It’s because we’re all egg-shaped the day afterwards.

I avoided chocolate (for the most part, anyway — admittedly there were a couple of bad moments with the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups), but it was a double-ham-dinner day, and I ate so much of the pink stuff I’m afraid I’m going to start oinking soon. (I also drank about six gallons of water to compensate for the salt, and was tempted last night to resort to elastic waistbands.)

But I went for a walk and wrote my words and had a modest lunch today, so I’m feeling slightly more human.

However, I realized half an hour ago that I’m teaching a class tonight, and that I haven’t yet come up with the writing exercises I want to assign. So I have to toddle off and do that now.

Before I go, though, reading-wise, I’m on a France kick right now; after working my way through Peter Mayle’s latest, which was fun, I picked up Mireille Guiliano’s book French Women for All Seasons (I’ll post the link later; this browser won’t let me do it). I have many, many things to say about that book, but little time at the moment. For now, though, I will say that thank God the French women I’ve met have little in common with “The French Woman” as described by Ms. Guiliano, or I would have been tempted to throttle them all with their fashionable scarves. (So attractive! So versatile! So potentially lethal!)

Oh — and I wrote 1700 words today. In case you were counting. 🙂 (I am, but then again, I’m the one with the deadline. Er, deadlines. Three of them, in fact. Gah! Need chocolate…)

So all of a sudden half the planet is headed to Poisoned Pen Letters… and I couldn’t figure out why.

But apparently my little post on car hygiene caught the eye of the folks over at Jalopnik, and they included it in yesterday’s “Blog Hoonage” post — which is, as they put it, an “…early afternoon daily feature highlighting the best and oftentimes unnoticed auto-related content in the blogosphere.” Of course, if you’d told me two weeks ago that anything I ever wrote would be featured on a car-related blog, I would have thought you were certifiable.

But there you have it.

And thank you, Jalopnik. Gosh, I’m honored!

Back to the mini eggs now…

Last night, after Susan Rogers Cooper’s surprise 60th birthday party (her daughter set the whole thing up, and even ordered a cake that looked exactly like Susan’s recently released book Vegas Nerve), I drove my friend and fabulous author Jan Grape home.

Jan, as it happens, lives about 40 miles west of town, and I found myself enjoying the drive through the dark Texas countryside. The highway was flanked by barely glimpsed wildflowers, the flash of fence posts, and the occasional rustic barbecue joint (like Opie’s, which Jan tells me is great). The emptiness of it all made me feel like I was far, far away from city life. And the street signs are great: fun, rustic names like “Bob Wire Road” (not barbed wire, mind you), “Haystack Road,” and then… quite unexpectedly… “Electric Avenue.”

“Electric Avenue?”

Who the heck named a street in the middle of rural Central Texas “Electric Avenue?”

And perhaps more importantly: why?

Was it because the road was the first in the area to have a functioning light bulb? Or is there a renegade early 80s fan lurking among Randy Travis and Patsy Cline lovers? Some lonely woman in love with Eddie Grant, maybe? You can’t help but wonder.

One of these days, when it’s not 11:00 at night and I’m not almost asleep at the wheel, I’ll have to find out what lurks at the end of Electric Avenue.

If I do, I’ll let you know.

Oh, and writing? Kids were home yesterday. No writing, but lots of clean laundry. Which is a good thing, b/c in-laws and parents are coming over for dinner, and now that I’ve done the wash, there are actually places to sit.

And, as I do on Easter Eve every year, I spent a good portion of the day trolling stores for Easter grass; I finally found some at Target, only to come home and discover I’d bought extra last year to avoid having to drive all over town this year.

Duh.

Of course, I also left Target with three sets of little paper lanterns for the back porch, a new broom, a bathing suit for Abby, several shirts, and a few bags of Cadbury mini eggs. For the kids, of course. Not me.

I need a Target chaperone, I think.

Anyway, I’m off to defend the mini eggs now. I hope you all have a wonderful Easter, and that it involves lots of chocolate!

I realized today (not incidentally because it was my turn to post) that I neglected to tell everyone about Inkspot, a new blog composed of Midnight Ink authors (and including fellow cozy chick JB Stanley, who may actually have more books to write than me in the next year).

So for today’s post, simply click here.

Cheers, and hope your days went well. My word count, in case you were wondering, was nonexistent. But I needed a day off. After all, I get to do taxes this weekend! Can’t wait…

In case you didn’t know, I am the proud driver of a minivan, the interior of which is… well, let’s just say it’s seen better days. This has not, unfortunately, escaped the notice of my extended family; the other day, when I told my son he needed to keep the cap ON the bubbles before getting into car, my charming father said, “But why? It’s soap. It can only help.”

Har, har, har.

At any rate, as you can imagine, car detailing has been rather low on the list the last several months, behind things like organizing my spice cabinet, doing tons of laundry, blogging, and writing, oh, say, three books in just over a year.

But I do try. Every Friday I lug out the collection of papers and shoes and clothes and as many intact goldfish as I can find. (The upside of all this is that if we were ever stranded somewhere, we’d have pretzels and raisins and goldfish to last us for weeks.)

Nevertheless, I am still a bit sensitive about it.

Which is why my discovery at the Westbank Library today was so marvelous.

