I don't think my lack-of-motivation streak is at an end.  In fact, I think it's dug in hard and doesn't wan to leave, but I'm tired of my apartment looking a bit cluttered and messy.  I don't think my friends really mind, I mean they come over willingly enough, but it's bothering me.  I didn't get any of the desired cleaning done yesterday because I got frusterated with my other website and started hand updating files.  It took two hours and it didn't fix the problem I was having.  I think I'm at the point where I'm just going to pay someone to fix it.

But!  But I have been successful about getting some things done.  I've written a lot recently, in fact more consistently and with more gusto than I have since I finished Abs.  That is encouraging!

So, I'm going to look for small steps this week.  I want to tidy up the apartment and go to bellydancing on Saturday morning.  I've been putting off going back to classes for, well, I don't know why, but I have and I will be going Saturday because I just will!  I think I'm going to only go once a month until I'm back into a routine and then kick it up to twice a week again.

I'm going to try to keep my dishes under control, and be a bit more tidy with my laundry.  Those are my goals for the forseeable future.  Start small, right?  Well this is small enough.  Little steps create habits, and making them good habits is kind of the focus I need right now, so there you go.

Tonight I really need to take out the trash and clean the Chinchilla cage and go grocery shopping.  I'm going out to lunch because I didn't have anything else to bring with me to work to eat - even for breakfast.  If I can squeeze in putting away my laundry I'll be thrilled and try to tackle the clutter in the livingroom tomorrow.

I'm hoping to start using the WiiFit again as I watch back seasons of Dr Who since it's on the Netflix Watch Instantly.

All in all, it's a start!

I'm making up my own knitting pattern.  Yes, you heard me right, I'm coming up with my own set of stitches.  I think I've figured out what I want to do with it so far, so now it's just a matter of knitting it to length, but I'm hopeful.  Thankfully the point of the pattern is to be rather holey and messy and not quite perfect; it's a very forgiving pattern so far.  When I have more than a few inches to show for it I will post some pictures, but for now it looks like a black rectangle with stylized holes in it.  Not much to look at.

So it seems I'm having an issue with lack of discipline.  Not surprising; I was never very disciplined before I went to college and it took me a year or so to figure out how to not drown in my classes, but then I cracked the whip and got through it.  Somewhere in the last year my discipline has crumbled.  I stay up late, I skid into work just in time, I put off finishing my laudry or dishes, and I really would rather not clean.  I'm lazy - which has always been one of my biggest vices - but mostly I've been able to hem myself in.  Lately I've lost even that ability.

If it didn't affect my life - like the things I want to be able to do - I doubt I would be upset about it.  But I can't really write or knit much when I'm exhausted from having stayed up two nights in a row until the wee hours of the morning because I didn't feel like going to bed just quite yet.  I'm not sure what I need to do to motivate myself more, but it needs to happen.

Mostly because I want to finish my Dr Horrible Wristies and finish writing this book, but getting other stuff done too would be nice.

Okay, so Alice and I have been hitting the idea back and forth like a never-ending game of ping pong about how we needed to get together and knit - and then there was the other conversation about doing a Harry Potter marathon since I've seen only a few of the movies in their entirety and another one in bits and pieces.  Well, yesterday was devoted to knitting - and Harry Potter.  Yup.

My goal for a while has been to knit a pair of fingerless gloves.  I want a pair.  I want to make a pair.  So after lots of digging around, Alice found this pair of wristies that were inspired by Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-Long Blog.  They used to be up on Ravelry and on Knerdy Knitting, but the site went down or expired.  Through some very impressive creative thinking on a friend of ours, we discovered that we could access the pattern through google's chache.  So, if you're interested, h e r e is a link to that pattern.

The wristies I made are a little different.  For one, my thumb hole isn't comfortable at all.  If I make another pair of these I'll have to experiment.  I also made the button track wider, and after I discovered I had no idea how to actually make the button holes, I just knitted a solid track and sewed the wristies together and will add buttons once I find some better suited to the jewel tone colors.  I have one almost completed wristie that's just missing buttons.

I've also completed another book cozie.  This one was going to be for me, but I ended up hating the way the self-striping yarn patterend on the book, so I'll be giving it away with a future book giveaway on Book Addicts.  Stay tuned!

This morning I started experimenting with an idea I hatched for a pattern for fingerless gloves, so I'll have to report back on how that's working, but later - because I need to do a lot of writing since I took yesterday off to watch Harry Potter and knit.

I swear I'm going to blog more this week.....

So I'm sitting in a Starbucks in Longview, out in east Texas, just hanging out until a reasonable time for me to head over to the country club for my brothers wedding.  This is day three of my staycation - no I don't care that it's a Saturday!

So far it's been all about the reading and revisions.  Thursday I think I finished reading Married with Zombies, did a bunch of writing and revising, read an ebook called Until Emie and read Blameless.  Yeah, I read a lot!!  Friday I got up and finished reading Never Trust a Rogue before putting in some serious revision time on MPG and then heading off for a quick B&N trip before the Writer's Date Night.  We're trying it out on Friday nights for a few weeks, but I don't think it's going to work.  There just isn't a night for everyone to get together that doesn't conflict with anything else, so we're going to have to make a group decision about what we want to do.  It's going to suck because any way we hatch this egg someone is going to get left out.  Boo. 

