Thanksgiving turned out to be a very pleasant day! We ate fake turkey, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, apple pie, brussels sprouts, mashed potatoes, gravy, and I even made pork loin for the meat eaters! We lit a fire and ate until we couldn't eat anymore, then we headed to the pub. Then we had leftovers for a few days, which was very tasty.

I don't have a hell of a lot of time to post, but I wanted to celebrate this:


For those of you that don't know, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. In the month of November, you write your butt off and if you make it to fifty thousand words before Midnight on December first, you are a WINNER! There's really no prize, per se, except the satisfaction that you wrote a 50k word, 175 page novel in one month. I took on the challenge and miraculously managed to make it to my goal. I say miraculously because I wrote 20k of the 50k in the last 4 days. But I learned a LOT about writing, how I work, and now I have a really, really crappy first draft. And I'm not saying that to be modest -- it's really bad. But like any first draft, it has great potential! So hopefully between now and death I'll be able to revise it into something that doesn't make me cringe when I read it.

What else has been going on? Well, of course Ireland's economy is almost completely flushed down the toilet, and we've been taking to the streets. However most recently, we were joined by 50,000 to 100,000 other people who also took to the streets. Here I am, waiting to march, in about six layers (it was cold):


I gotta mention this lady because she had one of my favorite signs. Apparently I'm not the only one who HATES Pat Kenny:


There were so many people, it was incredible. People of all shapes and sizes and interests. I've never been on a protest of that size before, and I wonder if it did any good. But there will be more, I'm sure. There are lots of images from the day, but here's a pretty good flickr set that someone has up.