...and oh, it felt good!

I came home from work and skipped the nap and didn't even pet the unicorn, put my hair up, put on my kitchen slippers, and went right to work.

(Those of you--you know who you are!--who have been promised candy...it's finally done! I will be shipping it this weekend!)

I made six-dozen filled candies of various sorts and nine peanut butter eggs for Bobby. (Being the confectioner's husband is all nice and all except you only get the broken pieces or the ones that turned out funny. So I made these special for him!) The other day, I stopped at the candy shop and picked up more molds, so making filled candy en masse is ten times easier.

And after that, I unleashed my inner obsessive-compulsive-disorder child. Oh, she hasn't been out in a looong while so she came out with a vengeance!

I scrubbed and sanitized all of the kitchen but the floors (which desperately need it, but tomorrow is another day.) Ai, my kitchen was a mess. I am a germophobe, so my kitchen is always clean...but often a mess. There is a difference, you see. I bleach my surfaces every time we use the kitchen. I think that I was born with a bleach sprayer in one hand and a clean dishtowel in the other. I always worry more about what I can't see than the big blob of chocolate dripped on the stove because the blob of chocolate doesn't give 33% of Americans food poisoning each year. (Did I really just say that?? Go away, PSA!Dawn!)

I don't know if I've gone so OCD without warning since I worked at The Piece and got to go OCD pretty much every day. Eru, Bobby used to hate the nights when we'd cook together and I'd be the closer, so he'd be stuck waiting for me to scrub and bleach every surface, squinting at stains older than me, running into the back for my Comet Creme (God himself uses Comet Creme, I think, to keep his robes white and nice-smelling), and attacking the unfortunate smudge with a vengeance that gave one epicondylitis just to watch. I used to write "love notes" to my kitchen staff in that oh-so-sweet Dawn Felagund style, the most famous reminding them that the knives should be washed and sanitized until I could see my lovely, smiling face in them in the morning. It's a wonder I didn't get jumped in the parking lot, really. (Except my parents had a big pool and didn't care which unsavory The Piece employees I brought home to use it for their weekly bath.)

Bobby, aren't you smiling at the memory of me calling, "Dad, can I borrow your Allen wrenches?" and taking apart the multimixer to clean it?

Or mopping the floor? Sloooowly mopping the floor?

Or climbing onto the counters to get the raspberries off of the ceiling?

(Actually, he's probably slowly throttling the closest living creature and pretending it's me. Probably Nelyo. Bobby, put Nelyo down!)

Well, now that I'm happily exhausted and my hands have that soaked-in-bleach feeling (and smell...mmmm), then it's off to bed because when I wake up in seven hours and thirteen minutes, it will be time to pick up Bobby from the train station.

*squees and scuttles off to bed*

Today was a happy day! One of those days when things just don't go wrong.

They're rare; I enjoy them.

It started when I woke up and I was not in pain. Nope, not a bit. Part of this probably had to do with my rather strict sleeping regimen: no sleeping on the injured hip and keeping the right (injured) leg elevated around my chest. For some reason, this is the only position where it does hurt to make sudden movement, like coughing or sneezing. Of course, that meant that poor Bobby had my knee in his back for most of the night.

I got to work and was piddling around, doing my warrant stuff that I do every morning, and the phone rang. It was my coworker Charlie; I'd made him a candy gift basket for his wife's birthday. It was my first non-friend/family order, and I asked him only for the cost of materials--since I'm not officially in business yet--but he gave me twice that. (Which means that Bobby and I have Italian ice money for at least four trips to Rita's!) And he called me this morning to say that she loved it and wanted to know immediately if I would take an order for Mother's Day. Hells yeah! I was less impressed that she said she loved it than that she loved it enough to want to order more. Anyone can say, "Yay, thanks, that was really good." But to be willing to spend money on my candy...okay, I'm gushing quite shamelessly. But this is a big moment for a confectioner.

Then I posted Tarion's birthday story, and it got a better reaction than I expected, considering that some muse wrestling had been involved and--as of 10 a.m. on the 22nd--I didn't even have two pages written.

