day to day

It doesn’t snow much in Castle Valley (especially compared to Salt Lake — where the lake effect snow really brought the valley a lot of snow.

The mountains that make up the southern valley-boundary get several inches of snow almost weekly, but down the geology of the mountains and cliffs and mesas that surround the valley aren’t very nice to approaching storms, and so a lot of the individual storms are broken up before they arrive.

Last night, it starting snowing at around 7p.m.  Beth and I hit the hot tub then, because it’s really pretty fun sitting in the hot tub outside while it snows on your face, and everything around you is white and brighter than usual.

This morning, a low ceiling + the sunrise made for some pretty dramatic pictures.  As always, it is so much more vivid in person, but the pics are petty spectacular as well, especially this pic of our house with Porcupine Ridge looming behind it all brightly lit and snow-covered.

Beth and I rang in the new year with homemade pizza, beer/wine, and a movie marathon. Oh, and we hit the hot tub for an intermission.

Me: pepperoni/ricotta pizza, CoConut Porter

Beth: eggplant/orange bell pepper/ricotta pizza, organic wine

We watched the second half of The Desolation of Smaug and the first half of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

It was a lovely night, and it was absolutely cold outside (in the teens), which made the hot tub both a delightful (settling into the 103f water) and miserable (walking back into the house) experience. But the 3/4 moon was amazingly bright, and the air very crisp.

Moving to Castle Valley in 2014

I really didn’t think, when we discovered and first flirted with the idea of moving to Castle Valley, that we’d make it out here before 2015 spring. But I was wrong. So the experience was extra special for me, being outside in the absolute quiet, the clean, smog-free air with the silhouette of various mesas, buttes, mountains, ridges, whatever they are.

Kitty

At the start of the new year, a natural time for reflecting, I am especially grateful that Kitty is still with us. After being diagnosed with feline leukemia in 2011 and given ~ 6 months to live, she did unexpectedly well for several years, until November 2014, when she almost died. We rushed her to the vet E.R. one night—a 1.5 hour drive for an emergency blood transfusion. Her red blood cell count was ultimately 11% right before the transfusion (that’s really knocking on death’s door), but she recovered well. After the transfusion her RBC was 21%. A recent blood test showed her RBC to be 46%. Amazing.

As I write this, she is sitting on my chest, purring. Am so thankful.

It was a good night. I’m looking forward to 2015.  Am super happy I get to spend it with this girl:

Happy New Year!

To celebrate my surviving a very nasty encounter with what was most likely food poisoning, Beth and I visited the USU Eastern Prehistoric Museum.  There, they had ACTUAL Utahraptor bones (including a real, not replica, fossil of a NASTY piece of bone known as the KILLING CLAW), a beautiful and in-tact Mammoth skeleton, and many Fremont Indian artifacts.

Here’s me and the Utahraptor:

It was a 2.25 hour drive, one way, and we drove through some (pretty) snow on highway 101.  Dinner was at Groggs Brew Pub, which was better than we thought it’d be!

My second favorite part of the museum (which included many full size dino replicas, such as Allosaurus and Stegosaurus), was the complete fossil of a mammoth.

Awesome.

Beth declared that Christmas is now Utahraptormas, so I made her a necklace of a velociraptor claw, and a website explaining the tradition.  It was fun. 🙂

Here is our rosemary tree with presents under it:

And a lovely shot of our little garden space, with snow:

It has snowed a bit here and there in November and December, but this was the first really strong snow, that stuck.  Kind of magical!

We made seeded bread with marscapone + toasted hazelnuts + blackberry honey for breakfast, and had a nice oven roasted turkey and mashed potatoes in the evening.  After it got dark, we made vanilla bean + cinnamon ice cream and watched (2/3 0f) The Desolation of Smaugh.  [Spiders!!]

We meet again, NaNoWriMo.

Since 2006, I have tried for nearly every year to complete this novel-writing challenge.  50,000 words in a month?  I should be able to do that.  I’m a fast typer, I like to write and am willing to devote hours to it at a time.

But it hasn’t been so easy.

I’ve struggled with being a neurotic perfectionist, and I’ve struggled with not planning my novels very well, so that I start flailing around after about 15,000 words, and then it’s all crash and burn.

This Time…

This year it will be different.  This year, with the help of my awesome wife, Beth, I have planned out my novel, and have done some good brain work to reduce the anxiety that I have about not writing a perfect, stellar first draft.

This year, it’s just about writing.  So I’m gonna write.  Maybe it won’t be very good, but it’ll be finished.  That’s the big goal.

Business + Nano

I think starting a business in October and spending a lot of time working on website and working with clients helps to minimize the amount of time spent worrying about the novel.  Previously, I could afford to spend hours THINKING and FREAKING about the novel, and a little time writing it.  Now, now I have Things To Do, and that’s SRS BSNSS, so I only have a little bit of spare time in which to write.

If all goes well, I’ll hit 50,000 words on November 30th, and will update on my progress along the way.

Now, I must got and write today’s 1667 words.

Wish me luck!