Big bamboo-a-palooza tomorrow!

I spent a good bit of last week dyeing bamboo blend sock yarns, including this new blend of 40% bamboo, 40% wool and 20% nylon (that one's balled because I have to sample the goods occasionally; quality control, you know):





the 50% bamboo/50% merino blend shown in the next couple of photos:








and a couple of skeins of Bamboo Lite, which is 75% wool/25% bamboo, very firm twist:



So stop by Black Bunny Fibers tomorrow to score some. Many of these colorways have that dreamy, harmonious quality that is good for showing off stitch patterns.

Coming tomorrow: the first of my fall preview posts...and there's lots of great stuff to show you!

P.S. Bonne Bastille a mes amis francais!

On a happier note...

my forthcoming book is now available for pre-order on Amazon:



This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. I hope that it will help sockknitters have even more fun knitting with handpainted sock yarns by giving them a feel for how these yarns work, including the common dilemma of what to do with sock yarn that pools or splotches, along with some spectacular patterns especially designed with handpaints in mind. I was very fortunate to get submissions from some wonderful designers -- from Ann Budd to Priscilla Gibson-Roberts to Ve-Ve to Charlene Schurch to Chrissy Gardiner and some new folks, too -- who love handpaints as much as I do and who were able to come up with some beautiful and creative patterns that make the most of them.

Interweave's got a preview here. Feel free to pre-order. . .

Origami by Elvis

From his handy-dandy new origami book (novelty paper included!). I will refrain from any observations regarding the perceived symbolism of this objet d'art.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

One of the hardest parts for me in having a family member with a substance abuse problem has been striking the balance between being involved and staying detached.

For a long time, I thought that I could help my father, that if I could say the right thing or be the right kind of person, I could help him stop drinking. As I grew older, though, I came to see that the opposite is true: I have no control over him, no ability to force him to make different choices.

This is both terrifying and liberating. It's terrifying to care about someone and to see them making a royal mess of their life and to watch them continue doing so, and to feel and know that there is nothing I can do to help. I saw my dad a few weeks ago and was, honestly, aghast at how he looked. In the past (although thankfully, it's long in the past) I have seen him drunk and belligerent, as he apparently was last week, and it's beyond ugly. The wasted potential of his life is heartbreaking.

I also hear the strain and tension in my mother's voice, feel her despair and pain, and it's awful to know that I can't make her be any different than she is, any more than I can make my father different. I can listen, I can offer support, I can make suggestions, but ultimately the decision how to live her life resides with her.

This is also freeing, to some extent. You don't need to carry around with you the burden of responsibility for someone else's life -- and that's an awfully heavy burden. I've often taken crap from my family for not being around them more -- for not moving back to my hometown, for not visiting often enough, for missing certain events, and yet this is a strategy born of self-preservation. Being too involved with them is painful to me (and not just painful, but downright harmful to me). I've spent a lot of my adulthood trying to find a balance between their expectations and my needs, enjoying some of the time I spend with them but finding other times just crazy-making. I had to be able to step back and let them do as they wish. Accept them as they are, and know that they and they alone decide what they're going to do. But also accept that I don't have to participate. I've created my own kind of life and it's different in many ways from theirs.

I've heard many people say that they've had to cut off toxic family members and I understand this completely. I've been lucky in that I've been able to maintain a close relationship with my mom. But I have consciously kept my father at arm's length. I believe there are people so fucked up that they just aren't capable of having real relationships. My father is one of them.

What it boils down to is that sometimes, when someone in your life is messed up, you have to make a choice: you or them. It sounds harsh but it's true. You have to realize you can't stop them from doing what it is they want or need to do, and you will only lose yourself and your own happiness trying. I see how my mom was never able to realize that, or else wasn't capable of carrying through with the choice of walking away. I don't blame her for that. It's easy for me -- a woman born into a generation where divorce is common and most mothers work, a woman with an advanced degree and lots of career options -- to envision kicking an alcoholic husband out and moving on with my life. It's not so easy to imagine my mom -- a woman born into a generation where divorce was unknown, where "good mothers" stayed at home with their kids, a woman with a high-school education in an economically-depressed region -- doing the same.

But as much as I hate the thought, I've got to detach somewhat from her, too. My mom told me this week how the emergency room doctor gave her the battered woman talk. She told him that my father was verbally abusive but never physically abusive to her, which as far as I know is the truth. But the vision of a doctor in an ER trying to reach out to my mom to help her was like a knife in the gut. It made my stomach ache for my mother, for what she's going through and for having spent fifty years going through it. And it made me feel guilty -- should I be trying harder to help her?

