Gluttony: My Favorite Deadly Sin

...though I'm also quite fond of Sloth and Lust. Anyway, I'm trying to give some love to my poor neglected blog here, so I've decided to post our menu for tomorrow's Thanksgiving dinner. It's just the two of us, plus Rob's mom and dad, so (believe it or not) we're trying to keep it relatively simple. ("Relatively" being the operative word, of course.) Rob's parents are bringing the wine, the bread, and the pumpkin cheesecake. We're making:

• Roast goose (which we've done a couple of times before in past years)--allegedly free-range--with bread stuffing, to which I'm adding water chestnuts and apple.
• Gravy. Of course.
• Mashed sweet potatoes with caramelized leeks and butter (this is sort of an experiment)
• Green salad.
• Brown rice mixed with wild rice.

I'm very excited, though I'm still attempting to thaw the goose, which is sitting in water in the sink. The goose requires day-before prepping--you have to dip it in boiling water for 1 minute to dry and tighten the skin and then let it sit in the fridge for a day. I realized earlier that I already passed the 24-hours-ahead mark for that, but oh well. I don't think a few hours will be critical in this case. I need to wait for Rob, though, who is a lot less grossed out by raw poultry than I am. I don't know what's worse--the moist and flabby texture, or the grease it leaves on my hands. Still, it's worth it for the sheer gluttony which we will gratefully exercise upon this meal's consumption.

And, of course, there's the thankfulness. That's there. I just hate sounding sentimental.

Behind on Life.

Ever feel like you're falling behind on life? That's me, right now. I just managed to post something on the YA blog and realized that was only the tip of the iceberg as far as blogging is concerned--I've been neglecting this one, my Welsh blog, and the reviews blog, mostly through the flimsiest of excuses. Too much work? Ah, c'mon. That's never stopped me before.

I do have too much work, though. I'm caught in another downward spiral of inferiority feelings and self-recrimination for a) failing to publish any fiction this year, b) failing to garner enough paid work to feel like I'm contributing adequately to the household, c) actually losing some paid work for various reasons, and d) still managing to have way too much on my plate to reasonably accomplish in the time available to me. How does this happen??!!?

Anyway, wallowing makes me even less likely to blog, as does the fact that at any given moment I'm actually either working or attempting to force relaxation upon myself by reading or watching TV (and I'm usually not able to do these very well when I'm worrying about what I'm not getting done). But for you, my wonderful and loyal posse of readers (all five of you), I will stop wallowing. I will get to work. And when I finish working, I will blog you into oblivion. (Whatever that means.)

NaNoWriMo Lives!

Just a quick note to say onward and upward! I added a NaNoWriMo widget to my sidebar so everybody in the world (well, all five who read my blog) can keep track of how far behind I'm slipping. I made an okay start, but I'm definitely about a day and a half behind where I ought to be in terms of average daily word count.

Today's not going to help, either, as it's Election Day and we're planning to hold a small party with a few friends. The party will involve a drinking game--we shall toast in celebration for each blue state won. Since this could incapacitate or even cripple the majority of humans if we were taking shots of hard alcohol, we decided we're going to take shots of sake instead. So before too long, I have to go procure said sake (after carefully calculating ounces required per person and so forth).

I still need to post about Halloween, too--as can reasonably be expected, I successfully added another entry to my list of confusing costumes, thus continuing what is evidently a personal tradition now. It's not intentional, I assure you.