reunion

Only have a minute....

but I felt compelled to let you know how much I love this FMP renewal time of year...

Normally, I'm not terribly aware of exactly who our subscribers are. But at renewal time, as your renewals come to me, I am reminded of all the great people who read the magazine each month, and whom I've come to know through the years - either online or at workshops. I smile when I see many of the names on the renewal notifications, remembering folks fondly. And some of you include little comments on your PayPal form, which are fun to read...

I am happy I know so many cool colored pencil folks. I am happy you keep liking FMP enough to keep renewing!

my wish for you...

nice things

I've been reading that you can become happier with different exercises. Like how you can become healthier by eating right and exercising. Or like how you can become more flexible by stretching, or...well, you get the point.

One of the happier exercises is to think about a number of nice things right before you go to sleep every single night. It's like the gratitude journal idea, only for the lazy. My sister told me she read about one woman who thinks of 20 good things about that day every night.

I'm headed off to bed right now...so I thought maybe I'd try the happy exercise tonight, but do it in my blog. Here goes...

• I got 5 or 6 hugs at dance tonight. All the instructors are so cool....it's a very huggy group.

• My son got a very dirty diaper tonight at McDonald's, where we always go eat when I take him out for a visit (That isn't the nice thing!) I didn't have another diaper to put on him after peeling (sorry!) off the dirty one, and without a diaper, his jeans are dangerously loose. Dangerously. The nice thing is that we managed to walk out of the McDonald's bathroom and all the way to the car without his jeans suddenly dropping to the ground!!!

• I got lab work results back today and my cholesterol level is 160 and my LDL is 112. Damn. I love passing tests I don't have to study for.

• 6 Christmas cards in the mail today! Very nice. Well, actually - a mixed blessing. I don't send Christmas cards so each one I get gives me both a warm fuzzy feeling and a stab of good old fashioned German Lutheran guilt....

• Tuna roll sushi for lunch today!

• Caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror at the studio while dancing the Swing tonight, and I think maybe I might kind of almost look like I'm starting to know what I'm doing on the dance floor???!!!

• My favorite nice thing about today? It will be another whole year before we have a day as short or a night as long as today's....

I think I feel happier already! G'night!

wind, rain and clam chowder

Thursday afternoon, someone unzipped Seattle's skies, and out fell seas of water.

Although Seattle is known for rain, it doesn't really rain here. What it does do is sprinkle, drizzle, mist and shower. Most of us don't even own umbrellas. So when this drenching started, Audrey (my assistant) and I leapt from our chairs to watch the violent waterfalls already cascading from the roof. It was shocking.

A few hours later, I sat on my sofa in the dark, surrounded by candles and afghans, trying not to lose a little bit of my mind. For 6 hours the wind howled and bullied and occasionally screamed, sending thuds to my roof and siding and windows and I just wanted it to be over! I do not know how anyone stays sane through a hurricane, I really don't. I was, in a word, terrified.

Around 3:30 in the morning, the monster outside my window calmed down enough that I finally had the courage to make the trek down my hall (a bee-line toward 6 of the largest fir trees in my yard) climb into bed and fitfully sleep.

Daylight brought relief...since I saw that other than no power, there was no damage. Certainly nothing like these poor souls had...

My yard was a mess of branches and shingles (not from my roof!) but that was it. I cleared off the bigger branches and made some phone calls. No one I knew had power in the entire greater Seattle area except my son's group home! Sensing it would be days before power would be restored, and being a woman too old and too smart to think that suffering does anything except make you suffer, I packed a tote and high-tailed it into the business center of town where some of the lights were back on. The Comfort Inn had power! And they had rooms!

I checked in, chatted with other cold souls in the lobby about where to get hot coffee and hot food, settled into my 2-queen bed room, then headed out again in search of something steaming and soothing, which I found at Coco's. They'd just had their power restored and opened a few minutes before I pulled up. Hot coffee and hot clam chowder and toasted garlic bread made absolutely everything all right again.

All told, over a million homes and businesses lost power in greater Seattle. I spent 3 nights at my hotel-home away from home, (my daughter and boyfriend joined me Saturday night, since they still have no power!) but now I am back home and I have power and heat and the internet and a TV and a microwave and an oven and a garage door opener and a printer and a DVD player and Christmas lights and normal is normal again. I didn't lose a thing in the fridge or freezer, since the house temp dropped into the 30's. I got to spend a couple of days with my daughter and we had fun playing cards using cough drops as poker chips, eating through a box of chocolates we treated ourselves to (she likes milk, I like dark) and just hanging out.

