Sunny Day...

Okay... So the logic runs like this...

Squish's birthday is next week, right?  And we're going to have a small family party next week, and go eat at Wongs and have ice cream cake (note to self:  must not forget ice cream cake) and then take Squish to a King's game, where she'll see her name on the board.

But she wanted to go to Build-a-Bear with her sister, and since it's easier to have a party for little kids on break, we thought we'd have a party at Build-a-Bear with a couple of kids--not huge, mind you, just a few, but, well, where to meet up?

The house was out of the question.  There was not enough time to clean the house.  Twice.  In the same week.

Crap.

So, the itinerary went like this:  Meet at the park for quick meal of finger sandwiches ("Finger sandwiches, mom?  I LOVE finger sandwiches!"  I don't know why, but cut a PB&J into tiny pieces, and you're a god.  Free parenting tip.  From me.  Finger sandwiches) Goldfish crackers and juice boxes, then caravan to the Build-a-Bear place which was about 1/2 an hour away, then, after they had built their bears, take them to ice cream (it turned out to be frozen yogurt since the Ben & Jerry's I'd been thinking about had actually MOVED.  Thank Goddess for fro-yo, that's all I'm saying.)

And that, folks, was birthday party one.

So, uhm, some of you might question the wisdom of planning TWO birthday parties on either side of Easter.

*piffle*  I say! *PIFFLE!*  Why SHOULDN'T I execute two birthdays  and an Easter Bunny while I'm trying to make a gazunga deadlines!  (Speaking of which, I've moved one back a little, thank Bob, but still.  Not catching up.)  With kids in the house who need attention and amusement, and for me to be caught up on every pop culture reference that they have, in their leisure time, been able to absorb.

Anyway-- so, yeah.  It's been a full an amazing break--for the kids-- and a sort of juggling act for mom. (What's for dinner tonight, Mom?  No, seriously.  We're starving.  What's for dinner?)

But in the meantime, we had a lovely time in the park and some very nice kids got some, well, very varied stuffed animals.  (Our names ranged from Darth Plush to Sir Mints-a-lot to Soft to Spike to Thorin to Cookie.  Seriously-- that's an eclectic bunch of bears from an eclectic bunch of kids, right?)  The only thing was missing was the little dog, but Big T said that he was happy to have Jonnies company.

So, it was a good day, and a good week, and seriously, Mate and I are going to need a day to nap when school starts and Chicken goes home.





Oh-- and this is just sort of a random kid story.  Squish got one of those Rapunzel dolls last year for Christmas, the ones that are three feet tall?  Anyway, she was fun for a while, but, you know, eventually the fun wore off, and the creepy started to sink in.  So Squish was ready to put her in the garage.

I had her put the doll in the hall, and it was one of those mom things:  Guys, could you put this in the garage?

And they completely ignored me and kept putting it back in her room.

Well, this morning, Squish had a mom moment.  She LITERALLY had a nuclear meltdown during which she turned into me right before our very eyes.

"Could you move my doll?  Could you please move my doll?  Because I keep putting her in the hall," gesture, "and she's SUPPOSED to end up in the garage," chin wobble, "but she keeps ending up back in my ROOOOOOOOMMM!!!" WAIL.  Her eyes teared up and everything, and her sister and I just watched her, trying not to laugh.

"God, Mom," said Chicken.  "That was the best impression of you losing it that I've ever seen."

So, well, good.  There we go.  Mini-me, it's a fact!

And wait-- here we go:  Morning turkeys.  You can hear their wing feathers dragging on the pavement when they're all ruffled up like this.

New Releases and More Family Hilarity

Okay-- I'm going to start with the family hilarity before I continue. I know some folks only read for the family stuff, right?

Anyway-- Mate and I did a little impromptu Easter shopping the other night, and forgot to take the stuff out for the next day.  When the kids noticed the candy in the car, I made something up about favors for Squish's birthday (which I had to back up by buying other stuff-- go me!) but I texted Mate first in a bit of a panic.  My text was, well, less than circumspect:

Oh fuck!  We blew the Easter Bunny!

I'm reasonably sure the Easter Bunny was more than a little surprised.

And the other hilarious thing happened just when I sat down to blog.  Chicken noticed that Zoomboy's underwear (which is pretty much his house uniform when there is no school) had seen better days.  Actually, that pair had seen better days when Zoomboy was in preschool, and now?  Well... they were shorts without a seat.  It look like he broke wind and blew out a hole.  When we told him to go change out of his peekaboo briefs so we could throw them away, he stripped naked in the middle of the living room, and all of us girls screamed for him to put his naked butt back into some boxers.  I swear, he's one of the guys from The Big Bang theory in the making.

