There was a mosquito in my bedroom last night.

I tried bargaining with it. I promised that if it sat on my skin, I wouldn’t flinch, I wouldn’t move, I would just hold still and let it stuff itself on my blood. I swore it could have a full pint of the good stuff.

I offered to set up a plate of water, shallow and non-filtered. Even rainwater, if that would be better for its little eggs. Anything, everything, whatever it wanted or needed, I would give it its heart’s desire (do mosquitoes have hearts?) if it would just SHUT THE EFF UP.

It didn’t.

My crankiness level would be sky-high, since I’ve been unhappily awake since 4AM, except that it is a gorgeous day, sunny and cool with a light breeze. And I have two adorable dogs who are wandering around the backyard appreciating the weather. B, especially, likes the temperature, I think. He’s a lot more active on cool days than hot, when he tends to lie underneath pieces of furniture with his tongue out.

Oh, people who know more about plants than I do: what is this plant?

I should know its name but I can’t remember it. I bought it to put on the front porch, but it lasted for two days out there, miserable and droopy at the end of every day, so I decided it needed less sun. I moved it to the patio and it’s been so flourishing ever since that I almost wish I wish I could keep it. I’m death on plants, so I’m not going to — it’ll go live with some safer person when the house sells — but I’m pleased that it’s happy at the moment. But I wish I knew what it was.

Writing is going so horribly that I’m being extremely mean to myself. Hmm, that sentence might be backwards. I’m being extremely mean to myself so writing is going horribly? Which is cause and which is effect? Tough to say. But I’m on the fourth version of the scene that I’ve been working on for the past week. I manage about six hundred words, then delete them.

I keep coming up with ideas for why it’s so hard, things I’ve forgotten to consider, plot holes, characterization issues — but I seriously wish I was done with this book. Last night — before the mosquito — I told myself that I just needed to do a writing binge. To treat this like a school assignment with five days before a deadline that would prevent me from graduating, or a magazine deadline where the issue is going to press with blank pages that would lose me my job. Then I met my friendly neighborhood mosquito and instead of writing-binging this morning, I’ve mostly been drinking coffee and playing solitaire and waiting for a plumber to arrive. That counts as work, right? Waiting for a plumber? Yeah, I thought not. But as soon as he’s here (or she, I don’t mean to be sexist in my gender assumptions about plumbers), I will settle into writing. Words will get written. Real ones. Meanwhile, though, I will keep drinking coffee and enjoying the weather.

At some point, I’m going to sit back and think about what I’ve learned from Grace. I’m not sure yet what it is. Not to have too many characters? Not to let side characters steal the show? To stick to an outline instead of abandoning it? To put more time into planning? Except I put a ton of time into planning with Grace. I thought I knew exactly where I was going, I just could never figure out how to get there.

I think probably the most important thing for me is that I really need to stop overthinking. I never considered plot or structure or character arcs with Ghosts and it’s entertaining nonetheless. And A Lonely Magic was a seven-week whirlwind where I never knew what was coming next and I adore it. Somehow the “write like mad without too much thinking” is my best strategy, I just need to figure out how to do it successfully without letting myself get turned around too much.

So yes, still working on Grace, finally starting to see a little forward movement instead of spinning my wheels. I don’t even know what revision I would call this now, maybe seven? And, of course, this is all before my usual multiple revision rounds that are edit rounds, not rewrites. Ah, well. I persevere! (It’s a character strength. :))

I’m persevering on the house, too. It’s not yet 10AM and I’ve checked off another item on the to-do list, namely clean and paint the trim on the patio. While I was at it, I wandered around to the front and touched up some of the trim out there and discovered — ridiculously belatedly — that the trim around the new windows by the door (sidelights, they’re called) was light blue. Seriously, what planet have I been on for the past month? I was berating myself for my lack of observational skills while I painted the blue white, to go with the rest of the trim, but then I realized, or maybe remembered, that I actually have excellent observational skills, as long as what I’m observing is people. Trim color does not interest me, not even when it’s on my own house, which is why I shouldn’t be a homeowner anymore. People do.

That said, when I was sitting on the patio, semi-admiring my work and mostly comforting a stressed-out dog who really wanted to be in my lap, I also did some good observing of the way the sunlight passes through my backyard neighbor’s bamboo. It’s seriously beautiful. Something about the way the light gets broken and the bamboo sways makes it alive. The light that is, not the bamboo, which is, of course, obviously alive. It’s magical. I tried to take a picture, but I’m a lousy photographer. I couldn’t capture it at all. Well, or maybe my iPhone was not the best camera for the job.