It's painful to watch her right now, but it also has the capacity to eat me up if I get too emotionally invested. Because I've danced this dance before. Father slides downward, his behavior gets more and more out of line, there is some major nasty occurrence, he swears he'll stop drinking, he never does any of the things that you need to do to stay sober, he starts drinking again. Lather, rinse, repeat. Just a few days ago, a few measly days after he swore off the bottle, he went for an overnight visit to a hunting cabin with my brother and some of their friends. To a place where after the hunting and fishing is over, the guys hang out and guzzle beer. So is a guy who's really serious about his sobriety going to go to a place where everyone around him is drinking and more likely than not encouraging him to drink? Probably not.

There's that famous quote from Tolstoy: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. But what I find striking is how these patterns of dysfunction are nearly identical in Tom's family. My M-I-L is the one with the "issues": bipolar illness that she's never committed to managing. She goes off the meds, slides into mania and often psychosis, and after some shocking event ends up with her in the hospital, she takes her meds, she talks the talk about staying on them, eventually she stops taking them again. In the meantime, she does nothing to improve the odds of her staying healthy -- no exercise, no talk therapy, no support groups, no internet chat boards, no nothing. Lather, rinse, repeat.

All of this is a long, long way of saying that my challenge right now, and Tom's challenge, too, is trying to straddle the line between staying supportive, doing what we can to help (with a clear-eyed view of how much we can and cannot do), and then knowing when to step back for self-preservation. Thank you for all of your kind comments and emails; they have helped tremendously. Just knowing that I'm not alone in this struggle is a tremendous help.

Happy 4th of July!

As has become tradition, the kids decorated their scooters and we marched in the Garrett Hill/Rosemont parade.




And in honor of the American holiday, I leave you with this knitting-related bit of history:

In Philadelphia, “Mom” Rinker was a tavern keeper whose work put her in the company of British soldiers. She was also a spy. Rinker often spent her days in a town park where she sat up on a high rock, knitting copious numbers of garments. As she knit, she concealed messages in balls of yarn and then dropped them to American couriers below.

Link.

The perils of blogging

Blogging is a very strange process. You are publishing your words (and therefore your opinions, your feelings, your news) in an extremely public forum -- anybody with a computer anywhere in the world, whether stranger or friend, can read what you say. Yet the vast majority of people who know me don't read blogs or knitting blogs, and therefore don't read mine. Most aren't even aware that I have a blog. Some have no idea what a "blog" is.

Because you write in isolation, and because the process is so mechanized and impersonal -- type away, click on the Publish button and it's all out there to see -- you are deceived into overlooking the fact that you are putting a lot of yourself out there. That also means that you are publishing intimate details about your life, and of necessity, about the other people in your life.

This is an on-going tension in blogging. How do I remain true to my own voice, how do I communicate what's going on in my life (because ultimately, a blog is just an on-line journal) without crossing that line of demarcation between the public and the private? This is something I think about frequently. I often write blog posts that I never publish. I sometimes edit posts, occasionally quite extensively, even after they've been published. (Second thoughts about what I want out there in the ether forever.) And sometimes I intentionally push my own limits because there are things I think are important to get out there. Certain issues are important to me and I'm willing to start some uncomfortable conversations every once in a while, even if it alienates some readers who have different opinions. And in all honesty, sometimes it's neediness. I have met many compassionate kindred spirits through this blog, and I treasure your support.

Right now we are having some family "issues." (Isn't "issues" a great euphemism? It can mean anything from a minor outpatient surgery to a full-frontal nervous breakdown, it encompasses substance abuse, verbal abuse, incarceration, mental illness and medical crises, and a world of other ills.) Some of them have to do with my mother-in-law, who was abruptly rushed to the hospital and appears to be facing a beyond-Stage-1-but-we-don't-know-how-bad diagnosis of colon cancer, with the added flair caused by her unmanaged bipolar illness. Some of them have to do with my father, who has been an alcoholic my whole life and is on something of a bender.

When these issues feel overwhelming to me, it's hard not to blog about them. Even though I'm painfully aware that these kinds of issues fall in that nether world of blogdom, that gray area between what is appropriate to blog about and what will cause pain to the other people in my life.

I grew up in a household where unpleasant truths were to be denied and ignored at all cost. I didn't like living that way. If some people now find me too in-your-face, too open and forthright, it's because I grew up in a family that ignored the elephant in the room -- and was miserable and fucked-up as a result of it. For me, part of living an honest life is naming the things that my family dared not talk about, facing them and trying to work through them.

