NaNoWriMo Time!

Published in The Packet

The number of locally written and published books stacked in Newfoundland gift shops astounds me. It seems that Newfoundlanders always have a story to tell, and that the history of this province is a gold mine for the amateur novelist.

If you harbor secret literary aspirations, there is no better time to try your hand at novel writing than November. National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo for short) kicked off on midnight of October 31^st. 

NaNoWriMo is an internet-based creative challenge designed to get people writing. A work of writing is considered a novel when it reaches 40,000 words. NaNoWriMo encourages participants to spend each day of November writing approximately 1,600 words per night. By the end of November, they’ll have a 50,000-word manuscript. There are 180, 138 writers from around the world signed up to participate this year, as of this article’s deadline.

Participants enter the NaNoWriMo challenge by logging in to nanowrimo.org and creating a profile. Each day they update the word count of their work and add it to the website. Beginning November 25, participants can submit their novel to the website and have it validated. The site will officially count up their words and if they’ve met 50,000 words, it will declare them a winner.

The goal of the project isn’t necessarily for the writer to produce a work that wins a Pulitzer Prize. Fear of failure keeps many prospective writers from ever trying to write a novel. NaNoWriMo celebrates quantity of words instead of quality of words. Participants don’t feel self-conscious about what they are writing, because all that matters it that they write.  There is no backtracking, no editing, and no worrying allowed. This serves two goals. The first is to help writers develop the discipline to write everyday, which is the only way to really hone their craft. The second is to help writers get a first draft completed. Once that draft is complete, they can edit it at their leisure until it becomes the masterpiece they’ve envisioned.

Yes, you might write a lot of crap. Yes, you might produce a manuscript that spends the rest of it’s life collecting dust on a shelf somewhere. But you’ll have experienced the thrill of pushing aside your inner critic and creating for the sake of creating.

Who knows? Maybe you’ll write the next Water for Elephants, which best-selling author Sara Gruen wrote during NaNoWriMo. Only instead of a traveling circus, your story might be set right here in Newfoundland, feature a protagonist resembling your great grandmother, and a mystery involving the railway station, and…why are you still reading this? Go get started on your novel!

Our Toddler Halloween Party

I feel a little silly posting about our toddler Halloween party because there is not a single original idea here. Just about every aspect of our little gathering was taken from Pinterest, and I encourage you to check out the board and all the original posts that inspired me.

Ellie and I got all gussied up for the event!

We had lots of easy to make goodies.

We served orange cups with little jack-o-lanterns drawn on the cover, chocolate covered pretzels that we decorated to look like witch fingers (the nail is a slivered almond), mummy gingerbread men, pumpkin chocolate chip muffins, banana ghosts (which you can barely see in the corner of the muffin picture, and witch brooms (mini pretzel rods and cheese sticks tied with chives).

I love this goblet I found at Walmart.

We set up a haunted house with lights and bats inside, made out of a gigantic card board box I'd been saving since May.

 The kids had a good time going in and out of it with Ellie's shopping cart.

They also decorated Halloween masks I found at Michaels and played with a big bowl of colored spaghetti that I forgot to take a picture of.

Ellie and her buddy Eli, were sad that Kirby had to go outside for the party, but he's a big dog, and a bit scary to the kids who do not have a dog at home.


In attendance we had Cinderella, a construction worker, a lion, a lady bug, a dragon, a transformer, three wizards, and my little pilot.

The kids took home bags of cheddar popcorn.

It was a great afternoon. Its always chaotic and loud when ten toddlers are running around the house, but I feel so blessed. Even though our family is far away, I love having my little ex-pat family of moms and kids to celebrate these fun holidays with.

Once everyone went home and all was quiet, I colored some masks myself.

I love my life.

Reading Time: Second Nature

Gardening.

I love it in theory. I have a Pinterest board with 150 ideas of what I would like my yard to look like. 

But I'm lazy. 

And I rent. 

And the growing season in Newfoundland is like three weeks or something. 

So I spend a lot of time reading gardening books and imagining my future gardens (and having the money to spend on hiring future gardeners to do all the work for me).

