Julia Park Tracey

Missing: One leather jacket. Gently used. 23 years old. Still fits. Sentimental value. I lost my leather jacket about three weeks ago. I had it on, I took it off, I laid it down, I apparently left it wherever I was and now it has vanished, seemingly forever. I bought that jacket when I was 19, at Coddingtown Mall in Santa Rosa, where I had taken the bus after classes at the junior college. I was working part-time for my father in his then-new brass wind-chime factory (housed in a barn on our rural property). I strung wind-chimes together: three knots for the center, five knots for the pipes, a…

News? Who, me? None to speak of, or, of which to speak…oh, all right. I’m lying. Everything is news to me.It’s been a whirlwind since that half-week in Las Vegas. The editor gave notice at the Alameda Sun so from Vegas I placed a Craigslist posting for a new editor, and when I came home, there were about a hundred emails from wanna-be editors. I sorted through those in an A-B-C way, then found out that my features editor wanted the position. However, I had already set up interviews with about eight other candidates, so I spent the next weekend in May — that beautiful Saturday — indoors, in the…

(Note — bits of this appeared as regular blog entry a few days back…see how it morphs, Aspiring Writers? This appeared in the Alameda Sun May 12, 2005)If you spend any time with teenagers, you’re bound to get into trouble. We just had a wacky and wild last-minute Cinco de Mayo party in the past week. Though it seemed like a good idea at the time to drag our friend Stella into the living room and do some salsa dancing with her, the children were not amused by this horrifying display of adult behavior. They peeked in the front door, because teenagers never congregate indoors when there is a front…

Holy smoke, I’ve been gone to Las Vegas to a convention of city and regional magazines, and so glad to be back! I took along my laptop with the intention of blogging my way through the dull seminars, and found that A) there was no wireless Internet to be had at my hotel (though I could have plugged in for $11 per hour), and B) the seminars were not boring — a delightful discovery. Anyway, no wireless, no $ to blow on the other, and no time. So I’m lagging instead of blogging. And carried that laptop to Vegas and back for…(say it with me) absolutely nothing. I sat down…

I am beat but it has been a Mother’s Day to remember. After a lost weekend, as it happens. I’ll see how far I get before drooling off to sleep. Started off the weekened with a bang Thursday night, dashing home to Patrick’s for our Cinco de Mayo party. Big whoopee — it was much fun for all. Moments to savor: the look of horror on the kids faces as I danced with Stella in the living room to salsa music. (Savanna: “On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the worst thing you could do as a mom, that was a 7 if you were joking, a…