Also, we went and got hair cuts.  Squish sat up and started talking to her hair stylists like an old pro.  "My name is Squish.  That's my big sister.  I'm a red-head like her.  Tomorrow is my birthday.  My friend Sophie is coming, and my brother's friend Sam.  We're going to Build-a-bear..."

Dudes.  I'm not playing.  She spilled her life story.  This girl is ready for the beauty parlor, no question!

Anyway...

Let's move on to Bolt-Hole.  

Okay, when Mate and I had just moved in (almost exACTly twenty-five years ago) we worked at T.G.I.Fridays.  It paid the rent (barely) and paid for school (with the help of credit cards) and I worked there until I got pregnant and Mate worked there until he got his paid internship at Intel.

Restaurant work is funny.

For one thing, it's HARD on the body-- and unless you master the ways of not beating the crap out of yourself, or work in a place with a slightly slower pace than your average chain restaurant, it really is better for the young.  And because of the pace--uber fast, uber urgent-- it really can seem to suck up your life through a straw.  I know a lot of my mangers had drug problems which stemmed from making the twelve hour days.  Dealing with irate customers (who are often being unreasonable--let's face it!) without ever really being able to be honest with them is sort of the optimum grooming ground for used car salesmen, and those of us who tend to wear our hearts on our sleeves end up fired.  (*cough*  Not that I was ever... oh hell, who am I fooling.    We all know I was fired for rudeness.  But if I'd known I was going to get fired for not sucking up enough, I would have told that flaming twat what I really thought of her!)  Very often, the only reason people don't quit isn't the money, and it's not pride in their jobs, although pride in honest work is always a plus.  No, the reason people don't quit is because the co-worker who just ran a ramekin of ranch dressing to that flaming twat on table twenty-three is your friend, and you'd help your friend through thick and thin, through poor tips and rich twits, and your friend will do the same for you.

It's amazing how tight, how immediate, how permanent, those restaurant friendships seem.  Restaurant friends become roommates, become bridesmaids, become husbands... or, you know.  They're never heard from again.

Because there are no guarantees, right?  Very often, the people working in restaurant work are working toward something, and once they get there?  Bye bye baby!

At the start of the book, Terrell has been working at Papiano's for a number of years, and Colby has been there for a year.  Terrell knows that sometimes, this job is where dreams go to die.  People with journalism degrees or film degrees or sociology degrees-- these people make outstanding restaurant employees.  The hours are flexible, and if they're competent, they can have an extra day a week to continue to work on the job they really wanted, and if they're smart enough to get the degree, they're smart enough to do the job and work with the people.  But eventually, that restaurant job that was only meant to be stop in the road... that becomes the road, and for some folks (I knew quite a lot of them) that's fine.  They're happy.  But for the people who had their whole identity pinned to a dream?

Well, there's a whole lot of bitter bartenders out there.

So at the start of the book, Terrell and Colby are friends-- but Terrell is very much aware of how tenuous that kind of friendship can be.  When Terrell makes the jump, decides to follow Colby into a relationship, it becomes very clear that if the relationship is going to continue, Papiano's is going to be the first thing they leave behind.

But that doesn't mean they can't have a whole lot of fun while they're there!

Bolt-Hole will be available Wednesday, March 27th Dreamspinner Press, Amazon, and All Romance e-books.  If you buy from DSP, you can use PayPal, and they DO send directly to your Kindle, and tomorrow night, I'll put the specific links up from my website--and in the meantime?  Let me know how you like.  I've been reluctant to write an interracial romance--not because I haven't seem them work and thrive, but because of some of the reaction from It's Not Shakespeare.  The critics who read that book and had experienced life from both sides of the fence loved it.  The critics who had only known people from one side were absolutely sure that I'd done the other side a tremendous disservice.  You can, no lie, find back to back interviews claiming that yes, I got the Hispanic community down to the details, but that I was painting repressed white people as a cruel stereotype, OR the exact reverse-- they knew people JUST like James, but I was being offensive with the portrayal of Rafi.

