This is Dave's brother, John. He got here Wednesday night.

I don't have any pictures of them, but I absolutely love seeing John and Dave together. John is THE most mellow guy you'd ever want to meet and Dave is... well... NOT.  I caught them walking out the front door together on Thursday afternoon and John was wearing his uniform: shorts and a t-shirt, chew in one back pocket, wallet in the other and Dave was wearing his uniform: pale purple oxford with a silk tie, black dress pants, glasses hanging off the end of his nose (he'd met with clients that day and hadn't changed his clothes yet) and it struck me as strangely as it always does that those two men came from the same vagina. Even more bizarre is how well they get along.

You know. Like brothers.

The next day, this guy got here.

That's their cousin John. He's CWAZY.

Then Butch got here too and things got even cwazier.

Butch and John both look a lot more menacing than they actually are. In reality, they're the kind of guys who would cut off an arm to help you out. Both arms if you're family. When you get the four of them together, it's like a Last Comic Standing competition between 14-year-old boys, only these boys have access to booze and have been honing their fart jokes for decades.

We girls had plenty of our own fun. This is John's wife. Genoa LOVES Lynne, as you can see.

Genoa does not, however, love me while Lynne is around. I get to play second fiddle (which is actually fine).

My favorite story from the weekend: Alex and Genoa are snuggling in bed with John and Lynne, who stayed in Genoa's room. Genoa tells a secret - she's not wearing any underpants! Which isn't so much a secret as it is her standard operating procedure. So John empties all the change out of his pockets and offers it to her so she'll find some underpants.

Her uncle paid her to get dressed. I love that.

On Sunday, we went over to Brandy and Wayne's house, which is this magnificent castle up in the hills of Vancouver. Every time we go there, I want to move in and no small part of that is how much I love Brandy's cooking. She not only fed ALL of us, but borrowed this awesome bounce house/water slide from her sister.
The kids LOVED it.

And they were so entertained that I got to sit back and chill out with the hubs for a change while my sister stole my camera and took pictures.

That princess band-aid on my finger was courtesy of the cut I got cleaning up the GALLON bottle of Svedka I shattered on the kitchen floor on our way out the door. I wasn't even drunk yet!

Audrey got this cool picture of a yellow ladybug on Alex's neck, as well as the following shot, in which I tell you all to KISS OFF.
Now that everyone is gone, we're nearly as sad as we are exhausted. Dave and I both feel like we'd be happy to not eat or drink ANYTHING for the next several days until all that steak and booze can make its way back out of our systems. Overindulge much? Man. Neither of will ever win an award for moderation.

So anyway, how was your 4th of July?

Our company arrived earlier than we expected yesterday; Dave and I were upstairs talking and didn't hear them come in over the sound of the oscillating fan and that was embarrassing - coming downstairs red faced and sweaty (from a heated discussion) only to find your family waiting for you and snickering. I think I'm officially the hostess with the mostest. The mostest CLASS.

Once the merciless ribbing was over, Dave barbecued and all twelve of us hung out, plus my sister who walked over from my cousin's house where she's been staying three blocks away. All night we sat around chatting and eating and drinking and when we finally went to bed, Dave snuggled up to me to tell me he couldn't remember ever having more fun than he had last night with his family - his brother, his brother's father-in-law and his cousin. They all sat out in the dark swapping war stories and fart jokes and drinking 12 year old scotch and every once in a while Dave would wander into the kitchen with his eyelids at half mast and a huge grin on his face. These big family weekends are a lot of work for me, but man I love seeing him so happy.

I've added a little Good Reads widget on my sidebar. Until Kindle comes up with an automated review system, I have to upload everything manually, but it's kinda fun, so I don't mind. If you click over to my profile there, you can read my reviews as well. Lately I'm reading a lot of romance and I'm doing that very intentionally to see what's out there before I try to sell my book.

