All the news that's fit to print

Just got home today from a quick visit to my mother-in-law's.  Bet you didn't even realize I was gone, did you? :P

Poor N'djema realized it, all right. She snuck into the house and hid in an off-limits bedroom while I was loading the car. She was locked in since Monday afternoon with no food and no water (we always keep the toilet lid down); but she was fine, just very much in need of attention.  Our couch (um, our landlord's couch), however, is far from fine seeing as how she used it as a litter box. One crap and a whole lot of pees.  Half of the seat is drenched in cat urine.  We have two blankets on the couch to protect it from baby messes, but sadly, they did little to nothing for the cat pee. Anyone have any handy tricks for getting rid of the stench?  Please? Why oh why didn't she use the bathmat or the doormat, or even our bed, where we have a waterproof mattress cover??? ETA: The couch seat is a bench with stapled down upholstery, not removable cushions. :(

Soëlie is eleven months old today. She very much did NOT enjoy spending most of said day in the car. However, when we were almost to Bordeaux, she started clapping. A first! My mil said that she and S were clapping along to songs this morning but that S was not very adept at it. She must have been mulling over how to do it because she had the hang of it in the car. Here she is going at it in the backyard, but I didn't have time to tell her it is easier without an oak leaf in hand before the phone rang and cut the photo session short. :P

I've decided that I need to print out what I have thus far of TBU.  I work better on paper, and I think having the physical MS in hand will help me wrangle my thoughts into line about what needs to be done. I usually get excited after doing paper edits, so I'm hoping that gives an additional boost. This is going to be an "anything goes" editing pass, meaning anything in need of fixing can be fixed rather than, say, reading just to get into the story or reading for plot fails only, etc.  Since I'm doing this to generate story love, any kind of inspiration to fix or tweak is welcome.

ETA:
Art journaling!  I knew I was forgetting something when I hit the post button.  I've been faithfully journaling, through the moves and all, and have only missed a few days here and there due to said moves and one spat of Funk and Fatigue.  I tried doing zentangles* for several days because I had read that some people do them for meditation. I had hoped to use them to enter a book-brainstorming-friendly zone, but that, alas, did not happen. I find it unrelaxing in the extreme** to constantly wonder if I'm doing some "approved, established" pattern correctly.  I also found doing tangles was stifling my personal creativity. For the past few days, I've been trying to do TBU-related sketches, especially creatures and artifacts from the world in order to foster book love...

I'll let you know how that goes.

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* You can google zentangles to find out more about them. You might be as unimpressed as frigg was. :P

** I first typed "in the stream." Um, yeah. That too. :D