So that's, I guess, what this blog post is about.

Like everyone else, I'm a mass of contradictions. I had a fabulous, fun weekend -- then came home to DefCon 12 crisis mode. I take great pleasure and joy in my fiber pursuits -- and it helps me deal with ugly, intractable issues in my "family of origin" (and my husband's). Sometimes my blog posts are humorous and perky and chipper, and sometimes they touch a deeper, more conflicted part of my soul.

Today, I felt like expressing some of the less humorous and less perky parts of my life, in a way that is honest but doesn't go too far over the line of invading the privacy of my family members. If I'm especially scatterbrained, if my email response time is slow, your forbearance is appreciated. I'm having an unhumorous, unperky kind of day today.

More beauty

Before we left for home the day after our splendiferous visit to WEBS, Elvis and I made a slight detour to the Magic Wings butterfly conservatory.



Wow.



Magic Wings is a large greenhouse full of tropical plants (and feeders, like the one below that looks like a strawberry daiquiri).


Butterflies have the run of the place.



They dive-bomb you, they sometimes perch on your clothes, they flit and flutter everywhere around you.



And they come in every color and size.



Do not be fooled by this guy (below); this is not a photo of a leaf, but rather the butterfly's protective coloring on the underside of its wings so that when it perches, it will be unnoticed by predators.



If I hadn't seen the butterfly land, it certainly would have fooled me. Here's another butterfly's camouflage, including "eyespots" which are supposed to fool predators into thinking that the butterfly is an animal with multiple scary eyes. (This guy was bright blue inside but he didn't settle down long enough for us to photograph his colorful side.)


We were entranced by the place and would have stayed much longer if we didn't have a long drive ahead of us.


I had never seen butterflies with translucent wings like some of them had -- and I never imagined being able to take such close-up shots of these unusual creatures. If you are in the South Deerfield, MA area, it's definitely worth a stop.

Oh yes, we met Akbar the tropical bird, too, as well as a turtle, quail chicks and some skinks. You'll be pleased to know, however, that there were no skanks.


Present company excepted, of course.

A thing of beauty

I have not participated in too many knitting or fiber-related swaps, but when Ted asked me to be a part of his Fiber-to-Scarf exchange, I was intrigued. I mailed off 8 ounces of fiber to Ted, as did several others; Ted then sent my fiber to some unknown crafter and mailed some unknown crafter's fiber to me. The goal was simple: to spin the fiber into yarn and then knit or crochet it into a scarf. The time frame was long: six months. You were not told whose fiber you were working on, or who was given your fiber, just to make it a little interesting.

Lo and behold, I received a box in the mail last week. Inside was this:



I was speechless.



Ted must truly love me, because he sent my fiber to Katherine. Katherine spun this gorgeous yarn (she even sent two balls of it that she didn't need to complete the scarf) from my BBF fiber (it was an 80% merino/20% silk blend). She then knit it into this gorgeous and huge scarf. The especially observant among you (and the fellow-Avery obsessed) may recognize this as a pattern designed by Véronik Avery, yes, my Ve-Ve. Talk about fate: Katherine had no idea that the Lace Ribbon Scarf was ultimately meant for me when she knit it!



I will strive to get a photograph of me wearing the scarf and post it, too, but thank you, Katherine! I love it and I am touched at how beautiful it is and how perfect for me. You can see some more photos of the scarf in progress at Katherine's blog here.

Exceeded expectations

Not to brag or anything, but I've been to a few yarn shops in my time. I've been to every Stitches for the last decade. I worked at a yarn shop for five years. I sell yarn out of my house! And so when I tell you, nay admonish you, that you simply must go to WEBS, you must believe me.

My expectations were high, I'll admit it. So when I drove up to that cheery blue awning, I was a little nervous. Could a yarn shop possibly live up to all the hype? I mean, this place has "www.yarn.com" as its URL. Would I be disappointed?


I didn't have to worry. For inside was the biggest, most amazing yarn shop I've ever been in. Ever. When I tell you that WEBS has everything, I mean everything: from Araucania to Zitron with everything in between. It is truly a knitter's nirvana.

The first thing I saw was a lovely table (with fresh flowers!) with Knit So Fine beautifully displayed on it.


