL, and while *I* don't look all that great, my hair is so much freaking fun I had to put that up.  Plus it shows off just how drastic the front really is.  And I'm loving the headband.  When I get some time I need to go button shopping so it's not being held together by a safety-pin.

So Tuesday I went to the eyedoctor.  Good news: My eyes aren't that much worse for wear.  Badish news: we're switching me over to a hydrogen peroxide based eye solution to soak my contacts in.  Now, the bad part of this is that if I forget it's hydrogen peroxide and wash the contact in it and stick it back in my eye, or let the contact soak for less than six hours - it's like insta-pain-please-kill-me-now!  It's sort of cool because of how the contacts are soaked. I took pictures because I think it's super nifty.  The contact vial is different than what I'm used to, each lense has it's own "cage" and it's submerged in the solution and the gray ring on the bottom of the cage-thinggie reacts to the solution and it purifies my lenses... Yeah, just look at the pictures already!

Yup, I find it totally interesting.  I do understand if you do not.

My little sprouts are shooting up!  I'm taking the cover off today because several are hitting the top of the cover and starting to grow bent.  There were also two who were just sitting on the top of the pallet, growing roots out but not putting them into the peat, so I manually planted those, LoL.  I have one pea plant that suddenly has a covering of silvery fuzz and I need to research and see what that is and if I need to remove it or kill it or something.  Any ideas?

I was going to show off some individual views, but they all look over-exposed and not all that great, so you get this.  I'm guessing I'll be planting them next week and then hopefully start a smaller tray of just veggies.

Last night was like... knitting night.  I tried and failed the fingerless gloves pattern I was irate at earlier this week.

There wasn't enough increase for it to go around my actual hand.  I'm bummed, but I went off pattern so I'm not all that surprised.  I couldn't figure out what it wanted me to do for the bow so I skipped it.  Bad idea, huh?  So I started on another piece, which was mostly me just figuring out how to read graph patterns, which I think I sort of do now, which is exciting.

I'm sortof not sure what I'm going to do with this.  It curls up on it's self really bad, but I'm thinking if I continue the stripes up a ways, I could make a dish towel or a small purse with a flap.  I don't know... Suggestions?  I think that, even though I tried not to, the yarn got pulled too tight in the back in places  :-/  Oh well, for my first try I'm happy!  I only missed one color change spot and you can't see it and it's so small you can't tell.  The picture looks a little warped, which is a bummer  :-/

And that's it!

Now for the weekend: I need to get up and get to cleaning and then write, write, write! 

The roaches are back.  Well, a single roach was seen last night and promptly attacked with all the viciousness it deserved for invading my domain.   At least I've progressed from screaming and running away, but these aren't the hissers, these are just the creepy big waterbug ones that fly.  My skin crawls just thinking about that.  I have yet to see another one, but now that I've seen one, I'm watching for the others.  I'm not stupid, I know they're out there - waiting for me to let my guard down just a bit.  That's when they'll really attack; but I'm ready.

This week is going better than last week.  It would be hard to be worse than last week, and thankfully this one is not trying to run that contest.  I'm still struggling with the previously mentioned knitting pattern, but I didn't get to mess with it today because I read Boneshaker by Cherie Priest.  I have also written this week - where I didn't read at all last week.

The plants are shooting upwards.  I'm going to have to pull the top off soon - I think.  I'm a little unsure of what constitutes as leaves.  I'm really surprised because the Bluebonnets are blooming; Bluebonnets usually take a year to plant and bloom.  I'm hoping to get a few viable seedlings; that would be fantastic.  I should have taken pictures....

I'm not sure if I mentioned this, but I'm not going to my mom's race this weekend; I'll be staying home, waiting for twitter updates on my mom's progress.  Instead I will probably do some much over-due cleaning, writing and knitting.  I'm poking people to let them know it's an open invite to come over and hang out because I don't have a plan to go out. 

And, tomorrow night is the 10th anniversary of Boondock Saints.  If you're a fan, go look at the Fathom Events for locations and tickets.  Boondock Saints II came out Tuesday but I haven't had the chance to go get it -- yet.  Okay, I'm tired and the Chinchillas are begging, for something.  As always, I'm not sure what.

((For some reason this blog is not showing up right for me. Hopefully it's just a problem on my end....))
Well this weekend was a bunch of well-I-didn't-expect-that's.  But ya know what?  It was still fun.

Friday I obviously stayed home and gardened, which I will digress immediatly into more gardening ramble....now.  OMG I had no idea things would sprout so quick! I thought it would take another day or two before I saw anything that really looked like it would make a plant.  It's been a while since I grew anything from seeds.  Anyways, several of my sugar snap peas are throwing out roots and that first little tale-tell leafy thing. I have a Sunflower that's really adamant about I-want-to-grow-NOW. I think the other ones are Johnny Jump Ups that look promising as well as several of the herbs that look like they're doing really well, but it's harder to tell with them because their seeds are so tiny so the resulting plant bits are equally as tiny.  Anyways, here are some really crappy pictures!!

Saturday was supposed to be my research day.  I posted about my like of research and how the research actually went via my other blog.  It didn't go as planned, I can say that much.  I stopped by Half Priced Books on my way home (bad idea, I know!) and sort of hit a gold mine.  I found several volumes I had been thinking about buying after at the library and two others that just looked promising.  I also bought two knitting books.  Yes!  Me - bought knitting books!  One focuses on using colors and patterns which I would like to learn.  I had sort of decided to spend the rest of a failing Saturday knitting, but a friend of mine wanted to go see Alice in Wonderland.  Long story made short, I drove all the way to Arlington - like south-west corner, lol - only to find out that the movie was sold out. Awwee!  So we saw Book of Eli instead!

