Riffraff Roundup

So. Here is what I've been doing while I was busy off being an incorrigible, degenerate slackass who wasn't regularly updating this blog:

• Scrapbooking: I finished the design work for two different calendars -- the 2010 Cupcake Calendar and the 2010 Cousins Calendar. Praise the Lord and hallelujah! If you click on the links, you'll go right into each set, where you can bring the pages up as a slideshow. I am really proud of all this work (most especially the pictures), but if you held a gun to my head and asked me to choose favorites, I would say that I like April and August best for the Cupcake, and May and September best for the Cousins. Both calendars are now off to the printer, thank goodness, and I am taking a break from digi-design work for a little while, so I can focus on getting other stuff done (like sleeping and eating and watching old holiday specials on TiVo).


• Reading: I finally finished Memories of the Future and all the other books I picked up for our October trip out to Chicago. The Hodgman book wasn't quite what I expected -- it's really more of a "book of facts" rather than something with an actual narrative -- but it's good to keep around for when you need some kind of bullshit answer for your friends and relatives who know eveything else.


• Reading: Now I've moved on to something else -- Found by Margaret Peterson Haddix. To be completely honest, I am not sure why I picked this one out in the first place; when I was reading descriptions of the book, I thought it was about adopted kids with mysterious backgrounds who suddenly started disappearing -- like okay crazy adoptive mother, are you insane? But this book has taken a left turn that I did not expect and it is turning out to be not at all what I expected, in the best possible way. There is another book in the series, Sent, which I will be picking up soon.


• Cooking: Well, I haven't been, not really, unless you count the three-spice dinner from the other night, and unfortunately I don't know that there will be much other cooking going on between now and Christmas, either. There are only two more weekends, and I still haven't finished my shopping, which is quite the embarrassment, believe me. But I get paid again on the 15th, and I have a pretty good idea of what all I still need to get (not too much, thankfully), so I think I will manage to get everything done in time.

Also, somewhere in there I had a nervous breakdown or two, but since that happens all the time these days, what else is new? And apparently Shae has a "monster" living in her room -- in her walls, I think she said -- and we are hoping to get to the bottom of that situation soon. Probably I'll talk about that on the 'riffic.