I am finding it hard to believe that it’s December already. Where did November go? I swear we must have skipped a couple weeks, because it zoomed by at light speed.

I failed to achieve any of my November goals in November — I didn’t finish revising A Precarious Magic, I didn’t succeed at NaNo, I didn’t finish writing Cici 2, I didn’t even take the van in for an oil change.

I did, however, visit friends. And I played a lot of games. My current favorite is Ticket to Ride, which is a game where you build train routes around the US. I think I played it once before and was terrible at it, because I had no idea where any of the cities were. But we’ve played twice now, and I’ve been highly competitive. Not only do I want to win, I want to build the longest route and have the most destination cards and go out first. I’m not competitive, usually — I like playing my best, but I don’t need my best to be better than your best. I don’t care if I lose as long as I played well. But I’ve found it so satisfying to have really good interesting routes.

I’m also jumping the gun on New Year’s resolutions. It’s the end of the decade, a thing that wouldn’t have occurred to me yet except that John Scalzi blogged about it and then a Jimmy Fallon video I saw on Facebook talked about it, too.* Given that it’s the very beginning of December, I’m sure I’ll have been reminded of this another twenty-hundred times before the end of the year and be totally sick of the idea.

But conveniently for me, I wrote about the decade ending ten years ago. Do you know what I wasn’t doing in 2009? Writing. Anything at all. And yet, about three weeks after that post (where I was thinking about meditating and exercising and losing weight), I started thinking about writing again. The 2010s are therefore, for me at least, the decade of words. I am not making any predictions about the 2020s, but I did decide it was time to put Streaks back on my phone and start paying attention to walking and meditating and taking photos again. Early New Year’s/ new decade resolutions!

*The Jimmy Fallon video included John Mulaney beautifully describing the 2010s. I had no idea who he was. Never heard of him, don’t think I ever even saw him before. Now I want to watch everything he’s ever done, probably on repeat. In fact, I have to admit, this blog post got greatly delayed because I had to watch videos.

It also got delayed because I got a new phone in November and it came with Apple Music. I’m far too poor to pay for a music service, but wow, I love it so much. I’ve been creating playlists like crazy, including one for the season. This has involved listening to endless variations of classic Christmas carols trying to decide which one fits best with the overall tone of my list. Do I want Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers or Mickey Mouse singing “Deck the Halls”? Etc, etc. Much fun.

Oh, but this was supposed to be a best of November post. Oops, I got distracted. Yeah, that’s the theme for the month, I think. And I’m supposed to be making dinner right now so I can write with a friend in half an hour, so I think I’ll just say best of November = playing games with friends.

But I will also say: A Precarious Magic. In celebration, Christina took me to her hair stylist. I couldn’t decide between blue and purple but she said I didn’t have to.