NaNoWriMo

Writer at Work!

November is National Novel Writing Month, which is a challenge to write 50,000 words over the course of thirty days, which works out to 1,667 words a day.  EVERY day.  The point of it is definitely quantity over quality. Can you turn off your inner editor, the one who says “Why did you use that word? It’s crap. Why are you using so many adverbs? You’re telling, not showing!, etc…”?

If you’re an aspiring writer, or just ever thought “hey, I bet I could write a novel,” it’s a great exercise. If nothing else, it helps keep the procrastination at bay, and at the end of the month, you may have developed a daily writing habit.

I love to write. It’s probably safe to say that I’ve been an aspiring novelist since I was about 12. I finished my first novel, an angsty ghost story, in 2005, that I even got to the “sending off to agents” point before I realized that it really belonged in my desk drawer more than it belonged on the shelf at Barnes & Noble. It’s good to know your limitations.

I attempted the NaNoWriMo challenge one November a few years ago but had to bail before Thanksgiving. I had no intention of trying it this year until I got an idea in my head on November 2. And if you have written before, you know that when you get an idea in your head, it isn’t going away. So before I knew it I had signed up and started writing.  And since I was already a day behind, I’ve been playing catchup ever since.  Tomorrow’s the halfway point, so I should be at 25,000 words. Yeah. Not so much. I need to catch up.

I’ve always loved writing in coffeehouses, ever since my college days when my friend Will and I would head to a local coffeehouse just off campus with our notebooks, both right after our creative writing class and on random evenings or mornings where we just needed to get away. I’m lucky in that Mount Dora has plenty of coffeehouses. And tea shops. And random restaurants that don’t seem to mind if you hang out with your laptop or a notebook for an hour or two.

Today I went to One Flight Up, which is one of my absolute favorite places in a town that is FULL of “favorite places.” I ensconsed myself at one of their tables out on the balcony and set up my little netbook.

It was a perfect day to be out on the balcony. That subtle fall weather is setting in here in Florida, which means the temperatures are hovering around 80 or so. A little spot in the shade on a balcony overlooking downtown Mount Dora, was the perfect place to bang out a couple of thousand words this afternoon.

Bird's Eye View of Mount Dora

The only real problem with writing at One Flight Up is that the view can be distracting. The balcony gives you a unique view of the heart of the Donnelly Street shopping district, and it’s got to be the best place to people-watch in town. Sometimes one of the horse-drawn carriages goes by – one today carried a newly-married couple, still in wedding gown and tuxedo, and I hollered “Congratulations!” over the balcony railing.

And the food.  Ohhhh, the food.  Good food is essential to the coffeehouse writing experience.  And yes, I should have had coffee, but it was a little warm today.  And a couple visits ago I discovered the Arnold Palmer – half iced tea, half lemonade.   And you know what goes really well with it?  Cody’s carrot cake.

It's got carrots. That's healthy, right?

Yummmm.  It’s all I can do to not lick the plate when I get that.

By the end of my writing session today, I’d broken 20,000 words, and when I finish this I’ll get back to it.  Will I make 25,000 words by tomorrow, or 50,000 words by November 30?  I’m not sure.  But I’m going to try, dammit.  And if I have to go to One Flight Up every weekend this month and have more carrot cake, well, then that’s just my cross to bear.

The rush to the end of the year

It’s early November, and I’m already thinking about how close the holidays are. I’m also thinking that there is so much to do here in Mount Dora that those weeks to the holiday season are going to seem like two or three days.

The summer is so sleepy – too hot to do much of anything, really, and the snowbirds that make up a fair part of Central Florida’s population are all up north for the summer – that sometimes it seems like Mount Dora goes into a little bit of a hibernation. It makes sense. I think I’ve stated before that summer down here is much like winter up north. Everyone stays indoors in the climate control, venturing out only when needed. It’s just like winter, but with bathing suits and beaches instead of hats and scarves and snowdrifts.

