I should not be this excited.

The husb is a gadgeteer. My blogroll brims with authors, agents, publishing folks, librarians, friends... his consists of Engadget.

I grew up manipulating the family computer, learning my way around it. I remember one fateful night when I filled up the entire hard disk, all 400 megabytes of it, by importing one silly little Enya song. And my parents bought me a CD-rom of fonts, not knowing I'd try to import them all and fill up the hard drive one more time. Those were the days when you had to stop and seriously consider whether you had room for, say, WordPerfect 5.1, and you had to figure out what you would delete in order to make room for it.

My point is, I don't care how muddy the sandbox is, as long as there's a shovel and a bucket and some rusted toy cars. I'll find a way to have a good time.

The husb is not so easy to please.

The result is that I, a mild-mannered woman who would probably just as soon be sewing cloth napkins, get to tag along for the ride, and I either get the cast-off item, which is often perfectly good, or -- if it's cool enough -- I demand my own.

This is why I'm going to the mall tomorrow around lunchtime to plant my literary bum on the floor and wait in line for two iPhones. I'm even roping a friend into coming so she can buy two for our friends. I'm bribing her with the Roomba we've never really used, except to watch Winston work himself into a frothing frenzy trying to get it to just. go. home.

And because I'm some kind of freak, some kind of Pavlovian victim of pop culture, I'm sitting here and I'm actually nervous. I'm actually anxious that I will get to the mall only five hours before the phones go on sale, and then I will not be one of the people to get two of them. Excuse me, four.

However, I cannot allow this to overtake me. Because the time between now and 1 pm tomorrow, when I leave for the mall -- these are crucial times. These are hours in which I can ask the husb for just about anything. "Can you take the dog out?" because I need my energy for waiting in line. "Can you get me a cup of water?" because I need to soothe my vocal cords for my upcoming shouting matches with nerds outside the Apple Store. "Also a glass of wine." because you will do anything I ask in order to keep me happy until I show up with two iPhones, possibly four, tomorrow evening.

I can't be too hard on him. After all, when I backed my car into a car belonging to a little person in March 2005, he is the one who said on the phone, "There goes your new iPod," which I hadn't bought, and then showed up at home with a pink iPod Mini.

My point is, when you don't have children, your electronics and your pets become your children.

And let's just say the MiniDisc player is the child we keep tucked out of sight. It's kind of the Harry Potter of gadgets.

PS - Christen, I need a mailing address -- 80kay (at) katiealender (dot) com.

I had something important to say. (PS - Big News)

But I forget.

Oh! Here it is. I just plucked a book off the shelves, one I've been meaning to read, and I opened it to find it has a Foreword, a Preface, and a Prologue.

I admit my passion has been dampened.

It's one of the books I got to take home from the Rejected shelf when I worked in the CBS Movies & Miniseries department. That was back when they had one guy doing reality shows and seven executives in my department. You can only imagine what has happened to that ratio in the years since.

Today is back-to-work day! I know I will have a good time when I get there. It's just the going that gives me such heartache.

Come to think of it, I do have Big News.

As I have posted, the Lovely Editor moved forward to the greener pastures of graduate school. We worked on the edit of the book to get it wrapped up and submitted to copyedits, and I and my project were placed gently onto the roster of a new editor (by the way, which sounds better -- Winsome Editor or Charming Editor? or Foxy Editor? or Delightful Editor or Beauteous Editor?), and she read over the manuscript and has decided that she wants to take a little more time.

Because I am no Rowling or King or even that person with the Foreword/Preface/Prologue trick, it is not, perhaps, wise to release my lamb of a book into the wilds of the summer 2008 releases. What does this mean? It means that (the book soon to be known as the book formerly known as) The Girl Least Likely will be emerging in early 2009, not late spring 2008.

What does this mean? It means a few things. Above all, it means that a book can always be improved, and in my experience, the more eyes, the better. It means that I will have a little more time to bang out the next project, as well (not under contract, but in the interest of expediency, nice to have them lined up like ships going into the Panama Canal), it means that I will get to work with (Winsome/Delightful/Beauteous/etc.) new Editor, which I am looking forward to only in the way that authors and other supreme narcissists can, because let's all sit down and think about MY book for a while. Plus, she's very nice, and I highly enjoy dealing with nice people.

Important transcript:
Katie: "Do you hate my book?"
Editor: "No!"
Katie: "Oh, okay! Everything is fine, then."

So we will all just wait a little longer to hold this masterpizza literary tome in our grubby paws, then. In the meantime I shall endeavor to write more books.

And now I'm off! Off to work. Where there are no cloth napkins at all.

Sing with me.

If your dog eats things he shouldn't,
clap your hands!
If your dogs eats things he shouldn't,
clap your hands!
If your dog eats things he shouldn't,
and you really wish he wouldn't,
If your dog eats things he shouldn't,
clap your hands!

If your dog eats sandwich baggies,
clap your hands!
If your dog eats foil-wrapped cheese spread,
clap your hands!
And if not just once but twice now,
he has eaten bees and said "ow",
If your dog eats cardboard matches,
clap your hands.

