Sunny Sunday

Thanks for all your comments on our Halloween costumes - I'm glad they were effective! Although I'm a little frightened to realise how much I look like Sarah Palin.

My in-laws are coming for dinner tonight. I had originally planned to cook something very complicated that involved stuffing meat with something and wrapping it in something else, but then came to my senses and realised it's disastrous to cook something difficult when they come over because I invariably screw it up. So we're having marinaded chicken, new potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots and peas instead (meat and five veg ... we always teased my grandmother for cooking that. And now my genes have come back to haunt me), all of which are very difficult to screw up. And a bought dessert, because I lack the mental and emotional capacity to prepare dinner and dessert together.

I got so much work done on my Nanowrimo novel today, as you'll see from my snazzy word-count-o-meter. I'm really excited about it (which is typical for the first week; in the second one usually hits a wall). It's set in Zimbabwe again, although back when it was Rhodesia, this time, and it's wonderful to return to that landscape. I missed it after finishing my Masters novel. Zimbabwe is the only place I know from the inside out, and sometimes I think that means it's the only place about which I can write honestly. Even after six years in New Zealand, I feel like I only know it from the outside in, like a friend with whom you get along but have never really talked to in-depth.

I live half in New Zealand, half in Zimbabwe, even though I haven't been in Zim for six years. In a weird way I feel like the 'real' Andrea is still living there - as if I split in two when I left, and the me living in New Zealand is an aberrant, alternate-universe version. As if my real life is being lived by someone else, somewhere else. It's a strange feeling. I still wake up in the morning sometimes and can't remember where I am.

Anyway. I feel certain that this is what I'm meant to be working on at the moment. And that's a good feeling.