Today I slept in on accident and missed dance class - again.  I haven't been in like two or three weeks.  Ug.  I'm a dance failure!!!  Hopefully after this weekend and the whole crazy trip for the wedding I'll be back on track and doing stuff normal like.

And my brother just surprised me at Starbucks.  Awe.  I'm supposed to meet everyone over at the country club in like half an hour.  I'll get snazzied up over there and meet everyone.  Tonight promises to be really interesting.

Okay, so I'm a *little* late with this - gimme a break!!!

Reading Goals

So after Armadillo*Con and an impressive book release day today, I really need to think about more space for my books.  I have a very large entertainment center that I got because I liked the way it looked, the style was something I really thought was nifty and there were matching bookcases.  I haven't put books on the entertainment center.  However, with the rate of my buying right now, I need more shelf space so I'm hoping to take some time during my staycation to do some serious organization.

That, and I think I'm going to get rid of my physical cd's.  I can't remember the last time I bought one or changed out the discs in my CD player.  I don't even listen to them.  They're just in there.  Doing that will give me three cubbies, combining my Wii stuff will give me one, getting rid of the VHS tapes I can't watch anyways will give me two.  Putting knicknack stuff in other places will give me two.  So, as you can see, that will add up!  And, I want to take my photo albums out of the shelves and put the "office" suppies somewhere else as well as the random compilation of binders. 

Other random things I plan on doing during my staycation?  Um.....  Write.  Read.  Clean up my bedroom as usual.  Clean the patio.  But mostly read and write.  I know, thrillingly exciting, huh?

In other news, I posted a recap of Armadillo*Con on my writers blog, and uploaded pictures to Facebook.  I need to Flickr them, but I'm going to bed early tonight.  Or, I'm going to bed early if I can after having read a quarter of Married with Zombies.  I love zombie books, but they do horrible things to my over-active imagination!

There's so much to update on, I just haven't had time to do it.  So here's a stupid picture of me at Armadillo*Con.

Today I was glancing through a friends Facebook pictures; not always an enjoyable experience when you turn up in them as the 14 yr old version of yourself, lol.  No, I'm not linking.  And it got me thinking about how I've always felt a little obtuse or abnormal in a group of people.

Tons of people go out of their way to dress or act in a way that attracts attention because they want it or they need it to compensate for something.  There was a short time in and around Jr High when I did that, but it was just too much work, and I went back to being - me.  I don't know what it is about just being myself, but I always seem to be the odd one out. 

I'm loud and opinionated.  That makes me stick out a lot of the time.  I like and have tattoos; that gets me all sorts of attention - but I didn't get the tattoos for attention.  I got them because I wanted them.  Do they make me look kinda bad ass?  Well, yeah.  Suz said last week that if the hotel was mean to us she'd sick me on them because I'm scary and have tattoos, lol.

But what I'm talking about is that I've always been sort of the odd one out.  It's just who I am.  I remember in high school really badly just wanting to fit in somewhere, even if it was with the odd kids, I just wanted people who liked me.  Maybe if I could change who I was I could have, but I've never once considered being anything but what I am.  I've always liked me, with my oddities and quirks, I've never once thought that the way I am naturally - loud, obnoxious, tattooed, creative - was something that needed to change or was abnormal.

I'm not sure what I'm trying to say, I guess I'm just articulating observations about myself.  I'm aware that I stick out like a sore thumb.  No, I don't do it intentionally.  Yes, this is who I really am.  It's too much of an effort to hide behind a fancy facade; I'm l-a-z-y.

So that's it.  Be who you are because it's what's most truthful.  Yes, it's nice to fit in sometimes, but at what cost?

So this was the tax free weekend here in Texas.  As in, the one weekend where you're totally okay spending way too much money because that 5% or whatever sales tax usually is, isn't there!  While it was a little crazy dodging people and finding the right size, I was sad that there weren't more people out shopping.  I know the economy is on a slow crawl up hill, but I'd hoped that there would be more people out taking advantage of the weekend and showing that the economy isn't all that bad.

Oh well.  It didn't stop me from having a good time.

To get the day started off 'right' I got my hair done.  I'd been holding off so that it was right before the conference.  It's not that much different from how I had it cut last time, I just had blonde and some splashes of red added.  You'd think with how little hair I have that it wouldn't take that long to do, right?  Um, wrong.  I was in the stylists chair from 9am until about 2:30pm.  That's a lot of fussing over my hair!!  We did the blonde, and then decided there wasn't enough of it and did a second round of bleach foils.  The red didn't come out with as much of a *pop* as we'd hoped.  But all in all it looks really good.  And the stylist had a great time figuring out how to do a fauxhawk since I said she could.  Will I be sporting the fauxhawk?  Probably not very often, but it was a fun style.

That said, it was off for shopping with Suzan and The Monsters!  It was a lot of fun; we hit up Old Navy, the Mall and Kohls and did some serious money damage.  The boys were fun, and bless their hearts they put up with us an awful lot!  I got two complete outfits which I'll be sporting at the conference next weekend and a few other pieces that will be good for work.  I really like shopping....

And just to prove how hardcore of a shopper I can be, I shopped until my foot literally bled!  LoL, something got in my shoe and I have a little cut on the very bottom, on the inner part of the ball of my foot so I've been walking softly all day.

The rest of the week will be spent taking care of work stuff and prepping for the weekend.  I'm getting my nails done on Tuesday and will be stressing over choreography for dance class I still don't know all that well and convincing myself to do laundry - again - before we go.  :D