It’s Friday. It’s been a loooong busy week. Everyone in my office is either completely stressed out or a little punchy at the mere notion that we will have two days in a row off.
I am not as punchy as Queen LaFoam here.
I suspect that this may be a tribute to Steve Irwin.
Or a dance of gratitude to the office supply gods, who so seldom deliver anything large enough to require foam inserts to hold them in place.
Yeah, my best friend all day Tuesday was my box of Kleenex. Bad head cold. I stayed home… ended up working from home for four hours, but sleeping a lot, too.
Hydra brought home Tom Yum Koong (Thai hot and sour shrimp soup). It’s the best for making you feel better when sick. It worked. I was feeling much better by the next morning.
Because I went to bed so early. Getting a cold. That’s a porcelain duck, not a real one.
I had pet ducks when I was a kid. Georgie and Baby (named by my mom and sister) where white domestic ducks. Wolfie was my mallard male. He was gold and yellow when he was a duckling, the colors of Wolf Lake High School and Elementary School. Where everyone but my mom went before consolidation.
Wolfie was a headstrong duck. He followed me out to the school bus a couple of times and stood in the middle of the road quacking up defiantly at the big yellow and chrome grill till I got off and tossed him back into the yard.
Good prep for parrothood.
As part of cleaning up my studio, which had gotten pretty messy and uninviting, I made shelf space for my stash of as-yet-unused bound notebooks.
A few months ago a good stationary store told me that the company that makes these wonderful notebooks had been sold to a bigger company and they were no longer making them. I made some calls and found them at the UCLA LuValle bookstore where I have bought them since 1990. With Hydra’s encouragement I went and bought 10 of them, which should get me through several years. These are 300+ page hardbound notebooks with wonderful heavy paper and numbered pages. They’re called legal notebooks for whatever reason.
So I thought, hmm, I’ll take a photo of this. My future in writing is right here, irregardless of my publishing future. And then I realized that my past is right there, too. Photos of my mother and my father, taken before they met each other. Surrounded by stones I found on the beach near Hedgebrook (writing retreat) and little animal figures given to me by my writer friends.
I remember reading somewhere that someone around the turn of the 19th/20th Century said that schools should be designed to look like workplaces. They looked like brick factories for a long time. My high school, which opened in 1969, looked like an office building.
I think this one looks like a prison.
Okay, I’m not proud of this one, but it’s the only photo from the day that came out! Hydra and I went to a matinee of Hollywoodland and then out for sushi. For some reason I was compelled to take this photo before we left.
I also tried to take one inside the theater, but it didn’t come out.
Hollywoodland : loved Ben Affleck. Could have cut all the Adrian Brody story. Click here if you want to see my full review.
