Mortaine’s Blog

Submission note.

The Sprawl: submitted to Inkwell and Quarterly West today.

You better not cry!
Better not pout, I’m telling you why.
John and Steph are coming to town!

That’s right, folks. We will be arriving in San Francisco on Friday, December 7th, heading down to Santa Cruz on the 9th, and back up to the Bay Area on the 14th, to catch our early flight out on the 15th.

There will be a smallish party on Thursday, the 13th, Tuesday, December 11th in Boulder Creek.

We’re coming for a friend’s birthday party, and to get some work and house things taken care of. With any luck, we’ll tidy up a bunch of stuff just in time to run back to Tennessee.

Meanwhile, we are still in Chattanooga, and still plan to head down to Florida next month.

And, just so this post isn’t All About Us, here’s a picture of a penguin:

I think I’ve mentioned last month that I’m in the Secret of the Stole Knit-Along (there’s a SotS II coming up after this one as well).

Today is the “deadline” to complete Hint 6, which means 3/4 of the stole should be complete.

Well, startlingly enough, I have caught up and made the deadline. It helps not to be working on any other knitting projects right now, I suppose.

Hint #6:

A quick update for you all.

We went through St. Louis….

Through part of Illinois…

Through a corner of Kentucky (leading to a LOT of “KY” jokes, like KY Lake, and KY Reservoir, KY river…..):

And into Tennessee:

Somewhere near Nashville, we saw an odd bumper sticker:

It reads: “37206 We’ll steal your heart and your lawnmower!” We thought this was really odd, and snapped a pic of it to look it up later. It turns out, it’s an East Nashville pride thing– proud of being “salt of the earth” kind of folks, I suppose.

Yesterday, my father-in-law took us to Bryant’s Cove, where John’s ancestors settled in the early 1800’s. We took grave rubbings at some of the sites where various family members are buried. Bryant’s Cove is being lumbered right now, and later will be sold off to land developers to be “developed.” Given the terrain, we’re all wondering how they plan to develop something that has frequent fifty foot sinkholes. There’s a lot of “space” underground around there– I certainly wouldn’t want to build a large building!

I would post more, but I’m a bit tired, and have a lot of writing to do today. My NaNoWriMo novel is at 13,488 words, which is woefully behind where I had intended to be, but is not so far behind that I can’t catch up, of course. We have write-ins tonight and tomorrow night, which I hope will help push me forward quite a bit. It would be nice to hit 20K by Wednesday night. It would be dandy to hit 25K (halfway) by Thursday, but I am not going to hold my breath. I’ll just be glad when Thanksgiving comes and I have a little extra time for writing.