tidbits: avalanche edition

When I think about all I’ve managed to get done in the past month, it makes my head spin. But yay, such a great sense of accomplishment, even if I had to let a few other things slide to get here (like fully participating in the Best of 2009 Blog Challenge, as I had planned; it ends up I’m no good at zipping off five-minute posts).

Santa brought us a fancy new camera, which I’ve slowly been learning to use, with much thanks to the camera-specfic book Santa was so thoughtful to bring along with the camera. (Turkey portrait courtesy of the fancy new camera. Through a not-necessarily-clean window. Yeah, the FNC rocks. So does Mr. Turkey.)

No, this will not turn into an all turkeys all the time blog. When something more exciting happens than turkeys peeking in the window, I’ll let you know.

So, after Santa brought the FNC, my dear husband got me a Kindle for my birthday. That has been a learning curve, too, although a much less steep one. I plan to sign up for the New York Times subscription (once I actually have time to read it), and I wish the Cleveland Plain Dealer were available that way. So far I’ve been (finally) reading Sense and Sensibility—a free download—as I ease into setting myself a book budget and get used to reading on screen. One thing I especially love: The case my husband got me for it folds back and lets me prop the Kindle up to make for easier reading without having to hold it.

I ended up with three unexpected projects over the past couple of weeks, in addition to my regulars: a book about jazz, another Weird book, and a relatively short formatting project. Jazz is done, I’m just over halfway through the Weird, and I’m squeezing the other one in over the weekend. Thankfully, the other projects on my desk have long deadlines, so I can still finish them with plenty of time to spare even if I don’t get started on them before the end of next week.

One of the nicest things to come out of these unexpected projects is finding the music of Melody Gardot. Love.

Sometime in all that, I still managed to find time to get the registration form up for my high school reunion and finish the redesign of the Cleveland Handmade site (based on a free template, but with a lot of tweaking). One of these day I still need to get to my much-neglected professional site, poor, sad thing that it is.

Oh, and I had four custom orders the last week of December/first week of January.

Whew. I’m tired now. But back to the grindstone for me.