I read somewhere that if you want to be happy, take five minutes every day and fix something that bugs the shit out of you. I may be paraphrasing.

This week has been insanely busy. The little angel had a science fair project due Monday, a variety show performance on Tuesday, last night was dedicated to constructing a box for the class Valentine's Day party and nineteen homemade valentines and tonight she has riding lessons. My parents are coming to stay with us for the weekend, and they will be here tomorrow. Also, this week I had a huge work deadline.

I'll admit it. I'm stressed out when I get this busy. I don't like chaos. I like my life to be a summer afternoon in a hammock. Don't we all? I am, though, maybe even worse with chaos than your average bear.

So this week, I've also taken it upon myself to fix some little annoyances, though some of them took more than five minutes to fix:

1) I organized Hoggincraft, the craft room that the little angel and I share. She has a church table covered in glitter and other crafty things on one half, and I have a wooden desk and a sewing machine on the other. We share the craft room with eleventy billion craft supplies, a filing cabinet, a dehumidifier, a large stuffed horse, two tubs of loom supplies for the hand loom my daughter inherited from her late grandfather, gift wrap supplies, a doll bassinet that now functions as a piggy bank drying station, a few lamps and at least 30 pieces of inspirational art made by my daughter. Sometimes she goes in there with her friends unsupervised, and then later I stumble down there before I've had coffee to find something and kick over the large glass bottle of beads she left on the floor. And then maybe I leave it there. And then maybe later that day, I realize I haven't seen the cat in a while and it turns out he's been locked in Hoggincraft for eight hours and took a shit in the beads he apparently thought were kitty litter in the perfect darkness of a windowless basement room. This may have happened on Monday. Obviously, I cleaned up the cat poop when I found it. But knowing Hoggincraft looked like a nuclear wasteland weighed on me until last night when I abandoned the overzealous Valentine's Day box and homemade valentine project to right the wrongs in Hoggincraft. When I stepped back to survey my organized and vacuumed surroundings, I realized my heart felt light. Seriously.

2) One of the lightbulbs in the pendants that hang over the breakfast bar burned out last week. It has driven me mad since then. I bought a damn lightbulb today.

3) My mouse was acting up. Changed the batteries. Used the last AA batteries. I bought more damn batteries so the next time this happens I don't take my own name in vain.

4) The printer's almost out of ink. Every time I go to print I hold my breath the same way I sometimes do when I check my checking account balance. Today I bought ink. HELL YES I DID.

5) My company sent me a new laptop. (Yay!) I needed to send the old one back, but instead it's been sitting amidst a huge pile of cardboard boxes and packing materials in the middle of my library where I spend all day. Today I took the old laptop to UPS and recycled all the rest of the things.

6) My present for Steph's daughter was 99% done. All I had to do was write her name on the little chalkboard paint plaque with a piece of chalk. We have tons of chalk in the garage and in the playroom. All I had to do was walk to find the chalk, write her name on the gift, and put the chalk back. I fucking wrote that name on that chalkboard paint like a boss and put the chalk back.

7) I washed the disgusting bathmats.

8) I figured out how to hook up the VOIP phone my company sent me. Today I listened to a conference call without twisting my neck in half on an iPhone when my husband was working from home and I didn't want to disturb him. My neck thanks my company, and I thank myself for figuring out how to hook up the phone to a data line.

9) I found my slippers. I've missed my slippers.

10) I put the reusable grocery bags back in my trunk.

I am still missing the workout room key and my iPhone armband. I have been looking for these two items for several weeks. Their absence remains a minor annoyance, but look at all those minor annoyances cleared since last weekend! Made dealing with the overwhelm this week just that much easier.

It's the little things, y'all.

Next week, back to writing. I have only done Rita Time once since I posted about it. I must get better. My parents will be here this weekend, but I'm starting again next Tuesday night. I am admitting this to the Internet so I will actually do it.

PS: It appears THE OBVIOUS GAME is stuck at 99 cents on Amazon Kindle until my publisher changes it back to $2.99. I'm going to email her tomorrow. So, just sayin'.

