Travel Series: LUXEMBOURG, GERMANY

Here we are for another Globetrotters post, and this time we're bringing the 1998 world trip to a close at last. Before I get on with that, just one quick little note - I started this series back on September 1st, 2011. For the most part I've managed to post a travel "snippet" once a month since then, but next year posts may become a little more sparse. Then again, maybe they won't!

Okay, let's get on with today's post.

Luxembourg & Germany

I'm completely serious when I say these are the only two photos I appear to have from this leg of the journey. Either I lost a film somewhere (highly likely), or I was just too over it all to take more than two photos (unlikely, despite the fact that I was very over it all). I do have a travel journal entry or two from this time, so I thought I'd share some of that writing:

We travelled to Germany overland from France and via Luxembourg. Dad and I spent about ten minutes in that little country [Luxembourg], just so we could say when asked that we’d been there. Then we moved on, Germany in our sights.

We travelled beside the great river, heading steadily north. It was wine country and we tried to find out where we could sample some wines, but nothing was free, so we forgot about it.

Germany struck me as being very green and lush. I guess that’s what generally colder weather will do for a nation. I was no longer used to the browns, reds, yellows and dead grasses of Australia, since I had just travelled through America in the tail-end of winter — places like Oregon and Washington State were what I had in mind as I looked around me [in Germany] — but I still took note of the landscape as decidedly German.

I must tell you now, in hindsight, that I really don't know what a "decidedly German" landscape is like. I guess when I wrote that, I just felt influenced by the knowledge of where I was or something.

Anyway, I am going to wrap this post up now, and admit that I'm feeling a little bit bittersweet about the 1998 trip reminiscence ending! But I have plenty more travel stories to tell, and I will be moving onto those sometime, somehow. Maybe even next month? I'm going to leave you with a couple of photos my dad took during our trip in 1998. They're less landscape and more us (okay, mostly me):

Not sure where this was, but I like the look of dry amusement on my face.

New Zealand - North Island. It really is beautiful. You should go!

In the middle of nowhere, in Australia, trying to figure out where to go next.

With family in New Zealand - I'm on the far left.

This was after my breakdown in Europe, once I had decided to go home early.

Me and a glacier, I'm pretty sure. Probably Switzerland.

Italy, I think. There was an art exhibition with free wine and snacks (of course we were there), a bridge over water, and this photo.

Airport, early on in the trip. Probably Sydney, on our way to NZ.

Thinking about 2014

Near the end of last year, I did a "Goals 2012" reflection post, where I talked about my various failures and achievements of the year. A few days later, I talked about my plans for 2013. Of the four things I mentioned in that latter post, I've done three of them. One of those three things was releasing a physical CD full of my music. The others were less of a big deal, but I'm glad I did achieve some things. Still, there are plenty of things I haven't done so far this year that I wanted to do. While I'm not quite ready to look at my Goals 2013 page and evaluate failures/achievements yet, I will be doing that sometime in December.

Actually, though, I'm already looking to next year. In 2014, I really want to change how I approach achieving goals. I want to focus on novel revision (that has been the plan the last 2 years, but other stuff has often got in the way of me actually achieving much there). I want to make it a goal not necessarily to get a particular number of projects revised, but to at least try to do, say, one chapter a night (this could be unrealistic). I have so many projects to my name that I will definitely not run out of work. I'd also like to schedule in some breaks from writing/blogging. I've never done that before. So, I guess you can see that I'm not entirely clear on what I'll be doing next year, but I do want things to change. I've tended to be quite regimented in my goal-achieving plans, and it did work at first, but it's no longer quite as effective.

One thing I can say is that I'd dearly love to finally get that Grimm Brothers book off my "currently reading" shelf at GoodReads. But that does require me doing up little reviews of each story. I just really want to get that done.

Anyway ... I'll write more about my 2014 plans as they slowly solidify. For now, I just wanted to say that I'm thinking about it. And umm, considering I've written 11 novels so far, and all of them need revision, I do have plenty of work to be going on with. ;)

Wahoo, it's NaNoWriMo time! (nearly)

The most exciting thing about NaNoWriMo 2013 so far is what I just found on their site moments ago - awesome 2013 graphics, which I shall scatter throughout this blog post.

I particularly love the 1980s videogame-style ones. :)

Are you participating in NaNo '13? I am, and my username remains the same as it has always been - yoghurtelf. There's actually no reason at all for me to have that username, since even back in 2002 when I first "enrolled" in NaNo, I wasn't a huge fan of yoghurt. I can say that I'm a fan of elves, but I haven't read any books with elves for well over a decade now (I used to be all about the fantasy, but I've branched out a lot since then). Let's just say that I love Terry Brooks's Shannara series, though I have yet to read any of Lord of the Rings (I did read The Hobbit as both a kid and an adult, and I loved it every time).

Anyway, dairy and me don't mix too well, but I am still overly fond of my NaNo name, and so I plan to keep it forever.

This year for NaNo, I'm writing a YA contemporary with "darkish" themes. I wrote the same sort of book this June for BuNoWriMo, and this was the other idea I was throwing around. It was either that, or this, and since I wrote that back then, I'm writing this now. Well, not now, but in November.

Will I see you guys typing away madly (or scribbling, as some people still prefer to do) during November?

P.S. If you're a long-term participant in NaNo and think this idea is cool, vote for it!! It appears to be leading the charge and the more votes it gets, the more quickly it should be implemented. Yay!

Yup, I'm a NaNo nerd. And proud.

[O&AM] Cats vs. dogs

This month I'm going to talk about something very near (literally and figuratively both) to my heart: CATS! More specifically I'm addressing that age-old question: do you prefer cats or dogs? All I can do is answer for myself, but I definitely look forward to seeing what you guys think on the matter (I already know what some of you out there think). So, let's get down to the matter at hand:

Cats vs. dogs

Some people are dog people, and some people are cat people. Sometimes people are just general animal people, with no clear "winner". And of course there are people who just don't like animals at all (I don't understand these people). I guess I don't really understand the universal creature lovers, either, because how can you love a two-inch-long flying cockroach as it zooms straight at your face ready to scuttle around in your hair? EW. But anyway ... moving on.

I'm mostly an animal lover in that I care about the welfare of all animals (I even feel sorry for theose scuttly disgusting cockroaches as they die very slow deaths in my vicinity). But there is one type of animal I love most of all: CATS! Not only do I love cats, but I have a slight aversion to dogs, even though I have known a few that I actually liked. In the contest of cat vs. dog, cats definitely are the winners in my world. And here are some reasons I love cats:

• they are totally weird (okay, dogs are weird too)
• they don't smell (well, sometimes my boy cat smells after he's done a stressed-out poo in his carrier after a vet trip)
• they're not completely needy (welllll, yeah, my boy cat craves attention and walks around the house meowing if something's not quite to his liking)
• they purr. ha! dogs don't purr! (at least I haven't heard of a dog purring)
• they don't sniff crotches
• they don't eat their own poo or spew, or anybody else's
• they are generally very neat and tidy when it comes to toilet time, i.e. you don't need to carry a poo bag around with you to clean up after them
• you don't have to bathe them (until they get really old and can't bathe themselves)

I think you get the picture here. I love cats, and while I can admire dogs for their silliness, their cute personalities, and their very cute faces, I definitely prefer them not to be near me. The two dogs I've loved most in the world are dogs that are incredibly well-behaved and placid. And yet there have been dogs associated with my family that were the naughtiest dogs ever to live, and I loved them too. But that's more a case of "you can't choose your family, but you still have to love 'em." :P

Are you a cat person, a dog person, both, or neither?