The sunlight filters through the tree branches behind my back yard and through the medium brown curtains in my dining room, turning them gold and iridescent. The wind has been blowing all day today, so the leaves are flowing across the kitchen walls and the dining room table and it’s just plain pretty. The sky is sort of peachy pink with a little tinge of purple and there are birds chirping back there. My porch door is open (it’s got a screen door) so I can hear them clearly, and the cats are enjoying the smells and sounds. Hawaiian sunsets are unlike any I’ve ever seen. I wish I was close enough to the water to watch, because the sun just sort of melts into a golden pool on a gently moving black horizon. It’s unreal. The Pacific Ocean is really amazing, and so different from the Atlantic. The Atlantic is cold and gray-green and beautiful in its own way, but the water out here is blue in a way I’ve never seen before.

I think I need to go to the beach tomorrow. As it’s going to be 85 degrees, again, that shouldn’t be a problem.

We have curtains in the house now, and it’s making me feel much more at home. It’s so much less like a fishbowl now. Except for the decorative ones in the dining room (where the window just looks over the fenced back yard), we got the Eclipse curtains that block all light and a good bit of noise for the rest of the house. The mini-blinds are thin here and I didn’t like the feeling that the neighbors could see inside. Maybe I was being paranoid, but then again, when I went to visit my friend next door, we discovered her daughter could watch my TV from her window because she was looking down through the blinds. Not anymore! I love my curtains.

This weekend was nice. J was home for the whole weekend for the first time in about a month, so we went out to a nice dinner on Friday night (when you only go out about twice a month, spending more on the place doesn’t seem like as big a deal, y’know?) and then spent Saturday doing the curtains and generally getting things done that needed to be done. It’s nice to have someone here to help me, and I’m much more productive. Sunday afternoon we went down to the Hilton Hawaiian Village and spent the afternoon there, starting with a submarine tour of a coral reef. There are pictures in my photo blog, if you want to see. It was amazing! We spent about an hour under the water and saw thousands of fish, plus a shark, a group of spotted eagle rays, four sea turtles and a spotted eel. I would definitely go back there, especially with out of town company.

Some of the fish came right up to the submarine and swam past the window. The deepest we got was about 104 feet, and the sunlight was filtered so much at that point that everything looked blue, purple and brown. No reds, yellows, oranges, or even really greens. It was wild. And I took far more photos than are posted, which I tend to do when I get excited. At least you only get the best ones that way.

I’m about 80% of the way through with my novel in terms of wordcount, but very far away in terms of realistically finishing the story. I might not even finish. I might get to 50,000 words, put it down, and go pick up something else I’d rather be working on right now. Who knows? But at least I know at this point I’ll make the goal this year. I haven’t lost NaNoWriMo yet, and I don’t intend to start now.

Now it’s time to dive back into the story. That’s why I haven’t posted much this month, for what it’s worth; if I’m going to write anything, it’s better if it can be included in my wordcount. ^_^