Is there a verb "to turtle"? Turtling???

I'm retreating this week, like the turtle. Inside my shell I'll be writing, reading, thinking deep thoughts...and working on my gymnastics moves :)

See you next week!

Blast from my gymnastics past

This week brought a flurry of activity over at Facebook, where--out of the blue--I've found or been found by a bunch of friends I grew up with. Kennebunk High School was a pretty small place when we were there, so everyone knew everyone. Now, as we reconnect, amazing to see how all our lives have turned out. The most astonishing thing, though, is how many people look the same! It's like we're all still 18, only now we have better haircuts.

The zenith of this reunion frenzy, for me at least, is this horrifyingly fabulous picture! This is me at gymnastics practice, in a photo resurrected by a teammate. Oh, the embarrassment! I was a pitiful gymnast: afraid of heights, so nearsighted I couldn't see the vault until I'd almost run into it...you get the idea. I can't imagine why I needed the ankle wrap, because this was my ONE move on beam; the most strenuous thing I ever did to my foot during those years was to point it. We had some amazing people on that team, though, with serious skills--we were Maine State Champions, two years in a row. And I got to be part of it all based on...who knows...enthusiasm, maybe? It's amazing how far that can take you :)

Time to call in the big Gunn

I've been out searching for sweaters to fend off the coming cold. It's not going well. Mind if I vent?

First, WHAT is the deal with the proliferation of short sleeved items in the knitwear section of Ann Taylor? Store/Loft/Outlet--I've tried them all. Not a full sleeve anywhere. Have their designers ever been north of the Mason-Dixon line? Do they understand WHY we expand our wardrobe come autumn to include wool? To leave the sleeves off of a sweater is, in my humble (and shivering) opinion, to seriously miss the point.

And it's not just Ann Taylor. I've tried Macy's, Express, every store in the TJMaxx/Marshall's chain...Nothing. In desperation, I dove into the "these sweaters don't fit/look terrible/were ruined in the moth invasion of 2007" bag I found in the back of my closet. I pulled out several of the items, convinced myself that anything that warm (and full sleeved!) couldn't possibly look that bad, and put them back in my closet. Then Tim Gunn came along and ruined my celebration.

Have you seen the new season? So good! I love him. Even though he told a girl with similar proportions to mine--wearing a sweater almost exactly like one I'd just pulled from the discard bag to put back in the rotation--that she looked like a giant cableknit cube. Sigh. And her sweater didn't even have moth holes...

Today, those holey, ugly, pilled disasters went back in the trash. If you don't hear from me, it's because I'm huddled under a blanket, trying to keep warm. Hard to type from there...

Just like Laura Ingalls Wilder

I just fixed the hole in my favorite sweater. Without scotch tape, staples, or safety pins. A domestic victory!

(The next installation of my 9-part life story will be called "Little Condo in the Big City")

Food, folks, fun, fall

Oh, where to begin?

We had an amazing weekend, and my love of all things autumnal (including the word autumnal) was more than confirmed.

First, I drove to Maine to deposit THAT DOG for a visit with the niece, the nephew...and their new cat. This was THAT DOG'S first experience with a non-canine creature that's supposed to be indoors, and suffice to say she didn't warm to the concept. Upon seeing said creature, she responded in what was (in her eyes at least) the only appropriate fashion, howling in stunned alarm and chasing the cat up the stairs, down the hall, and cornering her under the bed. It was not one of those cuddly family moments you hope for, but at least no one got eaten. Sometimes you have to be grateful for small things.

After dropping THAT DOG off for her feline acclimatization, Steve and I drove to Ithaca, NY for the weekend, to spend some quality time with friends I met at the beginning of the book tour. Our running joke all weekend was that Ithaca is JUST like Cambridge...only without the stress, the crazy drivers, or the parking tickets.

If I had to sum up my weekend in three bits of life wisdom, here's what comes to mind:

1. When touring wine country (who knew Ithaca had wine country?) avoid the places with the giant Hummer Limos in the parking lot, especially if you see dozens of 20 somethings pouring out, shouting, "Bring on the VINO!" There are other, lovelier vineyards to explore.

2. It doesn't mention this on the label, but Tylenol is super-helpful when you're at a dinner party and your friends make you laugh so hard, for so long, that your face aches.