I was distracted from the huge selection of yarns in the front room by some of the kindest, warmest people that ever graced a yarn shop, like Karen and Cirilla (did I spell it right? it's such a pretty name to go with that gorgeous face) and Gail (we're going to talk dye) and I even got to meet Pixie the crochet goddess, of webcast fame.

They plied us with popsicles (what we Philadelphians call "wadder ice") and lemonade and chilled spring water, and didn't make fun of me at all when I spent fifteen minutes looking around me with wide eyes, blubbering incoherently in shock and awe. But I had been forewarned by my crack research team to go straight for Teh Back Room, so as soon as I regained the power of intelligible speech, I asked Karen if she'd pretty-please take me there.

I'd heard, you see, that there are grocery store shopping carts (what old-school Philadelphians call "coaches") in Teh Back Room and quite honestly, I thought people were just joshing me (you know, like when you tell someone that the word "gullible" isn't in the dictionary?).



There are shopping carts in Teh Back Room.

Gentle readers, I filled mine.



My able assistant Elvis, who did a bang-up job of reading the map the whole way (saved me about twenty bucks' worth of gas in wrong turns, too) helped me traverse the aisles. You can't imagine what it's like. You look up one aisle,



and it's all Adrienne Vittadini closeouts (did I miss the announcement that they are no more?) in those luscious subtle colors they do did so well. Across from you are discontinued colors of some amazing yarn, say Berroco Pure Merino (you were right about that one, Franklin, it's a great yarn). Then something catches your eye and it's some fab Rowan yarn that you can't live without. Then, of course, I simply had to throw in a couple skeins of Nashua Superwash for the homeless veterans (you know how much I love my country).



It was insane.

Elvis, who is not the seasoned yarn shopper that I am, retired to the couch area to eat homemade brownies (thanks, Carol!).



I then tried to work my way through the front part of the store, but it was really just too much, even for me. I managed to snag some pattern books that I'd been ogling -- the new Elsebeth Lavold, Norah Gaughan No. 3 and Noro Joy were among them -- and then I met Hyphenated Carol's posse.



Kris and blogless Sara (no 'H') were fun and I've loved Carol for a while now, and I greatly, greatly appreciated that they drove all the way from Boston to see me. I also made a new friend, Knitting Dragon, who was on a massive road trip of his own:



And I got to meet Some Bunnys Love who is a Ravelry pal. (FYI, Mr. Some Bunnys Love: she did the right thing in bringing all the bunny photos. I loved them!)

Karen gave me the full tour (yes, WEBS is so big there are entire WINGS in addition to the store and Teh Back Room) and did everything but teach me the secret WEBS employee handshake (maybe next time?). I quite love Karen. I gave her three hugs before I left and I still think I owe her about two or three more hugs.

So when I tell you that you simply must go upstairs right now, pack a little bag (only a little one; you want to make sure there's lots of room in the trunk for all the yarn you're going to bring home) and pull out the atlas and find the fastest route to Northampton, MA, I'm not kidding. Even if you live in Togo or lower east Anchorage and you think you don't need to go to the real shop, because WEBS has a kick-ass website, let me tell you a little secret: there's stuff in the shop that is not on the website.

It's true.


Even Elvis wants to come back. After some amazing ice cream in charming Northampton, a dip in the outdoor pool AND the indoor pool



and several quarters in the Austin Powers pinball machine later,



he was in heaven, too. The next morning, I found Elvis filling out the hotel "How was your stay?" postcard. Where it said "How likely will you stay in this hotel again?" he had checked "Very likely."


Something tells me Elvis and I will be making that drive again real soon...

Thanks, Kathy and all the WEBS folks, for such a special visit! And thanks to the folks who came to the booksigning, too! Y'all rock.

Meet me tomorrow at WEBS!

I am so excited. Tomorrow, Elvis and I are leaving at the crack of dawn to drive to WEBS. I've never been, and I suspect this is one of those milestones in a knitter's life, like your first Stitches or Rhinebeck or something. I am going to be signing copies of Knit So Fine at 3 p.m., so if you are close enough to come, please stop by and say hi!

Care to help out a homeless veteran?

I belong to a Ravelry group called Knitters for Obama. I first looked at the group more out of curiosity than anything else; I wasn't quite sure where my decision to support a particular political candidate intersected with my love of knitting. Oddly, though, I've come to treasure the group. By and large, it's full of smart, caring and funny knitters and crocheters. They keep me well-informed about current political developments, and they often make me laugh out loud.

