Home for the Holiday

What. A. Week.

Or perhaps I should say, “What a fortnight.”

The last two weeks have been filled with travel, family, Thanksgiving, and a book signing at the Bethlehem Visitors Center. And, if that wasn’t enough, my husband and I also searched for, found, and moved into our new apartment.

The move is something we had been planning and working toward for several months (since my husband started working over an hour from home without traffic), but it still happened very quickly. In fact, two weeks ago today, we hadn’t even seen this apartment.

But we saw it, and we liked it, and we decided to move in before Thanksgiving. Fortunately, we were not planning on cooking our own Thanksgiving dinner because not only was our apartment full of boxes for the holiday, but I was also under the impression that our oven didn’t work.

I say, "Under the impression," because as it turns out a gas oven needs to be left on for a while before the flame ignites. Who knew? Meanwhile, I was afraid to leave the oven on for more than a few seconds without a flame because I thought it would fill the apartment with gas. This means that the reason the oven wasn't working was because I kept turning it off. I felt a little silly when the oven repair involved nothing more than turning on the oven, but, either way, I'm glad the apartment didn't explode.

Moving is an educational experience.

For example, we also learned the down side of purchasing bookcases for under $40. It seems that while the cases do a decent job of holding books, and they’re fairly easy to assemble, they don’t handle moving well. We started out with three identical bookcases, but one fell apart as we moved it, and another fell apart as we filled it with books, so now we’re down to one-- which isn’t going to cut it because my husband and I have A LOT of books. Go figure.

Anyway, it’s the end of the weekend, and the oven works, and the books are in piles around the broken bookshelf, and the apartment is full of boxes and… it’s November.

Which means it’s still NaNoWriMo.

And I am horribly horribly behind, because while these last two weeks were full of family, and moving, and friends, and boxes, and learning how to use my oven, they were not full of NaNoWriMo.

At just over 32,000 words, and with only two days to go, my chances of completing the challenge this year seem slim, but, you know what? I’m going to give it a shot. After all, can’t the boxes and books wait another two days?

Can’t they?