This week I’m reading through my novel before starting a new draft. I have filled a notebook with notes of things to change and I haven’t even gotten to the end yet.

Overall, I’m feeling better about the book this time through, but I am still amazed by my tendency to repeat myself. Although I don’t repeat major events or metaphors without meaning to, I do repeat small things within the scene. Thus, I have learned that my characters:

Love to smile. Oh how they smile. They beam. They grin. They smile slowly. Their smiles fall off their faces. Their smiles bloom. Their smiles turn their faces from plain to beautiful. They smile deliberately, with calculation. It is a book filled with smiles, and it will make you smile when you read it.

Cry easily. Yes, as much as my characters love to smile, they also love to cry. Fortunately, they do not cry as easily as they smile–that would be quite a rollercoaster!–but they sure do burst into tears when provoked. In my characters’ defense, most of the crying is manipulative or after a great tragedy, so it is somewhat understandable.

Look people up and down. You might think that with all these emotional outbursts, my characters lack analytical skills, but you would be wrong. They are good at sizing people up. They look along people’s bodies, sometimes suspiciously, sometimes sexually. Nothing gets past them, boy howdy.

Are well-dressed. At least, that’s the best I can figure what with all the description of clothes in this novel. There are entire wardrobes of clothes in this novel. Very little of it is relevant to the plot, but it helps you to know that the main character is wearing a pink dress, right?

In light of this, I am considering the possible title: All Smiles: The Story of Crying, Well-Dressed People Who Will Look You Up and Down by Joy Lanzendorfer.

I’m really feeling this poem today:

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

–Emily Dickinson

Applies today more than ever, don’t you think?

Every so often I get it in my head that I want to do something and then drag my friends along to do it with me. For example, I will have a party surrounding the Kentucky Derby or decide that I really really need to shoot a gun. This time, I decided that I wanted to have girlie English tea in San Francisco. So last Saturday, Marcia, Krista, and I met up with Stephanie at the Secret Garden Tea House in San Francisco for just that.

I am not really a girlie-girl, but if you’re going to do it, do it. Therefore, I wore my pink dress and Krista did my make-up and I ordered vanilla tea. We ate tiny sandwiches and scones with Devon cream. I liked the curried egg sandwich the best.

Krista gazes at our bountiful tea tray

Apparently having tea can bring even reserved San Franciscans together, because all the other patrons of the the Secret Garden were friendly and cordial. We had a lot of fun watching two little girls play with the frou-frou hats and dance around and wave plastic wands at each other.

The mother holding one of the girls

All and all, it was a great experience. Afterwards, Marcia mentioned how pleasant San Francisco is when you have someone drop you off and pick you up like Kyle and Troy did for our tea outing. I concur. I might even live there if I had a driver to drop me off and deal with parking.

Hooray for occasional girlieness!

LtoR: Me, Marcia, Krista, and Stephanie

Oh, and check out Stephanie’s pictures of our tea here.

Did you hear that the FDA decided that cloned meat and milk are safe to eat? I looked into this issue for my newest article in the North Bay Bohemian.

Excerpt:

THE Food and Drug Administration may think cloned animals are ready to enter our food supply, but some local ranchers and dairy farmers do not. In fact, they are concerned that this new technology may put our food supply at risk. And once that happens, it’s hard to go back.

Opponents say that it’s just too soon for this new technology to enter our food supply. After researching and writing this article, I’ll say I tend to agree with them. Although I understand the FDA’s argument that cloned meat looks and acts like all other meat and it’s therefore logical to assume it’s safe, I found myself wondering what the rush is here. Allowing cloned meat and dairy isn’t even something the ranchers particularly want at this point–although those companies coming up with the cloning technology certainly do.

This article was also picked up in the Metro Silicon Valley.

Happy Valentine’s Day! Today I woke up to roses on the dining room table. Awesome!

This is Not About Love by Fiona Apple (featuring Zach Galifianakis).

UPDATE: video gone because Sony owns Fiona Apple’s soul.

I must be having the worst bad day in the history of bad days. All the bad things that can happen in a bad day? They happened to me today. Isn’t it weird how that seems to happen?

I like to think of myself as strong, but today reminds me that I am really a delicate porcelain cherry blossom that can be destroyed with one well-placed finger flick.

