New Year, new.....what, exactly?

Well, it has been a while since my last post, and I'll just blame it on the holidays. Never mind that I had nearly two weeks off from work; I spent those either drinking or sleeping. Or sleeping off the drinking I'd done the day before. Whichever, it was a blissfully lazy time, with food, drink, family and friends that would only have been made better if we were living somewhere hot and could have done the eating, drinking and sleeping in the sunshine.

Here, for example....

But now it's back to reality. And reality includes keeping up my writing goals - including this blog. Also, now that I've had a bit of a break from it, I'm returning to my story from NANO and working on making it something that doesn't suck. Re-reading through some of this speed, not quality, writing that I did is actually making me cringe, but that's OK. I'm easily seeing how it can get better, which bodes well for the success of this creature actually seeing the light of day in terms of critiquing and (dare I hope) publishing! I'm lucky that I have lots of fellow reader and writer friends, who will give me feedback in both technical and artistic ways.

Of course, this time of year is all about the resolutions and new starts that people intend to make, and I'm no exception. I've already started shedding some pounds, due to the medical establishment finally giving me the diagnosis for an illness that I told them a year ago I had. Treatment is working wonders both energy and weight-wise, and of course, with less weight for a petite frame to have to pull around, comes more energy to burn off more pounds. So I'm starting the new year ahead of the game in that respect. Another resolution is also a continuation from last year, which I'm working on at this moment - writing every day. Off to a slow start in this so far, as this is the first day I've written this year, but if I can keep it up I'll actually have a completed and edited novel by this time next year. And that is exciting stuff for this girl!

That's all in terms of resolutions - continuing to improve upon decisions that happened last year and making them, and myself, even better. 2012 is going to be a rocking year, this is not a difficult realization. I've got some great travelling lined up with my fave travelling partner, more energy and more earning power than I had last year and everything is coming up roses. I'm excited to see how plans go, and what I succeed at and fail at (because failure is a part of life, no matter how we fight against it, it does happen!), and where I'll be 360 days from now. That's the truly exciting thing in life!

Funky photos!

Well, my current job, while getting to be surrounded by super-nice people, just is not that stimulating. It involves copious amounts of time sat at my desk and surfing the internet. Or, as I am now, writing my blog!

There are some wild and wacky sites out there, this is something we all know. But I came across a few that are really just too much fun for my writer's brain to ignore: the mysterious photos. These are collections of random pictures, often at least 50 years old, that have been found, or are just plain bizarre, since they usually don't have any context provided. This is the webpage that kicked off my fantastic Google search: http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/50-unexplainable-black-white-photos

Here are the pictures from that site, that intrigued me the most.

I have an instant scenario of murder in my head, and wonder why they are so happy about it. Did they kill someone that had been keeping them prisoner for years, and this was a memorial photo of their liberation? Had a rich relative been pushed into their next life, and now the six women were wealthy beyond their imaginations?

This one is puzzling. Did her fiance die, so she sits with his skeleton, imagining how their life might have been? (This is the slightly less disturbing version of where I went when I first saw the photo!) 

Creepy. Just plain creepy. This is a monster straight out of childhood nightmares.

Keep in mind that NONE of these pictures has any context to them, which makes them all the more intriguing.

This one, I found on http://blackandwtf.tumblr.com/, and it apparently documents a real event of a child being shipped via package delivery in the US, back when it was first introduced. This bears some further investigation, methinks, but what an idea!

I hope these pictures have whet your imagination, as they did mine. And check out the pages these are from, there are hilarious and freaky pictures over pages and pages. I'll post more if I find them!

Ciao!



Revamping and rewriting

So, here is the first, official entry from the revitalized blog that is mine!

Life has been crazy for November - I participated in NaNoWriMo for the very first time! If you've never heard of this, and you like 30 days of non-stop writing and panicking as you fall behind, along with euphoric highs as you hit the minimum of 50,000 words, check out http://www.nanowrimo.org/. It's also an absolute blast, and I've met some great people here in the Vancouver area, both in person and online in the IRC chat. I didn't make the minimum, so I didn't 'win' as it were, but I'm sticking to my story that it's all my computer's fault. And I have the convenient, and very real, excuse that it died four days, and only 10,000 words, before the cutoff date. I'm still waiting to get my computer back (thank God for slow work days!) but apparently the story I was working on, and all my pictures from my trips over the last couple of years, are safe.

As well, I've bounced from the great job I was at in University Advancement, to a couple days typing out recordings for the University Senate meeting, to working in Student Development. Such is the life of a temp, I suppose! I'm longing for stability, though, so hopefully one of these interviews I've been on lately will end up panning into something permanent sooner, rather than later!

And, since this blog started out to do with travel, I will mention that my friend and I are starting to plan our holidays - and it's been a long time since I've been so excited about a trip! We're hoping to hit both Wales and the Cinque Terre of Italy, both such gorgeous places, for different reasons. Cue frantic saving on my part, because this is going to be so amazing! I'll post more details as things start getting firmed up!

Ciao for now, have a great weekend!

Starting again...

Well, here we are, so many years later - even kind of forgot that this existed.

Early New Years resolution - write weekly or more! And here, as well as any stories I happen to be working on.

Shall we try and see how long I can keep this up?

Just an intro...

Just a few quick words as my introduction.

I'm 29, an aspiring author living in Vancouver, and a die-hard traveller.

I'm leaving for 1 year to live in Ireland and am starting this blog as a journal for all my friends and family here at home.

More to come......