I am glad it is over. I did learn one thing, though. I've decided it's time to grow up some and make myself, for the first time, an emergency backpack to keep in the hall closet. Water, flashlight, bandaids, candy bars, nuts, batteries and phone numbers. I realized that without the internet, I am completely cut off. I don't keep a phone book around, and I had to call my sister in Eugene to have her look up the Comfort Inn phone number. And without my cell phone, I know no phone numbers...not even my daughter's!!! It's pretty stupid to let a little device like a cell phone be your brain...

So far, we've had the worst winter we've had in forever....and it's not even winter yet!

it's ok

Have about a minute and a half to spare right now....

But I just have to thank you all for the heart-felt comments.

And also to let you know that, once I saw how ridiculous it was to save minutes, I instantly stopped that foolishness!

Marylou (my sis) and I had a juicy 2-hour talk yesterday and another half hour today, and I've upped my minutes in Verizon so there'll be no more of that minute-saving nonsense! :-)

She'll be my roommate on the Mexican Riviera Workshop Cruise in February, and with any luck, will also be on the Alaskan Cruise Workshop with me in May. We mostly laugh a lot when we're together. She's just the best...

saving my minutes...

My baby sister, you may know, has late stage ovarian cancer. That is a bad cancer to have...

She is my only sister and we're close. She lives 4 hours south of me in Eugene. We email a lot, but don't talk all that often because I'm on Verizon and she's on something else so it costs us minutes to talk unless we wait till after 9:00, but by then she's often tired. And weekends are hectic for both of us.

Today, I wanted to talk to her, so I made a mental note to try to remember to call her right at 9:00.

Then I got up from my computer and was walking down the hall to my bedroom thinking about finding my slippers when it struck me. I am not calling my only sister during the day, my kid sister that I will lose within the next half dozen years...because I am saving my minutes.

My minutes.

We go through life in half a daze of habit and unexamined behavior most of the time, don't we?

In a few years, how many minutes would I be willing to "un-save" to talk to my sister?

recurring dream...

Lately I have been experiencing a recurring dream....

I am backstage in a large auditorium. A signal is given, and I walk into the middle of the stage. The lights are white hot and blinding, so I can't see the audience at all. There are clues there may be at least a few people out there - a muffled cough, someone clearing their throat...

I sing a long, soulful ballad, then without pause, immediately launch into a short little whimsical ditty. Then, silence.

I walk off stage. I don't know if one person heard me or a thousand. I enjoyed singing the songs, though....and the idea that there may have been an audience was a little thrilling...

OK. It's not really my recurring dream. It's just sorta what it feels like to blog! If you are reading this, and ever want to clap, or hop on stage and sing with me, or throw tomatoes, please feel free to click "comments" found below every post.

surreal spam

I checked my email just now. Do you have any idea how utterly weird and surreal it is to get SPAM that includes an image you yourself drew?????!!!!

Here's a screen capture of my Outlook Express...with the spam mentioned. Let me tell you....it is a feeling that is way surreal...sorta like if I sent myself spam, then forgot that I sent it....

Seems like a great price on that 132-set, though! :-)

teeth...who knew?

Did you know that if you go to 7 different dentists, and they all take x-rays of all your teeth, you can walk away with 7 entirely different plans of attack on those teeth?

The older I get, the more I realize I live in la-la land...

See, up until yesterday, I still thought that what's wrong with your teeth isn't really open to interpretation. I thought if you have a cavity, you have a cavity and your kindly dentist fills it and then that's that. Or maybe you need a root canal and your kindly dentist does the root canal and then that's that!

My dentist retired about 6 years ago...and I'm on my 7th dentist since then!!!

Dentist #1: Wore plastic flip flops, had a bright blond streak in the front of his long black hair, and when I told him one tooth was giving me some serious pain, he gave me a prescription for a mouth wash. I...uh....didn't go back.

Dentist #2: Talked and joked incessently, mostly about the videos he was willing to play in the TVs he had in each exam room. Told me I needed 3 root canals and a mouth guard. We started with one root canal. When the cap didn't fit the first time, he sent it back. When it didn't fit the second time, he sent it back, when it didn't fit the third time he got mad at me and said I wasn't closing my mouth correctly. Huh??!! When it didn't fit the fourth time I lied and said it all felt great and since I'd paid him before we even started the work (should that have been a clue?) I lost in every way.