Book of Eli...  Okay, so you know going into this movie that it's probably some sort of post-apocalyptic, religious  movie.  After seeing Legion I was skeptical about this one, but I had heard a few good things so I still wanted to see it - and Denzel Washington does a lot of good movies so I decided to be hopeful.  The setting was sort of Resident Evil meets I Am Legend.  It was sort of believable from what you are led to understand.  The characters were ... interesting.  You really only get inside four characters through the movie, Eli, the girl I sort of intentionally ignored, the bad guy, and the girls mom.  Can you tell I don't pay attention to names well?  Anyways, they were all pretty much okay.  The plot is that Eli is taking what is the only copy of the Bible left on earth,  west, where God told him it will be safe.  Okay, I can believe that; a hard sell to non-Christian or religious audiences but I can get that.  The really hard bit for me to accept came at the end where they do the big reveal.  I've decided to not say what it is...  I don't really think the big reveal is all that believable because he was too aware of things through the movie for that thing to be true -- though if you ignored the plausibility of it, it was a dang good kick to the evil guy.  I liked the movie.  I really did, and that surprised me.  I was pleasantly surprised.

Sunday I had decided to go to church, take the chins out to the patio and scrub their drop try.  I apparently did not set my alarm, and it was raining.  Neither of those things happened.  I did, however, get some knitting done. Here are the pictures of my headband!  Which I finished while watching Ponyo, but I'll talk about that in a moment.
So the yarn is really great and soft.  I need to get a button to sew on to really finish it, but you get the idea.  It's a headband, super fun and comfy.  Of course it's done now, when it's too warm to really wear it anymore!  Oh well, next winter, right?  I'm really proud of this!!



Right, anyways, Ponyo!  I'd posted via twitter that I had it coming in on my Netflix and a friend of mine responded that she wanted to watch it so we deiced to get together and watch it.  Now if you know anything about Miyazaki's films, they're generally a bit abstract or weird, but usually really cool!  I have heard some not-so-great opinions about it so I was ready.  However, I don't know that I was really ready for this.  Ponyo is sort of a take on The Little Mermaid, where Ponyo is the daughter of... well... I'm not quite sure what he was, but he had magic and lived under the ocean and yeah...  So Ponyo has a brush with a human and decides that she wants to be human too!  And she sort of becomes this human-chicken thing.  It was strange.  And then she becomes a human and she gets utterly obnoxious.  I think we commented more on how crazy everything was and how irresponsible the parents were and just how nutty it was and how all the characters just accepted that crazy, silly stuff was going on all around them.  I can say that Ponyo is not my favorite Miyazaki film.


We proceeded to watch bad TV that I think was Legend of the Seeker -- based off of books I hated.  Eventually - thankfully - the Oscars came on.  We were both struggling to write and outline and be productive during all of this.  The best part of the Oscar's might have been Neil Patrick Harris doing the opener.  After that I officially didn't care as much about the awards.  Now, Ben Stiller coming out as a Na'vi was awesome and I still want to know if the fishing pole bit was planned...  I will have to say, after watching the Oscars I now need to see: The Hurt Locker, The Blind Side, and The Secret of Kells.  The fun part about watching award shows, all the movies you decide that you might as well watch.


Okay, so that was my long-winded weekend that was apparently all about movies....and gardening......and knitting......and not as much about writing and books as I intended.

Okay, so lets talk about gardening! The last few days have been so very near spring like it's glorious! Of course I have been stuck in doors.  The weather has been so crazy lately I haven't dared to even look at my patio.  I have, however, found this strange little plastic, miniature greenhouse thing.  I'm thinking that if I can start it indoors, maybe by the time the weather has mellowed out just a bit I can move everything into pots and out on the patio.

So the first thing you do is - submerge the whole thing in water and let the little peat pallets expand.  Once they've expanded -- which happened SO fast I really was surprised at how quickly they were ready.  The instructions say to pour off water, but I didn't have any to pour off.  I was a bit confused on the following instructions.  I thought you should pull the netting off of the pallets, and did that to two of them - which was kind of a disaster.

It occurred to me - I'm probably already behind on my patio gardening... I think I need to set aside some time for figuring out what I want to plant and start getting seeds and potting soil and harassing my planters into shape...  I'm sort of hoping I might be able to get some tulips this year...  I'd also like to do some vegetables, but I won't hold my breath.  I won't do anything crazy, but I'd really like to attempt something better than what I did before.  Everything I see says that February is the time for planting in Texas, so I'm toying around with the idea of getting some paints and painting up the old horse-buckets my dad gave me.  I need to try to drill some holes in the bottom so the water can run off, but they give me some nice, deep containers.  I'm tempted to try potatoes with these buckets.... How nifty would that be?  Currently I'm toying with the idea of, Chard, Peas, Tomatoes (maybe), some herbs - which ones I haven't decided, tulips and I wish I could remember the yellow flower I had on my patio forever; it just would not die and had great yellow blossoms.  I think I will go walk around the seeds at Wal-Mart and eye stuff to see what I think I want to try my hand at.  Suggestions are always welcome!