I did take a picture of Zelda, though, to commemorate the occasion.

Zelda, taking a nap on her dog bed

What occasion, you ask? Well, we’ve owned that dog bed for years, and she never, ever uses it. It’s where Bartleby curled up the day he wandered into my backyard, but neither of them spend time there. I decided to throw it away, since it’s got a hole in it (presumably put there by the now-unhappy mouse that was living behind the now-gone granite countertops that had been sitting on the patio since my kitchen remodel.) I intended to drag it out to the curb for the trash guys, but got distracted by the bamboo, and what do I see when I turn around?

Zelda.

Perhaps expressing her opinion of all this chaos.

When I started this blog post I had something specific I was going to write about and it wasn’t Grace and it wasn’t Zelda and I have no idea what it was. Maybe fear? I’ve been thinking a lot about fear lately, good fear and bad fear, and optimism and faith. Fear is an emotion that people want to dismiss quickly, one way or another. Either it’s, “oh, you’ll be fine, you’ve got nothing to be afraid of” or it’s, “then don’t do the thing that scares you.” I feel like neither of those is the right answer.

I think some fear keeps me alert but also lets me know that I’m doing something exciting. A little good fear — not anxiety, but fear — keeps me present and focused. On the other hand, anxiety is the bad fear. Anxiety is when the fear starts spiraling into worry and becomes irrational. I’m trying very hard to stay present in my life and not let the anxiety take over. It’s trying, some days more than others. But as long as I can see that, I think I can beat it.

That’s the optimism and faith speaking. Or maybe the character strength of hope? I’m often truly scared about the future that I’m heading toward. What if I get sick? What if the dogs get sick? How will I deal with X, Y, Z? But whenever I get too focused on those what-ifs, I take a step back, and look at the day I’m in. What can I do to make today better? And what can I do today to make my tomorrows better? The answers to those questions are so much easier than the answers to the what-ifs. Right now, the answer is “stop writing a blog post and write Grace instead!” So off I go.

What can you do to make your today better?

I totally stumbled across this article — I was reading another one about dogs not liking hugs, which turned out to be sort of silly and obvious and this one was a link on the side — but I like it so much that I need to save it, and what better place than my blog?

Basically, it suggests an incredibly simple mindfulness exercise: for fifteen seconds, notice your breathing, in and out. And then ask yourself, which of my character strengths am I going to bring to my next action?

The character strengths are categorized into Wisdom, Courage, Temperance, Transcendence, Humanity, and Justice and then broken down within those sections into deeper levels. Some of them will be easy for me to remember to use: perseverance, creativity, curiosity. I recognize and appreciate those strengths in myself. (From the Wisdom and Courage sections.) But appreciation of beauty and excellence; gratitude; and hope (Transcendence) are just as useful and necessary in my life.

And then the others — love, honesty, bravery, zest, judgement, love of learning, humility, perspective, kindness, humor, spirituality, forgiveness, prudence, self-regulation, fairness, leadership, teamwork, social intelligence (in no particular order) — well, I won’t remember to use them as often, but I hope having written this post will encourage me to turn to the idea of approaching life from a position of mindful inner strength when I need them. It’s fifteen seconds that could change my day.

In other news… my list of things to do seems to keep getting longer instead of shorter, but I think the items on it may be getting both easier and more nit-picky. A new one that I added today is that my painters missed an area in the front room. I’m not sure how I missed it on the run-through and part of me wants to just ignore it. But now that I’ve spotted it, I see it every time I walk through the room. So finding a little can of the same color paint and touching it up is now on my list. And re-grouting my bathtub looks so good that now I want to re-grout the other bathtub. I painted the interior of the French doors that lead to the patio and the inside of the laundry room door — they both look so nice that I’m considering painting the exterior doors. That kind of stuff. Maybe they’re delaying tactics? Or distractions to keep me from obsessing about the thing that I really need to do, aka finish writing Grace.

Speaking of which… yeah, I should be doing that right now. But I’ll breathe for fifteen seconds first and then bring a character strength with me. Or maybe two. It seems like a time for both perseverance and creativity!