Dentist #3: Smiled a lot and talk incessently about how much prettier my smile would be with 8 veneers. Every time I smiled, he'd shake his head and say "Oh...just let us make your smile prettier..." How creeeepy is that? In the end, he showed me on his super high tech monitor how the last dentist had missed a canal because.....LUCKY ME! I have an extra canal in that tooth! He shooed me off to his friend the endodontist. Endo-what???

Dentist #4: Yes. Entirely possible that I need my cap removed and another root canal done on that tooth, agrees the endo hot-shot. However, since I don't have dental insurance (the down-side to being self-employed ... Up-side? robes & slippers qualify as "work clothes") he suggests I find a cheaper endo-dude, as his fees are the highest in the state.

Where did I go wrong? What is happening? How can it be so hard? What dark, dental horror film have I accidentally fallen into??

Dentist #5: Gorgeous tropical fish in the Rhode Island sized aquarium in the waiting room....cool bells and whistles in the exam room....soft-spoken, pleasant mannered dentist...my third set of full x-rays in 3 years...Diagnosis: I'll need 4 root canals first. then I can come back to do the $5000 worth of work he'd also like to do in my mouth. He'd love for me to see his favorite endodontist - can't say enough about how highly he can recommend him....

sigh.

Dentist #6: oh my. We are talking one seriously nice waiting room - espresso coffee - a jungle of tropical plants - leather chairs. What am I doing here??? This lovely man said he would need to re-do the botched root canal, and would also need to do an additional 4 root canals. We're now at a grand total of 5 root canals!!!!!!!! The total cost for both this guy and the aquarium guy would be.....drum roll please......$14,000.

I went home and looked longingly at the pliers...

Then I turned 50. AARP, baby! So now, with AARP dental insurance card firmly gripped in my hand, I visited:

Dentist #7: Dr. Brossel was recommended to me by a friend I've made at dance. Dr. Brossel is my hero. He is the dentist I've dreamed of while passing up the salad coz it's too crunchy for my poor teeth (the Almond Roca, too..and that's sinful). My 5th set of xrays later, he tells me I need one root canal. One. I need a little gum work. I need a tooth re-shaped. I need 2 fillings, and I need a tooth filed down.

And if I'm feeling particularly vain and frivilous, we could do one veneer on the one "fang" I despise because it is just so very fangy.

I am more grateful than I know how to express, to have finally found a no-nonsense, honest dentist. I would clean this man's toilets for a year, I swear. Or clean out his gutters, at least....

Who knew 7 dentists could read basically the same mouth 7 different ways? Who knew?

Kelly again...

I'll pick up where I left off in my last post...

After Kelly picked up the Kitchenaide, he went home and emailed me. It was an extraordinary message - letting me know that he had an inoperable cancer, that he was finding a new and deeper life in his death sentence...and ended with this:

Thank you for the Kitchenaid, the baking supplies and a moment to touch each other's souls.

I replied to Kelly, telling him about my sister's ovarian cancer...and thus began a 3 month email journey. Our emails were full, surprising jewels of human-ness.....He wrote to me of the awful abuse he'd suffered as a child in rural eastern Washington, growing up in a home without running water....but always with a spirit of victory rather than martyrdom. I told him of my recent heartbreak and my fears about my sister. He answered with heartbreak stories of his own....and kind words of support, encouragement and love. He promised to find resources to help my sister in Euguene...We discovered we both are fiends for Boggle and Scrabble, and that Thanksgiving is our favorite holiday.

When you meet a man who has a year or so to live, you would kinda expect that you'll be the "supporter", the "giver", the "nurturer", right?? What a surprise to find that Kelly's glowing, calm spirit has given more to me than I can imagine I have given to him.

After 3 months of email communication, I decided to help Kelly pass away the hours at a chemo treatment last week. Once again I received a surprise from Kelly! I walked into his tiny chemo cubicle to find a virtual Chemo Party going on! The room was full of friends...all of whom emanated the same shining goodness I've come to expect from my unlikely friend...

It was great fun. Conversation somersaulted from seat belt laws to politics to baking to music to movies...Afterwards, a few of us went to Starbucks for coffee and more talk and laughs, and by the time I left, I felt I had forever known Kelly. When I got up to go, he gave me a long, long bear hug and said "I just didn't expect to fall so completely in love with you!"

