Zoe’s friend was over last night, telling us about her dad needing to go to the doctor’s for some testing.

Me: “What kind of testing?”

Zoe’s friend: “Diabetic testing.”

Zoe (eyes as wide as dinner plates) : “They’re testing him to see if he’s EVIL?”

Me and Zoe’s friend: *???*

Zoe: You know, an evil, diabetical plan??

Me: That’s diabolical, sweetie.

Zoe: Oh.

Zoe’s friend: Diabetic is when all you drink is Diet Coke.

Zoe: Oh.

Zoe’s friend: I can’t believe you thought my dad was evil…

“Hi, Mom, this is Zoe. Ummm, there is a color of paper here? And, ummmmm, when I look at it… my eyes? Ummm, I just get a really, really, really, really bad headache? And I accidentally looked at the paper? And now, ummm, I just have a really, really, really, really bad headache, and so I was wondering if you could come and pick me up… Ok, bye bye.”

**beep**

“Hi, Mom, this is Zoe again? Umm, I still have a really, really, really bad headache from looking at the paper, and so I was wondering if you could come and pick me up right away. Ok. Bye bye.”

(I’m wondering what color makes my child’s brain hurt so badly. I hope it’s not pink, or her life will be over. Also — for the love of her brain — I hope she can stop accidentally looking at it.)

I’ve taken my sleeping pill for the night, which means that any time now I could start doing/saying some really weird stuff. I have no intention of being your laugh-slave for the evening, so I’ll make this quick.

Chapters? Are being written, guys. Thousands of words… tippity-typed out. w00t! Are they all genius? No, but that’s beside the point. The first draft is just the bones, right? The understructure for beauty. The rewrite is when you go back and weave in all the pretty stuff. At least, that’s my plan.

And also? I’ve written a lovely, moody little tune on my flute. It’s slow and flowing and composed in some melancholy minor key… and it goes along with a scene in my story. (Not to give away too much, but the scene involves a lovely young princess who is stolen away into the woods by the nymphs… the male nymph seducing her with a lovely tune on his wood flute.) The tune was there in my head so I took a little time and figured it out, and then enlisted the help of my flute instructor to get it written down properly. Now if only I also played the piano, classical guitar, and perhaps the harp so I could properly compose the whole thing… *sigh* oh well.

And now I’m off… there are weird phone conversations to be had, and strange items to be eaten, and crazy yoga poses to be contorted into before I finally check out for the night.

Nighty-nighters all.

(Have I mentioned the yam situation in Africa…?)

Randy, my man… my dawg… we need to have a talk.

You’re a decent guy. You’ve helped bring fame, money, celebrity, and excess (and one or two record deals) to young people who would have otherwise never found such things.

But you and your outbursts of fake percentages — good night! — it needs to stop.

When you say things like, “Yes! One hundred million, three hundred, and a thousand percent YES!”… you sound like there is an 85% chance that you failed 4th grade math.

Here are some examples of real percentages. Please take notes.

* You are 70% nicer than Simon, 95% less crazy than Paula, and 85% more masculine than Ryan Seacrest.
* You have approximately 40% less body fat than you did in season 1.
* Simon has approximately 15% more.
* Victoria Beckham’s bony clavicles are only 35% less deadly than Chinese throwing stars.
* Victoria Beckham weighs 300% more than a teacup chihuahua, which equals roughly 10 lbs.
* Despite all of my snarky comments, I am 45% jealous of Victoria Beckham.
* I can only name 20% of the people who have won American Idol… and one of them I’m only aware of because he lives 15 minutes from my house.
* 75% of the people who audition are terrible singers. You judges will humiliate and crush the spirits of 100% of them.

Now, after looking at these examples of actual percentages, let’s take another look at one of your exuberant “percentages”:

“I like you! You got something. I’m going to say yes… two thousand, million, and forty-six hundred percent YES!”

Let’s put this in terms you’ll easily grasp. Could a person sell two thousand, million, and forty-six hundred records? No, they couldn’t. Not even a really super-duper awesome singer. Because “two thousand, million, and forty-six hundred” is a fake number.

From now on, dawg, if you really like a singer, go no higher than 100% when voting them through to Hollywood. They will be just as happy and jump up and down just as much, and screech and fling around their yellow ticket just as wildly.

I’m a billion, thousand, and ninety-eight percent sure.

WHOOOOOOOOSHHHHHH….

That’s the sound of a thousand ideas swirling around in my brain. Those ideas are all colliding with one another. Some are salsa dancing. The rowdier ideas are “crunking” with each other. It’s pretty out of control up there.

Creative flood gates have been opened. Stuff is multiplying, pouring out, overflowing… and my inability to focus and control it is wreaking some havoc.