I am miserably allergic. The combination of paint and dust and spring pollen and an extremely careless dairy intake* has knocked me flat. I want nothing more than to crawl under the sheets and go back to sleep. Well, apparently I want to whine to my blog more, because that’s what I’m choosing to do, but mostly I want to sleep.

But the blog inspiration was because I was realizing how lucky I am. My reaction to feeling so allergic was the automatic stress of a decade ago: I can’t be sick, I have too much to do! And it is true that my to-do list is about eighteen items long at the moment, ranging from the enormous — finish writing this damn book — to the marginally less enormous — clean the porch, touch up the trim paint, call a plumber about the dripping faucet — to the reasonably minor — install a bathroom light, spread some mulch around the plants out front.

And then I remembered that with the exception of the book, no one else on the planet cares when I do all the other stuff on my to-do list. I could crawl under my covers and have a completely unproductive day and it would not matter to anyone. When I put it that way, it sounds kind of bleak, but I didn’t feel bleak about it when it occurred to me. Instead, I just felt really fortunate. How lucky I am to be able to be sick with impunity. Sure, it sort of sucks to feel so lousy, but it’s so nice that I can be sick and decide to go back to bed and have that not be a disaster. It almost makes me not want to go back to bed, just so I can appreciate how fortunate I am.

I also woke up this morning to an incredibly painful jaw. I think I was grinding my teeth in my sleep. This is not fortunate, but I know exactly what it was from. I’ve been waiting for some of the houses in my neighborhood to sell and for the sales to close and have known, comfortably, that despite all my preparation, I wouldn’t be putting my house on the market until that happened. Well, it’s happening. Two houses sold this week and one closed. One of the houses that sold had only been on the market for about two weeks. That’s… well, exciting. Good news, right? Also terrifying in its own way. If I wanted, I could finish up the “must be done” items to put the house on the market this weekend. Well, not the book — but the house-related must-be-dones. I keep telling myself that there’s no rush, to take my time, to relax, but I think selling a house is just not ever going to be a relaxing sort of proposition.

Yesterday, I bought wood stain and black spray paint and touched up the cabinets in my bathroom and the solar lights that line my walkway (respectively). That’s the kind of job that normally I would think I should do but never get around to. Two hours of work, maximum, and both the cabinets and the walkway look so much better. It makes me wish I’d done the cabinets about five years ago. I could have been living with them looking nice all this time. Ah, well. Lesson learned, maybe.

Meanwhile, today I think I will be taking it easy. Some words on Grace, so I don’t break my current chain and maybe a couple of the phone calls I need to make, but otherwise, I think I’ll be wallowing in the freedom to be miserably allergic. Happily miserable allergic, if that’s not a total oxymoron!

*The dairy intake was both really stupid and sort of totally worth it. I was in my car, passing a Starbucks, thought how nice a coffee would be, and then got inspired in the drive-through lane to try their carmelized honey frappucino. It was perfect. Absolutely deliciously sweet and cold and everything I wanted. And I was probably a third of the way through when I thought, duh, the reason this tastes so good is because it’s real milk, you idiot! So yummy, though. If you handed me one right now, I would absolutely drink it even knowing the price.

The painters are here. For the past seven years, there’ve been two patches of different purple paint on my bedroom wall. By the end of today or maybe the end of tomorrow, the walls will instead be a subtle grey neutral shade. I actually think the color is really appealing and I hope it’s going to look good with all my floors because the whole house will be that color, bedrooms, bathrooms, living room, kitchen, all of it.

I’m not sure how I feel about that. It’s strange to be making the house so nice so that I can (eventually) hand the keys over to someone else. The last few days I’ve basically been cleaning everything that I can, taking down the pictures on the wall, stacking up the books in boxes in the garage or piles in my closet.

I should take a picture of my closet because the piles… well, I started putting just a few books in there. The ones that might be essential, the ones that maybe I couldn’t get rid of.

Some cookbooks. The Zuni Cafe cookbook that taught me so much, the Smitten Kitchen cookbook that my aunt gave me, the Perfect Recipe cookbook that I use every Thanksgiving.

And then the books that had just a little too much meaning. Not the ones that had so much too much meaning that there was no way I was getting rid of them — that tiny collection made it into my mom’s cedar chest. When I am 80 years old and living in an assisted living facility, I’ll be using a magnifying glass to read the copy of Winnie the Pooh that my parents gave me for my fourth birthday or the copy of The White Dragon that was an unexpected gift in sixth grade.

