Kendra Leigh Castle

Archive for February, 2010

That would be what I’m going to be taking from daily blogging for the next little bit.  Lately I’ve been feeling like I need to recharge the batteries a little and write more when I have actual interesting things to say.  The daily digging up of random interesting stuff has been tough recently, with the notable exceptions of Snowmageddon and the Manly Man commercial   It’s probably a combination of the long winter, which I hate every year regardless of snowfall amounts, and my own waiting for something, anything to happen that will allow me to make a video of myself running around the house like an asshole waving a sword and howling victoriously.  My writing career, such as it is, is just in a very in-betweeny feeling place right now, with me having a couple of things that are about to be shopped around widely (yay, more waiting!), and one more contracted book to write for Nocturne (this is not to say there won’t be more beyond that for the series, only that I have, at present, one more to write that is contracted), pending approval of the proposal for that book. 

Anyway, this sort of nebulous middle spot has left me at loose ends as far as daily blogging for the time being…try though I might, I’ve discovered that I’m honestly just not fascinating enough to merit daily babble!   What I really want is some fun writing news to be able to share, but right now, I’m in total waiting mode to see what happens next.  It’s a frustrating spot for someone with my level of patience, which would be about none.  But because I was not born Supreme Goddess of All the Universe, a fact I lament every day of my life, I do not get to be in charge of this.  A pox on natural laws, dude.  Seriously.

All that said, my posting will be sporadic for the next little while, at least until I know which direction I’ll be heading.  I’m thinking I’ll just hang at Cheryl’s and MsM’s to enjoy myself, and I’ll be posting here when I have either news ( of the good or bad varieties…I’ll share) or an actual thought that seems to merit a post.  Or if I run across any particularly awesome pictures of mostly naked guys that I am compelled to display.  So please check in and see what’s up (and to enjoy the mind-numbing minutiae of my daily life, you all know I’m on Facebook more than I should be), but know that as far as posting frequency goes, I’ll be in and out.  I’m still not sure if I’m naturally a daily blogger, but at some point here, I’ll find a rhythm that works!  

A big hug to my bloggy buddies who always manage to brighten my day, no matter how boring I’m feeling, and who are always up for a chat even if all I’ve managed to find to post is another video of Beaker exploding.  Because, I mean, I like those, but they’re probably not for everyone   I shall return, hopefully with that sword-shaking video in tow.  See you soon!

Hope you all have a good one.  It’s far from my favorite holiday (having spent a few of them in my youth thinking that Cupid needed a few of those damned arrows in his backside), but it has its bright spots.  Finding pictures like these, for instance   I’m still recovering from this stupid flu, and look like something the cat dragged in, but I should be good to go by Monday.  What a way to finish off the whole Snowpocalypse thing, huh?  Ugh.  Have a great weekend, ladies!

Okay, I had to put this up.  I’m very bored this week, so you’ll have to humor me, I’m afraid   You all may have seen this, but it’s new…and even though I was left staring at the screen after my first viewing trying to figure out whether I thought it was lame or not, it’s definitely grown on me!  It’s the romantic hero (aka “manly man”) explaining why our real men should smell like him.  And…he’s really just awesome.  Try to watch it and not be left grinning.  I mean, dude is narrating himself.  How can I not love it??

As an added bonus, here’s a commercial that didn’t make the cut for the Superbowl…banned, sadly.  But it lives on, on Youtube!  Who among us has not had to deal with this?

Have a great Thursday, ladies!

New Muppets!  Gave me a chuckle as I’m sort of semi-awake this morning.  Enjoy.  Beaker on fire always makes me smile

Well, the Winter Storm Watch we had when I went to bed last night has turned into a Winter Storm Warning this morning.  Sleet and snow today, 6-12 more inches of this white crap tomorrow.  In light of these wretched developments, I thought I’d put something warm up for this cold winter day.  I don’t know the model’s name, but he looks like he’d be perfectly comfortable outsdie on a beautiful summer day.  or night, for that matter   Short post today, because I’m preoccupied and have to go to the commissary before the world decends into complete insanity again.  I’m sure it’ll be a zoo, but hopefully they have food there.  I went out for the first time since all of the “snowy fun” yesterday afternoon, and I finally understand why they keep canceling school.  A lot of roads, including the ones in my neighborhood, are a mess, and they don’t salt the roads here.  I don’t think that the thick layer of ice in some spots is going to come off until it melts.  Ah well, on with my circa-1994 green Doc Martens, now having a second life as snow boots.  Once upon a time in the Grunge era, I used to wear those things with shorts.  There are no pictures, thank God.