If your dog eats things he shouldn't,
clap your hands!
If your dogs eats things he shouldn't,
clap your hands!
If your dog eats things he shouldn't,
and you really wish he wouldn't,
If your dog eats things he shouldn't,
clap your hands!

Clap clap.

On today's menu was bee #2.

What a diff'rence 23 days makes...

552 little hours...

Paris is free at last, and I think it is worth looking at the photo slideshow attached to that article, because it becomes clear, when you see pictures of her beaming, that she has never given the press a sincere, non-ironic smile before in her entire public life.

Who is this chick with the soul?

I especially love that she has considered the impact her image had on young girls.

I wish her the best.

In other news, the 48-Hour Film Festival went pretty well. I was the Head Writer, although it was a really good collaborative effort, in my opinion. It works like so: you pre-register your team with the festival. Friday night, you send a representative to their headquarters and are assigned a genre, which differs by team, and then they announce a character, prop, and line that must be incorporated somehow into the project. This is all to keep you from writing and shooting your entire project beforehand.

We got "Sci-Fi". The character was a foreign exchange student named Frederick Laino, the prop was a bumper sticker, and the line was, "Hey, my mom gave me that!"

So from 7 pm to 11pm, we brainstormed ideas and tried to nail down a concept. From 11:30 pm to midnight, I banged out a script. From midnight to 2:45 am, we revised the script. Then went home, got a few hours' sleep, and were back up bright and early Saturday morning to shoot the thing.

We had really great actors -- our star was Meredith Bishop, who starred in that brilliant Geico commercial a few years ago that was a tease for a fake reality TV show called "Tiny House"; Chad McKnight was our foreign exchange student -- he's been in some movies directed by one of Chris's good friends, one of which got scooped up at Sundance this year; and our two government agent types were played by Greg Jbara and Alice Ripley, two very talented Broadway actors doing us a huge favor.

It was a crazy weekend, and we could have used an extra 30 minutes at the end to polish it up, but the tape got turned in at 7:21 pm Sunday, 9 full minutes ahead of the deadline. Someone told my sister-in-law, who produced it, that they arrived at 7:32 pm and were disqualified. Ouch.

There's a screening Friday night, so we'll see what we're up against. Meanwhile, I'm still tired.

My marvelous hiatus comes to a close this Thursday... back to the dog shows for me. My heart is sad, but my head knows the mental stimulation will be good for my brain, which likes to get all mushy and lazy when I'm off work.

Happy Tuesday!

PS - Congratulations to author Jason Pinter, whose thriller THE MARK debuts today! Also to fellow Backspacer Renee Rosen, whose debut EVERY CROOKED POT also hits stores today.

Longing

We're doing the 48-Hour Film Festival this weekend... tonight is the writing, and then I'm pretty sure I'll be on set most of the weekend. Film school flashbacks, anyone?

Speaking of flashbacks, Sarah Dessen blogged today about her obsession with "Facts of Life". Man, I loved that show. That show taught me what a hooker was (remember the episode where Tootie ran off to the city and met the teen prostitute whose life seemed really cool?), what MOMA was (Blaire's date with Pizza Face), and in general fueled a minor obsession with boarding school.

Starting about fifth grade, I was a fairly awkward personage until, oh, college. I wasn't a total reject... I just never seemed to have the right clothes or haircut or opinions. I guess boarding school (and sleepaway camp, too) seemed like a place one could go and start fresh. I would know what to say when someone admired the cuteness of a VW Cabriolet (anything except that my sister's Dodge Colt was also a very cute car). I would not even once roll my socks down like an old lady (hey, I thought it was something cool I'd thought up all by myself). I wouldn't get the haircut that made me look like the guy in the Encyclopedia Britannica commercial, or the one that made old people call me "son" (even when I was wearing a SKIRT).

(I have a point, I swear.)

Convinced on some deep subconscious level that boarding school was the answer to all my ills, and also fully aware that my parents couldn't afford to send me there (after all, we were a Colt family, not a Cabriolet family), I did the next best thing --

I decided to write a book about a girl at boarding school.

It's really sad that I can't remember how old I was -- definitely sixth or seventh grade. We had a hulking IBM with like a megabyte of hard disk space. I wrote using WordPerfect, changing the colors of the screen and text to a scheme that would surely make my eyes bleed today.

My character was named Starr Lisette Wilson, which was definitely the coolest name ever. One could only hope to be blessed at birth with a name that cool. I wasn't. Starr was.

I don't know how far I got, and I don't remember anything about Starr's life or her roommates. An educated guess would be that she was very pretty, had lots of cool friends, maybe a bitchy rival, and the attention of a boy who wouldn't have given a second glance to the Encyclopedia Britannica boy-girl, but had plenty of interest in Starr Lisette Wilson.

At some point I abandoned Starr to write about Kayla and Kyle Bennett, who lived in a suspiciously Star Trek: The Next Generation-like universe (in addition to inventing sock-rolling, I also invented the name "Kayla"). At the same time, I wrote the story of Rebecca Seales and Marc Crandel, who were the actors that played Kayli and Kyle, and, not being actual siblings, were safely able to have a crush on one another. Those books made it to 300+ handwritten pages each, never finished. I wonder where they are. I have a feeling I got rid of them, which is probably just as well.

