You are all nice. So nice! Ponies for everyone. Except now we have to go back to pretending everything is fine, because I can only think about the Not Fine stuff in short bursts, lest my brain melt. Today, for example, I am busy making Black Friday my bitch, and to celebrate that, I am also giving away an iPod Touch over on Want Not. So feel free to come over and enter that. And possibly do some shopping. P.S. We had a lovely Thanksgiving, with much for which to be thankful. I hope it was the same for you. With extra gravy.
Today I'm grateful for writing, even on days like today, when I don't want to, I'm not "feeling" it, and I would rather be in bed with the covers over my head. And I'm grateful for all of the people who encouraged me along the way. This is the (very worn) back cover of my 6th grade yearbook. (Thank you, Mrs. Simons---it took me a while to get around to it, but you can rest easy knowing you were right after all.) And thank you to every single one of you who stops by my little corner of the 'net, too.
I totally meant to write something deep and meaningful for you yesterday, to make up for my absence, but it turned out that---it being my first day back home, and all---I was far too busy: 1) sleeping 2) playing with the dog 3) slurping vitamin C to ward off the cold I tried to bring home 4) wading through fifty gazillion emails 5) trying to catch up on work 6) whining about how much work I had to catch up on 7) inviting people to a party I haven't started planning yet (oops!) 8) trying to advise my daughter on the politics of cookie dough 9) trying to tune out my son watching every Annoying...
I'm going to a conference next week. As is my wont when I have a business event coming up, I carefully get all my ducks in a row: First I book my travel, then I organize the calendar to make sure the kids are covered while I'm away, next I make a hair appointment (lest you think I'm terribly girly, it's generally only because I have 3+ inches of gray roots which need to be beaten into submission), and finally I commence freaking out about my clothes. Sometimes I sort of want to punch myself in the face. That feeling generally comes on right after I either think or actually say, "I have...
Hi there, and thank you for visiting Woulda Coulda Shoulda! I can't come to the blog right now, because I am either away from my desk or struggling against being rendered completely incoherent with rage. If you leave me a message, I'll get back to you just as soon as I'm done weeping for my industry and humanity as a whole. If you are experiencing an emergency, please hang up and dial 911. Otherwise, kindly get off my lawn unless you'd like to hear a story about how back in my day, people worked hard and ate real food. Hmph.
Yesterday I took Monkey to the post office with me to mail some packages. We frequent four different post offices, depending on where the errands of the day happen to take us, but yesterday we hit the one we go to most often, and the clerk recognized us. She chatted up Monkey ("How old are you now? What grade are you in?") while I piled items on the counter. She began going through the stack and stopped to look at the return address on one of the packages. "Now, what's Want Not?" she asked, peering at my handwriting with a furrowed brow. "It's a bargain shopping website I run," I responded,...
I've been thinking, lately, about putting a new category in here specifically to tag Asperger's-related stuff. Of course---being me, and Monkey being Monkey---so far all of my category title ideas run to things like: Planet Rigid and the Unbendable Rules of Doom or I Just Memorized This Entire Dictionary In Under An Hour And Don't Understand Why You're Upset That I Forgot To Put On Underwear Today or Everything is perfectly fine right up until it's not or God either trusts me a whole bunch OR he has a wicked sense of humor You see my dilemma. Maybe I'll just go with Quirky is the new Black....
I'm not here right now; I'm at Mom 2.0, about to go sit on a panel about Business Strategy. (I know, I know... I'm not sure how that happened, either.) In the meantime, I've finally unveiled the key to my success over at Five Full Plates, and you might be surprised to find out what it is. I know I was. But hey, I'm not arguing. Yesterday I took off my jeans without unbuttoning them---hard to not love THAT.
Otto and I were discussing work, and somehow the conversation worked around to the sorts of things I talk about when I go give guest lectures or speak on a panel or whatever. My darling daughter---who probably wonders why anyone would VOLUNTARILY subject themselves to me droning on and on---asked what people usually want from me when I'm asked to speak somewhere. "Well," I said, "it usually boils down to them wanting to know how to start a blog that people will actually want to read." "That's EASY!" she said, throwing her hands in the air with the absurdity of it all. "You just tell them to...
