Vacation, all I ever wanted...

I had a wonderful Christmas, but have to admit that my vacation (which began Dec 22 officially, and ends Jan. 2) is the best present I got, followed closely by season 5 of Northern Exposure on DVD (thanks, Monkey!) and the Family Guy video game for PS2 (thanks, Keri!). Speaking of monkeys, Blogger ate my last post about helper monkeys and ponies in the form of an email exchange and I'm just too lazy to rewrite it now. But The Biffle and Alison used helper monkeys as a comedic Christmas theme, so you can get your giggle on there.

Besides the usual holiday-ness, I'm spending my vacation getting caught up on things that I don't have time to do when I'm working. Such as paying my car taxes (two months late) so I'm legal now after spending two hours at treasurer's office and DMV, spending the gift certificates I got for Christmas, car tune up, stocking up on firewood, cleaning house (especially after having 10-plus people over for xmas dinner), and coloring my hair (chocolate cherry). I'm also using this week to work on my book so I can meet my first deadline (in January) for an annotated chapter outline and about 5,000 words in the form of chapters. Everything has been finalized - contract signed - and my book will be finished by the end of March to be out by fall of 2007. I get such a kick out of little things, like how the standard friends and family question, "how's the writing going?" has changed to "how's the book coming along?" When I deposited my advance check, I wanted to jump up and down and tell the bank teller (yes, at the drive through) that the check was for MY BOOK. I didn't, but I wanted to.

To answer the obvious: the book is coming along fine. I'm loving every minute of working on it, even the research, even the editing. It's a topic I could talk about endlessly (women and work) and I also get to be funny.

I think 2007 is going to be a very good year.