I do read other genres (mostly commercial fiction and book club stuff), but I'm proud to admit that I've given up any and all pretense of being too smart/intellectual/feminist to read romance novels and I'm unabashedly enjoying everything from Harlequin to Historicals and all the juicy loves scenes in between. One of my most recent epiphanies, the same one that led me to start writing my own book in the first place, was that reading doesn't have to make you smarter. I don't have to prove anything by reading high literature and I'm not sure if you've noticed, but that shit is BOOOORING. It always cracks me up that the people who won't read genre fiction are the same people who watch Real Housewives of New Jersey.

If you haven't read The Smart Bitches Guide to Romance, GET ON THAT. It explains what I'm trying to say here but more thoroughly and with a lot more snark. 

Today is the day I'm cleaning my house, which means I'm doing everything in my power to avoid cleaning my house, like blogging! Tonight Dave's brother arrives, and then the cousins and then Johnny's wife and her parents and I can't wait. We LOVE the fourth of July and the only part I can think of to complain about is the fact that I'll have to wear a bra for the next five days and I am not a huge fan of bras.

I still need to plan out what I'm cooking and I might as well just do it right this very second!

Tonight - NOTHING. The space in my refrigerator is way too valuable. I'll be cooking for TWELVE all weekend.

Thursday - I'll probably make my pistachio pesto for lunch and we're planning to go out for dinner.

Friday Breakfast - Man-pleasing breakfast casserole, fruit salad
Friday Lunch - Cashew chicken
Friday Dinner - Dave's gonna BBQ burgers and dogs and I'll bake some potatoes and make a salad.

Saturday Breakfast - Another casserole
Saturday Lunch - There's a neighborhood BBQ after the 4th of July parade.
Saturday Dinner - BBQ'd chicken, potato salad, asparagus, probably some pasta too

Sunday Breakfast - Pancakes or waffles
Sunday Lunch - leftovers
Sunday Dinner - we're going to Brandy and Wayne's (and my mouth is already watering)

Monday - I'll probably be too exhausted to cook!

What are you guys doing for the fourth? We plan to get drunk and blow shit up the good old 'merican way. Don't worry, the people lighting the matches aren't the ones drinking.

Along with summer have come several unexpected pleasantries, which I will now describe for you in excruciating detail because nothing is more like a pacemaker to a blog than a wordy accounting of where you've been and why you haven't been blogging. The abridged version is this: I've been either A) writing B) reading or C) gettin' some. But never all three at once.

Alex is at camp from 9-12 every day and I've been leaving Genoa at the child watch area for 90 minutes and escaping into the bowels of the community center to work on revising my novel. It's an uninterrupted child-free editing bonanza and I get to do this for the WHOLE ENTIRE SUMMER. By the time I'm through with it, this book won't even have a stray comma. The kids both seem to adore this arrangement as much as I do and my favoritest part is that we get our boohineys out the door before 9AM every day and we're gone until noon. Then it's just a nap, a ride on the exercise bike and a couple pages of homeschooling before it's time to start dinner. It's the best schedule we've ever had and I already know I'm going to cry when school starts and it's over. (Kindergarten will be only two full days per week.)

It's also a schedule that gives me obscene quantities of time to read and in this single respect, I have never been a happier human being in my entire life. My Kindle is permanently attached to my person and when I need to use my eyeballs to, like, cook or clean or push my children on their bicycles or something, I simply pop in some ear buds, slip the sleek wonderment down the back of my pants (Genoa says, "put the book in your butt again!") and turn on text-to-speech. I'm burning through books like a stripper goes through g-strings and I'm looking for a sidebar application that will automatically post what I'm reading and/or upload my selections to Good Reads. (Any ideas?)

Lastly and most characteristically inappropriate is that Dave and I are doing that annoying thing we do every once in a while where we can't keep our hands off each other. I don't know if it was that photo I let him take of me a couple weeks ago or the season change or something in the water, but we are worse than a pair of lovesick newlyweds. We've been married almost a dozen years and I still can't bring myself to turn him down. Ever.