But now that the weather’s broken and we can spend more than an hour outside without dropping dead of heat exhaustion, it seems like there is something happening ALL THE TIME. It’s fair to say this really began in October, which had the Mount Dora Bicycle Festival and the Mount Dora Craft Fair (with Zombies! Seriously, I’m still shaking my head about that one). This weekend we have the Mount Dora Plant and Garden Fair down in Simpson Cove (near the marina and the lighthouse).  I’m sorry to say that I have not checked it out yet, because also this weekend is the Lady of the Lakes Renaissance Faire in Tavares, which we have attended for the past few years.  The Renaissance Faire is a fundraiser for the Lake County school system, and it’s also a heck of a good time.  I have to say I’m a little nervous about going this year, because it’ll be my first time in costume.  I’m kind of not used to having people look at me that much, and in a corset like that, I’ll be hard to miss.

Not too long after that is Yappy Hour (with a guest appearance by Santa!) with Piglet’s Pantry and The Wine Den on Friday, November 20.  Also starting on November 20 is Renninger’s first Antiques Extravaganza of the season.  THEN it’s the week of Thanksgiving, and Light Up Mount Dora on Saturday, November 28.  And then there’s the Mount Dora Christmas Walk coming up, and all the madness of the holiday season.

I’m already exhausted, and it’s barely November!

Halloween

To be honest, one of the things we were the most excited about when we bought our house in Mount Dora was Halloween.  Apartment living is okay, a fair amount of kids show up and you can give out candy.  But we love carving pumpkins and decorating for Halloween, so we were excited to get into it once we moved to Mount Dora.

Over time we’ve carved more and more pumpkins, added a lit-up pathway through the front yard and to the porch, a fog machine, and blinking light-up eyes that cling to the ivy on the side of the house.  Because this is what happens when two former theatre people get ready for Halloween.

Haul out the Box O’Halloween, test the fog machine:

This year we ditched the cheesy plastic fencing we usually string the lights with, and instead used plant stakes.  Much easier and faster.  Then we attached little plastic pumpkins to the orange lights, and got out the Japanese-style pumpkin lanterns to string in our pine tree.

We carved a respectable 12 pumpkins, not a record, but not too shabby either.  A few are pictured below.  This was my first Virginia Tech pumpkin, surprisingly. Don’t know why it took me so long to do one of those. The cat silhouette one came out a little too skinny and was kind of starting to curl over by the end of the night. That’s what I get for being experimental!

There’s a problem with pumpkin carving in Florida. You can’t do it too far ahead of time, or the pumpkin will be pretty much squishy and rotten by the time Halloween rolls around. So we typically buy the pumpkins the weekend before Halloween and then start carving them up a couple days beforehand, Halloween-style movies playing in the background. (This year it was a Stephen Sommers film festival: we were up till about 4 a.m. Halloween morning watching Van Helsing, The Mummy and The Mummy Returns while hacking away at pumpkins.)

It’s also amusing, to me anyway, to set up the spooooooky cemetery and other Halloween accouterments in 90-degree heat. Cemeteries with skeletal remains poking out of the sand just aren’t as creepy in the blazing sunshine, I guess.  

It took the better part of the morning, but we got it all set up by early afternoon. We really go for more “cartoon” scary than “give the kids nightmares” scary. I blame the old lady on the corner in High Point, North Carolina, who scared the bejeezus out of me when I was a six-year-old witch. Mom says I was plied with candy afterwards, but I don’t remember that.

All in all, I think our house looked pretty good.

Ready for trick or treaters!

It was a good turnout. Not as large as in years past though. And I have to say, I’m less than impressed by the number of houses that stay dark in our neighborhood. I don’t know if it’s just this particular subdivision, or if people just don’t trick or treat as much as they did when I was younger? But in any case, by about 9pm it was pretty much over, and I was ready to fall into bed.

