Reading the leaves

The excellent Reading the Leaves blog has posted a thoughtful and honest review of Indigo Springs here. Blogger Terry Weyna reads widely and well–her annual Best Books lists are varied and full of intriguing things I’ve never heard of, and she keeps up with recommended lists and award winners.

In honor of the occasion, I give you… a leaf, avec gastropod.

DSCN5292

Happy Thanksgiving, you Canadians!

This being Monday, I am at Favorite Thing Ever, telling you all about how much I love a good feature article, especially if it’s by Pamela Coloff, and how this is entirely Snuffy‘s fault.

kelly-yoyoKelly, meanwhile, posted a recent piece on Mika, musical love child of George Michael and Freddy Mercury, and kormantic sings the praises of a band called Flight of the Conchords.

In the spirit of being grateful, I offer this deep thought: be glad you don’t have one of these on you!

Orb Weaver

Hatch battening

Getting the new novel drafted and getting out for a walk every single day, whenever it’s somewhat nice out, have been my big priorities this month, with the effect here in the blog that there’ve been a lot of word count posts and “Weather fine, lots of spiders” entries. I have a few Journey interviews out, awaiting answers and of course I’ve had the Favorite Thing Ever and Quantum Leap stuff on the go, keeping me busy. It’s all very pleasant, and I’ve enjoyed sharing my Sunburst excitement with you all.

On which theme: Indigo Springs is the featured novel at Jim Hines’ site, as part of his First Novel Friday feature. It’s mirrored on LJ, here.

I have spent some of my remaining copious spare time trying to get the Out in Harmony facebook fan page to automatically load notes from the main choir website. It’s supposed to, and it says it is, but it always loads up everything and then stops. In the meantime, I’m manually cross-posting. (My own page loads notes from WordPress to Livejournal to Facebook quite happily, so there’s a little bucket brigade of data, and I played with getting the choir an LJ too, to see if it would help. But my site comes with more bells and whistles than the choir’s, and that includes the widget that kicks off the whole sequence.)

Choir itself has been a blast from the recent past. We are mostly relearning pieces I know for a twentieth anniversary / greatest hits concert, and this means singing a lot of my favorite songs.

Autumn has also brought myriad shifts on a number of fronts. Our digital TV provider upgraded our gadgetry Monday, which meant two days of disruption to both me and kelly-yoyoKelly followed by an incremental (but worthwhile) improvement in service. I’m sifting through my eating practices in search of a similar tiny shift toward better nutrition. I’ve taken the arcade game off my iTouch in favor of spending my mental downtime listening to CBC Podcasts, watching TED Talks, and playing word games and Sudoku. Mental composting, I hope.

I’ve bought new shoes, a nice dress, and the best winter tights ever. I’ve had the fireplace tuned, I’ve made sure our travel and medical insurance is renewing, and I’ve thought about (but neglected, so far, to follow through on) taking the bedroom apart and hoovering out every last speck of dust. I’ve planted some fall bulbs, but haven’t yet put pansies atop them. Small, gratifying combing of the life-in-progress. I am glad to have had the energy–thank you, August vacation!–the focus and the help from K in achieving them.

And I’m not the only one savoring the excellence of fall on the coast:
Seawall