But the others.

The Hunger Games trilogy, because when the third book came out, it was delivered, of course, on the day of release. R came home from school to find me reading it. Every twenty minutes for the next two hours he came into my room and said, “Aren’t you done yet?” until finally, exasperated, I said, “Do you need me to go to Barnes & Noble and buy another copy so that you can start reading it now?” He said yes. He said Yes! My dyslexic boy, who I was told might never learn to read, would certainly never enjoy reading, couldn’t wait two hours longer to get his hands on Mockingjay. Do I need to keep the whole trilogy for that? Probably not. But the sight of the books spurs the memory and the memory brings me joy.

Some Dianna Wynne Jones books. I’ve owned them since I was young. They were some of the first books I bought for myself. I’ve carted them from place to place for decades, keeping them even when letting go of so many others. The complete works of Lois McMaster Bujold. Comfort food when I’m sick. The Mystic and Rider series by Sharon Shinn, I couldn’t say how many times I’ve reread them. A couple books by Ellen Emerson White that are, on the surface, light entertainment, but on a deeper level, are stories of psychological survival in the face of trauma.

These are not books that are going to fit in an RV.

So maybe I stick them in a box and let them live in my brother’s basement for a while, waiting for the day that I decide to give myself a new home base. Or maybe I give them to friends, trying to find them new homes with people who might love them. Or maybe I donate them to the library, letting chance and fate decide whether some stranger will discover something that delights them or whether they wind up in a landfill. Maybe, maybe…

It was just about a month ago that I decided to embark on this adventure. I remind myself regularly, almost daily, that I can change my mind. This is my decision, my choice. If it’s too hard, I don’t have to do it. But underneath all the fear and all the angst about things, objects, stuff, a drumbeat of excitement steadily thumps away. I have no idea what the future is going to bring me, but letting go of the past is the first step on the path to finding out. Someday, sooner rather than later, I’m going to eat a lobster in Maine, go grocery shopping in South Dakota, admire the Grand Canyon with my own eyes, watch the sun rise over a beach while I walk the dogs before settling down to write… and suddenly those piles of books don’t seem so big after all.

On the other hand, I do need to be able to afford gas to do all those things, which probably means I should go back to writing the words that might someday earn me my lunch money. Onward!

My garage.

I’m getting ready for a garage sale today. So much stuff. So much stuff! It’s a strange process, deciding what you can let go of, what you can’t. Even stranger when you start getting into the question of what your belongings are worth. It’s obvious to me, at this point, that financially, I would do a lot better if I started selling all my stuff on eBay and spent as long as it took to do that. I posted an ad on Craig’s list for the sale last Sunday and the emails just started flying in. It motivated me to start looking stuff up and ugh, it’s so strange to see what stuff sells for.

The ugly Victorian pottery that’s been in my family for over a hundred years? Basically worthless. No surprise, it’s ugly. My great-grandmother’s china that I was comfortably ready to sell, believing it basically worthless? Not quite worthless. The sugar bowl and creamer sold for $20 on eBay. I suspect I’ll be lucky if I can get $10. If I tried to sell it on eBay, I’d have to list it and wait and pack it and ship it… such a hassle, and no guarantee that it’ll sell. Ah, but a new idea just struck me — I’ll try to sell it at the garage sale for reasonable prices and if it doesn’t sell, I can list it on eBay instead of giving it to the thrift shop. Perfect compromise.

Meanwhile, the Legos and Playmobil? Argh! So many people emailing me about buying them and of course they all want the bargains and they all want them now. I really hope that I don’t have people sitting outside my house at 7AM tomorrow, waiting to grab the toys out of other people’s hands. I also sort of wish I’d looked up all the eBay prices before I listed prices online. I thought I was setting fair prices — and I am, I suppose, by standards of garage sales of 30 years ago — but online auctions change the market. People know that they can sell this stuff on eBay so probably they do.

And then the books… wow, I have so many books. They’re piled up in bags under tables in my garage. There’s no room to put them anywhere else, at least not yet. I’m envisioning the Playmobil all disappearing in the first twenty minutes and then me lining the table with books. But my guess is that most of the books won’t sell. If they’re selling for .01 online, I can’t exactly undercut that price (except, of course, that all those penny books come with a $3.99 shipping charge.)