Mostly in my kitchen. (And my desk… sweet baby Moses, the poor desk again.) Because creative ideas don’t give a care about the dishes, nor about the piles of unread mail. Creative ideas are all, “Suz, write me down!” and then others are all, “No, write ME down!”… and then the ideas go all fistacuffs with each other, and I don’t know what to write down.

So sometimes I just stand in my messy kitchen and stare at the desk.

Focus, people. I need focus. Any one of the ideas could be really great if I could follow it through all the way. I’ve been typing away on my YA fantasy novel, forcing myself to power through the crap. I don’t know how published writers do it… hunker down and get through the crap. It’s like a Jedi mind trick that I haven’t yet grasped. (I’m still a padawan in many respects.) And today, Jachin gave me an idea for a picture book that is GOLD, baby. I asked him if I could steal it. He said sure, if I agreed to pay him $5. He later re-thought the math and told me I had to give him 25% of all profits once it’s published. (He’s sharp, that one.) Plus I still haven’t thought of anything stellar to submit for the Highlights contest this month, and I’m also trying to figure out something for another contest.

My attention is too scattered.

This post is even scattered.

I should probably be on medication for that.

Ow, my brain.

Ok, my attention is now turning back to my warring ideas. May the best idea win.

I have sleep… issues. Any time stress is introduced into my life, sleep goes out the window. Stress like, say, my husband going into the hospital. Or my baby going into the hospital. Or my husband going back into the hospital. (It was quite a year for medical bills.) Without the aid of medication, it could have been theoretically possible for me to have gone most of last year without sleeping.

I love me some Ambien. (And our bank account loved it when Ambien finally went generic.)

But here’s the deal: one of my super powers is that my body can acclimate to just about any medication. Meds will work for a little while, but then I will invariably require larger doses to maintain any sort of effect. This is true for all drugs. I would make a really awesome drug addict. Or a really crappy one… depending on how you look at it.

Now, here is where the hilarity comes in.

As my doses of Ambien go up, so do the occurrences of odd behavior on my part. As my body acclimates to high doses of sleep aides, I sorta do a lot of weird stuff in my sleep… except I’m not really asleep. (And though I appear to be awake, I’m really not awake, either. I guess I’m kind of like a hypnotized zombie, except with a little less of the rotting flesh.)

For your guffawing pleasure, a list of some things I’ve done after taking Ambien:

* Eaten large amounts of snacks. I wake up covered in wrappers of things I have no recollection of eating.

* Watched a wide array of movies which I have no recollection of watching. (I have been known to say many times “I watched that, but I was on Ambien, so I’m not sure if it was any good…”

* Read chapters of books that I don’t remember reading, resulting in the rereading of many, many pages. This is especially tedious when I have to backtrack through my Kindle.

* Made out with my husband, with little-to-no morning-after memory.

* Made out with someone other than my husband. (kidding… just seeing if you’re paying attention.)

* Confided in my husband that I miss my relationship with my younger brother, and declared my love of tiger prawn shrimp… in the same sentence.

* Held a conversation with my mother-in-law where I explained to her that there is a village in Africa where the birth rate of twins is the highest in the world because the people of the village eat a lot of yams. I then told her of my plan to eat lots of yams in order to try for twins. (Sadly, I did remember parts of this conversation the next morning.)

* Posted blog posts that I had to take down the next morning, due to their incoherent nature. One of them may have been about yams and their impact on reproduction…

* Fell off of my exercise ball in the middle of a set of crunches, smashing my face into the television screen during an episode of Law and Order. I got a good look at Detective Green’s pores.

Apparently this “super power” and odd behavior runs in my family. Talking to one of my aunts at Christmastime, she told me about her post-Ambien affinity for eating make-up, and about the time her kids found her out raking leaves and doing moderately strenuous yard work at 3am.

When I start eating eye shadow, it might be time to dial it down a notch.

Until then, for the sake of sleep, I’ll carry on with the occasional loony behavior… and just hope no one films it.

Sleeping under a dinosaur? Is about as comfortable as you’d expect it to be.

Friday night Zoe and I attended Dinosnorzzz at the dino museum. I could explain all of the festivities, or I could show you a video of Zoe in pajamas where she explains it all in giddy detail while an air mattress pump whirs loudly in the background. Yes, let’s do that, shall we…

(ps, why the crap didn’t I think of the air mattress??)

A few things she didn’t mention:
a 3D dinosaur movie complete with frickin sweet glasses

a near-fatal triceratops attack; proving that they were not, in fact, herbivores

(plant eaters, my butt)

and some dangerous pink dino origami, as well

In retrospect, there was a lot of attacking going on. I’d steer clear of the place after dark… even in spite of their claims that everything there has been dead for lots of millions of years. However, if you throw caution to the wind and decide to go, two words: Air. Mattress.

