It’s Christmas in some parts of the world, Christmas Eve in my neck of the woods.  I hope everyone has a joyful holiday season.

Me, I still need to do a little work-work (gotta check those bank accounts for fraud–ugh), wrap presents, bake (oh darn, I hate that…not) and clean up.  Then there’s my workout to do, my CreateSpace book to work on, my new Facebook to futz around with, tons of goofing off on Absolute Write and a novella to beta read.

About baking
Yesterday I made a “fresh orange” cake from the massive quantities of oranges, tangerines, grapefruits, and pomelos (and a few other mystery fruits) that my husband’s aunt in CA sent from their farm (thank-you Mary Lou!!).  I’d have posted a picture except hubby took 2/3 of it to work today and the last bits on the serving plate looked quite broken down and battle-weary.  He also took all the peanut butter Hershey’s kiss cookies I made too.  Just as well.  I don’t need all those sweets around and I need an excuse to make new stuff.  My spritz gun butter cookies are long gone; my kids devoured those within 24 hours.  But we can’t send Santa away without a treat from the Gillian household now, can we?

NaNoWriMo novel update
I spent a little time over at the NaNo site yesterday looking at pictures of the CreateSpace proofs people have already ordered and received back.  Ruh-roh, Shaggy.  I just realized that I have a lot more work to do.  Dummy me didn’t realize that I needed to provide the copyright page, the “about the author” page, the pretty chapter headings and all the other “stuff” in a book that you usually ignore.  This is in addition to setting the font and line spacing, page numbering, etc. how I wish the finished product to appear.  The manuscript has been in courier 12 font, double-spaced since the beginning but that’s NOT how I’d want it to appear in an actual book.  Oy!   I guess I thought a brownie would take care of all this somewhere along the line never realizing that the brownie would be me or nobody.

Facebook
I’ve now joined the legions of people on Facebook but I really don’t know what the heck I’m doing yet.  I set one up eons ago so I could see someone’s Facebook pictures but did nothing with it and promptly forgot about it.  (I have a MySpace too that’s in the same state.)  My sister told me she found my empty shell and I guess that spurred me into action.  Of course she didn’t bother to friend me, so I friended her.   It’s still pending…hmm.

I had all these friend requests waiting for me, many from my first high school in NJ, names I vaguely recognized but recognized nevertheless so I accepted them.  There’s a couple of others, I have no idea where they came from, probably mistakes, so I ignored them.  They’ve been waiting on me for months now, most likely they’ve already written me off.

I’ve been busy adding my YaYa friends (fitness forum) but it’s so tedious because many of them only know me by my screen name and first name so I have to put a personal message on them alerting them as to who I am.  But as I said earlier, I really have no idea what I’m doing and this whole “wall” thing has me stumped.  Does everyone have a wall or are we all on the same wall?  And what’s this chat thing in the lower right corner.  I saw a (1) pop up a few times but every time I clicked it, it went to (0).  Is someone teasing me?  Duh…  It’s times like this that I really feel old.

Last thing…I did a search on my own name and was amazed at how many of me’s there were out there.  I shouldn’t have been surprised because I just scrolled through 500!, yes 500 listings for one of my YaYa buddies.  I never found her either.  I finally nabbed her from a mutual friend’s friend list and voila, she’s added, pending but added.

Now I get to see how many accept me.  Gosh, it’s just like being back in high school again and passing around your yearbook for people to sign.  Do you give it to everyone in your classes or just your friends, the ones you’ll remember the rest of your life?

Joyeux Noel, tout le monde!