I learned to write out of longing, out of a desire to be more and see more and have more than it was possible for me to have.

I suppose I still write for the same reason. And perhaps the fact that I'm still writing about teenage girls means I'm somehow stunted, stuck, longing for my chance to reinvent myself and be the cool girl for once.

I like my life now, so I guess I have to be glad I lived with that kind of insecurity for so long. Who knows where I would be today if I'd made friends with the cool kids, if I'd decided not to go to the arts school...?

Besides, I finally found a boy who liked me, so in your face, Cabriolet-girl!

Rolling on a river...

I wasn't around this weekend, because I was out communing with nature.

We went white-water rafting on California's Kern River, to celebrate the birthday of a good friend. It was supposed to be a two-day trip arranged as follows: Day 1, raft to camp. Camp overnight. Day 2, raft some more. Bus back to cars. Drive home.

Here's how it went: Day 1, raft to camp. Camp overnight. Day 2, bus back to cars.

There was no water, you see. The Kern is a dam-controlled river, and someone (I believe his awesome title is "the watermaster") decided that yesterday was going to be a day on which no valve would be opened. The resulting raft trip would have led to a lot of getting stuck on rocks, and potentially even torn rafts.

I'm no adventuress. My idea of a rollicking good time is quilting. "Taking a risk" to me would be going into Joann Fabrics with just a $20 bill and no debit cards. We were with a group of 12 friends. One said, "I want to be in Katie's boat!" Awww, I thought. "Because I know she won't let them do anything scary!" she concluded.

It's true; very quickly, my motto became, "That sounds dangerous." We were six to a raft, plus our guide, Marv. Marv was nice, and did a very good job of not causing us to be propelled from the boat in most cases. Certainly not like the guide who had a boat full of tattooed macho men (too macho for sunblock, even), who, coming out of the first rapid, immediately steered his boat directly toward a giant rock and flipped it. During times when the other four boats would be taking a leisurely float down the slow bits, this other guide would have his macho crew working hard. I sensed that he was just trying to tire them out.

We had fun. It wasn't very scary, to tell the truth. I really loved getting soaked (it was 100+ degrees).

Now. As to the camping part of it...

I don't like bugs. I don't like being sweaty and hot. So I don't do much camping. The husb has gone a couple of times, but I guess he mostly goes to the places where you park your car, take your tent out, and proceed to set up camp with automobiles lurking on the edges like faithful dogs.

This is why we didn't know that you don't take a suitcase when you go camping.

A friend, we'll call him Friend A, wandered by our hotel room the morning of the trip. I asked whether I should take extra film on the raft. He said, "No, just put it in your nightsack."

Immediately, I panicked. A nightsack? What on earth was a nightsack? Nobody told us to bring one of those!

Friend A said, "Or just whatever you brought to..." He fell silent, and then exploded into ginormous peals of belly laughter. "A suitcase!?!? You brought a suitcase?!?!"

Yeah, so? We brought one suitcase for two people, which in our house is an achievement all on its own. Plus, the rafting company brings the baggage to camp for you, so it's not like you have to carry it.

As soon as we pulled into the parking lot, I knew we were in trouble. Friend A popped over carside to say hi, sporting a backpack about the size of my sleeping bag. It contained everything he would bring with him. We had about four times as much stuff -- per person -- as Friend A. In fact, we had to drive the car over to the drop-off because we had so much stuff.

And the whole "they'll bring your stuff" thing? Nice, in theory. In actuality, they bring your stuff to a flat spot at the campsite. You still have to cart all of it to your particular spot. Ours was like 400 feet of rocky, ant-covered slope away from there. The husb lugged the suitcase, thankfully.

After flinging several enormous cow patties out into the wild, we put up the tent, not realizing that it was on such a slope that we would spend the night sliding down the floor of the tent until our feet propped up against the entry-side nylon.

After that, we were hot and miserable and sweaty, so we went back down to the main grounds and followed a guide up the river a bit to do the camp swim. To me, a "camp swim" sounds like a fun way for a group of campers to hang out and cool off, floating down the river together. The guy pointed at the river, said, "First go to the right, then try to go to the left so you don't hit that boulder, and after the rock, flip over and swim toward the shore."

Then he flopped in backwards and went off.

I thought, we're going to lose him! I was closest to the water, so without thinking, I hopped in after him.

The water was much faster than I thought. And much harder to move around in, especially in the lounge-chair pose, where you keep your feet out ahead to keep from hitting rocks with your, you know, head.

Before I knew it, I was as far right as I was going to get, and then I was too far right to go to the left, and then I went plunging over the ridge and got completely dunked. I was not expecting it. By the time I emerged, I was already heading further downstream, approaching the shore we were supposed to swim to. I turned and swam horizontally toward shore while the water kept pulling me downstream. Apparently I'm a more powerful swimmer than I give myself credit for being, because I made it. Both of my contact lenses even stayed in my eyes, so that was cool.

