Friday, November 10, 2006

Moving On Up, and other Goings On....

Jenny's been offered (and took) a pseudo-promotion at work, and so she'll be staying with Michaels and actually moving up to (barely) full time. She doesn't want to get over-worked and over-stressed, so she made it clear to her boss that she would take the job, but only work minimal full time hours.

But she will be getting a slight pay raise + benefits, which (apparently) I'll be able to share. This is incredibly good news for the two of us, and the main reason she said yes to the job. That, and the fact that when the person she's replacing leaves, and she moves up to "Head Certified Framer" (something like that), she'll be able to stay in the back of the frame shop doing production most of the time, with new girl up front helping customers. The whole retail/customer service thing is the main part of her job she dislikes, so this is the other main reason she's taking it.

We still haven't got a garage yet, which is disappointing. I have seen (what appears to be) a few people cleaning out their garages, so hopefully the office has finally got after the sneaky people who've been "borrowing" garages for the last few months.

The apartment is clean, and I'm trying desperately to keep it that way through upkeep, as opposed to going on a mad deep-cleaning spree once a month. So far, so good.

We're going to put up our Christmas decorations very soon, so we'll actually be able to enjoy them for a while. We probably need some more, like a wreath, and more lights. But first the tree goes up and then we'll go from there. We also want to pick up some more Christmas music. Right now we've only got a Carpenters album and a couple of Celtic Christmas albums to listen to. We're aiming for "classic" pop Christmas music (Sinatra, Dino, etc.) and I'd also like to find the Limelighters and Kingston Trio Christmas albums on CD, since I fondly remember listening to those as a kid.

National Novel Writing Month is into week 2 , and while I'm way behind (about 2000 words), Jenny is making really good progress on her novel (over 8500 words so far). I had a pretty good idea what I was going to write about up until the day before the month started, and then threw it all out and went with a completely new idea at the last minute. So I've been kind of struggling to catch up ever since....

Not a whole lot else going on - I'm home sick from work today on orders of my boss. I'm not horribly sick, but I've been having sinus headaches and related symptoms, and my job has a general "if there's even a chance of you getting sick or giving whatever you've got to me - GO HOME!" policy, which is kind of nice.

I dropped out of the big Draw Off Tourney that LJamal was running over at Digital Webbing - the last subject was a Halloween themed Bloodrayne & Blade vs. zombies piece that never materialized, and I had to no show finally. Didn't even have time to start the stupid thing that week - disappointing, but I'll live.

Haven't been drawing much lately, with work and the shadow of NaNoWriMo hanging over my productivity, but I've still managed to start scribbling in pen in my various notebooks, so I don't completely forget how to draw (which is how I feel when I don't draw for a long time). Now I just have to remember how to write, so I can finish this novel.

Still have various projects that are still unfinished/started + some other things I'd like to get done, if I can only find that elusive "time" thing that people speak of: current Draw-Off (Cap'n A vs. Iron Man), Rising Stars of Manga contest (due sometime in January), I'd like to do some art-jam Holiday cards with Jenny this year, but we'll probably just end up buying some at Borders on the cheap.

We're starting at Borders this Sunday - the holiday crew meeting is 8am Sunday morning, although I'm not sure how long we'll be working. It's mainly a training day for us. Register training and what not for Jenny, and getting me back up to speed. We won't be working again until the last couple of weeks before Christmas, but Sean wanted to get us back on the payroll so we could take advantage of the discount, especially with an employee appreciation (40% off) day coming up. I see a lot of our friends getting books for Christmas this year! :)

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