3. Don't eat at the Ponderosa off the side of the highway. Never, ever, ever. (But if you do, there's a Wal-Mart 35 miles east that carries a full selection of Tums).

But that all pales in comparison to what Steve and I really learned, which was that long drives are worth it when you get to spend time with great people and expand the scope of your world. (Of course, I'm not sure THAT DOG would agree, given that her world expanded to include an indoor cat...but I took her for a run on the beach on the way home yesterday, and I think that was her version of Tums, making everything better!)

A Golden Retriever at the Aquarium...and hurds of turdles

My sister and niece came to visit this weekend. My niece is five, and very sparkly. She's a girl who loves adventure. She's also a girl who knows what she wants. We went to the Boston Aquarium, where after 30 minutes of fighting her little way through the crowds to see Myrtle the Turtle and Sebastian the Shark, she looked up at us and said, "Can we go home and put on jammies now?" It was 3:30.

What's even funnier is that when asked which creature she liked the best at the Aquarium, she raved about Clancy... the Golden Retriever we met out on the sidewalk as we made our way home.

In grown up highlights, we found a FABULOUS new game called Bananagrams. We didn't find it, actually--it was a gift from our favorite Midwesterners who were in town on Friday. It's amazingly fun, but also (for me at least) mortifying. While playing with Steve and my sister, I had these brilliant moments:

"I could add LE to TURD and make...TURDLE!"

Then later:

"I can win this game! I've got all the letters I need to spell HURDS!"

Yep. Hurds of Turdles.

My sister's response? "Wow--your editor has her work cut out for her..."

Bingo!

No matter what your voting plans are for this November, this will keep you entertained tonight.

And for those of you who'd like to compete against your spouse/significant other/roommate, here's a link to a card for the other side (Biden doesn't have his own card yet, but tonight could change all that...)

Let's get those bingo skills in shape for our golden years :)

2008: Year of the Frog

Does this mean 2009 will be the year of the Prince?

Blog from the fog

I'm having one of those "too foggy to blog" days, so I thought I'd just post a basic update, and invite you to do the same. Here are two tidbits about life in Trishville:

I spoke at a meeting of Moms today. It was amazing, and fun, and totally daunting. I mean...I'm not yet a Mom, and I don't play one on TV. I'm an AUNT, which means I know all about creating fun and havoc, then handing children back to the people who made them when diapers need to be changed, but not so much about actual parenting. The good news, though: I made it through the whole session without suggesting: "If crate training works for dogs, should we consider it for children???" I think the Moms appreciated this.

Saturday, we bought a new bed. To replace the trillion-dollar catastrophe we purchased right after our wedding. We've long thought the older one must be defective, given that it has giant craters on either side where we sleep, and a huge lump in the middle. (When THAT DOG jumps up on the bed to hang out with us, she looks like the Queen of Sheba, surveying us from on high...) But when we mentioned this to the not-at-all-helpful guy at the furniture-store-we-don't-ever-want-to-revisit, he said, "Oh! That's burrowing. People LOVE to burrow when they sleep!" I was like, "I'm not a ferret...I don't burrow."

New bed comes Friday. There will be rejoicing.

Seriously?

I ordered 20 copies of my book from Amazon yesterday, for an event I'll be speaking at next week. As promised, they shipped them immediately...

One by one.

How is this possible?

I'm less of a loser if I help you win big!

So I had planned to blog about how I almost came to blows with the salesman at the mattress store yesterday after he said he wouldn't sell us a mattress without a box spring. (We already have a box spring; a new one can't possibly bring me $600 worth of enjoyment, no matter what he suggests to the contrary while standing on various box springs around the store trying to make some sort of convoluted point...)

But then I saw this post on Allison Winn Scotch's blog and thought, This is far more interesting then my mattress woes...why not love my blog readers enough to send them there?

So there you have it! Head over, enter to win a copy of Allison's new book, Time of My Life, and tell us: what is your "What if?" life moment?

Three hours? No problem!

I had the fun--and slightly terrifying--opportunity to teach a writing class at Grub Street last night. Grub Street is THE writing organization here in Greater Boston, offering classes, writing groups, conferences, galas--it's an amazing organization. So when they asked me to expand the short talk I gave at the Muse and the Marketplace conference in the Spring on Memoir: Behind the Scenes into a three-hour class, of course I said yes.