We are currently working on a charitable project, making items that will be donated to a couple of shelters for homeless military veterans. We were inspired by reading about the shocking statistics regarding homeless vets: e.g., it is estimated that one-third of the homeless population -- 1/3!! -- are military vets. The Veteran's Administration estimates that over 150,000 U.S. vets are homeless on any given night. I suspect the number may even be higher. You can't drive half a mile without seeing a zillion cars displaying "Support the troops" magnets, but if we're all so busy supporting the troops, why are so many of them sleeping in cardboard boxes?

Anyway, our Knitters for Obama group is working in conjunction with a couple of homeless shelters, finding out what kinds of items they need and what guidelines they wish us to use. Right now, we are making hats, scarves and washcloths. It's important to me that we provide items that will be of beautiful quality and that will be suitable and useful for the recipients. So we've come up with some guidelines for participants to follow here.

If any of my readers would like to help, I will gladly collect any items you make and send them along with mine to the collections point(s). You can email me through the link in the sidebar when you have a finished item or items and I'll give you my mailing address. I understand that not everyone enjoys knitting for strangers, especially in connection with a politically-motivated group. But I would be deeply grateful for any items that you care to send that match our guidelines. (In fact, I would be so grateful that I would draw some names randomly from anyone who sends me an item and award a BBF prize or two...)

Thanks in advance for your support.

RIP: George Carlin

"I think it's the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately." -- George Carlin

I remember my brother somewhere getting a recording of George Carlin's "Seven Words You Can't Say on Television" routine. It was a real Beavis and Butthead moment for him: "he said shit, heh, heh." As I grew older, I came to appreciate George Carlin's wit and sense of absurdity even more than his pottymouth. It saddened me to hear of his sudden death this weekend. He managed to skewer the minor irritations of life as adeptly as the major contradictions of humanity, and that's quite a talent.

Well, if crime fighters fight crime, and firefighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?

The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.

If the police arrest a mime, do they tell him he has the right to remain silent?

How is it possible to have a civil war?

Have you ever noticed that their stuff is shit and your shit is stuff?

Religion has convinced people that there's an invisible man...living in the sky, who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn't want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer and burn and scream until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you and he needs money.

If a deaf person swears, does his mother wash his hands with soap?

Why don’t sheep shrink when it rains?

A strange anniversary

Long-time readers may recall that I am an ACoND: an adult child of a natural disaster. (I made that acronym up; someday I will write a self-help book and become the Dr. Phil of natural disasters. Except I won't be a mustachioed, cliche-spouting arsehole.). Thirty-six years ago tomorrow, the Susquehanna River flooded its banks, and a bazillion gallons of muddy water came gushing over the top of the nearly-forty-foot high levies. I remember the way, all that spring, it seemed to rain day after day, without end. I remember my mom taking us for a walk on top of the levy near my house and seeing the water so high, so close, you could almost touch it. I remember my brother and mother trying to put valuables up in the attic, the highest spot in the house, thinking that at most, we'd get water in the basement. I remember that surreal vigil the night the water was at its highest, my mom telling me to go to sleep while I was painfully aware that something was going on that had to do with "cresting" and it wasn't good. I remember the police cars driving through the neighborhood at two in the morning, shouting through megaphones: "Evacuate immediately!" I remember getting in the car after that, and driving to my grandmom's house, which sat on a higher part of the city, a neighborhood too far away and too elevated to be subject to flooding. I remember looking out the back window, wondering if I was going to see a tide of water rushing after the car. (I didn't.)

Our family lost everything except the bare-bones structure of the house. We lived in a HUD trailer for the better part of a year, while my parents and whatever contractors they could scare up rehabbed our house. It took my parents years to recover from the financial blow.

So when I see images from the Midwest of flooding, and people being rescued in boats, and sandbagging efforts to shore up levies, it hits me hard.

I know money's tight for most of us, and you have a lot of demands on your discretionary funds, but if the spirit moves you, maybe you can spare a couple of bucks for the flood victims in Iowa and other states. Here's the Red Cross link. If you're an animal lover, you might want to consider the Humane Society, which has sent crisis response teams to rescue stranded pets.

I hope none of you ever have to celebrate a similar anniversary.

School's out for summer

Since my kids are out of school, but haven't started day camp yet, I've spent the week moderating debates of critical importance to world peace, such as: If you have to poop in the middle of your turn on Wii, does your mother have a moral obligation to give you five extra minutes on the kitchen timer to make up for the run to the john?