What I was really unprepared for was the reaction of all my friends, as they swam over one by one.

"Wow, Katie!" "That was unexpected!" "That was awesome!" "Holy cow, you're so brave!"

What is this?

It turns out, you see, that camp swim is not a group activity. Also, it turns out that jumping backwards into rock-infested waters isn't something most people are prepared to do with the speed of a confused scaredy-cat author. You are supposed to take a minute, examine the water, get your nerve up, and then finally go. So my eager leap looked to the masses like some brazen gesture designed to show nature who was in charge.

Glowing in this undeserved praise, heart pounding, adrenaline racing, I went with the group back up to the launching point for another go. I was all ready to jump in and be a hero-times-two, when something occurred to me.

"I don't get it," I said. "What's so scary about what I did?"

Suffice it to say, by the time the explanations ceased, I was about ready to walk back to camp and content myself with just one go at it. Suddenly everyone was hitting rocks I hadn't hit. Suddenly I couldn't tell which part of the rapid I was supposed to aim for. And what if I wasn't able to swim to shore in time? What if I just floated away forever?

But no. Even I couldn't justify dampening my prior triumph by giving up now. So I waded out (the leaping was really too scary to repeat) and started all over again. This time, I knew to close my eyes and hold my nose when I went over the ridge, and it's a good thing, too, because I got plunged under. Then I started swimming and for some reason got plunged under again. But I made it to shore, heart still pounding, adrenaline still shooting through my body.

Everyone was cheering for me the first time. But I couldn't be proud of that, not really -- because I didn't know what I was doing. It took about ten times as much courage to do the second run. So I cheer myself for that one.

I was sad we didn't get to raft the second day. I was really looking forward to it.

Oh well. We'll go again. I have to. Because now I know how much to pack, so I'm going to get me a nightsack and go get me some luggage closure.

Thanks for sticking with this very-long post! :-)

How to bring out the worst in people...

...in one simple step.

For my birthday, my crafty pal "Sue" silk-screened me some shirts. One has a picture of Winston on the back and says TEAM WINSTON; this is my favorite shirt of all time.

Another has a quote she lifted off my MySpace page, under the heroes section, where I said, "I really like people who are really good at stuff."

I'm wearing that shirt today.

And it turns people into bumbling crazies! I think it's too much pressure for store clerks. They read it and immediately go all butterfingers, knocking things off the counter, forgetting my receipt, etc.

Anyway, I thought that was kind of funny. I'm making people uncomfortable. They can all thank Sue.

Only connect...

Thanks to E.M. Forster for that admonishment.

This will be a quick blog entry, because I have many places to go, including the post office, which I suspect is going to be terrible because it will be full of people like me trying to mail off their quarterly taxes (thank you, freelance). At least I get to buy stamps.

I was a fabulous letter-writer, back in the day. I wrote at least four or five a week. Choosing stamps was not an activity I took lightly. The bigger, the more unusual, the brighter and more vivid the stamp, the more I liked them. One summer I worked for a lobbyist and we mailed a lot of stuff to lawyers around the state (this was before the internet really took off). Some of the lawyers were courteous and responsive. Some were courteous and slow as molasses. Some were not courteous and were also slow as molasses. These were usually the ones who sent 60-page faxes at night, so we would enter in the morning to find a mess of pages all over the floor of our genteel little office.

We vented our feelings for these people in the only way we could: through postage.

If you were nice, you got the coolest stamps. Looney Tunes, modern art, whatever the post office had to offer. If you were neutral, you might end up with a flag or a historical stamp depicting some invention or something.

If you were bad, it was swan stamps all the way. Woe betide the attorney who opens his mailbox and finds the black mark of the swan stamp awaiting him!

I doubt any of them caught on, but we had lively discussions about which stamps would go to which lawyers.

Good times.

What I really wanted to say today is that there are one or two blogs on my blogroll which I link to, regularly visit and read and occasionally comment on, and I realized today that those people have never as much as visited here. I don't mean Meg Cabot or Miss Snark (God rest her blogspot address). I mean people who are kind of like me, I thought -- blogging as a way to make friends, to meet people who like to read, etc.

They don't even acknowledge that I've commented, actually.

Is it wrong or weird that this bugs me?

All I know is, somebody's coming off the blogroll soon. Because I don't want to set my friends and blog-readers up for the annoyance of being ignored by this particular person.

Only connect -- we are on a two-way street! I am so confused by bloggers -- and not the kind who dispense really useful, solid information, but the kind who ramble and talk about life and family and home, etc. -- who don't seem to grasp this.

If you are a person who reads or links here and I don't have you on the blogroll, please unveil thyself and let me know.

And Devon Ellington, if you're reading this, I do read your blog and it's fascinating but the only thing I can ever think to say is, "I like Seabiscuit!" and that makes me sound like a grade-A moron, although now I can also say "I like Ruffian!", at least based on the Wikipedia entry.

PS - If you ever want to lose faith in Wikipedia, watch the Marie Antoinette movie starring Kirsten Dunst and then read the entry there on Marie Antoinette.

