Before I forget: Assignment for writers this week: 1) Write for 15 minutes on whatever you wish. Just do it. 2) Take thyself down to the nearest coffeehouse or other public place and eavesdrop on conversations. Take notes on paper or laptop — transcribe conversations to get a feel for how dialogue works between/among real people. Note the cadences, the verbal tics, the pauses and how you can tell how they feel without seeing their faces (in other words, how you don’t need adverbs to tell us how a person says something, she wrote severely.) 3) Write your own dialogue between two people. Make sure each of them want something…

Catching up on the past few days — it seems there is drama, Drama, DRAMA at every turn. Every day there is some kind of excitement or tragedy or activity or scheduling fun that gives me heart palpitations. I could detail them here but my children are old enough that they don’t find their personal foibles on my blogspace to be that amusing anymore. In fact, they prefer much more anonymity. In other words, to be left alone. And who can blame them? So unless it’s praiseworthy or otherwise significant, alas, the fun days of blogging about wacky multi-family life are over. That leaves you with me. HA HA! You’re…

Not much to add (yet) today except, yawn, very tired, still recovering from last cold and my, but being ill makes one tired. News and notes: Mia may have found a new apartment, Simone got the lead in Footloose at school and is heading out to cheer at a basketball game; the rest of the kids are visiting other parents, so the house is quiet. It smells of fabric softener and incense. Patrick the Wonderful is changing the oil in the cars. He is making a “fabulous dinner for the woman I love,” and its menu is a surprise. I am slowly conquering the mountains of laundry that six people…

So on my way from taking one child to the orthodontist I was narrowly missed by a driver who blew through a red light in Oakland’s wacky Chinatown/produce district (honk if you love double-parked trucks with dead pigs falling out the back). He missed killing me by maybe one second and maybe three feet, and the muthafuckah just tore right through. I had turned my head and just from the corner of my eye saw him, managed to slam the brakes, (amazingly) wasn’t rear-ended either, and off he went. I usually have a kid in the front seat with me. I usually have 2 or 3 with me, in fact.…

Well, I guess I live too much in my brain and not enough in the real world, but hey. Whatever. I guess I never did mention the bead workshop here on The Muse. But there you have it. You know as much about it now as anyone. I did make it to work and I did update my blog and I do still have the cold, but I didn’t do lots of other things. But it’s a new year = no fear. Not beating up self over what I have not done, contrary to the Hail Mary. If life is an abacus, which it isn’t, but play along, won’t you?…