The Farm @ Beverly Hills in Downtown L.A

So husby finally got sworn in as a U.S citizen, and my mom came to town for the swearing in ceremony. So we all, including lil' one, went out to celebrate afterwards at the The Farm at Beverly Hills, which is a very nice-yet-kid-friendly restaurant downtown at L.A Live, across from the Staple Center. Yummy yummy food. I had a lobster sandwich, which was really good, but I really liked stealing from my mom's barbecue chicken salad. :) For dessert we ordered s'mores! They bought us a little fire in a pot and gave us homemade graham crackers, marshmallows and a hershey bar and we actually roasted marshmallows at our table. It was kinda pricey at $10, but it was fun all the same. We also all shared a big banana split. Oh, also I had a pot of green tea with jasmine and since I'm such a big green tea fan, I enjoyed it a lot.
Overall we had a very good day and a very good lunch! There are a lot of restaurants at L.A live but I hope I'll be visiting The Farm again sometime soon. I'm just sorry husby ate the remaining half of my sandwich instead of letting me save it for dinner. :p

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

This book has been sitting on my mom's bookshelf for the longest but I never picked it up until I was there this last Thanksgiving. Well it's about this African American named Macon Dead (there's a story behind the name) who's growing up in early 20th century Pennsylvania. His family is rather dysfunctional and he's sort of trying to find his place in the world. The thing I loved about this book is that the characters have such depth. Every one has a story behind them, and all of their stories are interconnected somehow. It's an almost dark novel with bits of other-worldiness mixed in. As a writer, I have to say that the imagery and similes she uses are brilliant. One that stands out to me was when Macon lifted a heavy brass door knocker to a big empty house, and when it fell the sound was "soaked up like a single raindrop in cotton." She actually lets your see, hear, feel things in writing. Combined with the excellent plot, I can see why she won a Pullitzer prize. I'll have to read this one again sometime.

Smizing

I was trying to smize (smile with my eyes, courtesy Tyra Banks)....

But Nana said I look kinda scary, so now I get the feeling that I was getting ready to bite into somebody's neck. Hm, were there any black people in Twilight?

December Ambitions

By the end of this month, I will have:

Finished 5(count 'em, five!) books

Learned to sing Con Te Partiro (Time to Say Goodbye) in Italian

Called my older brother just to say hi

Dined at a new restaurant

Memorized Ghana's national anthem

Learned a new Anansi story

Finished NaNoWriMo at 15,116 words

Which means I came 34,884 short of my goal. :( So I did not complete National Novel Writing Month this year. I didn't write as much as I could have. But I hated my story that I ignored it for days on end. Then in the end I caught up as much as I could, but unfortunately it wasn't enough. But on the upside I wrote 33 pages worth of fiction! Which is pretty awesome considering I started with 0 pages! Plus I learned some valuable lessons:

-On days you feel blah, caffeine rocks

-Consistency is the key to achieving a goal

- Writing stories about an afro-rocking business woman turned warrior princess of an underground rebel kingdom is probably not my specialty after all

-Dynamite and enclosed spaces don't mix! (something crazy one of my characters did)

So no, this was not a total waste. In fact it was fun to challenge myself to do something so ballsey as write a 100+ page novel in 30 days. I will try again next year. And next year, I will be ready. Oh yes, I will be ready!

#70: NaNoWriMo

November 1st marked the start of National Novel Writing Month! (otherwise affectionately known as NaNoWriMo). Every year, thousands of people converge onto the nanowrimo.org website to register to participate in a mad, month-long writing sprint that will result in a 50,000 novel being written by each participant. That's if you don't give up, lose your sanity or break your fingers in the process (or all three...it's possible!). So I joined the challenge not to obliterate the remnants of my social life, or to avoid going outdoors for the month of November. No, I joined because I love to write. And very few people in their lifetime ever start to write a novel, let alone finish it. So even if my resulting literary piece is a pile a drivel, at least it is a pile of drivel that I had the balls and painstaking persistance to create. This is in fact my greatest fear, that the novel I'm working on now will be absolutely terrible and painful to read (or as the NaNoWriMo site put it, I'm "concerned that my novel will set new records for suckitude."), but the aim here is quantity over quality. Every great book started out as a rough draft so this is no different. I just have to keep on, even if I wake up every day this month and am struck with fear and dread upon remembering that I have a 50,000 word novel to write. These are just birthing pains. I know I'll be happy with myself in the end.

Switching to Wordpress

I just realized that I would like to keep lists of all the restaurants and books and things that were involved in this so I'm going to switch over to wordpress. They have features for keeping lots of lists and things. So...*sigh* I bid you a fond farewell, blogspot. It was fun while it lasted. :) I'll give word once all my stuff has been transferred over to the new site.

*EDIT*

Blah, I changed my mind. Blogspot will suffice well enough. I will just do my best to fit all my lists into the left sidbar. :)