More pics up on flickr.

A comprehensive quickly thrown together list of things I want to do this year:

* Write something every day. Even if it’s short. Some days, it can even just be the shopping list.
* Submit three stories/queries per month to magazines
* Have a completed rough draft of one of my already-started novels by June 30th
* Find at least three occasions this year to play my flute in front of an audience
* Run jog walk use bipedal motion to finish at least two 5ks this year
* Read at least 6 novels to my big kids (bedtime)
* squeeze my butt into those size 26 Lucky’s that have been sitting in the closet with the tags still on for almost two years now…
* find some scripture study time daily

Have your goals laid out?

Happy New Year!

Hi. Our family loves attention. We need to have it all the time. From everyone we know. And even some people we don’t know.

Usually we acquire this attention by being generally awesome. Winning awards. Collecting trophies. Wearing fashionable clothes. Saving puppies. Thinking of creative ways to alleviate world hunger. Awesome stuff like that.

But when these standard practices don’t afford us the attention we think we deserve, we pull out the big guns. And our big guns are: going to the hospital with some sort of weird condition that has doctors and nurses scratching their heads.

(Our goal is to have one of our family members make an appearance in a medical journal… that would REALLY get us some attention.)

Last spring Jon went into the hospital (he drove himself…) with a weird heart condition. People were all like “OMG, WTF? R U guys ok?” and other misspelled tidings of worry. Facebook was all a-Twitter (get it?). His heart thing gave us some nice attention. For a while. But then summer came and people were paying attention to the nice weather and going to the pool and having picnics and taking vacations, and our family was kinda falling by the wayside and not making much note-worthy headway on the whole curing global hunger thing. We began feeling attention starved.

By the fall, it was pretty bad. Wearing fashionable clothes… not working. Saving puppies… nothing. In late September, sweet little Deac had had enough of people not paying attention. He took one for the team and flung himself off the bed, causing a rad head injury. I don’t know what would have happened otherwise. Without all the pics of Deac with a neck brace and a “brain drain”, our family may have fallen completely off the attention radar.

But then Christmas rolled around. People were talking about this awesome guy named Santa and this really cool baby named Jesus, and our family was feeling really left out again. Pay attention to us, we beckoned. But nay, there was no room at the inn (where “room” = “attention”, and the “inn” = “people’s minds”). So Jon decided to make another go at it. (He’s a real peach.) While, in truth, this latest health issue has been plaguing him for several months, he wasn’t admitted to the hospital for it until this past Tuesday. Which was his mom’s birthday. Because the whole thing was set up to steal his mom’s thunder on her birthday. (We are really good planners.) I even got to burst into her dining room during her birthday dinner, ding a fork on a glass, announce that Jon had a blood clot in his liver, and hand-off my baby for her to babysit. On her birthday.

How’s that for attention?

And now it’s New Year’s Eve and he’s still in the hospital. We are trying to steal New Year’s Eve’s thunder. Take that, New Year’s Eve!! (Note: New Year’s Eve will now be called “Jon’s Clot Eve”. You celebrate by curling into the fetal position, clutching your stomach, refusing to eat, and having intravenous narcotics administered to you. It’s not a bad holiday, really. Oh, but then you also have to have blood thinners administered… and that’s done by giving you a shot IN YOUR STOMACH, twice a day. For several weeks. I guess that part of Jon’s Clot Eve is actually kind of a downer…)

Pay Attention to Us!! We are running out of ideas! Up next, though: I contract Scarlet Fever, gout, and swine flu… perhaps with a side of lock jaw.

Let’s see how many Facebook comments and ward casseroles we can get for that one…

I finished the Quiet Book. Before Christmas. I also finished the projects for the big kids. Before Christmas. (Granted, I was still swearing and yanking and adjusting and crying over Jachin’s quilt binding on Christmas Eve…)

Behold:

Deacon’s Quiet Book!

Bound, and with most pages completed (though the clock’s hands keep falling off. I need to adjust the brad and eyelet).

Jachin’s video game character quilt!

Here are all of the characters:

quilt2.jpg

If you look at this quilt even a little bit closely, you will find a plethora of mistakes… luckily, Jachin doesn’t seem to care.

And Zoe and Julie’s aprons!

See the cute ribbon I found for the ties??

Here’s a close-up of Julie’s. Both aprons have fake pockets and everything.

Again, if you look closely, it’s not good. But Zoe doesn’t care and Julie’s eyes are made of glass, so she can’t look closely.

Pigs flew Christmas morning, and fresh bacon was had by all. God bless us, every one.