While a lot of my friends were killing it posting every day in November for NaBloPoMo (that's National Blog Posting Month for the uninitiated), I think I set a Surrender, Dorothy record for least amount of posts in a month, ever.

A series of events overlapped like a time-sucking eclipse of crazy this month. It won't get much better next week, as I'm leaving tomorrow on a jet plane to go to BlogHer PRO '14 in the Bay area to speak on a panel about book publishing with the awesome Laura Fraser of SheBooks. And that is fun and exciting, and I love to talk about book publishing, but all this moving about isn't conducive to blogging. 

Here is an incomplete list of things I've been meaning to write about, in no particular order:

• Robert Plant
• The World Series of Poker
• My Goodreads 2014 Reading Challenge
• Black kittens
• Holiday decor
• Running
• Midlife crises
• The new novel

Maybe now I will actually write about those things, since I put them there so they can bother me with their unfinished-y-ness. Right?

Here are some things I wrote or co-wrote at BlogHer in November:

• Mike Brown, #Ferguson & "You Should've Seen This Coming"
• How to Write a Headline or Teaser Copy That's Impossible to Ignore
• 5 Ideas for Your Picky Tween (That Aren't a Toy)
• Have You Seen Kim Kardashian's Golden Globes?
• 5 Products to Ease Your Travel Stress 

Hope you had a Happy Thanksgiving!

If you're at work, put on headphones.

Y'all, I am so tired. I got home around seven last night, dumped my stuff out of my suitcase and handed it to my husband, who left for his third week-long business trip of the month this morning. But I had a great time moderating the Getting Your (First) Great Book Deal panel and the leading the Grammar Clinic with the amazing Arnebya. 

Why didn't I get her looking at the camera? Or better yet, with me? I don't know, either.

I ran into my friends Maria Niles and Katherine Stone.

Celeste Lindell, my real-life Kansas City friend of 15 years, and me.

My co-workers/friends, Diane Lang (left) and Julie Ross Godar.

Backstage at VOTY, a sweet baby was attached to Janelle.

I took this right before Multi-Culti shut down for the night.

Arianna Huffington and Guy Kawasaki. Check out BlogHer's new initiative with HuffPo and the Center for American Progress, Make Life Work!

Great keynote on intersectionality in blogging could've gone on for hours.

I got photobombed by the author Margaret Dilloway. She had to leave early, so she asked me to keep her updated on the rumored appearance of Khloe Kardashian. 

Also 15-year-real-life-KC-friend Kelly Oliver George and I missed Khloe Kardashian at the Hairfinity booth. We were krushed.

But all was right in the world after I got a big smile and hug from my friend Luvvie.

Almost a month ago, all my stat counters started telling me there were zero pageviews at this blog. Zero. Typepad finally blamed it on Goodreads and their widget code (you'll notice I temporarily removed all my Goodreads widgets) spitting out faulty HTML or something like that. Both Typepad and Goodreads responded very nicely as they are good people, and I'm sure I'll have my widgets back soon, but it sure was weird during the very month I'm celebrating my ten-year anniversary of blogging here that ALL THE TRAFFIC DIED. It was like someone just came along and flipped a switch.

Goodbye, Surrender, Dorothy. Thanks for the memories.

I spent one evening contemplating if I should just shutter the blog. I figured there was something legitimately wrong and not just that everyone had disappeared, but it crossed my mind that the people who told me they had totally been here in the past month were lying to protect my ego. (It's not necessary. I am not kidding when I say I have no ego left over this blog. I have it for my books, but not my blog.) I wondered if I should keep writing even if no one was reading. 

It's a good question, isn't it? 

Ultimately, though, even before I removed the Goodreads widget and the statcounters started ticking again, I decided I would keep writing ... even if nobody read it. I don't write here as much as I did before I started working for BlogHer and writing novels, but this is where I come when I have that thought while staring off into space at the school pick-up line. Surrender, Dorothy is the junk drawer of my mind. It has a copy of my resume, sure, and links to my books and some posts I liked highlighted in a list that needs a massive update (although that wouldn't matter if no one was reading, see how we create this unnecessary busyness for ourselves?), but it also has a series of pictures I thought were funny when my daughter was four and some missives about politics and current events that didn't end up changing any policies but made me feel better in the moment. I like going through junk drawers, and I like having this blog. 

