Tomorrow is a Wednesday.

I have been carting this television around since 11th grade. Now, many years later, I realized it doesn't even work. I think I last used it in college, to watch a VHS with Veronica.

I thought it was so cool that I still had a television that could play VHS tapes. 

This leaves me thinking two things:

1. How will I screen Hallmark's DON QUIXOTE for my 5th graders?

2. Why did I feel it was necessary to inform the world that my television had played its last tape?

The things we think other people want to know.

Yesterday we hiked Angel Island's five miles.

I am not very good with this one line a day thing.

Tonight I am pretty sure I put too much detergent in the machine. We will find out in ten minutes.

Since I was on the verge of an emotional freakout, my husband fed me blueberries and drove me to the beach, where we read our books and waited for the sun to set. Crisis averted.

I have been reunited with Goodreads, but not with my car.

The St. John's Academy graduation ceremony reminded me of a wedding: grand entrance, first dance, cake-cutting, toasts and speeches.

The Tonga Room at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco looks like Pirates of the Caribbean meets the Tiki Room--and it rains indoors! (photo below from the site)

Even a Late-Night Line Counts

With an hour left of May twenty-second, I have to decide whether to write champagne and ice-cream sandwiches, Bed-Bath-and-Beyond in a fit of organization, paper mache with 4th and 5th graders, or crocheting in anticipation of my cousin's soon-to-be-born baby boy; apparently, my command of punctuation makes it so I can mention them all.

One Line a Day

I've decided to start a new project. I'm calling it something lame: One Line a Day. It's inspired by  my desire to buy a new journal.

The Beginning: 
I really like buying notebooks and journals. The first page of a new journal makes me feel inspired, as if the page pulses with potential.

The Conflict: 
After I write on that first new page, the whole journal feels old. And I have to go buy a new one, because I want to feel the adrenaline rush of empty lines.

I have a collection of mostly-blank notebooks: all of which have writing on the first one or two pages.

The Seed:
I found a journal, called "One Line a Day." My irrational self wants to buy the journal. My rational self is afraid it will end up like the others.

But it's just so beautiful. 

It has a line for every day of the year: 

room enough to write one sentence--One Line--

for each day. For five years.

 (journal pic from Pottery Barn)

The Compromise:


I resist the impulse buy. Instead, I give myself a trial period.

Kind of like when I wanted a cat in elementary school and my mom made me prove I could take care of something by committing to cleaning my room and bathroom everyday for a month.

I prove to myself that I will use the One Line a Day Journal, by using my blog as my "One Line a Day." For a month, I'll blog one line a day. If I can do it, I get the journal. If I can't, I have to pretend I did and start filling up all those neglected notebooks sitting in the bottom of our closet.

We got that cat. I'm gonna get me that journal.

Things I Wish I Could Have #1: Magical Reading Nooks

These Kids have it all

I officially have a Master's Degree. Yeah. That means ....







Your guess is as good as mine.

2 AM

for no good reason, other than the reasons
which keep me up, when everyone else
is sleeping.

Words I otherwise would have said
stick, on my tongue. Peanut butter
words, the kind with the nuts on the inside,
the kind you have to stir when the oil
separates.

I sometimes feel separate, too.

I would put a question here, a hypothetical
something to suggest a theme.
A motif. A common thread.

I am a well-punctuated sentence
without parenthetical asides.
The sticky things
stay stuck.

"If fiction is to be truthful about what human beings really are and do, we have to define knowledge as a goal of the imagination."

Ursula Le Guin, Making your Fiction Truthful