NOW, MORE THAN EVER,
NOT THE NEW ANYONE

1. The dark chocolate Bounty Bars that disappeared last December are back in stores around here (or at least one store) and we are pleased. A lot of you wrote in to tell me where we could order cases of the bars online and some of you even offered to send them from across the pond, and thank you, but we just held out and hoped the universe would return them to the place where we found them in the first place. Sometimes you want that little gesture even more than you want chocolately coconut goodness. As for those of you in Chicago, DON’T EAT THEM ALL PLEASE.

2. Sometime between 9 and 10 am CST today you can hear me reading my most recent Field-Tested Books piece on Chicago Public Radio WBEZ. If you miss it this morning (and you probably will, because I am posting this at the last minute), the segment will be archived here on the Eight Forty-Eight page.

Have a great weekend, chickens!

All weekend I couldn’t stop reading about Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin and her babies, and her guns, and the polar bears, and the book banning, and all her babies, and her ethics, and which babies are her babies and which babies are her babies’ babies, and her “foreign policy experience,” and her babies babies BABIES and holy mooseburgers hit me with a hockey stick I’M DONE. I’m not watching her speak tonight and next time that lurchy updo of hers pops up on my browser I am going to close the window and walk away. Yes, I am.

Other than that, though, I had a fine time the past few days, painting the TV room, going to Chicago Jazz Fest, and putting all my white shoes away. I have more or less accomplished my three summer goals, which were: 1.) Run a 5K, 2.) Start a garden, and 3.) Paint apartment. Notice I said start a garden. I wasn’t so great on the follow-through for that, but the sunflowers survived, and so did the basil, and the lettuce has long since ceased to be lettuce and has morphed instead into some kind of spindly Dr. Seuss-looking botanical freakout, but that’s okay.

I am also working a lot right now. Someone posted on my Facebook wall and said that she missed my blog, even though she understood I have “bigger fish to fry.” I wouldn’t say that the fish are bigger, just different fish that require a lot of my energy and attention and, uh, frying oil. Okay, never mind that analogy. But it’s true. Lots of oil! Not so much oil that Sarah Palin would need to build A PIPELINE ENDORSED BY GOD, AND YES I REALLY NEED TO STOP READING ABOUT THIS STUFF, but enough to keep me from updating more often. So kindly grab my RSS feed, if you haven’t done so already, and let me drop in once in awhile when I can.