Aren't my babes beautiful? I just took their pics now because it had been forever . . . . watchmebe, this is to torment you. These are the creatures that warm my feet while I write.

Children are evil. Not pure evil, just the diluted stuff. Yesterday, while I was taking Ginger out to do her business in the yard, I felt a disturbance in the force. Sure enough, by the time I'd climbed the stairs to the front door again, I found that my two year old son had turned the lock on the door. I peered in the window at him. He peered back at me. I smiled. He smiled. I asked him to open the door. He declined. My three year old daughter sat on the couch a few feet away and watched TV, completely disinterested in my plight.

It was cold. I was holding a wriggling puppy under my arm. I was stuck on the front step and every neighbor was at work.

I then proceeded to go through the five stages of locked-out grieving.

1. Denial. I wasn't really locked out. There was a window open somewhere. I probably had the ability to the pick the lock with my hair clip if I really put my mind to it. Why couldn't my admittedly criminal tendencies have run towards an aptitude for breaking and entering?

2. Anger. After about ten minutes in the cold, I was getting seriously pissed. I tapped on the glass and yelled,"Victoria, get off that couch! Come here and open the door!" She looked at me curiously, like I were one of those animals at the zoo that hadn't quite realized scratching at the glass got them nowhere. "I'm going to turn off the TV!" I threatened. She gave me a look that clearly said do you think I was born yesterday? You're locked out, you moron. TV's mine!

3. Bargaining. I instead turned my attentions to Will. He was still standing by the door, smiling at me. "Will, do you like ice cream? If you open the door, I'll give you ice cream." "Okay," said Will. He remained by the door, smiling up at me. Apparently, unlike Victoria, he was born yesterday, and really did think I was going to get him ice cream from my post on the opposite side of the door.

4. Depression. Twenty minutes in, I was freezing, had tried thumping on the neighbor's door, and was beginning to feel hungry. I wondered if I could possibly starve to death before my husband got home from his shift, seven hours later. I wondered if the children were going to draw on the walls and watch programs rated PG-13 for content that would make a two year old require therapy. Will had stopped smiling at me next to the door and had instead laid down in the middle of the floor with a car and was smiling at it.

5. Acceptance. I was never getting in the front door. I was locked out, and stages 1-4 were getting me nowhere. I went around to the back door, which is a French door with all the windows that entails, and I knocked.

Peanut begins to bark: there's someone at the door!!!!

Duh.

Will comes running into the kitchen to see who it is. Ah ha! It's Mama again! Boy, she's obsessed with this coming-inside thing!

Through the window, I make intricate gestures indicated how he should unlock the knob. He smiles at me. Then, he begins to lock and unlock the door, back and forth, back and forth. With a careful sense of timing developed from a grade-school experience full of skipping rope, I grab the doorknob on the upswing and push my way inside.

Will got ice cream. Victoria got the TV unplugged.

I should preface this post by saying that I like my sweet tea really sweet. REALLY sweet. Sweeter than my naturally syrupy disposition (hands up to everyone who really believes that statement). Sweeter than the happy ending on a Meg Ryan flick.

Today I was out with my brother and daughter, grabbing some groceries, and it ran into lunch time. Even though I can’t eat fast food because of my preservative allergy, I didn’t feel like depriving the others, so I hit the KFC (Kentucky’s Fattening Chicken) drive-through. I ordered a sweet tea so I could a) feel like I was eating something and b) get completely hyped up on sugar and caffeine for reasons I’ll mention below.

So, sweet tea and saturated fats in tow, we headed back from the big city towards home. I took the first sip of my drink, heady with anticipation and

P O W !



That stuff was ten different kinds of sweet and all of them were designed to rot my teeth instantly out of my skull. As I told you before, I like my sweet tea sweet. But this was like the mother of all sweet teas. It was as if they had taken the undiluted protoplasm that had been initially used to create all the sweet tea in the world and scraped some of it into a cup just for me. I swear, this stuff was crawling up the straw.

After coughing slightly and swerving (I was driving), I regarded my large plastic KFC cup with new eyes. It was as if I was viewing a force of nature, an immense volcano, a raging hurricane, a whirling tornado, firsthand: I was in awe and a little afraid, but probably not as much as I should’ve been.

My brother Andrew was cheerfully and obliviously sucking down Mountain Dew in the seat beside me, thinking of something complex such as just how much caffeine was in each strawful of soda.

ME: Try this.
ANDREW: Yup.
(sips)
(coughs)
(regards thoughtfully)
ME: Well?
ANDREW: That’s sweet.

This from a boy who was just drinking Mountain Dew, which has 800,000 grams of sugar per serving. You know the tea was sweet if it was sweet in comparison to Mountain Dew.

I brought it home, watered it down with a ratio of 2:1 and still couldn’t muster it. It wasn’t too bad, it was just having to eat it with a spoon that got me.

Anyway, on to why I’m thinking about sugar and caffeine. My charming editor Andrew Karre, knowing that I’m a fan of crazy deadlines, set one for me: turn in the remaining 20K of the revisions on my novel by October 2nd. The actual deadline is in January, but the idea of getting the revisions out of the way so I can move onto my next one is too strong: I know I have to give it a shot. So I’ll probably be a little light on the art-making side of my personality until then, though I’ll try and stick my head into the blogging world each night if I can.

Until next time, enjoy some puppy pics.

And I feel obliged to mention again for those who are just hopping onto the blog that they're Banded Mountain Terriers.

I know you guys wanted to see more puppy pics! Six days old now . . . see, they already look less like grubs. I think we're keeping the bottom one . . . though now my husband is having second thoughts and maybe wants to keep the top one, which is a male. We weren't going to keep a male . . .