I got rid of a heavy duty mixer in August...and got a heavy duty friend from it by December.

Life is.....truly.....amazing........

an unlikely friend

Later today, I will be keeping my friend Kelly company during his chemo treatment. I have met Kelly only once before - this past August, for about....oh.....maybe 8 minutes....

Here's the story. I was clearing mounds of unnecessary stuff out of my garage and putting anything remotely usable onto craigslist. One of those items was a Kitchenaide stand mixer. A beauty. But never, ever, ever used. I'm one of those for whom a Betty Crocker Brownie Mix is too much trouble. Shoot....half the time, I think toast is too much trouble! (my freezer is full of little boxes printed with the words "slit cover to vent before microwaving"...)

Being a night-owl, I placed the ad for the mixer online around 2:00 am at a pretty ridiculously low price. Being a night-owl, Kelly answered the ad around 2:15 am. Here was the email:

>>Oh, My, God.
>>
>>If you still have this, I want it. I will meet you anywhere, anytime,
>>with the bucks.

Now this is not your typical response from a craigslist-er. I mean...personality doesn't generally scream through the emails, you know? I instantly liked Kelly.

I emailed Kelly back, said it was hers, and we set a time for her to come pick it up. Only Kelly turned out to be a he, not a she.

Kelly breezed into my kitchen the next afternoon...bringing in with him some sort of light. A breezy, refreshing kind of shining. Tall, thin, a bit pale and clearly gay, Kelly was completely irresistible. I can't tell you what it was about him...he was just so there. When I asked him why he wanted the mixer, he said he baked scads and scads of cookies each week for the Seattle Gilda's Club and that his mixer had just given up the ghost.

Huh. Gilda's Club. Gilda Radner died of ovarian cancer. That's what my sister was diagnosed with last fall.

Huh. Interesting....the people that fall across your path.

I will tell you more about Kelly and me later. But it is finally getting too late, even for me, so I need to go to bed. After all, I don't want to fall asleep this afternoon while keeping my unlikely friend Kelly company...

winter!

We don't get snow in Seattle. Not much and not often, anyway...
I know, I know. Everyone thinks since we are a mere 2 hours south of the Canadian border, it must be cold here, but the Puget Sound keeps us mild so our winter temps rarely slip below the 40s.

But we got snow tonight! It's the most snow I've seen here in 3 or 4 years. Last year we didn't even get a dusting. I've always loved snow and still do...probably mostly because I can work right here from home and don't have to brave the roads. Since we don't get snow to speak of, we don't have snow plows. What we do have is tons and tons of hills. Hills and packed, wet snow don't go very well together, especially when you mix in a gaggle of drivers who never drive in snow!

I'm going to go make cocoa, if I can find some in the pantry. We so rarely have weather worthy of a cup of hot chocolate.....

Happy Thanksgiving!

May your gravy be silky, your potatoes fluffy, your turkey moist, your pumpkin pie crust flaky ...and may you spend the day with those you love.

Happy Thanksgiving!

be a fly...

Want to be a fly on my shoulder?
Went to bed at 3:45 am last night. I am an incorrigible night owl.

What was I doing into the wee hours? Manually editing an Excel database for an upcoming email campaign. Ugh.

What used to look like this: David Smith

I turned into this:
David
Smith

This was not fun. At all. Well, actually, seeing how many I could get done before I went completely mad was a little bit fun. (There are 3127 names to do. I got 890 done last night.)

Got up this morning at 10:45:

• Fixed a cup of instant coffee, checked my email, deleted the 287 SPAM emails I got overnight, then answered about a dozen or so real emails.

• Started making a punch list for the computer tech guy I'm going to hire after Thanksgiving.

• Opened Dreamweaver to work for an hour or so on the December issue.

• Called my aunt to try to coordinate a drive down to Oregon tomorrow for Thanksgiving.

• Answered another half dozen emails. My favorite one to read and answer was from Kelly. I will tell you all about Kelly in a future blog. I'll give you a teaser though...I met him through craigslist.org of all things!
  

• Updated my main website with some changes I've been meaning to do.

• Put in a load of laundry - darks. (I mostly own "darks".....so slimming, you know....)
  

• Called my son's group home letting them know I'm taking him to dinner tonight.

• Opened the fridge and about keeled over. Some really baaaaaaaaad salmon in there I forgot about. (read "forgot" as "ignored till now")

• Took a shower and applied liberal doses of lotion. ("Chalk" and "my skin" become synonyms during the winter months...)