So with some nice comments to boost my confidence, I embarked on *cue dramatic music* AMC. Yes, the dreaded novel that got mashed in the death throes of my USB key drive. I've been putting off for weeks looking at the last PoV section. I thought I had the whole thing saved, that it wasn't one of the sections that got lost, but I couldn't remember. And I couldn't quite muster the courage to look. Well, today I looked and it was all there. So I thought, "Well, why not read the first few pages of it, so that I have a place to aim in finishing the end of the previous chapter?"

I ended up reading the whole thing because--well, I don't like to praise my own writing but...it was kinda good.

Certain parts I didn't remember writing. It was like, "Dayum, who wrote that?" I like when that happens.

And it requires very little tweaking before it is ready to post, so when I finish this week's chapter, AMC is officially and completely written.

And Bobby and I had a fine Italian meal at home tonight, I didn't fall asleep from the wine, and I got a page done on my Midhavens (nee NaNoWriMo) novel. And my leg still doesn't hurt. I didn't have a single moment today when I was cringing from the pain. (I can tell it's injured, but it's healing, and that's what counts.)

It's just been a good day.

Yesterday, when I came home from work, I noticed something was wrong as soon as opening the apartment door: the vacuum cleaner was out.

I didn't get it out, and no one in this household vacuums except me, if they can help it.

( The Great Christmas Tree Disaster )

( Why I Love Being a State Employee )

Edit: The day of this post, of course, Bobby had to prove me wrong. By vacuuming. Gah.

Before embarking upon the weekend recap, here's a meme that I gakked from juno_magic:

Describe me in one word - just one.

Comment to me, then post this entry to your Live Journal and see how many strange things people think about you.

What can I say? I find this one intriguing!

( And now for the weekend.... )

I think it is official that my Earwen/Arafinwe fic is going to be a novella. *sigh*

Of course, in fan fiction, this isn't as lamentable as when an original-fic bunny turns into a novella. That is the point at which you wash your 20K-word dream down the publication drain.

My favorite piece of original fiction, actually, is a novella. It's something around 20,000 words, a futuristic piece (but not sci-fi) that just sort of happened. My husband liked it. It was also probably the first time that I even hinted at the existence of sex in a story. Perhaps I should post it, in small installments, f-locked of course. There are literary magazines that accept novellas, but they are far and few between, and I just never bothered.

Maybe I should bother. Hmmm.

So, anyway, the Arafinwe/Earwen is going to be a novella. It is currently at 9,618 words, but that counts my author's notes at the end. It's already heavy for a short story. I could easily take on a few different PoVs and make this a novel--the idea has really seized me--but I'm not going to do that because then, come December, I'll be editing AMC and my NaNo novel and writing this one and...no, I'm just not going to do that.

So it will be a novella. *sigh*

Meanwhile, I am so excited for NaNoWriMo. My poor husband has to listen to me squee over it every day and chatter about how close it is and how I can't wait.... What would I do, if I didn't write? I wonder about that sometimes. Well, I'd have time to watch Lost, about which I am intensely curious. My apartment would be cleaner; my laundry would always be caught up. I could finish reading a novel in more than six weeks. (I've renewed Oates' My Heart Laid Bare three times now at the library and still haven't finished it, but oh, it is a wonderful book!) I'd be fluent in CSS. I'd be taking cake decorating. I'd be doing a lot of things that don't involve wasting hours a day on writing.

Wasting? *sigh* Listen to me....

The apartment smells like peanut butter. It is that time of the year when my home smells like either chocolate or peanut butter most of the time, in other words, holiday candy time. Usually, I do elaborately painted candies that take literally hours to complete, but this year, I'm doing filled chocolates instead. It shouldn't take as long, and it always annoys me when people open the box, gasp at the pretty colored chocolates, and then say, "But I can't eat anything so pretty!" Thanks--I'm glad the four hours I threw away on that batch will end up in your garbage next year because of your unwillingness to eat them. One year, I made chocolate gift tags, writing each person's name in chocolate, fully edible. No one wanted to eat those either, and those buggers took a helluva long time to finish. (Have you ever tried to write in chocolate? It's not easy.)

So, tonight, I started on peanut butter filling for peanut butter cups. I also meant to make caramel, but I forgot to pick up cream at the store, so that will have to wait for next week.