It’s always worth it though. Those hours of prep for two or three hours of “show” reminds me of my theatre days, and when we hear little kids exclaim “Ooooh, look at the lights! And the smoke!” and come running up the path to get candy, it’s definitely worth it. One of the main reasons we bought this house in this great little town.

Mount Dora Craft Fair – Zombie Edition

Every morning,  I get up around 6 a.m.  Coffee, breakfast, shower, get the dogs fed and out in the yard for a little bit, and then drive an hour to work in Orlando.  Then I leave work around 6 (sometimes later) and get home around 7.  Dinner’s usually around 8, and I try to get in some time to read or knit between doing dishes and laundry, and then collapse into bed to do it all over again.  It can be a long week, and a lot of the time mid-week I’m tired and cranky, wondering why I live so far from my job.

And then weekends like this come along.  A festival weekend.

My voicemail from Pure Aveda mid-week confirming my haircut appointment on Saturday reminded me to allow extra time for parking because of the craft fair.   And I felt privileged to be a local.  Being a local means I don’t have worry about finding parking when it seems like half the world is streaming into town, finding parking for themselves.  Saturday morning I checked the air in the tires of my bike, strapped the saddlebags on the back, and rode the mile or so downtown.  There’s a bike rack right outside the Chamber of Commerce, so I locked it there and found myself right in the heart of the craft fair.  I supported the local economy by getting a fresh-squeezed lemonade and started walking around.

Holy claustrophobia!

I’m always amazed at the number of people who are able to cram into this sleepy little town on a festival weekend.  I had heard a 250,000 estimate a couple weeks ago, and then the other day I heard the estimate is closer to 400,000.  This place looks like Disneyworld in the middle of June!  If you have a problem with crowds you may want to bring a paper bag to breathe into or something.  I’m just sayin’.

Also, check out this great time-lapse video that was taken on Friday, which shows the action on Donnelly street as the city prepares for the craft fair.  Kind of makes me dizzy to watch.

Typically, we go to one day of a festival like this.  At the arts fair earlier this year, we went back on Sunday when we both realized there was a particular artist we couldn’t get out of our minds, so we went back to pick up a print.  This time for the craft fair… well.  I already mentioned the zombies.

The zombie attack was expected around 3pm, so we rode our bikes down a little early to do some looking around, and checked in at Pure Aveda to make sure they were fully prepped for the upcoming crisis.  I shouldn’t have worried.   Lucas was ON IT, with Comforting Tea and blue oil at the ready.

Lucas, ever vigilant (Photo courtesy of Pure Aveda)

A little before three came the announcement over the P.A. system.  (We have a P.A. system?)  ”Halloween has come early… zombies have been sighted in Donnelly Park… beware… beware…”

Then, with a clanging of bells, there they were.  A zombie procession.  Scary!

“Make way for the zombies!”

Thankfully, though, the zombies appeared to have been relatively contained, led and corralled by members of the Mount Dora Ghost Walk. Thank God.  I could only imagine the mayhem that would ensue if the zombies had gotten free.

It was scary enough as it was, really.  ”Don’t look ‘em in the eyes!” we were warned by the man with the bell.  Good advice.  These folks looked menacing.

“Craaaaaaafts….”

I really didn’t get enough good pictures of this event.  For a bunch of zombies, those guys moved fast!

However, I did hear that tragedy later struck at Pure Aveda, as Lucas succumbed to the zombie attack.  Guess we shouldn’t follow him after all…?

Run, Lucas! Run! The tea will not protect you! (Photo courtesy of Pure Aveda)

Seriously, that is some awesome makeup work.  What a great pre-Halloween event!

In non-zombie related news, besides the Christmas gifts I got for my mom and mother in law, I scored an excellent baseball cap for myself from a great collage artist.

“Does this hat make my ass look fat?”

Cell phone picture is a little blurry, but you get the idea.

