Update Link: Watch Me Burn – Part 37 | In Case You Missed It: NaNoWriMo Poll

Hope you guys are having a good week! I’m in the final countdown to the end of my summer break, and I got a sneak peek of what my school year looks like. My school district (and so do many others) uses the Remind app — and because I used to work in this district four years ago, I have the same email again. Which means Remind logged me into my classes, lol. It’s the first year of French, so I have only one French I class and one Honors French I class — the other four are a Freshman Seminar which I’m hoping isn’t just study halls, but I guess I’ll find out in a few weeks.  Next year, I should have more French I and some French II classes.

I still haven’t started writing again — I guess I’m not surprised when I think about having written like 59k over just two weeks. I pushed really hard, and the chapters were easy to write, but literally as soon as I got to the end of Act 1, I just hit a wall — hard, and I’m sort of struggling to come back out of it. I wasn’t expecting that, but we’ll just have to work it out.

I’m hoping to get back to wring some today — but I’m not sure what I’ll finish. Today is the one year anniversary of losing my best friend to cancer, and it’s already a bit of a hard day. But my friends and I are getting together to do something we haven’t done in seven years — not since the first of us moved out of state. We’re going to our old Wednesday night pub in Philly and playing pub quiz with our old host. Fado’s (the pub) and Tom had a recurring weekly role in Lauren and mine’s lives since 2011. This is the first time I’m going without Lauren. She and I went alone for almost a year before we started gathering a reliable, steady group every week. But we got older and started careers where it made it harder and harder to travel to Philly for a 9PM pub quiz start — and then Mike moved to Florida, so we just fell out of the habit like you do as you grow up.

It’ll be weird to be there tonight without the other half of the Redheads Do It Better (our team name when it was just the two of us).  We went to pub quizzes in every country we ever visited together and won a lot of money thanks to her insane music knowledge and my ability to remember the most useless of all trivia. Though one time we had a fight briefly over who was the original artist for Say Something back in 2014 — she swore it was Justin Bieber, and I was READY to die on the hill that it was Passenger. She finally agreed and we won. For college students who didn’t have a lot of money to go around, regularly winning $60 was pretty awesome. (And all ties were broken by chugging beer — your girl is UNDEFEATED. I actually beat a Marine once. You haven’t lived until you’ve had a bar full of assholes cheering USA for the guy and the girl kicks hiss ass. HIGHLIGHT OF MY LIFE)

Anyway, I’ll see you on Friday. Take care of yourselves 🙂 Here’s a picture of Lauren and I enjoying some Girl Scout shots purchased with our winnings after one of our solo wins in 2011. Pretty sure this is the night the humidity in the bar fried my Blackberry keyboard (which…is a thing that can happen apparently) and I’m sunburned because I’m a ginger who explodes in the sun.

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