PPS - As of 9:51 am, if you're still on the blogroll on the main page, it's not you, so don't worry.

Cover-centric

• I posted a link to the voting back in early May... check out the results of the Cover Cafe 2006 contest here!


• Agent Nathan Bransford discussed covers yesterday here.


• If you've never looked at the Book Design Review, I highly recommend it.

...I would ask what your favorite book covers are, but I don't want to steal from Nathan. Instead, I'm going to start a universal meme, tagging all of you...

What's your favorite poem?

Post it in your blog and comment here so I can find it! Here's mine, by Lewis Carroll.

"A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky"

A boat beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July -

Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear -

Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die:
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream -
Lingering in the golden gleam -
Life, what is it but a dream?

Making something out of nothing (or out of something else)

We'll call her "Sue".

Sue is a friend from work.  When she was 22, she was a better producer than 95% of producers working in TV.  Now she's 25, and that number has crept up to 97-98%.  That number includes me (hey, I'm no slouch).  

Sue also knows stuff about fashion. (Sue hates most of my clothes.)

She came over yesterday. I showed her around the house, since she hadn't been by in a while, and she said hi to Winston, and I gave her a guided tour of the new washer and dryer, and then we got down to business.

We sew.

We do it almost guiltily, as if we're getting away with something. We barricade ourselves in the sewing room for hours and hours, hunched over examining seams and details, pinning and taping and fitting like the elves who have snuck into the cobbler's workshop. We take a break to eat, watch an episode of some TV show, and then hurry back to our work.

In my house, some clothes are considered "condemned". They are shirts that the husb and I have worn (or not worn) to the point that they no longer interest us. This means they get taken downstairs, where they wait for the long arm of the sewing law to crash down on them and forever alter their construction.

One of these items was a shirt I bought a few months ago at Banana Republic for $10 on clearance. I liked the fabric, a narrow brownish-purple stripe, and I kind of liked other things about it. Mostly I liked the $10 price tag. But I tried it on once, and Chris looked at me and snorted, which, as you can probably imagine, was not the response I was after.

Downstairs it went.

Sue plucked it off the rack and said, "Hey, this is cute!"

I was skeptical. I told her she was wrong and tried it on.

But Sue, like, knows these things.

Sue said, "Look, all you need to do is take in this bit right here..." and pulled the bodice tight in the empire style.

We added a sash to the front. It ties in the back. We shortened the sleeves and added elastic. We brought up the hemline a couple of inches.

And now I have a new shirt.

There is a peculiar kind of peace that settles over a room where people are busily engaged in a productive activity. Not just the business of busy-ness, but the business of creating, shaping, molding. Having a specific goal and working toward an outcome.

In a room with this activity, you can sit in near-silence with a friend for hours and still feel, at the end of the day, that your friendship has grown. If I ever have a daughter, I hope we can sew together like this -- sensing a connection but not forcing it. Letting words bubble to the surface if they need to be said.

There's so much baggage attached to the word "creative" these days. It is not only used as a saddle for people with vivid imaginations, but a crutch for people who do not want to embrace activity. But the root of the word is the verb "create", which means "to make or produce".

If idle hands are the devil's playthings, whose playthings are creative hands?

Happy Wednesday!

(Click on either of the below pictures for a larger version.)



And here is a picture of Winston having it out with my new dressform (Katie Jr.).

How I Spent My Summer Vacation (a little early)

Notice to house finches: if you spent as much energy protecting your young as you do protecting your birdseed, that scrub jay would not have had a snowball's chance of carting off your nestlings. Also, can we hold the yelling until after, say, 6:30 am? The enormous terrifying monsters who actually fill up your feeder want to get some beauty sleep.

Notice to bobcat: please do not sit crouched in our trees. You are scaring the squirrels, and I also suspect that it was you who provoked the skunk in the middle of the night, right outside the bedroom, thereby trapping skunk scent in the house for days. The squirrels were here first. Bobcats go home!!

Robin Brande tagged me with a meme regarding personal & professional goals for the coming season. It's supposed to be 10-15, but I don't know if I can find that many. Here's a try:

1. (personal) Finish the baby quilt on or around the date of the baby's birth. This should be rather doable because I spent hours last night cutting, so I am almost at the piecing stage. (To clarify, this is not MY baby that I'm talking about... my baby has four furry legs and is currently sprawled out on the living room floor.)

2. (personal) Continue trying to eat better.

3. (personal) Lose ten pounds (at least!).

4. (professional) Get some non-ugly author photos taken, preferably after having lost ten pounds.

5. (professional) Start working in earnest on my next project.

6. (professional) Start working on side projects for THE GIRL LEAST LIKELY (super secret fun projects, cannot disclose).

7. (personal) Make a dent in the to-be-read shelves.

8. (personal) Make it to the Hollywood Bowl more than often than in years past.

9. (personal) Finish footie-throw quilt (this is a quilt with a pocket at the bottom to put your feet in while you watch TV on the cold leather couch).

10. (personal/professional) Start working more in downstairs office instead of upstairs office.

11. (professional) Refine website further.

12. (personal) Get in some good hammock-napping.