So let’s all look at the expression of joy that is this little dog:

Via Cute Overload

UPDATE: Thanks for all the kind e-mails and calls. I feel very loved. I am fine. I just had a bad day. Yesterday involved tricky conversations, accountants, and broken voice mails. Today involves laughter and really ripe grapefruit. Hooray!

I have the cover story in the Pacific Sun this week. It’s an interview with David Roche, who has written a new book called the Church of 80% Sincerity. I really enjoyed the conversation I had with David. Here is an excerpt:

“I am facially disfigured,” writes David Roche. “Woven through the left side of my face, head and neck, extending into my soft palate and airway, is a benign congenital tumor consisting of my own engorged and tangled veins and capillaries. My left cheek is tuberous and misshapen. My dark bluish-purple tongue is twice the normal size.”

So begins David Roche’s book, The Church of 80% Sincerity, which is being released this month by Penguin Group. Roche, who lives in Mill Valley, now makes a living off of his face. He tours around the world giving motivational speeches about what it’s like to be facially disfigured.

Read more here.

One good thing about having a house, I can plant perrenials without feeling like a sucker.

Things I am thinking of planting this year:

Kentucky green beans
Snap peas
Brandywine tomatoes
Steak Sandwich tomatoes

Early Girl tomatoes
Bell peppers
A mix of hot peppers
French radishes
Fingerling potatoes
Garlic
Green onion
Endive
Spring lettuce mix
Long thin carrots
Golden beets

Zucchini
Fennel
Artichokes
Sunflowers
Raspberries
Herbs: thyme, oregano, basil, sage, parsley, chamomile, rosemary, lavender
Nasturtium
Peonies

Also:
Two cherry trees
A kumquat
A pomegranate
Rita the fabulous lime tree (already potted)

Haven’t decided on:
Other flowers
Crocus
Another kind of squash
Your suggestion?

To Make The Garden:

Step 1: Rent a rototiller
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Eat things

P.S. Beautiful or weird?

If you happen to be around San Jose tonight, Kyle is giving a talk on computer-things for the Silicon Valley Linux User’s Group. Based on Kyle’s book Knoppix Hacks, Kyle will be going over how to re-master Knoppix or something like that! The free event will be at 7 p.m. at Symantec in Mountain View.

If you can’t make it to that, Kyle is also speaking on Tuesday at the North Bay Linux Users Group, which he is also president of. I quote:

In this talk Kyle Rankin will provide an introduction to performing forensics analysis on Linux machines using the popular Sleuthkit tools with their easy-to-use Autopsy web-based front-end. The talk will cover initial installation and configuration of Sleuthkit and Autopsy, basic concepts and considerations for a forensics investigation, and at the end there will be a demo with a compromised Linux image.

That talk is Tuesday, February 12 at O’Reilly Media in Sebastopol.

Kyle is also speaking on similar topics at Penguicon this March, but unlike that conference, these speeches are free to attend. Hurrah!

UPDATE: Also, check out Kyle’s most recent article in TechTarget, Server names: A checklist for scalable schemes, about naming schemes for servers.

Now that Kyle and I have a mortgage, we have to be more frugal with how we spend our free time. So we are being more creative, picking activities that cost less but are oddly enriching in their variety. This weekend, for example, I made Spanakopita for the first time, went thrift store shopping in the rain, visited the San Jose Museum of Art, and had Indian buffet (among other things).

The art museum has long been one of my favorites in the Bay Area. It’s smaller, but more discriminating in what it displays. I find that the art they have there is often more relevant and interesting to me than art in other museums in the area.

This time, they had series of Picasso sketches and Goya etchings. The etchings were Goya at his creepiest. They are called Los Caprichos, a set of 80 etchings that are satires of the church, society, etc. Even though Goya made these etchings in 1799, they are still somewhat disturbing to look at what with the witches and goblins and decapitations and pedophilia and whatnot. This is, after all, the man who painted Saturn Devouring His Children. I thought they were fascinating. You could just stare and stare at each one. (However, I did have to raise an eyebrow at some of the parents who were showing these etchings to little children. Talk about the stuff of nightmares. Some art is for adults!)

Church in San Jose shot through an art museum window.

We also hit the thrift store jackpot this weekend. I got:

Three owl trivets

A fondue set

A $15 leather office chair

Also: A monkey bowl, a vintage casserole dish, a water timer for sprinklers, a scoop for the cat food, and a new (never worn) shirt. There’s something so satisfying in bargains.