Christmas is near o_o

It's the week of Christmas, and I am not ready. Not at all. My house is a disaster area. My decorations aren't up yet. My Christmas shopping is only half done. Usually, I'm a little more prepared than this but this month has been hectic and the holidays have managed to creep up on me faster than expected.

For instance, last week I was in Colorado partly for work and partly for pleasure. As a result, I lost a week to the madness. I managed to get some presents while there so it wasn't a complete bust in terms of Xmas preparation. As a side note: Denver is awesome. We went to the Denver Festivus, a beer festival, in an old hangar which doubled as a museum. They had all local beers and even I, who usually doesn't care for beer, found a few I like. We also went hiking at Red Rocks which has an amphitheater built into the side of the the rocks. Pictures are below if you're interested.

Now though, Christmas with all the impending madness is around the corner and I am slightly freaking out. In addition to the usual amount of family, I have friends in town so I will be pretty busy. This is both good and bad. Good because I get to hang out with some people I rarely see anymore. Bad because I am so close to being done with this book that I can practically taste it, and I just can't physically find the time to write the ending. Grr. I just need two days of steady writing time. Two! I think I could finish if I had just that much time, but I have so many impending plans that I don't know if  I'll swing it.

Wish me luck. For now, enjoy the photos while I try to carve some writing time into my schedule.

The end is near...

Of the current book I'm writing, anyway. I'm entering the end game and gearing up for the final confrontation between my characters. It's gets my adrenaline going to be this close, but at the same time I still have several weeks of writing left.

I'm about three quarters of the way through and have officially entered the stage of just wanting to be done. My brain is so fried that I don't even care whether what I'm writing makes sense. At this point, I've promised myself that all flaws and bad sentences will be caught and polished away in the editing and re-writing phase. All I can think is 'the end is in sight. Must get there as fast as possible before my brain deflates.'

So to give my brain a break and also entertain others, here is a photo of my cat. She's found a new toy. It's called tissue paper.

Enjoy.

To my frustration, I've discovered that taking a good photo of a black cat inside is nearly impossible. Her fur makes all her features just blend together until all you can see is a blob. I refuse to give up though, hence the photo :-|