Sick Day. . .er, Turkey Day

Since we've had some comments on our lackadaisical & infrequent updating of said blog, here is a belated look at our Thanksgiving. Soon to come: Christmas. Maybe we'll post something for that by Valentine's Day. So the original plan for Thanksgiving was to head down to Florida to be with the rest of the Shealys for the big Turkey Day. Unfortunately, we both came down with the dreaded respiratory junk that was going around the office. By Wednesday night, I was running a fever, coughing, with a sore throat and runny nose, and Cy wasn't far behind me. We were able to get some last minute "fixins" for a Thanksgiving dinner and we even used our fine china for maybe the second time since our wedding!
It actually turned out to be kind of nice. At least we got to rest a lot, even though we missed spending time with the family, especially Noah. His Uncle Cy was really hoping to teach him some more great vocabulary lessons, like calling all cars "golf carts." And thanks to Aunt VannBeth, we were able to get some antibiotics and start feeling better before we had to head back to The Baud after Thanksgiving.

NaNoWriMo

November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, if you will. NaNoWriMo is all about motivation. It's a great thing for aspiring writers, to encourage you to get your ideas on paper. For one month, it's all about quantity, not quality. The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel (more a novella, really) in just one month. It's great because you just sit down and write, and you don't get hung up trying to edit and rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. That's for December.
This year, I decided to write a fantasy story just for Cy. He came up with the names for several of the characters, so each time I finish a chapter, I pass it along to him to read. If I'm feeling brave enough (which I doubt), maybe I'll post an excerpt on my profile one of these days:
Carissa's NaNoWriMo Profile
As of right now, I've got about 21,200 words, so there's still a lot to go. . .

Fripp Trip

The first weekend of November, we had an extra vacation day and were just itching to use it. We remembered that Uncle Mike had offered to let us stay at his Fripp house, so we emailed him to see if it was feasible. Turns out he has not 1, not 2, but. . .ding ding ding. . . 3 properties on Fripp, so we chose the house. The whole island is a gated resort, and it's very quiet and peaceful there (though that may be just because it's the off season). It was so nice to just get away from everything and spend some time together. We were feeling pretty lazy, so we didn't do much, but we did go for a long walk on the beach and around the island the second day we were there, so that was nice.


What was really funny about Fripp was the way there were tons of deer just roaming around. They seemed pretty tame--they would come really close to you and just kind of stare at you instead of running away. We saw one just chilling on someone's patio. But the funniest part was when we were sitting on the couch talking and we heard this noise at the front door, so Cy walked over and opened the door and there was a deer right on the front porch, spying on us! I'm not sure which of them surprised the other more - Cy kind of jumped and the deer took off running. It was too funny.

So last year we had this great idea that we would carve these really intricate jack-o-lanterns. Going with the ever-popular Pirates of the Caribbean theme, we made a Jolly Roger and a Captain Jack Sparrow pumpkin. How naive were we?! It took like 4 hours per pumpkin. And that was with the special tools. We decided to go for something a little bit more traditional this year, and a lot easier. But we were happy with how they turned out. We put them on our front porch on Halloween night and sat out there in our pirate costumes to give candy to the ten kids who streamed, yelling, off the random fire truck that had driven them all over from who knows where to trick-or-treat in our cul-de-sac. Weird.

Pirates of the Scare-ibbean

Okay, so now that we've verified everything seems to be working, let's back up to Halloween, since that was the most exciting thing in our recent history. After much debate (and Cy wanting to be Dobby from Harry Potter but unwilling to fork out the $ for that ugly mask), we decided to be Jack Sparrow (err, Captain Jack Sparrow) and Elizabeth Swann from Pirates of the Caribbean. We took second place in the costume contest at work - Yea us! And though the Dox Cave gave the Cube Decorating Contest (right before Trick or Beer) a valiant try, Cy and his cubemate Scott took first place for their 8 foot inflatable grim reaper. The Nightmare Before Christmas took second though, so the Shealys ruled the day!!!!

Testing 1, 2, 3

Okay, so everyone else has a blog so we figured we might as well do one too. I would say don't expect much because we have zero free time right now, but work can get kind of boring sometimes, so. . .there may be a new blog post every five minutes on some of those days. But hooray, here's our blog, yea for us, we're the Super Coolest of the Shealys, enjoy this glimpse of our glamorous lifestyle. Ha.