Someday life will slow down enough for me to poke through my own archives and look at all my junk, and here it will all be. And won't that be amazing?

Y'all, I'm having a blogiversary this year, the big ten. I even started this blog in May 2004. I got all sappy and made a big slideshow of ten years of my daughter and me and this blog over on BlogHer today. Please check it out!

I'm obsessed with Netflix's House of Cards. Partly because I have over the years inherited my sister's respect for Kevin Spacey and his I-look-perfectly-normal-and-now-I-will-eat-your-face acting and partly because I've adored Robin Wright since I first glimpsed her cheekbones in The Princess Bride. She's got an uncanny poker face; she had it then, and she has it now. 

I've discovered something about myself, too. I think I love House of Cards and Mad Men and Downton Abbey and pretty much anything featuring the Tudors because I'm fascinated by a society of people who hold their cards so close to their chests. I mean, face it, here I am writing on my public website about my feelings for actors whom I will never meet. Imagine if I were to hold my feelings in! I might explode.

There's something else: Last night as I watched the season finale (sob) of House of Cards, I was struck by how many people those characters came in contact with on a daily basis on The Hill. Much like the vast number of people on Madison Avenue in Mad Men, the show that makes staying married look like a full-time job. Or Downton Abby, where you get dressed even if no one's coming over because SERVANTS.

It's an interesting scenario to me as I sit here typing this post in my workout gear because heaven knows I'm going to work out sometime today, but even if I don't, nobody but my husband and daughter and maybe the drive-through pharmacist at CVS (gotta pick up that prescription today) will ever know. Weeks can go by without me seeing anyone else if I want it that way. People do not expect me to show up well turned-out. The people I interact with on a daily basis are behind screens. My tailored oxfords are nouns and verbs, because that's really all I have to show for myself most days.

I've had jobs that required daily pantyhose and the 'L. I've had jobs that required security swipe badges and pissing contests to see who could use the coolest pen. I've had this job working from home for going on five years now, and it wasn't until last night at Zumba when another WAHM asked if I would meet her at Panera one day a week because she talking to the walls that I actually realized how little I physically interact with other adults on a daily basis, especially when Beloved is traveling. That it never bothered me before is also interesting, because I've always considered myself an extrovert. 

Does it matter that I'm rarely seen? Not my outfits, or my hair, per se, but my facial expressions? My persona? 

As I watched last night's House of Cards season finale unfold, Kevin with his pull-out-the-stops ambition and Robin with her show-nothing-but-wear-clothes-requiring-shapewear cool, I realized maybe I'm just not capable of hiding my emotions like that. Of course, they are actors. Maybe normal people can be actors, too, which is something I hadn't really considered before. Playing daily life on stage could be fairly exhausting. Though being completely authentic and therefore vulnerable is exhausting, too.

These are the moments when television adds rather than detracts from my life. Because I'm still wondering this morning -- would I be different if I were more often seen?

I spent this week growing increasingly shocked at how really not nice the world is. I know, I know, I'm forty, but I really AM SHOCKED at Joan Rivers. And I'm not shocked but was sort of surprised how annoyed people can get over slowness. 

Humanity did get redeemed in my mind last night, though. Last night I was a Giver for World Book Night, and everything about that was totally awesome, including the look on the homeless guy's face in the Plaza after my daughter and I handed him a book he'd never read before. He looked interested.

Hope you're all having a great week!

In the past week or so I've written on BlogHer about Gwyneth Paltrow telling us it's harder to be a movie-star parent than an office-worker parent, things you'll miss while spring cleaning, why I really didn't like The Muppets Most Wanted, whether I'd save Beloved or the little angel if they were both hanging off a cliff, and what Fred Phelps saw when he died -- but by far the best comment I got this week was on a post I wrote about struggling with Beloved's travel.

The post was shared on BlogHer's Facebook page and the comment appeared there and got pulled over to BlogHer via Livefyre. When I went to read it, I realized the commenter probably didn't realize I've worked full-time for BlogHer since 2009. But still. Hilarious. Scroll down.