Jaci Dawn

I just checked to see when I last posted (aside from last night’s post on my weird dream): it has been almost a full month!

I’ve been busy. I took on the NaNoWriMo challenge, again. I did finish the challenge with 50,066 words. The novel is a bare bones manuscript with poor character development and not much plot to brag about, but it does have a beginning, a middle, and an end. there’s a heroine, a hero, and an antagonist. There’s a clash of good vs. evil. There’s at least one funny line in it. It really should have been just a short story, so there’s also a lot of fluff in it as I tried to figure out how to dig myself out of the corners I kept writing myself into.

I have also been spending time in a local gym. Yes, me. I hate gyms. I hate anything remotely resembling middle school P.E. or high school P.E. (especially middle school – that period of time when I was still a budding preteen in a very adolescent body and the rest of the girls were actually budding adolescents in almost-teen-bodies). I hate anything that sounds like having to run laps, even if laps are being run on exercise machines.

Why am I going to the gym? I went to my doctor about pain in my neck and upper back after my last accident and he sent me to physical therapy. Turns out that I had some pinching in the C-6 or C-7 area of my neck, typical with whiplash. Mild whiplash, to be certain, but enough to warrant physical therapy and torture by way of having to use upper-back-strengthening exercises on machines in the adjacent gym.

It is hard to go into a gym in your work clothes and to see all those lean, muscular bodies running gracefully on running machines. I have never run gracefully in my entire life.

I have also been immersed in the culture of my workplace, which has changed dramatically in the past 12 months. A year ago, I had been working with everyone in my department for at least 6 years. This November, none of those people still work with me. The company has changed hands, re-branded, and we’re deep in the middle of changing up accounting software. I don’t know how I have survived all the cuts or how I managed to survive emotionally (it was pretty dicey at times), but I have new friends at work and we’re making progress toward becoming a fine-tuned team once again. It has been an incredibly difficult year for me.

I don’t do rapid change very well. And yet – I survived this.

Finally, there was the first Holiday of the Holiday Season: Thanksgiving. I am a staunch traditionalist, so the fine china and the fine silver come out for Thanksgiving.

Simple, but also elegant: the silver was a gift from my folks, the china was a set Donald picked out, some of the cut crystal belonged to my grandmother (and some have been gifted to me down the years), and the fragile champagne glasses (crystal) were my mother’s.

I pull this out to set all the pies and bread on. It was something my parents picked up and saved through the years. It spent a lot of time gathering dust in the sun room of their house in Ely. I can’t find much information on it (it is a collapsible tea table), but I did find the patent # for it last year.

Fen, the Grand Dog, discovered his reflection in the TV console doors. Wish I had video of it, but that dog in the glass barked and scared the bejeezus out of Fen.

November is nearly over. I’ll spend more time on my blog now. I hope everyone had a productive November.

Giving thanks for my online friends and my real family.