This was a BIG Mount Dora weekend.  I needed it.  I needed to remember that this, this right here, is why I get up early and drive into Orlando.  Because riding my bike home past Lake Dora and up the hill toward my house, I felt energized.  Refreshed.  Recharged.  I can only feel that way here, in Mount Dora.

Zombies at the Craft Fair… WHAT?

As previously stated, the Mount Dora Craft Fair is this weekend. Which means that my little town of about 12,000 will play host to about 250,000 over the course of 2 days. It’s an awesome time to be a local, but it can also be a little stressful. That’s a lot of people! And now, apparently, we have to be mindful of the possibility of a zombie attack as well.

This link has been making the rounds through Twitter the past couple of days.  @Pure Aveda has assured the public that they will be open on Sunday to provide Comforting Tea and Stress Relief massages to see us through this troubled time.  As for me, I’m torn between hysterical laughter and head-shaking bewilderment.  Zombies.  ZOMBIES.   Really?

This, in a nutshell, is what I love about living in Mount Dora.  We have awesome events like a world-renowned craft fair, but that’s not enough.  Let’s throw in some zombies.

My original plan was to check out the craft fair on Saturday, when I’m venturing downtown for my haircut, but I may have to drop by for an hour or two on Sunday as well.  Because, dude.  ZOMBIES.  I just hope I can outrun them on my bike!

Welcome to Fall!

Yikes!  I never meant to take this long a hiatus.  No, I did not drown on our epic canoe trip.  Someday I will tell the full story of Two Rubes Go to Juniper Springs.  It involved capsizing three times, finding out our cooler wasn’t waterproof (even though it floats nicely), and having to replace our cell phones, cameras, and my glasses.  Word to the wise – don’t go canoeing with all your worldly possessions if you don’t have a dry bag!

But that’s not what I wanted to write about tonight.  I wanted to talk about fall.

Change in season is tricky down here.  I’ll admit, the first couple years were hard.  Coming from Virginia, I’m used to a definite pattern to the seasons, and at first, Florida just seemed to be summer, summer, OHMYGODSUMMER and hurricanes.  But then, one night a couple years after we had moved here, we came out of a restaurant and I thought “Huh, I should have brought a sweater.  It’s getting chilly tonight.”  Then we drove past a bank: 75 degrees.  And that’s when I knew that I had become a Floridian.

Thinned-out blood aside, I’ve come to appreciate the subtlety that is the change of season in Florida.  Oppressive heat and humidity gives way to temperatures that are merely balmy.  You can kind of taste it on the breeze – the weather’s ever so slightly cooler.  Summer’s over.

@CentralFLTop5 on Twitter wrote a great blog post recently about fall in Florida that you really should read if you don’t think the seasons change down here.  I agree especially with #3: the dogs go INSANE when the weather cools down.  The living room becomes the site of Puppy Wrestlemania, and the cat mostly just tries to steer clear.

Friends and relatives up North are fond of decrying the heat and humidity down here. “Ohhh, I could NEVER live in Florida. It’s too hot in the summer.” Which is true, of course. But lately I’ve come to think of our summer as the equivalent of a winter in, say, Buffalo. You stay inside in the climate-controlled air as much as you possibly can, venture out when necessary, and prepare for the weather when you do. It’s just with sunblock instead of hats and scarves. Those first crisp days, as a cold front shows up in October, is to me the same as those first tentatively warm days of spring. Just like up north, where people will throw on shorts even though it’s technically too cold for them because IT’S NO LONGER SUB-ZERO TEMPS OUT HERE, those of us down here will happily don jackets or sweatshirts because it’s not in the nineties anymore! Brrrrrr!

This opposite-type feeling rang true for me this past weekend, when the cold front dropped the temperature outside by about twenty degrees. I happily turned off the air conditioner, opened up the windows, and while the puppies chewed on each other’s faces in sheer joy, I did some spring cleaning. In October. Because that’s how you roll when you’re a Floridian.