• Spent half an hour online trying to figure out Google Adsense. (read "trying" as "unable")
  

• Ate a banana, a granola bar and am washing it down slowly with a Diet Coke.
  

• Worked on the database again for about twenty minutes (I'm on 1116 now!).

• Hopped over to my blog, and decided maybe I should write something...so now I am writing something.

Whooooeee....what a ride!!!
I absolutely promise I won't put you through anything as dull as this ever again...

i'm a lousy blogger

It turns out, I'm no better at blogging than I was at waitressing, (see previous post) but for entirely different reasons. Blogging is the strangest thing...really. I don't see how so many people can do it. I mean...I write this stuff...but really have no idea if anyone reads it. And it's sort of strange to write for no reader. It's like a high tech diary. I wasn't good at diaries, either. I think I'm more of a talker. When they have talking blogs, (maybe they'll call them "togs"?) I'll be killer. Just you wait...

In the meantime... I started taking ballroom dancing lessons at our local Arthur Murray in June. I'm at the dance studio almost every day, when I'm not traveling. Dancing at Arthur Murray is magic. Here's how it works: There's a group class every night. The men all stand in a row and the women all stand in another row in front of them. The instructor shows us the steps we're going to do...and then we dance those steps with the man in front of us. "Rotate!" the teacher yells, and each woman moves to the next man down, and practices the steps again. "Rotate!" and again...In 10 minutes, everyone has danced with everyone...and we've also basically gotten that set of steps down, and the instructor teaches us something new.

Nothing particularly magical there, you say. Ah...but wait. There is magic. Everyone starts out not knowing something, and a few minutes later everyone knows something. That's pretty cool, I think. But the real magic lies in how close we are forced to be to someone we don't know, how much we touch and how often we laugh.

People don't touch, really. We touch our significant others some, if we're not single. We touch our small children, but touch our older children less. We touch at arrivals and departures, but not a whole lot in between. We don't touch co-workers and we don't touch bank tellers (shoot...most of the time we don't get out of the car at a bank anymore!) and we don't touch strangers.

Not that I'm advocating that we should. I'm just saying that when you have to, and you get over the initial fear/embarrassment/awkwardness/wariness....it is magic. People smile. People laugh. People warm to you and you warm back. (or is that sweat? The cha-cha can be pretty strenuous!) Suddenly, you are dancing. You are in someone's arms and you are twirling and turning and gliding. Hips come alive and ankles show off and it's all magic. It feels like nothing short of a celebration of health and vigor and life and of the music we usually hide too deeply in our muscles and hearts and souls...

I love dance.

remember patty melts?

I'm in Carlyle, Illinois teaching a workshop this weekend. We all went to a diner together for lunch today, and I had a patty melt. Remember patty melts? You don't see them on too many menus anymore...at least not in the Northwest. Had kinda forgotten about them...

I remember my first patty melt. It was 1973, I was 17, and I'd just started working as a waitress at Sambo's in Hillsboro, Oregon. (don't yell at me...I didn't name the place, I just poured coffee there!) I wore a 100% polyster white uniform with a skirt ending far too high on the thigh for a chubby girl...(don't yell at me about that, either!) I worked 2 nights a week and weekends and poured loads of 10 cent cups of coffee and served a thousand silver dollar pancakes and Hamburger Steak dinners with grilled onions.

I was an earnest, but lousy, waitress. Too flighty to remember to serve them their iceberg lettuce salads before their dinners came...too giggly to rack up the tips. And way too naive to know what to do with the hordes of drinkers who formed a line around the building every Friday and Saturday night at 2:15, right after the bars closed. They all wanted coffee now. And eggs now. And pancakes now. And they wanted it loudly. And they all loved to tease the smiling, nervous, harried blonde who blushed a furious magenta when she brought scrambled instead of over-easy.

After each brutal shift, we got a free meal. My very first meal at Sambo's was a patty melt because I thought the name was groovy. I thought it was named after a girl named Patty.
I'm not lying. It is true.

Doesn't matter...I loved that sandwich from the first bite, and not just because I loved the name. Slathered in Heinz, I thought it was an astounding combination of greasy, crunchy, savory, cheesy loveliness. I had a patty melt nearly every night that I worked that year...only occasionally flirting with a shrimp basket or a Chef's Salad w/ thousand island.

