Remember that one time I said, “Things should slow down in the next couple of weeks ….” Yeah, that happened.

Seriously, every time I get busy I look at my calendar and pick some random date when things are magically supposed to slow down; the truly crazy part is that whenever I hit that magical date I am genuinely surprised when I remain as busy as ever.

If you want to measure things purely in word counts and/or days written AcWriMo didn’t go so well for me. I set a pretty low goal of 12,000 words and probably didn’t write more than 3,000.  (Next time I am counting all the damned emails I write at work!) I am, however, declaring November a success! What I didn’t do in terms of word count I made up for in ideas!  No, I don’t have 9,000 ideas laying around right now, but I do have three little embryos of projects started and that makes me happy.

Finishing the dissertation left me so wrung out I really wasn’t sure I’d ever be excited about an academic writing project ever again. What changed? Well, for one I have co-authors: two of them. These women are super smart and will challenge me to do good work, and most importantly my fear of letting them down will keep me going. The second thing is a research project. I know! Me? A research project? But, yes it is true, and actually exciting because I’m learning so much in this process.  (Remind me about this excitement in a few months when this project really gets underway and become hard. 😉 )

Yes, I am as busy as ever, but I think I must secretly like it that way since I keep coming up with new ways to keep myself busy.

The truly fun part of November using the pictures Ouiser took for us to make our first ever personalized Christmas card.  Here’s a sample.  No, it was never possible to get the dogs to look at the camera at the same time.  We probably should have given Ouiser an industrial sized jar of peanut butter; that would have gotten their attention.