Now that the weather’s cooling off and the snowbirds are starting to come back, there’s more and more going on around here.  At the beginning of the month, there was another Arts Stroll in Mount Dora, followed by the bicycle festival.  This weekend is the 25th Annual Mount Dora Craft Fair, which, like the arts festival in February, will see my little town swell with people for a full weekend.  I have the good fortune to have a haircut scheduled for the Saturday of the craft fair.  So I’m looking forward to riding my bike downtown, locking it at the Chamber of Commerce and strolling for an hour or two beforehand.  Then Halloween!  November!  The holidays! Didn’t this year just start?

So it’s the beginning of fall in Mount Dora!  And since Juniper Springs ate my camera, I’ll be taking pictures of it with my cell phone!  Classy!

Yikes!

Oh, man.  Up at o’dark-thirty to go canoeing in Ocala.  Not a bad plan till I saw the massive wall of rain on the radar.  Now we’re trying to get out of here FAST so we can hopefully be on the tail end of the seven-mile run by the time the rain hits.   After all that time outside, a little rain will feel good, right?  RIGHT??? (Oh, GOD.  I should just go back to bed now.)

In other news, have you Mount Dora types heard about the wine dinner at Mount Dora Sushi Company?  Ohhhh, that looks good.  Wonder if we can skimp on groceries that week and go.  Also wonder if I could manage to get home before 7 on a weeknight.  Hmm, maybe not.  Maybe I’ll just talk Morgan into taking me out for a beer tower sometime soon.  That should keep me motivated to paddle faster – as if the darkening skies aren’t enough motivation today!

Wish me luck, y’all!  I was worried about death by alligator or snakebite last night, now I’m adding lightning strike into the mix.  Huzzah!

“I’m an outdoorsman.”

While we were planning our Labor Day weekend, we knew that some of it would involve actual labor – we are still working slowly on turning this garage-turned-storage-space area into a library. (Got all the walls sanded – one step closer to painting!  YEAH!)  But Morgan had another idea.  ”Would you try canoeing?”  he asked.

Now, I have an irrational fear of canoeing, so whenever he brings it up I usually dismiss it out of hand.   Some of it is that awesome “fat girl” thing that invades my self-esteem at times like this.  The same part of me that doesn’t want to sit on a delicate piece of furniture was afraid of tipping over the canoe if I got in it.  Or what if I couldn’t get out again, like William Howard Taft in the bathtub?  Seriously, the things that go through your mind when you’re afraid to try something.  My other fear was of alligators.  Yes.  I was pretty certain that if I got in a canoe, one of the many alligators I know live in the lakes and rivers of Florida would swim up and tip over the canoe (easy to do when there’s a fat girl in there, right?), and when I fell out, he would eat me.

I was seriously afraid this might happen.

But Morgan went canoeing a lot as a little boy on Chautauqua Lake in Western New York, and was pretty convinced that I would not only NOT fall out of the canoe, but would probably make it back to shore without being an alligator snack.  So, with some hesitation, I finally agreed to give it a shot.

We chose DeLeon Springs State Park to begin our adventure, one reason being we had been there a month ago for their “Day in Florida History” event and had been captivated by the water there.  My main reason for going was because one of Morgan’s friends, who lived there, described the canoeing there as “boring.”  I think for my first time out I needed a little “boring.”

We went about it all wrong, really: hopped in the car and drove up there, walked up to the counter and rented a canoe.  No hats, no water.  Just a couple of rubes with money to spend.  But this was meant to just be a quick trip, to see how we (well, I) liked it.  Morgan got in and held the canoe steady.  I stood on the dock and hyperventilated.  I really didn’t know if I could do this, and at the same time, I was mad at myself for being afraid.  This was ridiculous.  I got in the canoe.  It didn’t sink.  Or tip over.

