Some recent sunshine & raindrops:

- Splitting Thanksgiving into two days. This year was the first since Ryan and I have been dating that we didn't share our Thanksgiving meal with both sets of parents. Instead, we had one meal on Wednesday with my family and a meal on Thursday with his. And I loved it! There are so many yummy dishes that we only make this time of year, so I always feel the need to eat EVERYTHING. But since we were spreading it out, I didn't feel that way at all.

- Not being in charge of cooking the turkey, stuffing, and other main dishes definitely has its perks, but then you end up eating weird dinners like this instead of all the yummy leftovers.

- Not going Black Friday shopping. I have only waited outside for a store to open once, but have always done at least a little Black Friday shopping for the past few years. But this year, it just seemed like too much. I'm tired of the excessive consumerism of it. So instead we did a bit of decorating and had sushi with our family.

- Getting the Simplicity Itch. I blame Our Yellow Door, because I've been reading through her Simplicity blog series. But this has been on my mind a lot over the past few weeks. We have so much already and we have need for so little, but yet we keep collecting more stuff!

And a little NaNoWriMo Update:
NaNoWriMo is over and I won! I actually completed my 50,000 words a day early after writing almost 10,000 words between Friday and Saturday. It was amazingly fun, and I really enjoyed picking my writing hobby back up. One of the only downsides to pursuing photography full time was that I lost it as a hobby. Once photography became my job, I felt like I needed to leave it in the office and shut the door at 5 pm instead of spending all my evenings and weekends on it. So at least for the month of November, it was nice to renew my love of writing.
Some fun and interesting ways I made it to 50,0000 words:
- Changing my main character's name from Regan to Anna Claire. Words added: 300 (To be fair, I realized that her married name Regan Leland sounded awful, so it was begging to be changed.)
- Creating two characters whose sole purpose in the novel was to gossip about other characters. Words added: 782.
- Writing not 1 but 3 epilogues to the novel. Words added: 753.
- Having one character teach another a couple of line dances at a party. Words added: 706.
- Quoting a scene from You've Got Mail. Words added: 162.
- Including vows and other excerpts of a wedding ceremony. Words added: 846.
- Describing various buffets and meals in detail. Words added: 530.
- Writing the same flashback scene from the angle of each of my main characters. Words added: 1124.
- Describing one character's social media life. Words added: 655.