The lyf so short

No news on the job thing.

The cold season is beginning so I'm not outside but in here where I can light the fire, or as Julian puts it, "heich" (heiß is German for hot). Cooking is also "heich". His vocabulary is small but beginning to grow - every couple of days, he'll produce a new word. So far, he says "Mama" and "Papa", "Nana" for Grandmother Ingrid, "Bebi" for Felix, "Bibi" for pee, "Mau" (meow) for cats and horses, "auf" (on or up) for open doors, lighted lamps and going up the stairs, "ja" (yes) and "nein!" (no), "ne" for "I don't know", "baff" ("thud") for everything that moves downwards (particularly if it does so very fast...), "fah" (from fahren, drive) or "brrm" for cars, "ei" for gentle, "au" ("ow") for things that hurt, and "hmm-mm" for "hungry", "food" and "delicious". "baff" and "nein!" are his most important words. He likes music on CD or TV, but when anyone starts to sing in real life, he'll immediately go "nein!" Felix listened to singing endlessly, I could even sing him to sleep, but for Julian, singing is "nein!". He doesn't like sleeping much, either. He still wants to be breastfed. We're trying to limit it to evening and nighttime. He has eleven and a half teeth, and the most adorable cheeky grin. And he knows exactly that nobody can resist that grin. He tries to copy whatever his big brother does.

I have stuff to do outside but it's just not warming up, so I'm procrastinating. Can't do so forever, but right now, it's tempting. I don't think I'll do much in the garden today, but I will have to protect a couple of plants from the nightly frosts (or else). There's enough to do inside but I'm not feeling like it, either. On the plus side, I finished Chapter 15 of Golden Days. It turned out an extremely short chapter. I posted Chapter 14 on October 10th 2013 so this is sort of ridiculous. 2 years for 2500 words. But maybe getting this chapter out of the way was the most important thing and the words will flow more easily now? One can hope.

Speaking of word counts, I have decided on what to do for NaNoWriMo. Not fanfic (I never use NaNo for fanfic, because NaNo is supposed to be special) and no editing of old material, but picture books. I've had several ideas for children's books in my head for a while and never did anything about them, so I hope NaNo will help me change that. As a picture is worth a thousand words, I figure that if I do 50 illustrations, that's like 50.000 words, i.e. winning NaNo. It's not cheating, it's rebelling...

Finally, I'm just 20 pages into The Sleeper and the Spindle and I'm already shippin' Snow White/Sleeping Beauty. It's like in the old days!

Finally finally, The Last Kingdom series on BBC2 starting next week?! Oh my heart. CAN'T WAIT PLEASE DON'T EFF THIS UP.

I adore Ubuntu, I do, but GIMP drives me insane. See, it's just enough like Photoshop to make me forget that it's not Photoshop, until I try tweaking something and it won't work and I'm reminded that it isn't, well, Photoshop. Followed by a lengthy search for just how I can do what I was meaning to do which should have been a matter of seconds and now is turned into manual reading (or at any rate a lot of experimental klicking). ARGH.

Yees, yes, I know. Here I am, got a powerful, useful graphics program for entirely free - legally - and I whine because I have to relearn stuff.

- - -
Have some fun stuff.

Via coppertone:

Spock kissed a girl. And he liked it. >:D

Via cowboy_r:
First Person Tetris. Weird. But cool. But weird.

Via officialgaiman:
Plans for an American Gods convention, sort of, at The House on the Rock itself, for (apparently) Halloween. Gods, I wish flying to the States weren't such an absolute pain these days.