We started paddling.  Almost immediately, someone in a neighboring canoe says “Hey, see the alligator over there?”  Oh, GOD.  But it didn’t seem to give a rip about us.  Another fear put to rest.    The water was gorgeous and calm, and I took out my cell phone to document the fact that “OMG I’M IN A CANOE.”

Look how calm that water is! Like a mirror! A very hot mirror!

We stayed out on the water for only about an hour.  (Did I mention?  No water?  No hats?  Oh yeah, no sunscreen?  Truly we are stupid sometimes.)  But that was enough for me to  get completely and totally hooked on it.   Sometimes we stopped paddling and let the canoe drift on the very slow current.  Total silence wrapped around us, and the sounds of the lily pads brushing up against the sides of the boat seemed loud.  We saw three alligators, a kingfisher, a hawk and a bald eagle.  Lots of jumping fish.

Today I’ve had nothing on my mind but going back out again.   This coming weekend we were planning to celebrate our anniversary (last week) and my birthday (next week) by going to Disney.  We went to the Magic Kingdom together for the first time when we had first moved to Florida in 1995.  We hadn’t been in years, and I wanted to go back.  But then today, I meekly asked if we could maybe go out canoeing again instead?  This time with water and hats and sunscreen, maybe a picnic lunch in a cooler.

And even crazier: we want to rent a few more times, just to make sure we really love it, and then we might get ourselves a canoe for Christmas.  We live less than a mile from Lake Dora, for heaven’s sake.  There’s a boat ramp RIGHT THERE.  The idea of taking a boat out for an hour or two on the weekend, just to experience some of that quiet that we heard at DeLeon Springs, would do a lot to keep me centered during my crazy workweeks.

All this, based on one hour on the water.  Comquering your fears is a very powerful thing.

On the way home, we stopped at JC’s Lobster Pot for a late lunch.  Because how can you not stop somewhere that looks like it should be in a Jimmy Buffett song?

And the name of this entry?  Is me making fun of myself for being this gung-ho this fast.  It popped into my head as I started writing this entry: a scene from The West Wing, one of my favorite shows.  Josh calls himself an outdoorsman, based on the fact that he gets to sit outside after recuperating from a gunshot wound.  God bless YouTube for having this scene.

Anticipating the weekend

I like Thursday nights in an odd kind of way.  Like Christmas Eve, the weekend is juuuuuust around the corner, and all you have to do is get through that Casual Friday and you’re home free.  Friday nights are awesome too, of course – the weekend stretched out like that.  But I love the anticipation of Thursday nights.

One and a half of my puppies were featured today on Animal Crazy, the animal-centric blog on the Orlando Sentinel’s website.  The blog links here, so I guess linking back to it creates one of those weird loops, like looking at a picture of you looking at a picture of you looking at a picture…  ANYWAY.  I was tickled to death to see their picture there, and there will be no living with Gambit after this.  He is already lobbying for better and more frequent treats.  Guess I’m going to Piglet’s Pantry this weekend.

I thought, in honor of Gambit and Wash’s newfound fame, that I would post another picture of them.  The one on the Sentinel’s blog was taken when Wash was a kitten.  I was going to say “when he was small” but he’s still small.  Y’all, he’s a dwarf cat or something.  So tiny.  But even though he’s grown up, he still loves to cuddle with Gambit, who is his mama.

I think this configuration started out with Wash snoozing on the couch. Then Gambit lying down on top of him.  Eventually, Wash kind of…oozed to the top.  Like cream.  I don’t know.

Time for bed, y’all!  Happy Friday Eve!

Oh, so that’s what relaxing feels like…

Man.  It’s been a rough few weeks.  Mostly work stress.  I’m a legal secretary in Orlando, with a boss who does a lot of business law and banking law.  As you can imagine, the banks are pretty busy right now.  Lots of foreclosures (business ones.  No, I do not “throw people out of their homes” like my grandmother-in-law thought), lots of legal filings in lots of counties.  So there have been quite a few sleepless nights lately, mostly of the “crap, what did I forget to do?!” variety.

