Monday Evening Update Just to Update

Today's Update Just to Update (UJTU) is brought to you by the letter "W," as in wet, weekend, windy, weather and say whut??

1. We had a wet, wet, windy weekend. Which means, naturally, that my stuck-indoors yucky-weather survival skillz mode kicked in, and instead of doing anything seriously productive this weekend, I made prodigious quantities of beef vegetable soup and chocolate chocolate-chip muffins and did a lot of reading (Connie Willis, in fact). I did no NaNoWriMo planning. Lots of weekends left for that.

Only there aren't, as I realized this morning as I was paddling...er...driving (kinda) to an early morning dental appointment. NEXT MONDAY is the first of November!!!? How did *that* happen??

I suppose I should at least pick out a notebook and start figuring out character names and such.

2. Speaking of notebooks, one of the few things I actually *did* accomplish this weekend was my first ever outing to the bookstore of a local college. The college has a rather...umm...polarizing reputation, but I will say this for 'em: their bookstore is pretty awesome. They don't have much in the way of woodcase pencils (a handful of sketching pencils and a jar of the ubiquitous Ticonderogas), or unusual pens (mostly your standard Pilot G2s and such) but they do stock all *sorts* of nifty paper products. We're talking stacks of Rhodia, seemingly every available Moleskine product, Blueline notebooks, regular composition notebooks, all sorts of interesting engineering notebooks, Paperblanks journals, a whole aisle of sketchbooks in every size and configuration, and--my favorite, since I'd never had the chance to see them in the flesh before--a full aisle-end display of Rite-in-the-Rain pens, papers, journals, and notebooks.

I bought both a very small pocket notebook and a medium sized one, though I suppose I have no real excuse to own one. Granted, I do live where it rains about six months out of the year, but I really don't *need* to write in the rain. But on the other hand, now I can. If I can bring myself to actually use the things. I'm half afraid to, for fear of not using them to their full potential or something. But I'll probably give them a shot just out of curiosity. The paper doesn't *feel* that weird. It just feels like slightly heavy regular paper. The notebooks smell kind of funny to me, but that may be the cover material rather than the paper treatment.

I rather like the bright yellow color of 'em. I'd take a picture of them, but my indoor lighting shots are pretty lousy (witness the candy corn and pencils shot a few posts back), and although the notebook may be immune to rain, my camera isn't....