To get the actually on-topic stuff out of the way from the start, today I wrote 2,701 words, making for a total of 122,078 words in November. Not bad. Though I'd have preferred to get further into the VN script than I did, but...I'll take it. :)
Since I'll be talking about my NaNo experience tomorrow for IWSG, I thought I'd talk about Black Friday-Cyber Monday instead in this post. Because I feel like it. :P
I set myself the goal of not spending too much time or money on the various sales this year.
I didn't really live up to that very well. Particularly the time part. 😅
Spent more money than I'd have liked, too, but at least the two of the three really expensive purchases were clothing I actually needed, and most of the purchases were from small retailers.
So there was the two clothing purchases--one from a major chain that has stores in most malls, and the other from a small business that I found out about when I supported their Kickstarter some years back--and I bought a couple of albums on Bandcamp, not because they were on sale, but because I think they were having one of their days where the creator gets all the money, also one of them actually released on Black Friday, so it was literally the first time it was available, and I wanted to help it have a nice strong release day. :)
I also bought a couple of games on sale in the Switch store (I meant to buy some games on itch.io, too, but somehow I forgot 😭), one from a major publisher and the other from an indie developer.
That was going to be the extent of it--it was already probably too much, since both clothing purchases were over $100--since I figured out a work-around with stuff I already had at home so I wouldn't need to buy an actual standing desk.
But then yesterday the people across the street from me declared war on the tree in front of their house.
By which I mean to say that this happened:
8:00, I wake up (yes, I know, that's late, but I'm self-employed/online-freelancer, so who cares when I get up?) to the sound of a big truck idling in the street in front of my house. I look out the window and grimace to see that it's owned by a tree-trimming company. By 9:00, there are two of them, and there's a wood-chipper waiting between them. Both trucks have their engines running, btw. At no time were the engines on those trucks off.
By the time my brother came to pick me up and take me to his house to escape from the noise (I couldn't drive myself because the stupid trucks were across from my driveway, making it pretty much impossible to get a car out of the driveway, because why would they care if they're inconveniencing someone who isn't paying them?), it's maybe 9:30, and they've already started chainsawing branches off the tree and feeding them into the wood-chipper.
When I come home again mid-afternoon, they're still at it. They ended up lopping off every leaf-bearing branch of that tree. Not that they cut off the whole branches, I mean, just that they cut off the parts that bear the leaves. So next spring, that tree is going to have to work a thousand times harder to survive, because it has no way to put out any leaves without growing new sections. It looks like the skeleton of a tree for a particularly cruel Halloween exhibit.
So it's not so much that my neighbors decided to wage war on that tree as that they wanted to wage war on the entire planet in miniature.
Because in order to murder that poor tree, they also had two huge trucks running their engines for at least eight hours. So on top of preventing that tree from doing its part to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, they also paid someone to have those trucks spewing out even more CO2 into the air, plus they were supporting the destructive fossil fuel industry in order to run those trucks in the first place!
I already hated those people because their guests always park across from my driveway despite countless other places they can park, but now it goes beyond that. Like, now I know that they are truly evil as well as thoughtless jerks.
Sorry.
I just had to vent about that.
Anyway, because I was so ticked off at what was happening, I ended up deciding to give myself a present for surviving it.
Which ended up being two dolls from Pullip Style, and became my most expensive purchase of the extended weekend. But there was a coupon code on the order for 10% off, and both dolls were a lot cheaper from Pullip Style than direct from the manufacturer (in fact, one of them was cheaper new in her box from Pullip Style than the loose sample doll being sold by Groove!), so I feel like it could have been a lot worse. (Scratch that, I know it could have been worse: if I'd gotten the Sailor Saturn doll from Groove, I'd have paid more for her alone than I did for both dolls at Pullip Style. Of course, now I need a Chibi-Moon to go with her, but...)
I had thought about buying one of the "pop statues" from Today is Art Day, but the problem with that was that the sale price wasn't that much lower than the regular price, plus the statue I like best (Nike of Samothrace, of course) had the absolute worst color scheme by a mile. Like, it's got the only bad color scheme in the bunch, in fact. :( Hence I ended up going with dolls instead. Also I wasn't sure where I'd put the statue: whether I'd gone with Nike of Samothrace or Venus de Milo, either way it would have fit in neatly with my Minoan axe goddess and Athene statuette, but there's no room on the shelf with them unless I move Poison Ivy or the Sailor Uranus/Sailor Neptune duo. (Yes, I have statuettes of ancient goddess surrounded by pop culture figurines of tough, sexy ladies. What's wrong with that?)
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