A Time For Everything

Well, I was a bad blogger and didn't post on Friday. I don't have much of an excuse because I was up early and at the gym, but then DH and I got sucked into TV before we had to head south for our Thanksgiving celebrations. We had a delicious (as always) dinner at my in-law's house and just sat around and visited for a couple of hours before heading back home for a low-key weekend.

I did break out some Christmas decorations...garland and the strings of snowflake-tipped lights that go around the front window. I busted out the winter/Christmas votive holders and tea light candles too. I put up the tree, too, which took all of twenty minutes because the tree is only 18" tall. There's still more stuff I want to put up, but it's start and I have to find the rest before I can do anything.

Oh! I'm happy to report a weight-loss break-through. I finally dipped below the 132.8 lb. mark I haven't gotten under that in forever. I know it won't hold, but I broke the plateau, so I've got incentive to keep pushing until I can get below the 130 lb. mark once and for all and stay there. The biggest obstacle is going to be the weather now that it's getting colder. My warm cozy bed is going to be hard to leave each morning once the temperatures get below the 50s overnight. But I can the light at the end of the tunnel, so hopefully, I'll keep reaching for the light.

On the writing/publishing front, things are going mostly well. Book one is ready to go, with cover art and everything. Book two is with the content/copy editor and on her schedule starting tomorrow. No cover art as of yet. That's scheduled for end of January. Book three is in progress and I need to get my act together and finish it. Book four is done and ready to go to the content/copy editor and ready for cover art (end of February). Book five needs to be read and revised. Book six is in the planning stages. I have characters and a premise and some scene ideas, so once book three is ready for it's 2-to-3 week deep freeze (when I don't look at it in order to re-read with fresh eyes), I can juggle books five and six. I'm mostly on track. I'm not stressing because I am self-publishing, so I can push back deadlines, but I really, really want to keep my original goal of publishing on my birthday in June.

Hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving weekend! Tell me what you did.

Yep, I'm definitely looking forward to this weekend. Partly because it's been a hell of a week and partly because I get to spend AAAALLLL day tomorrow with some of my favorite people in the whole wide world--my critique group. Right, we rarely critique anymore, but it's more like our little writer sisterhood. We gather monthly to talk and talk and talk and talk. We support one another in all things; family and jobs and personal issues as well as writing. And they are all such wonderful, beautiful women. I don't know what my life would be without them.

Borrowed from the Readers Digest...their sources at the bottom...

Our Grand Old Flag
The current 50-star American flag was designed by a 17-year-old as a school project in 1958. He got a B-.

Talk about a Great Lake
There is enough water in Lake Superior to cover the entire landmass of North and South America in one foot of liquid.

A whole lotta pizza
Meanwhile, we sell enough pizza every day to cover 100 acres.

Our mighty military
The largest air force in the world is the U.S. Air Force. The world’s second-largest air force is the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps combined.

Cry me a (very old) river
Three of the world’s five oldest rivers flow here: The New, the Susquehanna, and the French Broad Rivers are each hundreds of millions of years old.

The power of youth
But our nation is young: The government is still paying one pension on behalf of a Civil War veteran (to his 85-year-old daughter).

America's deadliest job
Statistically, the deadliest job in America is … president. Of the 
44 men who’ve held the post, four have been assassinated in office—
a rate of roughly 9 percent (or about one in ten) killed on the job.

An entrepreneurial president
The only U.S. president to own a patent and a saloon: Abraham Lincoln. His patent was for a device to lift boats over sandbars. His saloon was a miserable failure. Here are famous presidential "quotes" that are completely fake.

The president you don't want to mess with
The only president who was an executioner: Grover Cleveland. As sheriff of Erie County, New York, he hanged a murderer.

In praise of the pilgrims
An estimated one in ten of us could be a blood relative to one of the original 102 pilgrims who arrived aboard the Mayflower in 1620. But we still believe these myths about Thanksgiving.

The FBI is watching us
And roughly one in three of us has his or her fingerprints on file with the FBI.

A nation of do-gooders
According to the World Giving Index, Americans are the most likely people in the world to help a stranger.

Thanks to our firemen
Case in point: Slightly more than 69 percent of firefighters in the United States are volunteers.

Our real Independence day
The day Congress voted us free from British rule is July 2, 1776. July 4 is just when John Hancock put the first signature on the Declaration of Independence to spread the word.

The highest court in the land
Finally, the real acme of the American justice system? That would be the basketball court on 
the fifth floor of the Supreme Court building. It’s known as the Highest Court in the Land.

Sources: todayifoundout.com, seagrant.umn.edu, fbi.gov, wsj.com, thewire.com, cafonline.org, nfpa.org, usnews.com, reddit.com, nationalinterest.org, navy.mil, smithsonian.com, knowledgenuts.com, washingtonpost.com, the Mayflower Society, and atlasobscura.com

It's a week of Benedict Cumberbatch!

Yesterday, DH and I went to see BC's latest film, Dr. Strange...the story of a neurosurgeon who loses the use of his hands after a car accident. After traditional medicine fails him in his quest to regain the use of his hands, he searches the globe for something else. During his journey he comes across a sorcerer and becomes a student. Over the course of his training he transforms into a superhero.



The movie wasn't what I was expecting, so despite Cumberbatch, I'm only giving it seven stars. That is of course a subjective opinion. I haven't looked, but I'm sure it's gotten rave reviews. I wasn't keen on Rachel McAdams as the love interest. I just felt like someone wiht more acting chops--on par with Ben--should have been in that role. But that's just me perhaps? The character wasn't an integral part of the whole thing, so...whatever I guess.

The kaleidoscope graphics were awesome, but the other froo froo ones left a lot to be desired and contribute a lot to my lower star rating.

Benedict played Strange with an American accent, which was fine. I've heard him do it before. I would have much rather he'd been allowed to be British. I mean it's not unheard of for people to move to another country to live and work, so I think it could have been fine. I get that the original character of Dr. Strange was American, but, really, worse things have been done cinematically.

Have you seen it? What did you think?