it's Monday...

Monday.  That means yesterday was football.  My team won.  So did Bob's.  That made us very happy.  Teams we wanted to lose did so, and the Miami Dolphins, who were winless, beat the Kansas City Chiefs 31-3.  This has been a very strange gridiron year, the lock-out to blame.  I can't believe my team is 7-1, Bob's is undefeated.  Last night the Baltimore Ravens squeaked past the Pittsburg Steelers, in Pittsburg!  Yes, it's an odd pigskin season...

So it's Monday, sunny, cool.  Autumn has hit, makes it feel more NaNo-y.  November is a busy month, with writing, birthdays, turkeys.  I don't cook a turkey anymore because I'm writing.  Not actually on Thanksgiving, but I employ NaNo as a reason to let someone else roast the bird.  I made lots of Thanksgiving dinners in Britain, occasionally for many people.  Now others can cook a turkey.  I have words to consider.

Words to scribble, football to watch, hummingbirds too.  It's not overly rainy and cold as Novembers were in Yorkshire, it's a different life here in California.  My kids, well most of them aren't teenagers anymore, and if I said to Jay's face that nineteen was still a teen she would scowl.  My team plays better, which is a new occurrence since our return, Bob's too.  And then there is just this thing about Mondays.

Mondays used to be just another day.  When we lived in Britain, Monday Night Football was really Early Tuesday Morning Football and I never watched it.  I never wrote fiction in Britain, not until the end of our sojourn.  Mondays weren't even school days!  We homeschooled Tuesdays-Saturdays, so Bob could participate more readily.  Usually on Mondays I corrected last week's work, then planned that week's assignments.  Not quite like writing angsty fiction, but maybe an early prep.

Mondays were these days that often saw rain, but then in the UK, many days carried precipitation.  This time of year they were dark, getting darker, rare to see the sun.  But in California...

California changed so many aspects of our lives.  Kids went to school, like stepped OUTSIDE the house and everything.  It was sunny, warm, rain never fell (still hardly does).  I finished a novel, starting thinking about others for NaNo 2007.  Then suddenly, I didn't stop.

Didn't stop writing, didn't stop plotting.  Editing was a new feature, but my team still lost, woefully dropping to the bottom of the rankings.  Yet novels emerged; NaNo became a great reason not to cook a turkey in November.  That and spending it at my parents' or my siblings' homes.  If I never cook another turkey, I really won't care.

And I probably won't; NaNo will suffice.  I have to work around NaNoWriMo you see, I can tell my eye-rolling family, all of them.  My kids, my folks, my siblings, their kids too.  My kids are nearly all twenty-somethings, but as my youngest nieces and nephew grow older, they'll know their auntie as that funny writer.  Lynn has her Lego obsession, I have words.  And both of those taskings have kept our heads above water for years now.

That's what Monday is now, at least in autumn; a day for considering the pigskin from yesterday, a day to get to work!  Or faff around with a blog entry, one of the two.  Mondays have a meaning like never before.  As the late Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis would say: Just Write Baby!!

Write, win; it's all the same thing...