Pumpkins and Such

Hello, all!

Had a really fun weekend with the Scouts, even though I thought we might need an Ark on Friday night! The sky opened up as we were driving down and it didn't let up for a single moment (no exaggeration!) until about 11:00 Sat. morning. It was the most relentless storm I've ever seen! The winds were whipping all over and the rain actually created a small river through the middle of our campsite. The boys were great! They got all the tents and troop gear/tarps, etc. set up in under 20 minutes in the pouring rain and dark. Amazing to watch them move! Saturday we built our catapults and proceeded with our "Pumpin Chunkin" competition. We had events for accuracy, distance, and speed loading. The boys had a blast . . . must have destroyed nearly 200+ pumpkins throughout the day. When it was done, the boys took care of cleanup and I have to say that the sites were cleaner when we finished than when we started. After the event, we had a LOT of leftover pumpkins so we also held a pumpkin carving/painting competition. I was amazed at how good some of these kids were at carving! At the campfire that night we lit up all the jack-o-lanterns (about 25 or so) and it looked like a professional display. It was really cool.

One of the other adult and I took some of the left over pumpkins and decided we were going to cook something with them. We hadn't planned on anything beforehand, so we did an impromptu version of what we dubbed: "Deep Dish Pumpkin Pie". We didn't have all the ingredients for a traditional pie but we improvised and turned out two dutch ovens full of what the boys called: "the best pumpkin pie they ever had!" Gotta say, I was impressed my own self! It's amazing what you can do with a little flour, butter, and cinammon!

So, NaNo starts tonight at midnight. I'm all ready and raring to go: got my counters on the blog, the outline for the story is (mostly) done and now it's writing time! I love the freedom of NaNo. I get to write without thought for anything other than the story itself. I can just let it flow out of me as fast as my little fingers can tap the keys on the laptop. I'm looking forward to it. Of course, I just got an e-mail from The Wife teling me how busy we are this month. We have things scheduled for every single weekend and at least two nights each week already! Finding NaNo time is going to be rough but I will make this happen. The contractor killed me last year and I had to tank on the process (else "First" would have been 100% done by now!) but I means to git 'er done this year, come hell or high water! Keep an eye on the tickers at the top of the page!

I had fun last night helping The Boy with his school project (ya' know: the one I bitched about in Friday's post?) They have to create a fictional civilization, complete with religions, government, architecture, etc. It was a great world-building exercise. We spent a good two hours of me asking him questions about his society and him coming up with the answers about how their religion came into being, who runs the government, how did it develop, what's the society's feelings on education, etc. And here I thought all these years of working on fantasy novels had been pointless exercises in geekdom! I finally found a practical use for my weird little brain. (and it was cool to just spend the time working with The Boy!) After that, we watched "Heroes" on NBC (our new 2nd favorite show - BSG is still #1, but this one totally rocks!) Everyone who writes fiction should sit down and watch this program. It's like a great graphic novel brought to life before your eyes. It holds to comic book tradition with its episodic nature, and the slow build up of tension and dribbling of facts/foreshadowing of events is wonderful. This is just really good story telling. The Boy pointed out that there is a potential for problems with this show though. There are so many characters working, each with very detailed story lines, that it could easily become too complex to follow. So far though, they've done an excellent job of keeping it flowing well. Great stuff!

Oh, and lest I forget . . .

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!!!!

Later!