It’ll be interesting to see how it goes, anyway. Ironically, I scheduled the day because a friend wanted to bring some stuff to the sale and I knew he was going away for several weeks. As it happens, he can’t make it tomorrow. It may be a long day running it on my own. And I guess I should get back to pricing! Wish me luck. 🙂

My parents lived in an RV for a while, shortly after they retired. The one thing I feel safe to say that I learned from them is that there’s a lot to know about RVs before one complacently heads off into the universe in one. So I’ve been looking for blogs about them. First thought: learning is such a different process today than it was twenty years ago. I know we all know that, most of us probably appreciate it on a regular basis, but seriously, so much knowledge exists at my fingertips about so many things. It’s mind-blowing.

But I found a site that’s been helpful, Hitch Up and Go, a huge list of all the blogs on RVs that have been submitted to the creators. By huge, I mean huge, at least several hundred of them. I’ve been slowly but steadily working my way though, looking at each one and then sometimes following links to other places, and it’s fascinating.

The list is like a microcosm of the blogging universe. It includes a tiny smattering of professional blogs, people who are clearly making a living via their online presence and maybe even a pretty good living. It includes a larger group of people who clearly wanted to earn money online, maybe even do, but their blogs don’t look professional and the money they’re making is probably only from sidebar ads. Then there are the active blogs, people who are writing about their lives on the road. Some of them are fascinating, some of them not so much, and some are both on consecutive days.

A fair number are very dry: listing every road they went on, every place they stopped, the people they met, without telling much in the way of stories about their experiences. But those are personal blogs, so maybe they’re saving information for themselves. Still, for a reader there’s such a difference between “We went out for dinner with Tom and Mary. The food was okay.” and “We had dinner with Tom and Mary, old friends from our days in Poughkeepsie. Tom’s retired now from his job at the bottle-cap factory but his collection of bottle caps is impressively weird. For dinner, we ate Mexican at a little place down the street. It looked like a dive, but their chips were delicious. Not so much the refried beans.” Details! Not only important details, but details that give context & meaning. I’ll try to remember this if and when I start to write about traveling — no lists of roads taken without at least trying to say why it matters.

The interesting ones, though, are the dead ones. Plenty end with an ending post, a good-bye as the former travelers settle down. Sometimes it’s sad. One woman ended her blog with the story of her husband’s death and it was heart-wrenching even though it was the first thing I’d ever read about them. But so many just sort of stop. Some day in some month, some year, they wrote a post and then… never again. Sometimes that last post is “I’m sorry it’s been so long, here’s what’s going on.” You get the idea with those that the author has gotten bored with blogging and can assume that they didn’t pick it up again. Other times, though, the post is just another day in the life and then… nothing more. I’ll never get to know what happened to that person. Since I never knew them anyway, it obviously doesn’t matter — but it’s still just an interesting experience. Blogs become books with no endings, stories that never finish. Ghost blogs.

Poor Zelda keeps sticking her cold, wet nose under my arm saying please, can’t we get up, and it’s 8:30, so she’s been incredibly patient with me. So off I go! But reading random blogs has been fun. Maybe tomorrow — or someday soon — I’ll link to the good ones that I’ve found, because there are some people having great adventures and writing entertaining tales about them out there on the internets!

I used to think I was sort of minimalist in what I owned. My house, compared to many others I’ve seen, has far too many books but not otherwise a lot of clutter. I had entire rooms that I thought were close to empty. A guest room with nothing in it but a few chairs and lamps. A front room with a chair, a footstool, and three bookcases. The living room with a couch, a chair, a daybed, a dresser-like television stand and a television. Seriously, not much stuff.

Oh, I was so wrong. My house is overflowing with stuff. Stuff, stuff, and more stuff.

I’m trying to balance my competing needs — to take my time looking through it and to get rid of it all as quickly and painlessly as possible. To save what I value but not get bogged down in owning (or being owned by) a lot of things. To respect my past but not wallow in it.

A long time ago, I threw away my high school yearbooks because I didn’t imagine I would ever care. I’ve regretted it since. I don’t want to figuratively do that again, but at the same time, if I owned those yearbooks right now, they would so be going in the trash. I’m trying to cut down the memorabilia to only what will fit inside my mother’s cedar chest and it is requiring me to be ruthless. R has these big thick binders, portfolios, from all of his early school years. So much art, so many stories. Math worksheets, science projects, records of field trips, photos, mementos. So much stuff! Meanwhile, I’ve got letters. I found an envelope with all the letters that R’s dad wrote to me during a year we were separated. Ugh. I’m not sure I want to read them, but I’m also not sure I want to throw them away. Letters from friends, journals from all the years that I wrote journals, baby books, high school awards, scrapbooks, photos, photos and more photos.