And then yesterday afternoon around 4pm, I thought, Oh--what have I done?

Three hours is rather a long time. I tried to remember the last time I sat through a three hour class--if ever? All I came up with was the soul-sucking tedium of Bar Review, in that long summer of my life between law school and taking the bar exam, where android lawyers from distant cities lectured us via video hookup on the never-ending intricacies of Civil Procedure. I remember sitting there in that classroom, staring at the video monitor, thinking "I hate you. I simply hate you..." Good times.

Here's what I forgot, though, and was reminded of the minute last night's class began: I hated being a lawyer, even before I was one. But I love being a writer. I think that makes a difference. The class was filled with fun, interesting people. They inspired me, reminding me what a cool thing it is to write, to wrestle our personal experiences into stories that might entertain or inspire others. It was a great experience--almost enough to push that whole "studying for the bar" debacle out of my mind :)

And I had a secret going into the class which gave me an extra shot of courage: our awesome blog friend Stacy (you probably know her as the girl with the minions) sent me a gorgeous necklace the other day. It was a thank-you for an interview we did together for her awesome online magazine, Halfway Down The Stairs. I was surprised, and touched beyond belief. I wore the necklace last night, as a little reminder that this writing life is filled with unexpected benefits (I'm even hokey enough to call them blessings). It connects us to cool people we wouldn't meet any other way. And last night's class continued to prove this true.

If you're a blogger, you're a writer, and therefore part of this. So let me say now: Thank you :)

Pretty cool, huh?

Here's a link to my interview with Stacy. (That it's in the magazine's "Bon Appetit!" edition strikes me as rather ironic, given my culinary ineptitude, but maybe it's a sign of things to come???)

Wanted: Sheep, Numbered 1-1,000

What do you do when you're plenty tired, but your brain is so full you can't sleep?

Reading and Writing (Absolutely no Arithmetic)

I read two great books this weekend. (It was raining, and I'm not much for college football.) First, Don't You Forget About Me, a first novel by Jancee Dunn. If any part of your adolescence coincided with the bizarre decade that was the 1980s, you will love this book. My favorite thing about Jancee's writing is that she doesn't just talk about all the funny fashion and music choices we made back then, she captures the feelings in a way that is spot-on. Reading this story was like being transported back to my own high school experience, and then snapping back to the present quickly enough to appreciate that while that was a wild ride, it's not something I'd ever want to go through again!

The second was the final Harry Potter book. This series might be the best take on the supernatural battle between good and evil I've seen in recent fiction, and book #7 is the most intense. I won't give anything away, except to say this: It's possible (even preferable) to get through the entire book without giving a whit about Dumbledore's romantic preferences.

I've been thinking a lot about writing lately, specifically the question of what keeps us motivated. I look at authors with two, three (seven, twelve...) books on the shelf and wonder, what does it take to sustain that kind of inspiration/persperation over the long haul? So I emailed some of them, and I'll be sharing their thoughts here this week.

But I'd love your thoughts, too, because we're all so different.
So if you're inclined, tell me:
What was something you did recently that was really hard that you didn't HAVE to do?
What kept you going?
Was it worth it?

Thanks, but no

Has anyone else seen the new body lotion commercial with the tag line, "Shouldn't YOUR skin be soft like yogurt?" Or did I fall asleep on the couch and dream it?

I hope it's the latter. Because really, it's hard for me to imagine what kind of exhausted minds would base a marketing campaign for skin care around a dairy product produced by bacterial fermentation? Not to mention that, when I dream of what my skin will feel like at it's optimal best, goopy and runny are not the words that come to mind...

Is it just me?

(Thanks to the fine folks at Wikipedia for helping me get my yogurt facts straight, and providing the lovely picture.)

Big Plans...

We were up laaaaate last night, watching the Red Sox. I won't talk about how the game turned out, because it's too grim to recount. Instead, this will be a rose-colored glasses/lemon from my lemonade kinda post about the rest of the night, where my friend Francesca and I cooked up big plans to save (a teeny, tiny portion of) the world.

It started at 9:49am with an email that said, "Rob and I have extra Red Sox tickets, wanna come to the game tonight?" (For those of you who live outside New England, this is the rough equivalent to asking, "I just found all this extra cash we can't use, wanna go shopping at Mercedes?")

