Coloring

It's probably not a surprise that I love coloring. I always have. Not so much flowers and animals or landscapes...but geometric patterns. Coloring relaxes me (and a lot of other people, which is why we do it.) Most of the mandala designs are too flowing for my tastes - I prefer geometric or Art Deco designs. I'll get lost in picking out the patterns, creating variants with different palettes. When I was visiting my parents, it was "college dorm move-in weekend" and so the downtown area was full of sidewalk sales...including one at the art store, where they were selling 100 markers for just under $20. Mom got me a set as a gift, saying that she'd thought of buying it for me for a long time, but wasn't sure if I'd like them or not. She also let me pick out some books to color - and I zeroed in on the Dover section. The Altair Design books that I fell in love with as a kid are long out of print, and their successors just weren't that amazing; but lots of other collections of Arabic, geometric, prismatic, and kaleidoscopic patterns have been released.

I've already filled my cart at Amazon with other books from Dover that I want to get...as soon as I have the spare money to do so!

Lisa Gerrard's latest album

I've loved Lisa Gerrard's music since the 1980s, when an aunt sent a "Christmas-card mix tape" that contained some songs by Dead Can Dance. The group broke up in the late 1990s, and Lisa Gerrard went on to a pretty successful solo career (including doing soundtracks for movies like Immortal Beloved and Whalerider, and collaborating on many others.) Her latest album Twilight Kingdom just came out about two weeks ago, and I've been listening to it almost nonstop! As soon as it's available on CD, I plan to purchase that as well as the digital album that I bought. (I'm an old-school type who really really really prefers to have all my music and books in lossless formats - meaning CDs or dead-tree edition books.)

Jane Lindskold's Athanor novels

In the mid 1990s, author Jane Lindskold wrote two urban-fantasy novels. Normally I'm not big on urban fantasy - I had a housemate who was absolutely wild for nearly anything urban-fantasy-related - but I'd read and liked other Lindskold novels, and the premise for Changer seemed interesting enough, so I bought the book. Then about a year later, the sequel came out...and I pounced on that one, too. Changer and its sequel Legends Walking deal with a group of 'athanor' - people, and animals, who are immortal. They've been around since the beginning of the planet (their number includes some sasquatches, fauns, yeti, all those creatures that we now think of as myth) and have managed to become mythological figures in their own right...while trying very very hard to keep their existence secret. The books were given new covers and the sequel renamed "Changer's Daughter" to appeal to folks who fell in love with Lindskold's Wolf trilogy, but the stories are a bit broader than that. They're very well-built worlds, very interesting characters and societies and stories.

My Changer book is a mini time capsule - the back cover and some of the pages bear toothmarks from my second cat, Bear, whom I had to put to sleep about eight months ago. I bought Bear home when he was about nine weeks old, and so he was still in the "teething" stage for about a year - first while his baby teeth finished coming in, and then when his adult teeth took their place. I have several books with tiny-kitten pinprick holes in the covers.

Fall and winter evening routines

Now that the days are getting shorter, and it's dark earlier, it's easier to cozy up to a good book in the evenings. (I tend to stay mentally and physically energetic until I see the sun go down - which means that in summer, I can easily stay working at the computer until 9pm or later.) I'll put on a kettle of water, make a giant mug of cider, and read a book for an hour or two before turning out the lights. The kittens are loving this, because once they've gotten the evening zoomies out of their systems, they come upstairs to find their warmblooded furniture (me) settled in place.

Decisions and milestones

I've participated in NaNoWriMo once before, and cheered on friends as they've participated other years. This year, I think I may participate again. I have had a story idea - or pieces thereof - banging around in my brain for the past year-plus, and they've marinated long enough. Time to start committing bits to paper, and see if they can form a cohesive whole! (Actually, I've had two story ideas. Both involve a lot of worldbuilding, one is straight-up fanfiction, one isn't. I have no idea which one I'll work on during NaNo2014; maybe I'll work a bit on both.)

Also, some of you know that I've been looking for my next role, and I have a job interview tomorrow! It's for a small group within a large company, so it's neither hard-and-fast corporate nor total-freefall startup. There's lots of different things that need doing, lots of ways this role will contribute, so that interests me a lot. And it has more of a PM (project management) focus, which is something I've been wanting in my next role! I've been preparing, researching the people and the company, writing down questions I want to ask, getting my own background more in focus to answer more questions about my project management background.

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