We invited Carol over for BBQ'd chicken on Saturday night and she caught us making out in the kitchen (god forbid I bend over to reach something out of the produce drawer!) and she scoffed at us to keep our hands off eachother in front of the kids. Of course I came to our defense with the argument that some of my fondest childhood memories are of teasing my father for groping my mother while she cooked dinner! Am I wrong? I mean, Dave and I have the kind of marriage where we openly discuss things and even argue in front of the kids because we think it's healthy for them to see us work our problems out. Shouldn't they bear witness to (an edited PG version) of the good parts too?

The highlight of my week came this afternoon when after something like six or seven years of pretending it didn't exist, my sister Audrey chopped off the disgusting skin tag I've been hiding in the crook of my elbow. We first tried using fishing line, but instead of severing it, the string got stuck around the very base of the nub and then broke, leaving me with a strangled finger mole that was beginning to turn purple. I numbed it again with a piece of ice and then she clipped it with my kitchen shears.

The castoff looked like an adorable little bald baby scrotum.

You're welcome.

So I broke down on Thursday and ordered myself a Kindle II. I've been having terrible shoulder pain lately and I began to notice an eerie correlation between book thickness and shoulder pain - the thicker the book I'm reading at any given time, the more Tylenol my shoulder requires. How pathetic is that? I get READER'S SHOULDER and that's the full extent of my fitness-related injuries. (I always read while I exercise).

Anyway, the Kindle came to mind because it's lightweight and thin and most importantly - it lays flat and requires nothing but a single button tap to flip a page.  I don't actually have to hold it while I read either. I figured it would do two things - eventually save me money (e-books are generally less than $10, even for hard-cover bestsellers) and it would alleviate my shoulder pain.

I WAS COMPLETELY UNPREPARED FOR HOW MUCH I WOULD LOVE IT.

I LOVE my Kindle. LOVE! LOVE! LOVE! LOVE!

Within ten minutes of opening the package, I transferred my OWN manuscript to the device. For free. And now I can read/edit my book using the Kindle's handy keyboard and I have saved myself approximately 14 ink cartridges and 27 trees (it's 300 pages long!). The best part is that I can edit my book WHILE I EXERCISE. In fact, the Kindle will READ MY BOOK TO ME OUT LOUD, a feature I didn't think I would use until I was stuck in the car alone twice this weekend and there was nothing good on the radio.

When I tweeted about the Kindle, I only received negative responses. Why is everyone fighting the ebook revolution? Even as an aspiring writer, I don't see the downside.  I mean, I will always still buy real books, but the Kindle gives me IMMEDIATE access.  On Saturday, I drove to Portland for my first Romance Writer's of America meeting and one of the authors there referenced a recently published book. I had my Kindle in my purse (it's so thin, it's like Virginia Slim), so in less than a minute, I bought her Harlequin for $6.39 and started reading it right there at the meeting. I call that a WIN-WIN.

In other news, look what Alex can do!
That would be him riding a bike without training wheels for the first time. Two weeks ago, we bought Alex a lighter bike with the hope we'd be able to take off the training wheels some time this summer, but we were at the park on Friday night and he just hopped on his friend Lauren's bike and IMMEDIATELY STARTED RIDING IT.  No practice - just VROOOOM.  We were floored!

Six months, 102,000 words, countless hours of Disney channel later and it turns out I can add one more thing to my resume: I'VE WRITTEN A BOOK!

In hindsight, the only reason I can even think of why I wrote the damn thing in the first place is this: I just couldn't stop. 33 years later, I finally know what I want to be when I grow up - a Romance Novelist - and writing those two words at the top of my list feels every bit as good as you'd imagine. Now I just have to revise the crap out of it and figure out a way to sell it and I get to die happy.

The book is called: GRAVY. I called it that because I wrote it and that means my protagonist likes to cook, DUH, and GRAVY is the word Italian Americans use for Ragu (red sauce). But mainly I decided to call it GRAVY because that's what it's about: once you find your people - the family you were meant to have - the rest is just gravy.

Feeling better today. Rode 15 miles on the bike. Carefully monitoring my blood sugar.

Also? 99,000 words and counting. I'm THISCLOSE.