My favorite gardening book of late was written by one of my favorite authors, Michael Pollan. I wrote about his most recent book here, but I was inspired to read Second Nature: A Gardener's Education because it was his first book, published before I was born. 

Like all of his other books, this one is beautifully written and I had to access the dictionary a few times for words like inchoate (not yet completed or developed), Pyrrhic (a costly victory, making it not really a victory at all), and antinomianism (which I'm honestly still not totally sure what it means). 

But I highly recommend it for those who garden and those who love the idea of gardening. :)

My Juicing Adventures

So for the past few months I've been playing with the idea of doing a juice cleanse, to reset my tastebuds and give my body a break from the sugar overload my body is used to.

In theory, I subscribe to an "everything in moderation, avoid processed foods as much as possible, buy local, don't abandon an entire food group to lose weight"mantra.

In practice, I have limited options as far as grocery shopping goes, and limited will-power when it comes to eating in moderation.

My baby is going to turn two in three months and I still have twelve pounds to go before I'm back to a "normal" weight for me.  Feeling a bit desperate, I read a bit about the pros and cons of juicing.

Pros:

It's a great way to increase your consumption of fruits and vegetables.

It limits your calorie in-take.

You can free yourself for awhile from the power your cravings have over you.

You might lose weight.

You'll feel a sense of accomplishment.

Cons:

It removes all the fiber from your fruit and veggies, which some nutritionists believe leaves produce devoid of any nutritional value.

Fresh juice is not pasteurized, leaving you at risk to consume dangerous bacteria that could cause vomiting, diarrhea, or in very severe cases kidney failure.

Irritability, nausea, fatigue, and dizziness are a few side effects of drinking nothing but juice.

You aren't going to feel satisfied or full after a day of just drinking juice.

Juice lacks essential proteins and fats that your body needs to function properly.

It is expensive! More on this later.



Basically, long-term juice fasting is probably not a good idea.

Still, I wanted some sort of kick start in my effort to get rid of these last twelve pounds before my daughter's second birthday.

I'm spurred forward by  USA Today's assertion that "drinking juice in place of one meal to lose weight may work for those without health concerns, especially if it's part of a balanced diet."

So I decided to try a weekend juice fast and then switch to replacing a meal a day with a freshly pressed fruit and vegetable juice. I waited for a weekend when my husband would be home, because I didn't want to inflict my irritable and fatiguey self on my daughter. 

I bought enough fruits and vegetables to make nine juices. This cost about $140 and if you were surviving solely on juices, would only last you three days. Add in the price of a juicer (anywhere from $30 to $300) and you can see how expensive this gets. It is also time consuming, because even if you prep all your fruits and veggies ahead of time, and suck down your juice in a few minutes, cleaning every piece of the stupid juicer three times a day takes FOREVER. 

Day one went pretty well. I found some juice recipes in justonjuice.com that were not too horrible to drink. I definitely missed solid food. I felt like my blood was running cold inside my veins, so I wore a few more layers than usual. I had a that dull headache that occurs when you are hungry, but overall it was not as awful as I thought it would be. I kept busy sewing to keep my mind off of food, which wasn't easy because my husband made a delicious looking pizza that he and my daughter devoured, and there were so many yummy goodies around the house left over from our toddler Halloween party on Friday.

Day two has been a bit harder. It's hard to make yummy breakfast for the family, and then slurp down a frothy green juice with the smell of scrambled eggs wafting through the air. I'm determined to power through, and will reward myself tomorrow with a healthy, solid breakfast.

I'll keep you posted on the transition from nothing but juice to juice once a day. We'll see if any weight loss occurs.  I'm hoping to phase back into running in a few days as well which should hopefully move things along as well. 

Have any of you out there been a part of this juicing fad? Did it work for you? Is it just another form of yo-yo dieting? Let me know!

5 Ways to Get Excited About Fall

Published in The Packet

Like Anne of Green Gables, “I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.” This month is flying by in a blur of gorgeous foliage, costume making, and chilly back yard romps with the dog.

If you don’t find yourself gushing about the arrival of fall, here are five effortless ways to crush your ambivalence.