After dealing with that critical mass, I had to wait until a very smart, very human character started talking in my ear before I decided to try another attempt at getting the American race experience right.  Terrell was that guy-- and I love him, a lot.  I just hope that the people reading about him see that I'm drawing from my experience in a racially diverse area, and from my own struggle to put my middle-class white upbringing into context with the kids I taught. By the time I left teaching, it was a no-brainer, but I had a lot of growing up to do in the meantime.  Terrell and Colby's relationship is the result of some of that growing up--and I hope you all love them like I do.

A Chitter Here, a Chatter There

Heya, all!  

Okay, I've got two deadlines this weekend, and four children who are in the house and need to be entertained.  Can she survive?  We'll see... we'll definitely see... I have a release on Wednesday (Bolt-Hole, which is available for pre-sale and which I will talk about on Tuesday/Wednesday-- I put up the little header because it looks VERY spring break, and I thought that was fun!) and if you don't hear from me by then?  Send someone to my house, STAT, because I've been shanghai'd into watching Teen Wolf reruns on Netflix and have achieved a knitting coma of epic proportions.  

Anyway, in the meantime, thought I should share some of the family hilarity, since, you know, all of my fledglings are home, and I am thrilled to the base of my tail feathers.  Because things like this happen, mostly:

Zoomboy:  Mom!  Look at this-- it's an extra special book, because it has episodes four, five, and six in it!  They're all together mom!

Me:  Yes, that is amazing.  I haven't seen anything like that since you bought episodes one, two, and three all in the same book!

Zoomboy:  And look, they've got bookmarks with all of the bounty hunters on them!  Isn't that amazing?  Don't you want me to tell you their names again?

Me:  No.  

Zoomboy:  This one's Greedo, and this one's...

Me, to Mate:  I'd say you did this to him, but I don't think one person alone can shoulder the responsibility. 

Mate:  It takes a nerd village to raise a geek child.

Zoomboy:  I'm a gerd, I like sci-fi, and I'm really smart!

Me and Mate:  0.0  

We need to get into shape faster.  Middle school is coming and we're going to need to catch up.

***

Zoomboy:  Look!  The alpacalypse is here!

***

Me, to random, adorable gymnastics mom:  Hey, could you model these fingerless mitts.  The friend I'm giving them to has really small hands.

Nice gymnastics mom:  I have really small hands.  I'm a really small person.  It's because I'm Chinese. 

I didn't really have a come back to that, but did I mention she's adorable?  It deserves repeating.  

***

Me to Mary:  I don't know what I'm going to do!  This was supposed to be an adorable Christmas story, but it's grown, and it's really more YA than Christmassy.  

Mary:  Well, submit this one to Harmony Ink (Dreamspinner's Young Adult line) and then write another story for Riptide!  (Who sort of contracted this one at the beginning.)

Me:  Seriously-- I've been planning to write this story since the very beginning!  I've got a queue!  I've got deadlines!  What, I'm going to pull 25K of OTHER Christmas story out of my ass?

Mary:  Yeah!  It can be about two guys, see?  Evan and Grayson, and they can have this problem with Grayson's two kids and a swimming pool, and a pet, and they can be--

Me:  Wait a minute.  Is this your story that you're working on right now?

Mary:  Yes--but I'm sort of stuck.  I'll gladly give it to you so you can finish it. 

Me:  Go write your story.  Seriously. 

Mary:  You'd do a great job at it!

Me:  SO WILL YOU!   

***

Me, to Mate, upon seeing this book:  It's awesome to know I'm not the only person going to hell for writing a book.

Mate:  Yeah, I really can't figure out if that's blasphemy or religion.

Me:  Let's call it blasphemy and buy Zoomboy some legos! 

***

 Me to Mate:  So, this is Tom Cruise as a rockstar.

Mate:  Yup.

Me:  I like it.  I like it a lot.

Mate:  As long as he keeps singing Def Leppard, I'm a fan.

***

Squish:  Yes, I know my socks match, but sometimes I have a better day if they're both the same length.

***

Squish:  Do you want me to read you the funny part of Frog and Toad again?  When Sophia read this to the class, we all laughed.

Now, between you and me, I didn't see how funny this was, but apparently it was class A material for first graders.

***

Chicken:  No, I don't want to see The Hobbit again.  Quite frankly, I've seen some of that fanfic, and I don't wanna imagine Frodo and Thorin doing that.

Me:  Oh for heaven's sake-- skip that fanfic.  Jesus, have I taught you nothing.  

Chicken:  Yeah, but all the Teen Wolf and Johnlock was all read out!  All that was left was the porn!

