Friday Fun Words

Hi pals! Yvie's back to provide you with another dose of Friday Fun Words!




Well it snowed here last weekend, and though we all hoped maybe it would melt, it didn't. We're officially into winter and soon not even doggy sweaters and boots will be enough for us to keep up on our morning walks.

But that's OK - snow also means Christmas, which also means presents! So I'll take a little snow.


Onto the words!


*Bions - Ions who find both ion genders sexy

dead sexy

*Frogirsu - tiramisu for frogs. Yes, it has bugs in it.

*Snugglyd - When one is attacked by a Snuggie






*Disherna - When one insults a hernia. Which isn't very nice, they're just doing their jobs by messing up your insides.

I couldn't find a hernia picture that wasn't gross or safe for work, so instead, enjoy this LOLCat




*Haudi - A Saudi Arabian cowboy.





And that's it for this week ape-friends! Stay warm!

*Words and/or definitions provided by Anne Gallagher

In Which We Have An Update

So we're a little past mid month which means NaNo is halfway over!


How's it going for everyone else? Are you behind? Ahead? Tell me all about it. I want deets on how NaNo is treating you this year.

I'm ahead by a few days. I wish I was ahead even more than that so I could really slack for Thanksgiving, but I'm not quite there yet. Still maybe I could do something like hard work, and get even farther ahead.


But hard work is hard, and I'd rather be lazy.


Have you been keeping up with the 30 covers in 30 days project on the NaNo blog? If not, you should check it out because there have been some AWESOME COVERS! For reals.


Just a short post today, so here's an LOLCat to zazz things up a bit.

In Which It Snowed

How was everyone's weekend? Did you do anything fun?


We had a mini snowstorm here. It didn't stop Hannah, Teebore and I (along with Twin and Brother) from hitting a NaNo write in on Saturday at the libary, but it did prevent us from having lights in our conference room due to power issues.


Also I've come to the conclusion that I need new winter boots. I stepped in many a puddle and my shoes were soaked. Also Brother and I helped a group push their car out of the libary parking lot, which made my pants super wet.


Still, it looks pretty. I'm just crossing my fingers it will melt for a few days, so we can clean out our gutters, get up our leaves and winterize the asparagus and garlic.


Twin, myself and our Mom hit up Target for space heaters, but ended up buying some Christmas decorations, so that, combined with the snow, gets me all excited.







What about you? Are you excited for the holidays, or is it still too early?

Friday Fun Words

Hiya all! Yvie is back to provide you with another selection of new words to help you improve your vocabulary.




Good news about Tidus, our kitty we found on the walk. He was adopted by a family with like 6 children, so he's off to enjoy his new forever home.

Wish him luck!

Onto the words!

Cleal - A clean seal






Diskend - the final floppy disk ever made






Lingerms - the germs left over after you do a particularly shitty job of disinfecting something






*Twilint - what one can find in Jacob and Edward's belly buttons. I bet you could sell twilint on eBay and make a cool mil.






*Lyablobs - Blobs that tell falsities. Something like "oh don't worry, I'm not going to devour you" and then they're all "hahaha! Just kidding, I'm TOTALLY going to devour you, even though I have no stomach or other internal organs to speak of. And also, what's my motivation? I'm a blob!"






And that's it for this week ape-friends! I'll be back here next week, same bat-ear time, same bat-ear channel.



* words and/or definitions provided by Anne Gallagher

In Which We Discuss Backup Methods

Once NaNo rolls around, I always see a lot of talk about backing up your work. In fact, I think NaNo has a national "back up your novel" day to remind everyone to do so. Not that it helps anyone who loses their novels before then (and I already know of one girl in my region who lost everything and had to start over)

Almost everyone I talk to says the same thing:

I email it to myself
AND I save it on a jump/flash drive so I am safe.

But are you?

I remember once, back when I still regularly read Murderati, one of the writers said he had added a good 10K onto his novel when he experienced some sort of corruption. The corruption erased the 10K not only from his computer and the jump drive but ALSO (and this is the kicker) in his Gmail.

So even though he was super anal about backing things up, his methods still didn't work.

Which is when he discovered the wonderfulness of Dropbox.

Which is, of course, when I discovered it as well.