It was an older Japanese car, probably from the late 80s, but it wasn’t the exterior that caught my attention. It was the interior, the contents of which included (a) an antique magazine rack filled with sun-bleached papers, (b) a wooden arrow, complete with three scraggly feathers, and (c) a hubcap — that’s right, a hubcap, right there on the back seat — that made it so delightful.

Of course, I didn’t want to stare, so I just did a quick visual inventory. But on the way back out, I paused and looked again. There were also seashells, sand, several sunglasses cases, an assortment of books and magazines, a McDonald’s bag, two umbrellas, and what might have once been an apple.

It was so satisfying.

How about you? Are you a car neatnik, or more like me?

P.S. I wrote 1600 words today. And am drinking (literarily, anyway) margaritas on the Riverwalk in San Antonio now.

So I went and had lunch at my daughter’s school today, and as it turned out, I came away with more than just a ham sandwich. (Which was delicious, incidentally, with great chewy bread and lots of tomato slices. But that’s beside the point.)

You see, the way it works in my daughter’s class is that after the kids eat, they read for a while. And today, as I munched on my sandwich and the teachers oohed and aahed over a bunch of bead necklaces one of the other teachers had made, Abby shared two fascinating books with me.

The first was about Louis Braille. I never knew this until this afternoon, but the creator of Braille wasn’t born blind. His father was a saddlemaker, with lots of leatherworking tools around, including an awl, with which three-year-old Louis accidentally poked himself in the eye. Unfortunately, this being in the pre-antibiotic era, the eye became infected; then the infection moved to the other eye, and the poor kiddo went blind. And after last week’s little melanoma scare, I found myself tearing up just reading about the poor kid and the awl. What an awful accident! How terrible his parents must have felt — and how helpless! (Louis didn’t lead a charmed life afterwards, either; not long after the blinding accident, his family’s house was occupied for a couple of years by Russian soldiers. And he eventually died at 43 of tuberculosis.)

But if little Louis hadn’t played with that awl and poked himself in the eye, we wouldn’t have Braille. And he made a huge difference for hundreds of thousands — probably millions, actually — of people despite his obstacles. Heck — it was because of his obstacles. I mean, what would have happened if his dad had been, say, a dog groomer? Not that they had dog groomers back then, but you get the idea. Then again, if he’d been running with scissors… Oh, never mind.

When we were done with that book, while I was surreptitiously blowing my nose and wiping my eyes (I’m still a little overwrought, it seems), Abby trotted over with another book, which I read over her shoulder. This one was about Louis Armstrong. According to the book, as a child, he found a gun in his house; when he and some friends took it out and fired some celebratory shots into the air, he was arrested, taken from his family, and sent to the Home for Colored Waifs. (Horrifying. Can you imagine?)

But while he was there, someone invited him to join a little band.

And then gave him a bugle.

And the rest, as they say, was history.

So I left the school with a lot of food for thought this afternoon. I’m not usually much of a biography reader, but maybe I should be; it’s amazing what can come out of what seem like the worst of circumstances, isn’t it? And what a poignant reminder of how fortunate we all are to live when and where we do.

Okay, enough of the heavy stuff. I’m off to take a bath and read Peter Mayle’s Provence A to Z while I pretend I’m really living in a gite in Provence. All I need is a glass of marc to complete the illusion. Not that I’ve ever had marc, or even know what it is (I haven’t made it past ‘G’ yet), but if I don’t fall asleep, I should know in the next few hours.

Hope your days were all fabulous, and for those of you who are writing with me, I did manage to write a speedy 1600 words today, clocking in at somewhere over 41,000 words. And I’m excited about the next scene, which is lovely. How’s it going with you?

I’m just now getting around to posting, as the last few days have been chock-full of writing-related engagements, dinners and lunches with relatives, and (of course) more appointments with the pediatrician. (This time it’s Ian, who has a nagging cough.)

Anyway, about a half hour ago I got back from teaching a mystery class on a semi-empty stomach. (I was forced to eat Doritos, which I love, but which are horrible for me.) When I came home, I was craving vegetables, so I rooted through my pantry and located a can of artichoke hearts. They’re packaged by a Mexican outfit called Luna Rossi, with the intriguing tagline “Romance you can taste.”

(Yes, that’s right, ladies and gentlemen. We’re talking ARTICHOKES. Granted, they’re artichoke HEARTS, but still.)

Anyway, I ate the whole can, even though they were disappointingly spotty (despite the promise of being canned “eight hours or less after picking”) and more than a bit choky (that wiry hairy stuff). So now my mouth feels like I’ve been chewing on acid-laced Brillo pads. And if that’s what romance tastes like, I’ll pass, thank you very much.

But enough about artichokes. I wrote 1400 words or so today, and plan to make up the 100 words I missed tomorrow. I long ago left the outline I made, and am hoping that the new road I’m forging will lead somewhere interesting and in some way related to the beginning of the book. We shall see. And in the meantime, things are moving ahead full-steam on the third Gray Whale Inn mystery, despite the fact that I haven’t had a lot of time to think about it. I have decided that this whole two-series thing would be much easier if I had multiple-personality disorder.

At any rate, it’s time to de-choke myself with a toothbrush and hit the sack. Sweet dreams everyone, and I’ll be back tomorrow!