Enjoy the hunk, and have a great day!

Morning, everyone!  So as you might expect, yes, we all survived what they’re calling “Snowmageddon” in good shape.  Plenty of accumulation (and one of the Catholic schools had the roof cave in from all the snow), but I’ve seen worse.  This is what happens when you hail from near the Canadian border and the Great Lakes: when it comes to snowfall, I am hard to impress.  It always melts quickly enough down here, though it’s so cold that it may be a while yet.  It has been SUCH a snowy winter here!  The kids are off of school today, naturally.  AGAIN.  We didn’t get hit as badly as they did up by Baltimore, and we kept power, so I can’t complain about much except for the continuing canceled school problem.  The roads are definitely icy, courtesy of the sleet that pounded us for quite a while Friday night before changing back to snow.  I really need to get to the post office to mail off my line edits today (all done as of yesterday! WOO!), but I’ll be waiting a few hours, I think, for some melting.  Anyway, this is a picture of Saturday morning before it got incredibly nasty again (we had blizzard conditions all afternoon).  Brian bought a shiny new snowblower because he’s tired of shoveling the driveway!  It’s been a big help, that’s for sure.  Our driveway is really long, which is great until it gets covered.  Here are a couple of other pictures I took from the big event:

This was during the nastiest part of the storm on Saturday.  There were quite a few times we couldn’t see this house in the picture!

More blizzard from the front of the house.  I’ll admit it, it was kind of cool for a while.  Reminded me of home!  All of our old neighbors from when I was growing up were writing me during the storm, asking how their weather got down here   I guess the Northern NY weathermen on TV were having a good laugh about the, shall we say, “Mid-Atlantic Panic”.  There was definitely much freak-outage.  Here’s a final pic from yesterday, because my patio table is a pretty good way to measure how much snow we got:

As you can probably tell from all the little paw prints, Brian had to shovel the deck for the dogs.  The short leg thing wasn’t working so well for them in the snow!

Anyway, that was my weekend…how was yours?

Well, what do you all think?  The “weather event” we’ve been having here got my butt in gear on a few things, amazingly enough.  I’ve been wanting to redo the site for a while now…the old template worked well enough as a stopgap, but it was never quite what I wanted.  I had to just pull one off the internet, and though there are hundreds of templates out there, nothing I chose was ever really going to be “mine.”  The problems were that a)I don’t know code, b)I have no idea how to design a website in general, and c)I’m not really interested in forking over a bunch of cash to someone who does right now.  So it took some looking around to find a product that would allow me to design for wordpress without, well, actually knowing how to design for wordpress.  I wound up using Artisteer.  Very user-friendly if anyone is ever looking to do the same!  Which is not to say that I didn’t swear at the screen at all, but that would happen no matter what.  It’s a way of life.

Anyway, it’s very late, but I’m feeling all pleased with myself, so I thought I’d put up a post.  Just in case anyone noticed that I’d redecorated   If you notice anything funky, let me know…the old font killed my eyes (one of the many things I couldn’t fix with the old template), so I made it bigger.  Hope that works for everyone, along with everything else all shiny and new around here.  I have a very cool blue dragon head that I almost put in the header…I may save him for the future!

Hope you all had an excellent week, and I’ll see you Monday!

Manuscripts, I mean, not the Stephen King story (though that was pretty good).  Any writer will tell you that manuscripts do NOT stay gone, no matter how many times you try to send them off in the mail, by email, anything.  There’s always something.  And even once you get them on the shelf, chances are you’ll have a look out of morbid curiosity and discover, much to your chagrin, that you missed something anyway.  That said, I now have, parked upon my messy desk, the line edits for RENEGADE ANGEL which are fairly pressing in nature (as in, I have a couple of weeks and they’re due…quick turnaround, which is fine).  After flipping through, I’m comfortable that there’s nothing earth-shattering that must be messed with at this point, but there are a number of items I need to address with my Red Pen of Doom.  SO, I will be absent from blogging this week while I get this stuff done.  I very much like my editor and her assistant, and I’d like to make ‘em happy

Hope you all had a good weekend…my baby girl had a wonderful swim meet, making me a very proud mom (really, I stand amazed…she does things I could never do and makes them look effortless, plus she’s just a really great kid), and I’ve enjoyed having my mom in town.  I managed to watch Sleepless in Seattle yesterday with her, and only half listened to my husband’s mutterings about “chick movies” when he occasionally wandered through.  Man, I love that movie.  It’s one of my fave romantic films ever.  He’s right, though, it’s a total chick movie

Have a great week, ladies!  And for fun, what are some of YOUR favorite chick movies?