nano- — denoting a very small item. (New Oxford American Dictionary)

It’s been a little while since I’ve posted anything on here. But that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been doing anything! My friend Jonathan Spaulding has rightly said that there is an inverse relationship between blogging and life…

So this is a quick news post to let anyone who might read this blog with any regularity what’s been goin’ on as of late. First up, NaNoWriMo.

Yep, the insane November novel-writing challenge is still going on (it’s still November, the calendar tells me), and so far, so good… The goal is 50,000 words by the 30th, but I’m going to try to hit that mark by this Thursday (the calendar tells me that’s the 20th). Of course, that won’t mean that the story will be done, but that I’ve met the goal. I’ve tried to charge ahead in my word count this year to leave room for attempting to actually get a novel COMPLETELY finished in one month (that means that the story has a beginning, a middle, and an end).

In other news, I still have some good intentions about posting a bunch of pictures from a trip my Dad, brother, and I took down to King’s Bay, Georgia, a couple weekends ago. We attended the annual submarine veteran’s memorial service at the naval base there, being there to honor my grandfather, who served on a submarine during the Korean War. We also got to tour the sub training facility while there, and—well, I should save telling you about it for that blog post.

Since we were close (relatively, anyway), on our way home we swung up through South Carolina and visited our dear friends, the DiMarias. Our time was short, but we had an awesome day and two nights with them, doing all sorts of stuff! I’ll tell you more about that later, too.

Let’s see… What else has been going on in the past couple weeks? Oh! The Precious Treasure premiere took place last Friday, and was a lot of fun! The turnout was good, and I think some people were blessed by it, so that was really nice.

Saturday (the 15th), I went up to Wheaton for my weekly rehearsal with the Baroque Festival Orchestra (which is a ton of fun; Drostan Hall is a superb conductor!). Following that, I drove over to Orland Park; Jonathan Spaulding’s family’s church there was having a fine arts event, and his film, Father Who Art was going to be shown. Since I’m not going to be able to attend the premiere for the film (which is next Saturday in Iowa), I wanted to see it there in lieu of the premiere.

To make a long story short (I think I’m already putting this post in jeopardy of losing the “Nano-” prefix of its title), I ended up staying with the Spauldings until Sunday afternoon.

It all started with watching Jonathan’s film. He did a fantastic job of putting it all together; I was greatly impressed with the work that he did, particularly since this was his first serious effort at filmmaking!

So after the film, I was thinking that I needed to hit the road so I could get home at a, well… Okay, so it wouldn’t be such a decent hour… It would have been after 10 PM by the time I get home. And I don’t do good driving at late hours; the later it gets, and the longer I’ve been driving, the sleepier I get. So Jonathan suggested that I stay at his family’s house, so after calling Dad to make sure it was okay, I agreed.

Thus, it was a fun weekend being with Jonathan again, meeting some new people (including his family), etc., etc. Sunday afternoon we all gathered in the Spaulding’s living room and sang/played hymns for a couple hours, a few people singing while the rest of us hopped around from instrument to instrument (the Spauldings have oodles of instruments scattered around their living room), so that was a great way to finish up the visit.

At any rate, that’s the past week-and-a-half or so, wrapped up in a NaNoShell. More posts containing pictures will (hopefully) be coming soon!