Charming Monsters

I hope everyone had a happy holidays! Like most people, I have a few resolutions for the coming year. They’re not too exciting, I suppose, but it’s always good to have goals to focus on!

1. Stop shopping!
That sounds pretty drastic, especially for a fashion blogger, but it’s not quite as terrible as it sounds. My husband and I are going to Japan in May for our belated honeymoon, and I want to have as much spending money as possible for the trip. If I just keep reminding myself how much I’ll save on shipping costs by waiting to buy clothing in Japan, I might be able to pull this one off.

2. Redesign my blog
My domain has been dormant for a while now; I’d like to bring my different blogging efforts under a single banner, including the better stuff from this blog. My goal is to accomplish this by February.

3. Lay off the junk food
I’ve started to notice that many of my favorite dresses don’t fit comfortably any more: they zip up just fine, but they’re just a tiny bit tight. I’ve also noticed that I’ve gotten in the habit of drinking soda and eating junk food a lot more often than I used to. Hopefully cutting back on the later will fix the former!

So what are your resolutions (if any!) for the new year?

I was planning to post about Halloween: costumes (keymaster & gatekeeper from GHOSTBUSTERS), pumpkins, parties and comic book treats, but the week started busy and then Maine voted against same-sex marriage rights and I was back to my usual misanthropic self, which is generally a Not Good place from which to blog.

And then mid-week got even more busy and I didn’t have time to post and now it’s Friday and I still don’t have time, darnit, because I spent most of today trying to find out why other people haven’t gotten their work done and now I’m seriously behind on my daily word-count, argh!

So this isn’t a real post either. This is the blog equivalent of wiping off the sink with a rag and shoving the dirty socks under the sofa, lest your guests think you have no sense of cleanliness and decorum at all.

Ahem. In the meantime, here’s a picture of the thing that made me laugh the hardest today:

Sweater shorts.

No, really.
SWEATER SHORTS.
A steal at just 15,000 yen! (about $150 US)

First off, many thanks to my pal Phil Rickaby, who sent me some very useful links and advice regarding WordPress which have finally allowed to me update the site to something that doesn’t make me want to gouge my own eyes out. Much.

Today was a fairly crap day, pretty much from the get-go. Woke up tired, muddled around waiting for a Fed Ex delivery, had my laptop battery die mid-fight scene in a cafe with no plugs and too many loud children, found out my boyfriend is staying in China for an extra day and my screenprinting studio is closing their doors at the end of the month, permanently, which leaves me without a workspace once again.

Also, the sidewalk outside ZubHaus is littered with dog poop and cigarette butts. Thanks, neighbours!

ANYWAY. It has been the kind of crap day that people are talking about when they talk about Mondays as if the word is inherently diseased. Mondays. The kind of day that is barely salvaged by a Neil Gaiman reading, even though he read a marvelous story from the “Who Killed Amanda Palmer” book that I am now sort of wishing I’d pre-ordered instead of being sensible, and was asked some very interesting questions by Mark Askwith, who is always very sharp about these sorts of things.

Fortunately, tomorrow is another day, and one that is highly unlikely to be Monday. People rarely say Tuesday as if it’s a fatal illness, after all.

Back from Book Expo America with a mild case of Con Crud, the low-fever, head-spinning sore throat ailment bred from meeting too many people in too short a time span while coping with airplanes, airports, awkward hotel rooms and strange new tap water.

(note to self: NY tap water will make your bangs look terrible all weekend long. Consider traveling with bottled Toronto tap water in future)

But at least I am home, with a head full of new ideas and great new contacts (along with the Con Crud). Jim is now in LA, and will be in China after that, and it feels like a very long nine days until I will see him again.

I have plans to crash & burn my website this week, which seems to be the only way to effect an upgrade on WordPress thanks to some wonkiness with my webserver set-up. If you’ve got me on an RSS feed, and you don’t see any more posts from me this week, you may need to re-sub!

Cultural magpie Anna Jay has some great write-ups of the recent BookCamp and PaperCamp events in London. The whole set can be read on her blog, Mondoagogo; the sessions on creating new readers and Why Everything On The Internet Is The Opposite Of How It Is In Print are especially interesting reads.

ZubHaus (the nickname for the house I share with Jim) was hit hard by the blackout in Toronto late last week. With power out for almost 24 hours, we wound up fleeing to the warmth & Internet of his parent’s place in nearby Oshawa. Luckily, our pipes don’t seem to be any worse the wear for the freezing, although our schedule for the weekend can’t say the same.

I’m tapping away on a new book. It’s not the one I should probably be writing, but it’s the one I need to get out of the way before I can move on to more market-viable projects. My current work contract has just 11 weeks left to go, and I’m hoping (with some luck and a lot of early mornings) to have a first draft done before I hand back my security pass.