Naturally, I said yes. I had a secret motive, you see.

In this picture, we look all happy and innocent, just two girls enjoying America's favorite pastime with our husbands (wait, that sounds entirely different than what I meant...and REALLY different that what's in the picture...) But the t-shirts and cheering were just a cover for our REAL mission: We're planning to stage a coup (and I'm not too proud to admit that if I hadn't found that word in my Webster's Misspeller's Dictionary, I would have anounced we were staging a coo...taking on the powers that be by attacking them with soft, soothing noises...)

We're not plotting to take over the whole world...just a very small corner of it. Specifically, the corner occupied by members of our college class. You see, the most recent edition of our college alumni magazine just came out. It offers page after page of facinating descriptions of the things members of other classes are doing: feeding the poor, solving illiteracy, discovering a cure for the common cold.... And then there's the news of our class: No one sent anything in, so the poor girl saddled with our class notes had to tell us about how her recently adopted cat got spayed.

The biggest accomplishment of our class is that one of our members is a responsible pet owner???

Pitiful. So much so Fresca and I have decided to TAKE ACTION. Members of our college class: Be ready! (Because seriously, unless you spay your cat yourself, you shouldn't have to put the news in the Quarterly.)

Write Now

I'm thinking about writing for a class I'll be teaching next week.

Do you like writing? I mean writing in the general, everyday sense, rather than WRITING (which is what we do when we think people--rather than friends or loved ones--will be reviewing our efforts).

Tell me: What's something you've written in the past day or so: a grocery list, labels for file folders, descriptions for the pics in your online photo album???

This is your brain...described in food

I just read this great post on The Dude Abides. I liked it so much that I even copied Cathleen's illustration, because it's simply too awesome not to have on my blog. (I'm justifying this thievery with the axiom imitation = flattery.) The post describes Cathleen's experience with how our our brains--specifically the differences between the left and right sides--can affect our experience of the world around us. Interesting stuff.

And if you're squeamish (like me), kinda gross.

Here's why: The post includes a video of a winsome neurologist/stroke survivor...holding a human brain. Suffice to say that I may never again able to chop up a head of cauliflower...

(It could be worse, though: I just read an essay by a father who complains that since seeing one of those "This is Your Brain On Drugs" commercials when she was six, his youngest daughter still won't eat eggs.)

Follow the leader

I have to admit, it's taking everything I have not to blog about the twists, turns, and dramatic revelations of our ongoing Presidential election. The past month has been like a reality TV show, where each new episode features a character doing something that astonishes and/or horrifies me. But because so many awesome writers are already filling pages with articles, op-ed pieces, and blogs about the bizarre state of our Union, I'll back away from the keyboard...

Except to ask this (because I'm curious how other people sort out all the information coming at us): Do you think it's fair to write someone off because you just don't like them as a person? Or because what you see in their personal lives (rather than their political record) indicates that their priorities are vastly different from yours, and that they seem to lack the character you'd want to be led by?

Here's why I'm asking: I've had some interesting experiences with following different types of leaders (if you've read my book, you know about one bestselling New age author in particular, not to mention a disaster of a first husband) whose personal lives turned out to different than what you'd expect based on their shiny public appearance. Ever since then, I've looked at potential leaders with two very specific questions:

1. Do I want to go where they're going?
2. Do I want to end up where they are?

And when I ask this, it's not based entirely on their position regarding potential amendments to the Constitution, or which decisions are best left to local government, but also their personal life: the interrelationships between the people and situations and circumstances closest to them.

Does this play a role for you as you're picking leaders to follow?

Secret swimmer man

I drove up to Maine today to take my Mom out for a birthday breakfast and my sister out for a "Your cold isn't that bad, is it?" lunch. Fun stuff.

On my way home, I grabbed a cup of coffee and went to the beach to ponder deep things about the meaning of life, etc. That's when I saw this guy down in the water:

I don't know if you can see from this distance (I was trying to be stealth like Swishy with my camera) but he had on swim trunks, goggles, and...a scuba hood?!? He kept staring up at the beach, then diving into the waves over and over again. Clearly, it was a happy moment for him. I felt kind of bad watching, but he was RIGHT in front of where I was sitting; there was only so much staring out over the horizon I could do.

If you have any idea what this might mean about the meaning of life, let me know, cause I'm stumped...