Thoughts from the job searching front

Did I mention that I hate writing cover letters? I'm not very good about telling strangers how very awesome I am. Also the fact that you can't (well shouldn't) just send out the same one to every company is annoying. And then there's the whole who-do-you-address-it-to thing. Most of the time it seems like all the hard work you put into making the letter sound more personalized is ruined by the fact that you have to address it to "Human resources at_____" or the "hiring manager at ______" or whatever. Totally spoils the effect I'm going for. Sample lessons? Short stories? 50k word novels? Bring 'em on, but cover letters make me want to hide under my bed.

Attempting to revive my neglected blog for... the however many-th time

It has been a while. Things got busy and exciting in Korea, and in all the busy-ness and excitement my poor blog fell by the wayside. But now I am not busy, and life now is not incredibly exciting (I do my best to make it so though!) so I don't even have those lame excuses to not update my blog.
I've stated to look forward to the beginning of NaNoWriMo (www.nanowrimo.org), and in preparation (What! I'm actually preparing?! I guess so!) I've been reading "No Plot, No Problem" by Chris Baty. Perhaps his words of wisdom will help me cruise to the 50k finish line a little easier than last year, when I didn't much cruise as crawl. Ah, well. Baty suggests that would-be-novelists hold off on novel-planning until one week before the novel-start-date, and I'm trying to abide by that rule, which is actually very, VERY difficult. I do scrawl down occasional ideas, but they are very disjointed and don't even belong to all the same novel, so I don't think it counts.
Along with immensely difficult task of NOT working on novel-planning, I am stocking the shelves (and by shelves I mean the tiny tupperware container) of my etsy shop. This can be fun because my most popular penny charms are those with Doctor Who quotes, which means I can watch episodes of Doctor Who in the name of furthering my etsy shop sales, which sounds positive, since my etsy shop is currently my only source of income (although I expect that will change in the next week or so).
Here are two of my newest listings, plus a sneak peak at a LOST charm I made using a Korean 100 won coin, which I will be listing in my shop within the next few days. You can check out my shop www.etsy.com/shop/westwoods

Anyway, September has been a month of Penny Charms galore so far, and looks to continue that way, provided that JoAnn's or Michael's sees fit to stock the all-too-necessary dimensional mod-podge.