***

Mate, looking at Chicken's computer:  OKay, have you been to any sites that would have popups?  Vendors?  *drops voice* *looks grim*  Porn?

Chicken (to dad):  No-- I swear, I haven't clicked any popups or enabled any apps.  Or looked at any porn on that computer.  (to me, sotto voce)  I use my friend's computer for that.

***

Big T:  Mom, if you're going to go shopping, can I at least make your shopping list?

Me:  No, you only want to write my shopping list so you'll have less to put away.

Big T:  No, that's not true.  Well, yeah it is, mostly, but still-- you buy too much stuff!

***

Big T:  Here, Chicken-- let me show you this website.  It's awesome.  C'mon--c'mon, you'll like it!

Chicken:  Did you just slap your thighs like you would to Johnnie?

Big T:  Yes, but come here and do it anyway.

Chicken:  I don't like games.

Big T:  Trust me.

Chicken;  I don't like games.

Big T:  You'll like this one.

Me (because T is sounding hurt):  Go ahead, Chicken--you can play this one with Squish.

And that was two hours ago.   They're still playing.  Imagine me patting Big T on the head-- Good boy!

***

And that's about it for the family hook-up-- may all of you enjoy your spring break too!  Next post, Bolt-Hole will be out, and I'll chat about that!

Timesuck Thursday

Okay.  You all have this friend.  Perhaps somedays you ARE this friend. (I know I am!) Somedays, ALL of your friends are this friend.

The friend with the "OMG--READ THIS!" or, "Oh crap-- watch this video!"  The friend with the, "Have you SEEN this show?!!"  or the, "Oh sweet jebus, you MUST read/see/watch/do/fondle/own/tweet/retweet/facebook/link to/rubyournakedskinagainst THIS!"

You KNOW that friend.

The reigning King/Queen of the timesuck.

I am discovering that I know a lOT of these people.  Hell, two posts ago, when I was posting about things that made me happy, I had most of those pictures in my files thanks to them.  I love them all.  I have become them.  I dodge out of writing for a nanosecond, and I spend twelve to thirty minutes in a land I had completely not anticipated.  Sometimes I'm informed or outraged, but most of the time?  I'm amused and entertained.  And then VERY much of the time, I'm behind!

Now I'm not here to judge you if you do this.  I certainly have no plans to reform myself, much less other people.  I'm just in the mood to quantify the timesucks that seem to be thrown my way.  Because it's fun, that's why, and I'm behind, and it's time to blog, and after spending a half an hour giggling over THIS FANFIC that Mary sent me, I figure it's time to put a name to where'dallthetimego!

So here, in random order, are things I obsess about, and that people obsess about sending ME, and that I enjoy the hell out of, even when I'm supposed to be doing something else.

*  Wincest videos-- THIS ONE HERE is my favorite right now. And this one.  And this one too.  But some of you know this about me.  And I've infected YOU with this sickness.

*  LOL cats-- can't get enough of them!

*  Tasteful art pictures of pretty men-- drawn is best, real is fine, no peen, penetration, or general raunch, sweetness preferred.  (There is a one person exception to this rule.  She knows who she is.)

*  Alpacas-- this one isn't my fault.  I published that story about the alpaca rancher/yarn mill owner, and suddenly people are sending them to me.  Real ones, ones in pictures... it's really sort of damned cool.

*  Animals wearing clothes.  This include chickens in capes and cats in gawdawful ugly hats.  I'm pretty sure it's a direct result of the whole knitting series thing, and I'm fine with that.

*  Public typos.  Man, I can NOT get enough of that shit!

*  Fanfic-- Avengers, Johnlock, Wincest, and now, (THANK you, Mary!) Teenwolf.

*  To die for little adorable baby animals.  Rhys, this is you.

*  TED videos.  Thank you, Mate, for making me look not totally trivial!

*  Left-wing propaganda vids.  Thank you, Huffington Post, for keeping it COMPLETELY unbalanced, since, well, we know I like it that way. No. I'm not posting any.  I'm trying to pretend politics don't exist atm.

*  Felicia Day videos that seem particularly relevant to me.  Thank God I adore her-- and her ten-minute you-tube show is HYSTERICAL.

*  Yarn I want to possess, in a totally non-platonic fashion.  This one is my fault.  I've sent a lot of my non-knitting friends the link to the Loopy Ewe, and suddenly they're like, "I want to roll in this color like a naked dragon in a field of wild flowers and medicinal dragon marijuana!"  And I'm like, "Yeah, I can totally see that!"