Hmm... the rest of the things I can think of are more like to-do list items. Things like this include writing birthday thank-you notes, which are overdue; picking up my copy of Tish Cohen's TOWN HOUSE from Bookstar; and calling the pool guy to talk about dismantling the old hot tub and carting it out of our lives forever.

I am a huuuuuuuge procrastinator. I suppose I work better with deadlines, because otherwise I tend to take my time, even in my leisure activities. Like, instead of writing, I'll sew, but first, instead of sewing, I'll waste a couple of hours doing something even less productive.

I tag...

Therese Fowler
Mary Witzl
Christy

Happy Sunday!

900 billion little yellow squares

Actually, 89. Three inches by three inches. Out of a lovely buttery yellow fabric, part of an elaborately geometric quilt I'm making for a baby due to make her debut within weeks.

I got through several and thought to myself, "Wait... HOW many yellow squares do I need again?"

Not 89 -- 49! Right there in my handwriting.

I counted the number I'd already cut.

48.

So. I got lucky.

It's so easy to make little mistakes -- or to overlook something little that has big consquences. You hear it from many authors going through copyedits -- how could I miss this? One fellow blogger, but I can't recall who, discovered that a character went from being in the house to being in the car, with no transition or anything.

Back in my intern days, I read a whole Tom Clancy-esque script about a guy who has to keep some nuclear launch codes out of the hands of the bad guys. They are in a labyrinthine underground facility that is built somehow near a lava flow. This man used every trick he could think of to keep the codes secure -- except immediately, I thought, "Why doesn't he throw the launch codes into the lava?" And I continued to think that for the rest of the screenplay. And I think it to this very day.

A book I read earlier this year has a character whose name magically changes 5/6 of the way through the book.

A book I just finished and really liked, Uglies by Scott Westerfeld, used the word "purchase" ("her feet found purchase on the hoverboard") probably four times.

Another book somehow found the phrase "rumor has it" transformed to "room or has it". It took me a long time to figure out what was meant. And I still don't know how something like that could happen.

These are the things writers hate to find in their own writing. Hate hate hate. At one dog show voice-over, I realized that I'd written somethng like, "Prized purebred poodles push for a point." (That's an estimation.) And no one caught how ridiculous it was until the host actually tried to say it, and went tumbling down into the verbal booby-trap I'd written for him.

I'm not sure when my copyedits will be finished. I'm actually kind of hoping the copyeditor says, at least once, "You use the word 'stuck' eight times on this page." Because then I'll know someone's on the watch for that stuff.

What I don't want is emails and letters from readers gloating about spelling and grammar errors in the final product!

PS - From what I can tell, cheese is at least mildly addictive, because it contains casein. That explains sooooooo much about my cheese-eating habits.

"Contrex" is not a sexy word.

Chris got a sample of some water called Contrex. Apparently by stealing it from him and drinking it, I'm getting lots of calcium, etc. I was totally down with that until I read the bottle -- specifically the part where it talks about the "unique taste". Suddenly it makes me gag. I don't want my water to have a unique taste. If I go to the trouble to drink water, I want it to taste like water. (What was I expecting from a product called "Contrex", though?)

Jury duty is over! And now that a verdict has been reached, I can talk about the case. It was a DUI case involving a young man who was warned by a police officer that he shouldn't drive. A few minutes later, the police officer saw the young man pulling his car out of a parking lot and pulling it to the curb. After some not-so-hot performances on the field sobriety tests (FSTs, and if anyone tries to make me sit through the individual definitions of them EVER again, I will pour Contrex all over that person), he registered a "weak" attempt on the breathalyzer and scored a .12, which as we all know is .04 over the legal limit for driving.

This would have been fine for the prosecution, had he not gone for his chemical test a half hour later and scored a .17. Because of this, the defense was able to call the sleaziest DUI expert in the biz (picture a short, creepy Patrick Swayze), who posed the famous Rising Alcohol Levels defense. Basically, because of the difference in test results, there is no way to know whether his blood alcohol levels were over the legal limit while he drove.

This was a strange sensation for me. Because everything almost lined up. I went into deliberations thinking, "GUILTY! Duh!" But then little things started to nag. And as unlikely as it is that he did five shots of vodka, drove his car for two minutes, pulled over, and THEN became too drunk to drive, the very fact that it is a reasonable possibility meant that we had to vote him Not Guilty.

On the first count, driving under the influence of alcohol, we deemed him Guilty. On the second, driving with a blood alcohol level greater than .08%, we went for Not Guilty. Our reasoning was: poor performance on the field sobriety tests as well as the eventual documented blood alcohol level implied that, whether he was above .08% or not, he was definitely under the influence of alcohol.

It was very interesting to subjugate one's personal prejudices, instincts, and feelings, and make a decision based on the presumption of innocence. We kept wishing we'd had a little more info, but the burden of proof lies on the state, and they didn't provide us with that info during the trial. In my head and heart, I think the guy was drunk at that point. A little more math, a little more expert testimony, more detail on the technical stuff, and things might have gone differently.

I know I will be able to sleep tonight with a clear conscience.