Then the wave crested, and the natural ebb-and-flow of the job went into an “ebb” phase. (Ebb is the slow part, right?  Not flow?  I love cliche phrases that I don’t quite understand.)  Friday afternoon my boss even sent me home at 5:15.  That NEVER happens, y’all.  My normal theoretical quitting time is 5:30, which is usually anywhere between 5:45 and 6:30.  5:15?  That’s for special occasions like Christmas eve.  So Friday afternoon I bolted before he could change his mind and ran for the car.  After battling rain and Friday traffic, I soon saw the most beautiful sight in the world.

as seen through the windshield of my car

I pass that “Welcome to Mount Dora” sign on Highland Street by the golf course every night on my way home, and every night I draw this huge sigh of relief as I pass it. I’m so happy to be away from Orlando. I’m so happy to be home.

This past Friday night, I was really happy. Because it was time for beer.

Morgan had sent me a text at about 9:30 that morning. “Wouldn’t a beer tower and some sushi taste really good tonight?” That was all he needed to say; it doesn’t take much to talk me into sushi. And the beer tower can only mean one place: Mount Dora Sushi Company.  Already my favorite destination for sushi, they’ve recently added the beer tower to their repetoire:  3 liters of Kirin for $20. ($15 at happy hour, which we apparently missed.  Boo!)

We sat outside in the beer garden (Mount Dora Sushi’s outdoor seating area).  The evening was already setting in, the heat of the day had cooled off just a little.  Amanda brought over and set up the beer tower.

Happy Friday Night!

Oh, God.  Three liters of beer?  Really?  This thing is basically a red flag to the tables around you: These people are ready to ENJOY their Friday night!

And enjoy it we did.  There was a kid out in the beer garden with an acoustic guitar playing like crazy.  Seriously, Eddie Van Halen-style riffs on an acoustic?  Sweet.  He sounded great and his laid back playing style went really well with the warm evening and the cold beer.  Then we had some sushi:

Rainbow roll. OH MY GOD SO GOOD.

Not pictured: the other metric ton of sushi we ate. Seriously, we can only go out for sushi every once in a while because it’s all so good that we keep ordering more. We’d gotten there fairly early in the evening, so at first it was just us and a couple of tables.  We  clapped hard for the kid playing, because he was really good and deserved to have more people watching him.  As the evening went on, more people showed up to hang out in the beer garden, the sun continued to sink, as did the level of the beer tower.   Night settled in for good, and now that it was full dark outside the tiki torches that surrounded the beer garden were lit. Eventually, we were full of sushi and the beer tower had been drained. “Oh, that’s depressing,” our server Amanda commented, gesturing to the empty beer tower. As we made our way home, I glanced at the people still sitting in the beer garden, listening to acoustic guitar music, lit by twinkling white lights and tiki torches. It all looked so relaxing.  I was just there, I thought. I felt pretty relaxed too.

The feeling spilled over into the next day.  Morgan had a haircut appointment at my new favorite indulgence, PureAveda Salonspa.  They’d managed to work in a pedicure appointment for me at the same time, so we both got treated to a little relaxation.  And I walked out with blue toes.  I have a thing for blue, apparently.  I picked blue because they match my Birkenstocks.  But they also match my car.  And my mini laptop. The rest of Saturday was spent in Leesburg, finally seeing the new Harry Potter movie and grabbing dinner at Tijuana Flats. We have a weakness for their hot bar.

So now it’s Sunday. The weekend’s winding down. I have groceries to buy and laundry to fold. A ton of dog hair to sweep up in the living room, and at least one long-haired dog to brush today. But you know what I don’t have? Heart palpitations. A panic attack. The feeling of IMPENDING DOOM. I love weekends like this, where I can stick close to home and feel nurtured here in my little town.