*  TJ and Amal-- it's my only webcomic, and since I hunger and yearn for it, I think it's best I stay that way.

*  Snarky signs and post its and notepads.  I blame Ashlyn for this link here.

And that's not even the half of it.

And yeah, no sign of going cold turkey any time soon.


But I do have a suggestion for, you know, containing the madness-- and that's sort of why I made this post.  See, I figure, if I'm known for a couple of things, then that's what I'm going to get.  So I keep to myself my yen for dragons, Arthur Rackham, impressionist art, Romantic poetry, repressed Victorian poetry, Walt Whitman, Lord Byron, and Ben Franklin references to bisexuality,  teddy bears, Nathan Fillion, sexy pictures of food, and baby blanket patterns.  I figure that what people aren't sending me is time I have to do real work!

City Mouse

So, long ago-- twenty-five years, this fall actually--Mate and I had a non-fight.  See, we'd moved in together in June, but this was October.  School had started, and I was working full time and Mate was working and taking a break from school (which meant finding his reason to go to school while working, because he wasn't seeing the point twenty-five years ago) and the apartment was a disaster.

Now this was back when I still did housework--for one thing, our apartment was about the size of our kitchen and living room right now (which means it was miniscule, because our house ain't big)  and it was sort of bothering me.  I mean, I was DOING more at that point in time, right?

So I came home, sat down on the bed and woke Mate up and started telling him about my day.  He yawned, and I said, "Yeah, and I've got a paper in English and I hate taking Physics, it's making me crazy and I have to work tonight and I know you're off and if the apartment isn't clean when I get back I'll go sleep at my parents until it is."

Wait-- I was gonna what?

Yeah-- took us BOTH by surprise.

I was just so calm about it, but apparently, I'd hit my limit.  (Oh, if only I had that limit now.  You have no idea how foreign that concept seems at this moment.  Pretty much every room in the house is WAY over THAT line!)

Anyway, I got home and the apartment was pristine, and although I've never EVER threatened to leave him since, that did pretty much begin the sense of partnership we have now.  When one of us is busy, the other picks up the slack-- with the kids or with shopping or with whatever.  (Not the house, so much, alas...)

But all this partnership? It had to have it's snapping point, and that's where some of the groundwork for City Mouse came from.


Okay-- so the question you had to ask yourself at the end of Country Mouse, after Malcolm makes his grand romantic gesture, is, "What next?"

I mean, you've got the sweet American who is deceptively submissive (HA!) and the pushy Brit, who thinks he's a dom.  How exactly do you make that work in real life?  What are these two guys going to do to keep this relationship working?

Well, that's the question that Aleks and I asked each other as we were working on City Mouse, and it came down to two things:  food and work.

Sounds simple, right?  But if you think about, living together really does come down to the simple stuff: sloppy or neat?  Eat in or eat out?  Have wild passionate chimp sex when the kids are gone or go to a movie?  Or, you know, both?  So food and work?  Those are two "staples" as Owen calls them that can determine whether or not two people are going to make it.  If they can agree on a compromise, then they'll make it.  If one guy's eating hamburgers all the time while the other one is eating salads, and they're constantly fighting over money?  That's gonna be a wash.

That's the premise behind City Mouse.  We have Owen in the big city, getting a job (that Malcolm hates), becoming domestic (making food he's not wild about, because Malcolm has a pathological fear of gaining weight) and generally learning how to get on.  Like most honeymoons, it's passionate and sexy, and turbulent.

Owen's snapping point turns out to be much different from mine and Mate's, and Malcolm's pushing point is different as well--but that same idea is there.  What are the things these two people need to create a successful partnership?

And speaking of partnerships, hopefully mine and Aleks's partnership worked as well in this one as it did in the predecessor-- but we really did love writing this.  Once again, we both got together on Google docs, and the little pink cursor did it's magic dance.  I love dancing with Aleks--I hope to dance with him some more!

Country Mouse is now available at Amazon, ARe, and Riptide publishing!  We hope you enjoy!

A Grand Day Out

Okay--

So, the last two days have been sort of, well...

Oi!

Yesterday was the "sea scattering" of my grandma, and since we had all of the sadness in the tribute and other places, this was really sort of a different kind of moment.  This was a gorgeous day in San Francisco, in spite of the fact that it looked like we were driving into the foggy maw of hell at the beginning.