It's probably been over a decade since I had a patty melt....until lunch today. I gotta tell ya, it's still a damn fine sandwich...at least at Cruiser's in Carlyle...

surprises

I wonder if everyone else also thinks they live in the best part of the country? Seattle has clouds from mid-November through April. I don't mean partly cloudy, and I don't mean fluffy, cotton-candy cloudy....I mean gray-oppressive-depressing-deadening-gloom cloudy.

But I still think I live in the best part of the U.S. Maybe it's just rationalizing, since I don't really have the option of living anywhere else. My autistic son, Kevin, is in a group home 20 minutes from my house...so I'll be staying in the NW.

But maybe it's just that we don't have winter snow and ice, and we don't have summer humidity or high temps, we don't have hurricanes, we don't have thunder & lightening storms, we don't have earthquakes and we don't have cockroaches! We do have a volcano or two, but they're generally well behaved....

Or maybe it's because it is beautiful. Took a drive with my dad recently on one of our last sunny days of the year. Never were we further than 8 miles from my home...and what a day of wondrous surprises we had...

First we stumbled across, almost by accident, a new little park with a pier with amazing views. At the end of the pier we found a whole world of fisherman - a couple of dozen men of so many colors and nationalities all trying their best on a bright Sunday afternoon to nab a "keepable" King salmon at least 21 inches long. (we saw at least one succesful catch!)

A few minutes from the pier, we stopped in the parking lot of the old Cliffhouse restaurant just to take pictures of the breath-taking view of Mt. Rainier. Dad said he was hungry, but I told him the Cliffhouse was a fancy-shmancy place and we weren't dressed.


But Dad's 84, and he's sort of done with little rules like that, so he wandered toward the building anyway "just to check". Come to find out the Cliffhouse has a casual restaurant downstairs....with the same world class view! We had coffee and clam chowder and basked in Mt. Rainier and the Puget Sound.


Our last surprise was a a mountain dressed in lilac pink frosting....


At least on this day, I think you can forgive Dad and me for believing we were lucky to live in the best the country has to offer....

full moons and coleslaw

My friend Paul sent me this photo today that he took of his Illinois evening...I have a thing about the moon. This photo takes my breath away. But I can't help it, it makes me sad, too.

Back in 2000, driving home from a wonderful first date with my sweetie, I saw there was a most spectacular full moon rising in the August night sky. I was so struck by its beauty that I grabbed my cell to call him and tell him to look up and find it. I'd known him for only a few hours, but already I had to share beautiful things with him. It felt like the right thing to do...

He found the moon. He agreed it was spectacular. And he said "I can't wait to see you again."

After 6 mostly sweet years together it ended this last summer with a shock and a moan and uglier than coleslaw thrown at a fan.

In August we met for dinner for the last time...a wrenching, bitter, painful good-bye. As we walked back to our cars in silence, we turned a corner to see, in a wedge of indigo blue sky caught between Portland's office buildings, a most spectacular full moon rising...

Photo by Paul Hadfield - http://pawleewurx.com/

lest ye think i whineth too much...

Nicer, bigger room today! And on the 3rd floor with inside entry, so I can have the drapes open and let the South Carolina sunshine in! (lost? see yesterday's post)

Get this, though...the guy at the front desk (rude little man who was also there last night!) told me all their rooms are the same size so I couldn't get a bigger room. I'd looked up the hotel online last night, so I knew that was a lie. I told him I'd seen bigger rooms online. "No. Same size." he says. "Then let's go look online right now." I replied.

He ROLLED HIS EYES, sighed and gave me a new key for a larger room. Get OUT!! Couldn't believe he actually rolled his eyes...chuckled all the way to my new room....I love it when I win.

Oh...yeah...I said I know how to do something besides whine. Here goes: I witnessed an amazingly beautiful blood red sunset from the air last night as I flew between Houston and Savannah. Never seen anything like it. What a lucky girl I am, I thought...to live in a time when you can watch, from cloud-height, the sun sink behind the earth...

Cranberry-nut muffins instead of pretzels on the Continental puddle-jumper yesterday!

And I can see palm trees from my window...nuthin' wrong with that...and I can hear a few birds outside with such sweet, sweet songs, each trying to outdo the other....an avian american idol, of sorts...

you do not want to be ann kullberg tonight

The next time you wish your art career was at the same level's as Ann Kullberg's is...STOP IT!! You should be more careful what you wish for!!