Dropbox is a free program/website that allows you to save your documents or pictures or whatevs. You can download it on your personal PCs (it uploads a cute little box on your desktop) AND, it's also available online, so you can access your work on a public PC if you need to, no carrying around a flash drive.

One of the best things about dropbox, though, is that it SAVES PREVIOUS VERSIONS.

So if you make a huge change in your novel, save it, and then immediately have regret, well no worries. Dropbox has your older versions saved as well.

I've been using Dropbox for almost a year and I LOVES IT.

It offers so much space (though I'm sure if you upload a lot of photos your space could easily fill up) AND they offer even MORE space for every computer you download the box on. For example, I downloaded it on both my old and new laptop, and Twin's PC and I got an extra 250 MB for each PC. You can also earn more space by recommending it to others if you roll that way.

I have a few photos uploaded, but even with all of my writing stuff saved, along with our board game info and some stuff of Twin's in there, I'm still only using like 5% of the space.

So let's say I upload my novel on Twin's PC (why I'm using her PC, I don't know, but let's just suspend disbelief for the purpose of the hypothetical).
I save my novel in her dropbox and it is automatically updated in all my other dropboxes on my laptops.

OR, I take a fun photo and upload it to my dropbox. Instead of then emailing the photo to someone, I can just share the dropbox folder with them. They can open the folder and see whatever I have stashed in it.


IT. IS. AWESOME.

I cannot overstate the awesomeness. Because the best thing about it is, I don't ever have to worry about emailing myself and saving my novel to a flash drive ever again. Which frees up more time, which I can then use to get more writing done.




So, are you still emailing and flash driving your work? Do you have a fun program like Dropbox?

In Which I Share My NaNo Spreadsheet

A few people (or maybe it was just Hannah. I don't remember for sure) expressed interest in seeing the NaNo spreadsheet I created last year.

Now, granted, with some of the new stats on the My NaNo pages (have you SEEN those? Cuz they're awesome!) some of the spreadsheet is superfluous, but nevertheless I'm still using it.

I'll show you the completed one from 2009, since the 2010 once is identical, just not filled out as much since we're only a week into it.

Here's a screenshot:

That's kind of a far away shot, so here's some closer ones:



The yellow days are holidays/birthdays.

The above is where I actually make changes. The document automatically fills in the Red zeroes in the "Words Written" Column. All I have to do is type in the words I wrote that day and everything else is calculated. It also automatically turns green. In the "Over/Under" column you can see how many words I was ahead or behind for that day. So on day 10 you can see I wrote an extra 10 words (it says -10 due to the math involved, but you can see it's green which is good) whereas on Day 11 I didn't write any words, so I was 1667 words behind (red = bad)

The next column is a simple Count Up - it tells me how many words I've written in total up to that point. Then there's the "Total Remaining" column which tells me how many total words I have to write before I reach 50,000

This part of the spreadsheet is just a chart. Mostly I included this because it's a pain to try and see your chart on the website when there's a lot of traffic. Also, I like visible representations. The red bars are what I wrote for that day, the black bars are where I was supposed to be (don't ask me why there's not a black bar for day 30.)

At the top of the Spreadsheet I just keep a running total of how much I've written and how much I have to go, so I don't have to do a lot of scrolling around.

So that's it. It's colorful, which I like, and provides me with a lot of data.

If anyone would like a copy, I'd be happy to email you the blank template. Just send me an email (my email on my profile is up to date)

Anyone else keep a spreadsheet or a NaNo measurement system outside of the website?

Friday Fun Words

Yvie's back! To provide you with your usual fun words to enhance your human vocab.

Unfortunately, once again words were scarce this week. So I'll have to throw some other fun things your way.

But first, guess what we found on out walk on Wednesday?

THIS!







We heard him crying outside, so we went to go take a look, since maybe he was just asking for his owners to let him in. But once he saw, he came running across the street to us!

George and Tula wanted to eat him, but I was a lady and said "Do not worry, small furry mammal. I shall not eat you."

Mom and Anne named him Tidus, after one of Mom's character's in her NaNo project.
I wish we could have kept him, but there are people with cat allergies in the fam, so it was a no go.

Anne brought him into her work where he'll be on stray hold for five days and then he'll be adopted. Just like me!

I hope he gets a great home.

Onto some fun things!



















See you next week Ape-Friends!