Well, I’ve managed to lose my head start.  After a good first day, which gave me a head start of 501 words, my NaNoWriMo project is now sitting at a 1244-word deficit.  Which basically means that I’m barely past yesterday’s goal, let alone at today’s.

More fun was offered in the form of an H1N1 vaccination today.  My arm is still stiff from that, but I can’t even convince myself that it’s a reason for my falling behind on NaNo.

Guess I’m going to need a productive weekend.

I spent the day today in the damage control school, learning how to use our new breathing apparatus.  As always when I wear an air pack, my shoulders are now killing me.

Anyway, I got a bit of writing done during lunch.  495 words (about a page and a half, handwritten), which brings me up to a running total of 4106.  Unfortunately, that leaves me 896 words behind my daily milestone

Guess I know what I’m doing when the kids go to bed tonight.

This Sunday marks the beginning of NaNoWriMo 2009.  This gives participants 30 days to write 50,000 words, approximately 1667 words per day.  I intend to do this without computer assistance.  50,000 words, by hand, on notebooks.

Why would I do this?  Because I’m crazy.  Actually, because I want to be able to work on it during breaks at work, which is very difficult when my writing is at home.  Emailing it back and forth is probably just going to cause confusion, in addition to excluding transit time in my writing periods.

It just so happens that I am duty twice during November, giving me lots of time with not much else to do than write.  And luckily for me, the first day of duty is also the first day of NaNo, which should give me a half-decent head start.

Let the madness begin.

I have digital cable at home, which requires the use of a cable box.  One of the joys of the cable box, as provided by Shaw, is the lack of local control.

Yup, that’s right.  If we lose the remote, there’s no way to change the channel.

On Wednesday, I will have a one-year-old son.  His current favorite game is hide-and-seek.  But he doesn’t hide himself.  He hides other things.  Toys.  Soothers.  Spoons.  Phones.  Remote controls.

The toys we can deal without.  Soothers we’re trying to get him out of anyway.  Spoons we have a-plenty.

The phones have a pager on them.  I press a button on the base, and the phone beeps loudly.  Why isn’t there such a feature on the remote?  Instead, I’m stuck searching for a remote control while Treehouse or YTV is running.

There are parts of my job that I’m not allowed to talk about.  Sometimes it makes it into the news.

We were already at sea, but since we were the duty ship, we would have been recalled.  Just got back today from the training that was originally scheduled.

I didn’t even know you could do this, but a Peter Katz, a researcher in London, has proven that movie suspense is just as terrifying as movie horror.  Seems he plugged a movie viewer into an MRI as she watched his new movie, Pop Skull, and watched her fear indicators spike.

He claims that this will improve movie making, as producers can find out exactly where his test audience loses interest.  But I’m pretty sure this isn’t a good use of a declining stockpile of medical isotopes.

I’ve noticed that it’s been a while since I’ve posted.  I’ve spent a bit of time at sea, and can’t really post about alot of it.  So I’m just going to settle with a quick “Happy Thanksgiving” posting.

Here I am, sitting in the MCR, enjoying Navy life.

We have just finished our second week (of three) of our FNO course.  Basically, we take out a bunch of navigator trainees, so they can do their final exam with a real ship instead of working in a simulator or on paper.  Of course, with a real ship comes a real crew.

The fact that I’m sitting in the MCR means that I was one of the poor bastards who got tagged with first-day duty watch.  Which wouldn’t be so bad, except for the fact that I’m sitting in home port, and my family is about a ten-minute drive away.

On the plus side, I managed to get first day duty (starts when the ship gets in, so it’s shorter than normal), so I get the rest of the weekend with them.  I also pulled first watch, which means I’m going to be dead tired for my watch, but I’ll be able to get a bit of sleep before I go home in the morning.

This was not in my recruiting video.

Finally got my ICBC write-off check.  Still left me holding a bit of debt (carried over from a previous trade-in), but all-in-all good.

Now, it’s just time to go car shopping…

I’m still waiting to hear back from ICBC about my accident.  Apparently “we’ll call you after we look at it in the next day or two” doesn’t mean “we’ll call you in the next day or two”.  I called them, and got the daytime number for my estimator.  Yay.

Tomorrow’s a fun day of a PT test (which I have to attend in order to give the tester a chit saying that I can’t participate), then an ROE briefing where we find out who we are and aren’t allowed to shoot on our next sail.  Details withheld due to OPSEC, sorry.

Then a nice leisurely sail to show off to VIPs (your tax dollars at work?), followed by a nice leisurely sail to train navigators, followed by….? Family time?  More sailing?  Time will tell.