Here’s a photographic tribute to the chef, without whom dinner would be far less interesting, and life certainly less flavourful.

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Overall, even though I finished a novel and began new projects, 2011 will probably go down as the year where I took my foot off the gas, so to speak.

My goal for 2012 is to burn some literary rubber. Here’s hoping it’s a great year for you and yours.

Cheers!

That’s not a typo in the title. While everybody else was participating in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), I was basically doing the anti-NaNo, AKA National No Novel Writing Month.

That feels better to say than I thought it would.

Oh sure, I did some desultorily outlining, and I futzed around with photos for a non-fiction project I’m trying to figure out. But fiction? Actual, real, fiction writing? Not. A. Word.

There are plenty of reasons excuses. I could list a dozen. But I won’t, because really, let’s be honest. I didn’t write, because I didn’t feel like it.

And guess what? I feel refreshed. Finishing the second book was a slog and a half. That puppy kicked my ass, and my brief foray into jumping straight into the next big thing nearly backfired. I was bummed about book three before I even started. Which is not conducive to writing a good book.

I have another month or so of long day job hours before my schedule goes back to normal, and because I wasn’t beating myself about the head for not writing, I am way more positive now about writing in general. I’m actually starting to chafe at the bit to get this new story going, instead of treating it like the next chore in the list.

There’s a certain tyranny in the “write every day” mantra. I’m not sure about you, but it was starting to leave me wondering if I was an inadequate fraud. This month freed me from that.

NaNoWriMo is a great way to get the basics of a novel written quickly. But I suspect if I’d tried it this year, I might have had a complete writing meltdown. Given up. Thrown in the towel forever. My big takeaway from this November is: know yourself, and do what’s right for you at the time it’s right for you.

I’d like to do NaNo one year. But this year, NaNoNo was just as necessary.

That confession made, I do foresee a busy new year. :-)

While not climbing into the rarified realm of true Apple fangirl, I am a big user of their products. So when I got my new phone I gleefully left its charger at home the first day – thinking “yippee, I am no longer a slave to my plug!”. Which left me completely nonplussed when the battery died just after noon. A six hour charge implied even worse performance than my gimpy, tired, 3-year-old iPhone original 3G. Frowny faces ensued.

It seems I’m not alone. So I decided to do some research and run some tests. Here’s a handy chart documenting my results (click to view full size).

Horizontal axis is hours from when I disconnected the phone from the plug. All start at 100% charge. Vertical access is percent battery remaining. In all tests, WIFI and 3G data were enabled.

The blue line is my first test. I followed the recommendations on the forums, and disabled diagnostics and error logging and reporting, turned off Siri, and turned off Find My iPhone. I turned off the location services for compass calibration and setting the time zone. I also disabled all notifications, and killed any app I started right after using it. I think I made one or two calls, and sent about 5 texts during this test. I put the phone in airplane mode overnight as it sits near my head because it’s also my alarm clock. That’s hours 4.5 through 11.5, and 28.5 through 37.5.

The green line is my second test. I re-enabled Find My iPhone, and Siri, and turned on Twitter notifications. I did make a point of killing apps as soon as I finished using them. I stopped logging data for this test as its trajectory looked similar to test 1. Which made me feel somewhat better about using the phone as it’s meant to be used.

The red line is today. Last night before I went to bed, I noticed the battery charge starting to diminish faster than normal. So without turning the phone off, I put it on the charger. Half an hour after it came off the charger this morning, I noticed the phone had lost 7% battery charge, even though it was still in airplane mode, so I started logging again. I turned off airplane mode. Twitter notifications were on. The Facebook, Twitter, and Mail apps were running in the background. Note that I only push Twitter mentions, I do not push Mail or FB updates. [Ed.: In going through my notes, I noticed I killed the FB app at 8:30 AM] I was in meetings all afternoon so I missed the actual point the battery went to zero, but at 6:30 PM, 11 hours after it was taken off the charger, the phone was dead. I made and received no phone calls. I sent and received no texts. A few Twitter notifications came in.

I like Apple products. But I also expect my brand new product to actually be better than the old one I considered broken. Apple says a fix is forthcoming, in a few weeks. It better be, because I’ve tried the DIY fixes (with the exception of resetting my contacts), but that still gave me today’s red line.

Which is unacceptable given my usage. Sorry, Apple. I really like you, but this battery thing bites.

to this

you need a cleaver, a pot, a stove, and a potato masher.

To go from this

to this

you need the same cleaver, and a blender.

To go from this

to this

you need this

which my handy spouse whipped up from spare parts and a 6 ton jack on Saturday.

Not that it didn’t require a tweak or two before we really got it working.

This

freaked us out. What you can’t see in the picture is all the juice about to spill over the sides in highly random directions because the drain hole in the bottom is the wrong approach.

You only get this (and highly relieved non-splattered people)

when you whip out the sawsall and convert that tiny drainhole into a full slot.

Do we know how to torture fruit, or what?

My feet are thankful for the new radiant heat in the bathroom. I’m thankful for my handy spouse.

In among the jelly making and cider pressing, I found some time to take a few pictures of the Thanksgiving bouquet. These just make me happy.

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Here are some results (small size – my upload failed on the full size ones but if I can debug it I’ll add them in later):

Diesel’s “I love you” face. Which he uses when you stop massaging his shoulder in ways that halt feline pleasuration.

His eyes haven’t *quite* rolled back into his head yet, but that scene from When Harry Met Sally does come to mind…

Panicked. Just panicked, I tell you.

For those needing context…

The rustic look is intentional. The work involved stripping off most, but not all of the paint, a light sanding, followed by two coats of tung oil and one coat of paste wax.

I’m pretty chuffed by how it turned out.