Being ruthless is not so easy.

However, I woke up joyful this morning and that was fun. Not joyful about cleaning out the house or the big adventure, but joyful because yesterday, while driving home from Sarasota, I figured out why I’m stuck on Grace. It means going back, but not all the way back, and — much more importantly — it means I see my way forward again. Two weeks ago I would have been so annoyed with myself at the thought of going back at all, but after days of grinding my wheels, being stuck in the mud, I’m just delighted that I’ve got an idea that might bring some movement. Yesterday, in fact, I gave myself permission to not write — it’s been a long week and I was wiped out after spending the day driving to Sarasota and back — but before I went to bed, I wrote a few sentences anyway, because I wanted to write. Wanting to write is such a good feeling!

Tomorrow I’m taking my niece to Universal and then after that spring break is over and I’ll be able to really buckle down and get back to work again. In between throwing away letters and journals and beloved books, that is.

Writing this weekend was absolutely horrible. Yesterday came very, very close to being the first day of 2015 in which my total word count was less than zero. In fact, it might actually have achieved that dubious honor. But I’m not counting it as such because even if I did delete more words than I wrote, I did write at least a few sentences and the words I deleted were not working anyway. I also discovered my problem, which is what I really needed. Writing work happened, in other words, even if the word count doesn’t show it. Besides, I haven’t been tracking my word count this year, because tracking word count just stresses me out instead of inspiring me.

My problem, alas, was that my ending doesn’t work. It’s strange the number of ways writing can not work. You’d think it would be so straightforward: do the sentences make sense? Do they line up one after another in a proper order? Congratulations, your writing works! But, no, that’s not how it goes. You’ve always got the question of whether they’re good sentences, interesting sentences, but you’ve also got the question of whether they fulfill the promises that the story makes.

In this case, events changed in little ways to the point where my ending no longer made sense. Noah was making a choice that worked for the situation I expected him to be in when I started writing. But along the way, little things happened — not big things, not huge changes, just minor drifts away from my mental image, natural embellishments to my mental map. And suddenly I was at a blank wall, no further progress possible, until I realized that Noah — the real Noah, the Noah on the page, Noah as he had taken form while I wrote — that Noah was nowhere close to being in a dark enough place to do what I was trying to write him to do.

There was much wailing and ranting and pulling of hair when I realized this. Honestly, it’s a good thing I write on a computer and save my file in multiple spaces, because if I’d had one paper copy, I might have taken it out into the backyard and set the damn thing on fire. My frustration level was high enough that watching it go up in smoke might have been really satisfying. But then I would have woken up this morning thinking, “now what?” regarding my own life, instead of spending yesterday evening pondering “now what?” regarding Noah’s life. And my pondering did get me places. I might spend some time writing in some circles, my words might not drive toward the conclusion the way I expected them to, and I probably am not going to finish writing this week (DAMN IT!), but I have a direction this morning and a plan for how I can keep what I liked about my ending and write around the parts that didn’t work. So, progress. Slow and frustrating progress, but progress.

This week is a weird milestone for me. I should wait to write about it until Wednesday, but ten years ago Wednesday, I was at SXSW for work and a co-worker convinced me I should start a blog. To say that I didn’t take it seriously for the first few years would be a dramatic understatement. I had various computer problems, a busy life, and a strong sense of privacy, of not wanting to reveal much about my circumstances to potential professional contacts. I didn’t have my name all over the blog or anything, but there’s no real such thing as anonymity on the internet. Anything you write might someday be discovered by a real-world contact or the whole world. In those first few years, posts were sparse. But it’s been ten of them and wow, ten years is really a lot of life.

It makes me think back — and think forward, too. I think it’s time to make some of my daydreams reality. Not the ones involving magic kingdoms under the sea or small towns where people fall in love but the ones involving my day-to-day life. But there’s a dog stuffing her nose under my fingers, saying, please, please, please, her tail wagging, so more about that the next time I write. Happy Mondays! May all your work this week delight you. Hey, I like that wish so much I’m going to make it for me, too — may all our work this week delight us!