Franklin turned 36 on Sunday! I can’t believe I’m married to such an old man! We had a lovely day together, from breakfast in town to dinner with friends. As usual, all he wanted for his birthday was guitar building equipment. He is a man of steadfast focus!

I finished my NaNo novel before the deadline, can you believe it? Here are some completely useless details:
Final Wordcount: 50,050
Total Writing Hours: 53.5
Words Per Day: 1925
Hours Per Day: 2.06
Average Moral: 6.6 (on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being “I’m never going to write again” and 10 being “I want to write novels every day for the rest of my life”)
223349 characters (not counting spaces), 980 paragraphs, 3887 sentences.
Google Documents informs me that the novel scored a 6.0 on both the automated readability index and on the Flesch-Kincaide grade level scale.

The actual story is only about 47,500 words long, so to reach my final word count I was forced to write a long, rambling epilogue that will never see the light of day. I did most of the writing at the coffee shop at the mall (no wireless and nothing to do except write) or in bed (the most comfortable place in the world). It’s about as far from a well written piece of fiction as can be imagined, and I think I’ll spend the next month rewriting it before making it publicly available for interested parties.

In other news, things are gearing up here for the board meetings next week. Franklin is massively stressed out, and neither one of us remembers what life was like before all the stress arrived. By the end of next week it’ll be over for a while, at least until Franklin finds something else to worry about.

The Embassy is having a massive Christmukkah party on the 10th. We’re inviting all our friends and neighbors, and we’re expecting over 500 guests. Since a huge chunk of our staff is on holiday, those of us still in the country are going to have to do double duty. It’s going to be hectic, but fun.

That’s all for now, I’ll post pictures soon. I also want you all to know that I wrote this whole post using the dvorak keyboard (and yes, it took forever!).

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It’s Thanksgiving week and we’re looking forward to stuffing ourselves on the big day. We’re getting together with other expat friends for the traditional turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie (and a ton of other food as well). It’s always hard to be away from family this time of year, so we’re very thankful for our excellent friends here.

The NaNo novel is going well - I just passed 40,000 words and today I’m feeling good about the story. My plan is to spend a few weeks rewriting and then make it available as a pdf on the site.

Despite the chilly weather, Franklin has embarked on another home improvement project. He and a friend from work spent the afternoon Saturday repainting the rusting iron work at the front of the house. Hopefully there will be enough sunny Saturdays in the near future to finish this project before it’s time to start the next one.

I’ve started putting November pictures in the gallery, and you’ll notice a new feature on the right hand menu called “currently checking out” where those interested can follow my ramblings across the internets.

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Franklin and I both went to the dentist today. I don’t think I’ve ever had a joint dentist appointment before. Anyway, after a brief period of wrist slapping wherein we were both informed that we don’t floss enough, we checked out OK for the next 6 months.

As I write this, our house boy is in the guest bedroom packing his bags. That’s right, the Davinator is leaving the Linker nest, and the house will be quiet and empty without him. We are consoled by the knowledge that he’ll be back when we least expect him. We know this to be true because he’s leaving a bunch of his junk in our storage room.

NaNo is going well, but I’m having a bit of trouble working through my plot. Tuesdays are good though, because I head over to the mall, order a guilt-free ice aroma (there are fewer calories when I’m actually getting work done, of this I’m sure), and write for at least an hour and a half. So hopefully tomorrow will be a good NaNo day.

For those of you who are interested in the surprise engagement saga of Laura Gail and Steve, here is the video of the happy event. Laura Gail watches it at least three times a day at the office.

The rains have begun in earnest and it’s getting cold in our house. At the end of every winter we decide not to fill the oil tank in the naive hope that over the summer oil prices will go down. This plan never ever works. This year oil is selling for a whopping 6 shekels a liter, and Franklin has put his foot down. We can buy space heaters for every room in the house and run them all winter and it will cost us less money than heating our floors (OK, I’ll spare you the math. We’d be looking at over $500/month). So we’ll stay toasty this winter, but we’ll miss the happy warm-footed feeling we’re used to.

In other oh-so-exciting Linker news, we’re getting our car inspected tomorrow, whee! The dog is doing well, no signs of neurological disord…well, no seizures anyway. She’s as neurotic as ever she was. I’ve decided to go with the Dvorak keyboard layout, and that’s heaps of fun. I’ll go into that more at a later date.

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Some people are just impossible to please. For the first time in my life I’m updating the blog on a regular basis, and what does my family want? More twitters! Just kidding guys - it’s an encouragement to know that there’s someone out there that loves us!

Today is the first day of my NaNoWriMo adventure and so far I’m having fun. Franklin is being a huge encouragement by constantly telling me that he’s proud of me. I swear I would walk to the moon to make that man proud. I know that my mother (Hi Mom!) is going to want to see my NaNo in progress, so I made a page where interested parties can read selected bits of my NaNo drivel. I’ll update it daily if I think I have anything at all of interest to share. Find it here.

Interestingly enough, November is also National Blog Posting Month. NaBloPoMo invites participants to commit to updating their blog every day for a month. I find the idea fascinating, but obviously I can’t do that and NaNoWriMo at the same time, lest I end up using my blog to whine about my novel progress. Maybe some month in the near future I’ll try doing that.

It’s calm around the embassy nowadays. We’re having to say good-bye to many of our friends as the annual end of the year crowd departs. Many people will be going on vacation in November and December, and as the cold weather settles in it gets a bit echo-y around here. Franklin is in the process of preparing for an upcoming board meeting. He’ll have to do the presentations himself this year since his boss just retired, and he’s pretty uptight about that. He isn’t getting to spend as much time as he’d like in his guitar kingdom.

Friday night we’re going to a friend’s birthday party where the theme is a pimpin’ formal casino night. Franklin and I had a blast at the mall last night picking out pieces for our pimpin’ outfits. Franklin bought a black velvet jacket (looks fantastic on him, he’ll get a lot of mileage out of it), a black fedora and a black scarf. With all of them on he looks like a rap star. I won’t even tell you the ridiculous article of clothing I purchased - let’s just say it’s not going to get the same mileage as Franklin’s jacket. Hopefully we’ll have fun pictures to post afterward.

Speaking of pictures, our October Flickr gallery is now closed. You can now view the pictures without fear of missing out on pictures we add later (see the link in the right hand side bar). Or, if you don’t have the time or energy to look at all those photos, you can just watch the video synopsis:

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