Makes you think, though.

Pop quiz!

"Paris Hilton" is to "back to jail" as...

a. "Katie Alender" is to "back to quilting and hanging out with Winston and reading Scott Westerfeld's strangely-addictive Uglies"
b. "Winston" is to "back to barking for cheese" (PS - is it true that cheese is addictive???)
c. "Joann Fabric" is to "about to get raided by Katie and her birthday giftcard"
d. all of the above

Answer: d, all of the above

Seriously, is cheese addictive??

Spirit Level 1

That's me. I am the very embodiment of light activity, low-impact living. Thank you, Easy Spirit, for pointing it out to me on the label of my new shoes. Why can't you just trust that we Level 1'ers are quite aware of our shortcomings? Why can't you just label the Level 2 and 3 shoes? Those people know they're awesome. We know they're awesome. You don't have to remind me that I am NOT awesome, especially after I just paid $40 for your shoes! Which are hurting my Level 1 feet, by the way. I think I have to go change my socks. Too bad the only socks I own that match this outfit are Level ½.

At least I'm more hardcore than Paris Hilton. Who gets medical leave out of jail??? I mean, seriously. Seriously. I guess I can let go of my dreams that Paris would find some way to change herself for the better. *sigh* Did we as a nation learn nothing from Martha Stewart?

In other news, I finished Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits yesterday. I was already inclined to like her because our last names are so similar, but now I really like her. The book was a bit exhausting, but when I finished it, I felt that very nice, satisfied sensation you get when you feel the author has done right by you. I don't know how to describe a book wherein the author has NOT done right by you -- I could pull an example or two from my bookshelves, but that is against my blog no-book-bashing policy.

I've started an unspoken (uh... til now, I guess) system with myself to control what I read. It's basically not reading the same type of book back-to-back. No long string of women's fiction or YA or books about animal psychology. This is important for me, I think, because I am slightly obsessive and I tend to like to keep a good thing going. If I read one great YA book, I want to devour all of them. If I read a Stephen King, I want to go get them all and read straight through. I think this is actually a kind of laziness, of giving in to the demands of my subconscious, which likes things to be easy and always stay the same.

So that explains the craziness of my TBR lists. And the fact that Scott Westerfeld's Uglies moved up to the top. So far it's a very good read. It's disturbingly similar to a back-burner project of mine, but that's okay. They don't call it the back burner for nothing.

In other news, I'm so thrilled to have so many new commenters. I might have to have a coaster contest just to celebrate.

Actually, one thing I've been fantasizing about doing is making a communal quilt. Like, choose six solid colors and put up six options for quilt squares, then let anyone who wants select a design and colors for their square. Then make it all into a quilt!

This is the sickness of quilting. Yes, I know I'm a huge nerd.

That is all. I'm off to interpret the law. I'm quite tempted to gloat since now I know you're all so jealous of me!

Jury duty = preschool

I'm on a jury. I won't talk about the trial, because that's, you know, illegal. It could cause a mistrial, waste taxpayer money, AND just get me another round of jury duty in three months, and let's be clear: nobody wants that.

My morning leading up to jury duty, however, I think I am at liberty to describe.

I arrived at the Burbank Courthouse ten minutes early. I looked at the map that showed where the parking structure was. I proceeded to circle the same two blocks for the next fifteen minutes, hissing and spitting like a badger. When I finally found the courthouse parking, I went to the front of the building, where I waited in line for ten minutes.

That was the first of so much waiting. So, so much waiting. So then at approximately 8:30, we all go into the jury holding room (two adjoining rooms, actually), get locked in for some reason (who do they think they are, Scientologists*?), and are shown a video. First, the woman says to my side of the room, "The TV has a lot of static. Don't worry if you can't hear it. It all gets repeated in orientation."

Well, okay.

The video starts out with a relaxed-looking guy who says, "If you end up on a jury, don't worrrrrrry." Then they show a litttle montage about how great America is and how beautiful California is. Then some woman says, "I think our system is a little bit better than other countries? Because, like, we get to have trials?" The video sputters to an end, and then the (live, human) woman proceeds to dispense information. She has this amazing robotic ability to loop herself and say the exact same thing twice without missing a beat. She has this amazing robotic ability to loop herself and... oh, you get it.

Remember how I said, "Wouldn't it be great if they let me go at 11?" Well, they let me go at 10!!

They let me go to the Glendale Courthouse. Six miles away. But I only had to drive 5 1/2 of those miles, because the parking structure is 1/2 mile from the courthouse, which is really cool. At this point, I started to think about that Demi Moore movie where she's a juror and somebody follows her around, threatening her. Since I do have the bright orange "JURY PARKING" pass in the back of my car and all.

Get inside, sit down, get all sweaty because it a million degrees, and 45 minutes later get dimissed for lunch.

A two-hour-and-twelve-minute lunch.

Luckily, only one short half mile away is a shopping mall (and my car). So I practice some retail therapy. I buy books. I buy clothes from Old Navy that probably don't fit. I buy Panda Express at 11 am and eat it, sooooooo yummy.