When we got there, we found the fog lifting, and after wandering around and shopping (and blowing a wad o'cash at the puppet store!) we connected with the rest of the family (I started calling them the family amoeba-- we gathered together, moved slowly, and occasionally some of us sheered off in an act of osmosis and went somewhere else) and a dribble and drabble at a time, made it to the gate to the ferry.

There, we met my cousin Yeshi, whom I've only ever seen a couple of times.  Once as a hyperactive six year old, once as a carefree twenty-three year old, and now?  He's a world-traveler (well, his father is Italian and my aunt Carol is a world traveler!) and in this incarnation, he was handsome, funny, had an Italian accent via five years in Dublin, (*aherm*  For the record?  Dreamy. How do you get someone with those layered accents to NEVER STOP TALKING?  If anyone has a plan for that, let me know) and looked very very Bourne Identity.  I hope to talk to him and Carol some more this week,  and hopefully some of the awesome rubs off.  (I am sorely lacking in continental awesome.  Perhaps he'd be willing to share!  I am family, right?)

Anyway-- we took a lovely ferry ride and scattered her ashes.  The older family scattered the ashes with reverence, my sons, of course, scattered them with ghoulish glee.  (This was a person?  Cool!) Big T was without his father or I as his turn came, and... well, of all of us, he's the one who dumped the ashes directly into the wind, insuring that we all got to take a bit of grandma home with us--in our eyelashes, in our hair, on our phone covers, in our clothes--you know.  With us.  Mate and I were without words for how to explain to him what he'd done wrong.  What we came up with was "don't dump ashes in the wind", but really, how often is that going to come up in a real life scenario.  Besides.  He dumped all the rest, and I think someone else wanted a turn.  There was actually some sadness and some sentiment during the ceremony--including an impromptu "hymn" of Patsy Kline's "Dream a Little Dream" led by Squish, which was really nice, and a whirlwind impression of grandma after Big T dumped the last bit of ashes, en masse, into the water.  But when the sadness had passed, we were really grateful--in one last gesture, grandma gave us a really really lovely and amazing day.

We were supposed to go for lunch when we got back, but the place we put our name in at was not really prepared for the grand lot of us.  After almost an hour, Mate said, "The kids are DONE--they need to eat NOW!" because they'd been living off of snacks and graham crackers since eight in the morning, and they were tired now.  So we said our goodbyes and ate a quick (and appreciated) meal of clam chowder in bread bowls, and then took off.  We took a brief pee break at the Golden Gate overlook, and came gratefully home to fall asleep in front of the television.

Okay.  I wish.  We came gratefully home where I wrote two blog articles for the promo tour of City Mouse, and the kids built Leprechaun traps.  And I went, OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE! Because Leprechaun traps mean Leprechaun droppings, and I had to put my shoes back on and drive to the store for candy and stuffed bears.  *headdesk*

But Happy St. Patrick's Day-- it would have been my grandma's 92nd birthday, but I'm pretty sure she counted yesterday as a really decent party as it was.

Things that make me happy...

Does anyone remember that book?  It was right at the cutting edge of the new age, shiny-happy-people-holding-hands part of the nineties (which went very oddly with the grunge... don't ask me to explain... I listened to R.E.M. and Pearl Jam and rode out the contradictory wave with hardly a batted eyelash...)

Anyway-- the book was called 10,001 Things That Make Me Happy-- and it was, in truth, a list, and sort of a way to count your blessings, and was, I'm starting to think, the grandmother of the blog MeMe.  So, I was finishing stuff up today, and nursing my UTI (dudes... don't ask... not the first time I've ever worked myself sick, but not the most dignified either!) when it occurred to me that A. It was time to blog, and B. I was oddly enough, out of words.

I needed to take a cue from Knittech and write a 1000 word post (you know, a picture is worth a thousand words?) but I had to get CLEVER because all of my pictures SUCKETH, and, well, I had some sort of residual horror memory of that book and R.E.M. singing "Shiny happy people holding hands!" and a bad Cipro reaction, and, well, here we are.

Things that make me happy!  (And now, with EXTRA SPECIAL EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!)

In no particular order...

Little girls in hats!

Puppies!













Kitties!

Alpacas!

Pretty yarn and knitting!

Finishing projects!



















Little boys and face paint!











Supernatural!





















Pretty menz in general!
















Good television!















Great Movies!
























Great music!


















Books books books!











Batman!






















Parenting!



Good friends AND knitting!

Funny Pictures!

SPRING!!!!












Mate!











Steve

New Book Releases!

Friends!

Which includes, even without a picture, all of you:-)