A scoop: Vintage Baby Knits

One of the extremely fun things about TNNA is getting a sneak preview of some of the wonderful yarns, books, fibers and other knitting/crochet accoutrements that will be introduced this coming fall. I'll be giving you some previews of what's coming for fall in the next few weeks, beginning today, with my first real-live, GKIYH scoop: a preview of a knitting book that is coming next spring.

At TNNA, I happened to run into Kristen Rengren (known to many of you as “Retroknit” on Ravelry). I’ve been corresponding with her a while but this was our first face-to-face meeting. You know how when you have an on-line acquaintance with someone, and you think you’d get along wonderfully in person, but you aren’t 100% positive because, well, sometimes people sound normal on teh Interwebs and then when you meet them in real life, they’re a little cuckoo?

That is NOT what happened with Kristen. She is every bit as charming and funny in real life as she is on-line. (Phew.) I cannot vouch for whether she thought I was a little cuckoo, however.

When I first saw Kristen, she was walking around TNNA with a suitcase. She was at the Mission Falls booth, and she opened up her suitcase and it was filled with some truly gorgeous baby stuff. I knew Kristen was working on a book and I figured it'd be good, since Melanie Falick is her editor, but I had no idea how adorable her designs were until she showed me some of the sample garments. With the permission of her editor, she was able to share a few photographs with me:

I was especially intrigued by the fact that Kristen's designs were inspired by vintage baby patterns from the twenties through the fifties. Here's how Kristen describes them:

The book is 42 all original vintage patterns, retooled to varying degrees for gauge, size, fit - a few I basically just reknit and called it a day, but most required serious re-working in some form or another (and a couple patterns were so bad that we just threw the original pattern out and reverse engineered the garment from scratch.) The book has tons of sweaters, plus booties, caps, soakers, bonnets, toys, etc -- enough to keep any new mom more than occupied for the first year or two. The size range is 0 to 24, although most patterns come in 3 or 4 sizes only - so some garments go 0-12 and others go 6-18 or 12-24.

I love vintage patterns and I love that Kristen has done all the work for us: instead of being instructed to find a skein of “Glossila” or 12 oz. of a fine cotton and some small whalebone knitting pins, you will find yarns that you know, and modern lingo, gauge instruction, etc.


And since Melanie Falick is editing it, you know it’s going to be a gorgeous book.

I don’t think the book is on Amazon for pre-orders yet, but rest assured that as soon as it is, and as soon as I have pre-ordered my own personal copy, I will post the link.

Oh yeah, did you notice that Kristen is putting the ridiculously large number of forty-two (42!) patterns in the book? And fine yarn fans: many of the designs use the skinny yarns that we know and love. This is definitely one to look for next spring.

And one more. . .

Today it's our last blog visit, in which Lisa stops by the blog of Woolbearers -- discussing the always-timely topic of substituting yarns.

We hope you enjoyed our blog tour -- learning more about us, the book and some of our favorite skinny yarns. A huge thank-you to all of the bloggers who helped us, our publicist, and all of you dedicated readers who followed us from place to place!

It's up!

My interview with Dolores is live!

Be patient!

It's Saturday night, you know: Dolores probably has the poor man hog-tied in a closet so she can have her filthy way with a Mongolian acrobat from Cirque du Soleil. I assure you that the interview will be well worth the wait.

Lucky 13: Me 'n' Dolores. Bonding. (No, Dolores, I did NOT say "Bondage.")

Oy vey. After inviting Franklin Habit to be a host for the blog tour -- we all know how well-mannered, erudite, charming and full of grace and class he is -- I was informed that the interview will instead be conducted by Mme. Van Hoofen herself. I don't know quite whether to be insulted or flattered. I do know enough to be scared. So fasten your seatbelts, pour yourself a champagne mojito and go to The Panopticon for A Very Special KSF Blog Tour Stop.

Update: Franklin and I have been experiencing some minor technical difficulties with Blogger, so if his post isn't up yet but this one is, please don't fret -- he will post as soon as he is able. Thank you for your forbearance!

Allons chez Ve-Ve! Toute de suite!

Do you love it when I speak French (paging Gomez Addams)? Today one of my heroes and girl-crushes, Véronik Avery, hosts the KSF Blog tour. Like everything Ve-Ve does, her blog is beautiful, artistic and in exquisite taste. She will be visiting with Laura today. Please note that Mme. Avery just announced on her blog yesterday that she is working on her next book. Woo-hoo!

And for those of you lucky enough to live within driving distance of WEBS, I am thrilled to announce that Laura and I will be there for a book-signing on Saturday, June 28th, mid-afternoon. A visit to WEBS? It is a dream come true. . .