Bake pumpkin muffins. I promised these suggestions would be effortless, so if you don’t have at your disposal a great-great grandmother’s treasured recipe with fifteen ingredients in it, feel free to use my two-ingredient recipe. Mix a yellow cake mix with a can of pure pumpkin, plop it in a muffin tin, and bake at 350 degrees for 25 minutes. If you’re feeling really fancy, add some chocolate chips. One bite of this moist, delicious, treat will have you reveling in pumpkin season.

If you don’t have half an hour to spend baking, spend a few seconds to light a pumpkin scented candle. The dim, romantic flickering of a flame and the smell of pumpkin pie provides a quick treat to the senses. The smell will remind you of scrumptious baked goods and Thanksgiving feasting. It might also stir up your libido. A few years ago The Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago discovered that the scent of pumpkin pie increases sexual desire in women and penile blood flow in men. Who knew fall was such a sexy season?

Take a walk with your camera. The crisp air will awaken your senses. Plus, there is something about looking at the world through a lens that encourages you to slow down and notice the minute details of fall that we ordinarily drive past without a second thought.  Delicate acorns, the veins within the showy leaves, early morning frost on dead tree branches, are visual poetry for you to discover.

It is hard to not associate the arrival of fall with returning to school. This fall, awaken the old school-age rhythms within you and go learn something new. Try attending a martial arts class, make something crafty, or pick up a musical instrument. With kids in school, many parents have more time in their schedules to check out classes for themselves that conveniently start new fall schedules.

My favorite thing to do in October is to enjoy a good mystery. Read a gothic thriller, have a Harry Potter movie marathon, or watch BBC’s Sherlock on Netflix. It doesn’t matter how you experience the mystery or who you experience it with, so long as you enjoy your mystery curled up under a blanket, preferably with a bowl of popcorn and a cup of hot chocolate.

Happy fall friends!

#2 Jayme Learns To Speak Spanish Fluently

In my on-going, at times half-hearted, attempts at becoming fluent in Spanish I've tried a bunch of different strategies that can be hard to stick to.

I thought I'd share my new favorite FREE language-learning tool, Duolingo.

This TED talk is a fabulous explanation of how the program works and what the benefits of it are.



Here are the things I like about Duolingo. I use the version for my I-Pad, so my comments are specific to that app:

• The program is broken into units that build upon each other. You can test out of the units or review them as you see fit. Each time you complete or test out of a unit, a newer unit is unlocked. It reminds me of a game.

• You can spend as much or as little time practicing your Spanish, but you are encouraged to do it daily with reminders.

• The app works a lot like Rosetta Stone. You identify pictures, practice speaking sentences into the program, and practice translating from Spanish to English and from English to Spanish. But Duolingo doesn't have the $300 price tag. People with $300 bucks to spare on a computer program shouldn't be the only ones allowed to learn a new language. 

• If you sign up through facebook, you can see any friends who are working on languages on the program. You get points time you complete a unit, and your points are stacked up against all of your friends. For a competitive person like me, this works wonders at getting me to practice my Spanish when I don't feel like it, because I hate the idea of anyone getting more points than I have.

• I like that by practicing my basic skills, I am helping the internet translate websites into Spanish. (Watch the video for more info on how this works)

• If I feel like trying out another language, Duolingo also offers French, Portuguese, Italian, and German.

Duolingo isn't as effective as learning by speaking in Spanish with an actual Spanish tutor, but if you are like me and don't have the time or money, Duolingo is an excellent substitute that you can do anywhere you have an internet connection. I love it!

Yay for Fall

Hello!

Anyone out there reading?

Echo... Echo... Echo...

I've been away for the past month in Florida and in Toronto, but I'm back in Clarenville, Newfoundland and feeling that blogging itch.

On the agenda for this month: figuring out a use for a gigantic box sitting in my basement, making a Halloween costume for the pup, building a photo backdrop, and some articles for my favorite local newspaper, The Packet.

I didn't ever want to let summer go, until I went to Florida and endured my parent's broken air conditioner, and now I'm so happy to welcome fall!

Anyone doing anything fun this month for Halloween?

Thanks for reading!