I'm writing from Hilton Head, SC. I am here for a week because I'll be teaching a 5-day workshop here starting Monday. I got in late tonight. I'll admit I'm cranky and road weary, since it took me about 13 hours, all told, to get here from Seattle, and I didn't get any dinner at all, except a week old raisin oatmeal cookie I just found in my computer case....and a diet coke.

But even in one of my sunnier moods, I wouldn't be happy tonight!!! Checked into the hotel the organization booked for me. I was a little leery, as it's a very cheap hotel chain...but honestly, I'm always ready to give a place the benefit. (In fact, the Comfort Inn I stayed in last week in Clifton Park, NY was practically elegant and completely lovely and comfortable and just super-super in every way!)

But oh man. The lobby clerk was border-line rude with no smile in sight (actually basically hung up on me when I called from my room with a question) and as unhelpful as I've run across in a way long time...I have a tiny, cramped, old (but clean...I'll give them that!) room on the ground floor - one of those old-fashioned places where the door opens directly to the outside, which always makes me feel very unsafe....my room is right across the vending machines (so close you can see the Coke red through my drapes and hear each coin dropping in whenever someone uses it!) and the air conditioning isn't working, so I've got the door propped open to get some cooler air in here, which means anyone walking by is also watching me type this post.

Will have to decide at some point which I care about more - getting pajamas on, or being cool....since I clearly won't walk around my room in my nightie with the door open. (I do have the chain across the door....)

I am not staying in this room for a week. Nooooooo way.

This is a lesson I thought I'd already learned. The lesson is that I always, always, always make my own lodging plans for workshops. Always. I had a bad experience a few years back. The room I'd been booked into was so nasty I wouldn't even roll my suitcase into it! I had a car so I just told the front desk I wouldn't need the room, hopped back in my car and drove around until I found a nice Best Western, checked in, called the workshop organizer to say that the room was unacceptable, blah, blah, blah. So that was when I made that rule about finding my own hotel. Only I up and forgot my own rule!!

No car this time.....but I'll just nicely let everyone know tomorrow morning that finding another room/hotel for me is absolutely imperative. As I age and my estrogen levels drop, I've gained nerve along with a few extra chin hairs...I think it's a great trade off, since I happen to own some really nifty tweezers....

Soooooo anyhoooooo...tonight you do not want to be ann kullberg!

(and no...that is not really my chin!)

which "last laugh" ?

A long, long time ago a woman divorced her husband of nine years. In just a second, you'll understand why she felt this was necessary.

One day, the now ex-husband came over to pick up their 2 kids for the weekend. Oh...and also to crumple up a child support check into a dense little ball and throw it across the room while rather vehemently exclaiming in front of the children, "Why don't you just get off your fat ass and quit coloring!"

Oh my.

But look!! 20 years have passed and I'm still coloring! I've written 2 books about coloring, I've taught coloring in nearly every state, I make things to help people color better and I get orders from all over the world about coloring...So I always sorta figure I got the last laugh on that one...

and that, boys and girls, is why I always sign my first book "Happy Coloring!"

oh happy (popcorn) day!

I can start the "Happy" part now! Today...a box was delivered to my home. It was big and white and square. It was from Decatur, Illinois. And as soon as the outside tape was slit open, up wafted the most dreamy smell of POPCORN!!

I got a popcorn surprise today, for no reason at all!! I've taught a couple of workshops in Decatur in the last year and have swooned over Del's Popcorn Shop, where the popcorn melts in your mouth, and the caramel corn doesn't crack your fillings open. Heavenly stuff. The coordinator of the workshops sent me the popcorn out of the blue, "just because". A hand decorated popcorn bowl, too! Awwwwww. So, so, so nice.

Thank you, Jen.

don't you hate when you jump on the bandwagon?

Like, I remember I had this sort of weird little pride that I was the only person I knew who didn't have cable TV. Like maybe that was somehow going to get me some special Tropical Banana "Welcome" Smoothie in heaven or something. And I hated when I finally capitulated just last year and waited all morning for the cable guy to show up, and then, of course, went way overboard and had him hook up practically every room in the house...rooms without a TV....rooms that have never had a TV....rooms that should never have a TV.....

Dang. Here I am again. See Ann jump. See Ann jump higher. See Ann jump allllllll the way up onto the blogging bandwagon.

What the heck is a bandwagon? and why do i keep jumping on them??!!

Welcome to my Happy Coloring blog. Which, as you have already very astutely noted, may have very little to do with "happy" or "coloring." But it might. Stick around and see...