Back to the courthouse by 1:30. 1:45 the last guy gets back from lunch, and we get sent into a courtroom. This is where I have to get a little fuzzy. Suffice it to say, not to pat myself on the back or anything, but my response back to one of the attorneys was bitingly clever and observant. NOTE: Do not be bitingly clever and observant during jury selection. Instead, I recommend being like the lady a couple jurors down. She just kept repeating, "I might get confused... I'm just afraid I might get confused."

But no, I had to go getting all inspired by the courtroom ambience and being all, "Are you sure you're asking me what I think you're asking me? Would you like a chance to rephrase the question? Or how about I just clarify for you with my remarkable powers of Ally McBeal-watching experience?" (That's paraphrased.)

California schedules its trials like it schedules its business lunches: for three hours a day, starting in the middle of the afternoon. So it's not like I won't be around.

* I know lots of people who got locked into a room by Scientologists and made to watch Scientology videos. No offense to any Scientologists who might be reading this blog. I'm sure it wasn't you.

Wouldn't it be great...

...if Paris Hilton emerged from prison a truly changed person? If, having had this time to think, she realized what a damaging force she's been, and decided to change the way she presents herself?

...if they let me go from jury duty at 11 am today (or earlier, I would definitely settle for earlier than that)?

...if the blogosphere were more confidential, and I could dish about the books I've read and hate? Except I won't, because people Google themselves constantly, and that would really hurt someone's feelings.

...if people wanted to buy dog quilts for like $200 each? I could spend June making like a zillion and then live off the interest.

...if I can maintain the self-discipline and continue to eat healthier and workout, and then make an actual dent in my physical appearance (and musculature) before we go white-water rafting in two weeks? That way, when I fall out of the boat, I can save myself, not get eaten by trout and piranhas?

...if I could force myself to STOP buying books until I've read a significant percentage of my TBR pile? Right now I buy at a rate of 3 to 1. Maybe more. Yes, more, because I have a new Amazon order shipping this week.

...if the dryer started blowing hot air again, instead of just tumbling the clothes around?

What's on your "Wouldn't it be great" list? Bearing in mind that I'll be in the Burbank courthouse today, trying to get myself on Nicole Richie's jury (and then editing this post so as to avoid a mistrial.)

Now I can be mean again.

About five years ago (right when I married the husb -- coincidence?), I started noticing little white hairs sprouting around my temples. Not a lot, mind you, but a few. As the years went by, more of these little white hairs appeared. I thought, ah, who cares? My little sister liked plucking them out and I thought it was kind of cool to have pockets of albinoism on my head.

So then about two and a half years ago, I was talking to some co-workers, who are much cooler than I am and have much better fashion sense, too. And I said, "Look at these little white hairs!" and one of them said, "Honey," (she being from Louisiana), "those may be white hairs, but they are called gray hair."

Me?? Gray hair? Impossible! So I did what any self-respecting Los Angeles resident does:

I went blonde.

Oddly, it never occurred to me to go darker. For one thing, it was supposed to be highlights, you know? But before I knew it, I was "the girl with the long blonde hair".

Only weeks into my transformation, I began to feel, in fact, like "the long blonde hair with the girl". It didn't help that the length was getting out of control. It took me ten minutes to comb it out every morning. Ten loud, whiny minutes. When I walked into a room, it seemed that my hair was walking in first, and I was just buried somewhere underneath it.

The winds of change, they a-blowed. And I went from bra-strap length to just-longer-than-chin length. The second my dear hairstylist chunked off those ponytails, I looked at myself in the mirror and felt like I could breathe again. The Hair was vanquished! And then we handled The Blonde. We covered it in a rich chocolate brown.

It had taken me a week to get used to seeing myself blonde (and a year and a half to undo it) -- but the moment I saw myself in a mirror with short brown hair, I felt like me again.

I like blonde hair. I even like my blonde hair, in retrospect. Sometimes I look at pictures of myself and think, "Gosh, why on earth did I cut off all that pretty blonde hair?"

But the truth is, it's hard enough in this city (this world, this life) to hold onto who you are, without having one of your prominent physical features sailing around selling you as something you can't identify with.

With short, dark hair, I can say cynical things in a deadpan voice around people I've never met, and they don't look at me like I'm a Disney princess who just fell off her throne. I can ride with the top down (the CAR top, get your mind out of the gutter). I can be me.

I know it's not healthy to base that much of your identity on something like hair. I know there are a lot of very hilarious and cynical blondes out there who crack jokes much more deadpan than mine and set the crowds rotflmaoing. I know if I were more fully actualized as a human being, I could be content with myself blonde or brunette, at ideal weight or at ideal weight plus twelve-and-a-half. A truly healthy person would acknowledge (cough cough) that if I were really being honest with myself, I would stick with my natural hair color and not darken the mousy out of it.

I guess I'm not there yet. And maybe that will come with age. But for now, and especially since I finally got up off my duff and got my fading demi-permanent chocolate hair darkened the other day, I feel comfortable under my own hair.

I might even grow it long again. And then I could be the evil Disney princess!

For the morbidly curious, Here's a before & after picture.