I slept like hell last night. We spent the weekend outside and yesterday working in the yard, and between the muscle exhaustion and the allergy infusion, I just couldn't stay comfortable. At about 5:45 this morning, I woke up and flopped around again (my poor husband). Petunia stirred from the foot of the bed and walked over my body until she got to my arm. Then she curled up in the circle of my arm, put her paws over my elbow and laid her head on my shoulder. And purred.

And then I fell back asleep. And to think she was months from being put down when we adopted her.

---

Other things I wrote last week:

• Plants toxic to cats and dogs
• Six tips for talking politics with your friends without a fight
• Parents sue school district over a blog and I can't figure out why

On Monday, I went to hear The Book Doctors (Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry) do their Pitchapalooza for the second year. Last year, I just went and watched, not really sure what was going on. This year, I took along my reframed novel pitch to see what they would say.

It was monsoon pouring that night, and the temperature inside Unity Temple ranged somewhere between moist and sauna. I am terrible at estimating crowds, but I'd say the auditorium was about half full -- and it appeared every one of those people had a book to pitch. I got lucky and was selected as one of the twenty-five people who got to read my pitch and get some feedback on it. (This was really, really lucky, because Arielle and David and the people they pick to be on their panel are always nice. I've been to pitching/querying sessions at writers' conferences in which the panel brought "vindictive" to a whole new level.)

As I waited to see if my name would be called, I studied my audience mates. I was there alone, so I had nothing to do but look around. I myself kept rewriting my pitch over and over in my notebook, changing a few words here and there. It wasn't fully baked and I knew it, but I hadn't had much time to spend on it and when you get a chance to get feedback on your writing, you take it. I saw the man in front of me had his pitch all typed out. He was staring a hole through it. The woman beside me was scribbling in a notebook.

If you could've bottled the collective angst in that room ...

I felt a tremendous sense of empathy toward every person in the room. Even though I got one book published, it doesn't get easier. I don't feel any less angsty about my current pitch than I did about my Sleep Is for the Weak pitch. One thing I am able to do better is recognize that the feedback you need is the feedback that sucks the worst to hear. Identifying the problems is their job, fixing them is mine. 

I hate fixing. I wish it would just come out right the first time.

Then again, if it did, I wouldn't know what to do the first time it came it wrong.

It's sort of a vicious circle.

Some of the other writers had shaky voices. One commented about how nervous she was. Even in such a friendly atmosphere, it's terrifying to say out loud what you've been typing and whispering over and over to yourself for weeks or months or years. 

I got the feedback I needed, went back to my seat and waited for my heart rate to return to normal. I looked over at the woman next to me, and she smiled. I smiled back.

I knew she knew exactly how I felt.

---

Speaking of authors, check out my review of longtime reader Shannon Hyland-Tassava's new book, The Essential Stay-at-Home Mom Manual on Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews!

This morning I saw a post on BlogHer called "I've Never Had a Best Friend" by all.things.fadra. She wrote:

I used to get offended when I would meet people, especially people I really liked, and they would tell me about their “best friend back in Michigan” or the woman they’ve been friends with since the second grade.

I took it to mean: Hi. Nice to meet you. We can be friends but not that good of friends because that position has already been filled. And perhaps I stayed guarded in the friendship.

And I felt a pang, because I refer to my best friend in conversation as my best friend to people who don't know her and never mean to insinuate there's no more room in my heart for besties. 

In my case, I have a friend I've known since I was three years old. We've only not lived in the same metro area for two years of that 35-year period of time. When you know someone that long through so many phases of life, it's hard to compare it to any other friendship.

However.

It never occurred to me that my referring to her that way might drive away potential new friends. I've been blessed in my life to have had many friends who were the most active in my life at that moment and for whom I would go to great lengths to see or help. Some people -- whom I enjoy immensely -- I see in real life barely at all. Life at this juncture is so busy with the earning of money and the improving of still-clunky houses and the raising of children that it's a wonder I see anyone who doesn't live in my house or neighborhood ever. There are plenty of times when I'm free but they aren't or vice versa or it's just so dang hard to get off the ever-loving couch at the end of the day.

But every time I meet someone new, I look at them closely to see if we will be friends. I adore making new friends, new close friends, because friends are like your children -- your heart can make enough love for all of them, don't you think? You may not have enough time to see all of them every day or even every year, but your heart ... it doesn't get full. 

At least I don't feel that way.

I've always been fascinated by the little angel's skill in balancing and arranging her toys in all manner of Norman-Rockwell-meets-The-Shining scenes: super cute when she's there and super creepy when she's not.

When I got out of bed this morning, I heard the steady cadence of her voice in the next room. I looked at Beloved. "You're missing Story Hour," he said.

But I was late getting up and went down to get coffee and then we scrambled for the bus, and I forgot all about the whole thing until I went upstairs to shower and her light was on.

This is what I found.

The whole gang. She sleeps every night with almost everyone you see pictured here.

Ski Bear (slumped in the middle) is getting plastic surgery over Easter because my girl thinks he looks unhappy and wants him to smile more. SCARY!

Alexandra and Erin and their many pets.

Luv Bear, Sophie and Benjamin

Pink Kitteh and company

Tanya, who is unfortunately always in that hospital bed with tuberculosis, which killed Louis Braille.

(That was her explanation. I don't ask questions any more.)

Totally the best part.

Ever have a writing project that's not moving as quickly as you want?

PAINT STUFF.

Wish you could take a three-week vacation to Europe?

PAINT STUFF.

Scared about how hot this summer's going to be if it's already 80 before St. Patrick's Day?

PAINT STUFF.

Tired after a conference followed by an intense workweek?

DON'T SLEEP. PAINT STUFF.

Painting stuff is awesome. It's the cheapest way I know to start over. In the 2011-2012 edition of The Transformation of Chateau Travolta, Beloved put in a doorway arch that I completely forgot to document and then he got a wild hair and painted the dark beams in the living room white. Once he did that, I realized how much I hated the Friendly Yellow on the living room walls even though I love it in the hall. 

So then we decided we needed white molding to go with the new white ceiling and if we were going to go to that much trouble, we might as well paint the whole room, because what the hell.

So that's coming soon. I hope we get it all done this weekend, because the molding's been sitting in the garage since February. (That last bit was for my mother, who thinks we work really fast. It's all relative, Ma.)

This is all part of dealing with the fact I really want to use the Corolla insurance money to buy a 1984 convertible with cash. I will paint stuff instead, because that would be foolish. 

Right?

A few miles from my house, there are palm trees. Palm trees are not native to Missouri. When I first saw them, I thought they were fake. Then I realized they were taller than the other, native-to-Missouri trees. That would have to be a pretty good fake. And they moved in the breeze the way real palm trees would.

And when winter came, they were wrapped. 

I drove past that house recently and saw they'd installed carved and painted wooden palm trees with their house number at the base of their driveway.

I also saw the fronds of the unwrapped palm trees. They were still green. It was a very mild winter in Kansas City, but still ... the palm trees made it through the winter.

As I continued on down the road, I saw some wild turkeys, which actually belong in Missouri, and I thought about the plants those same neighbors planted at the base of their driveway a few years ago -- they were palm-like, but they were planted straight into the ground, probably several hundred dollars worth of these palm plants, and in the blazing Missouri humidity, they lasted about three weeks before they dried up and died.

So these people went from a several-hundred dollar failed palm-like-plant experiment to five full-size palm trees and huge carved wood statues. I don't even know how much it would cost to transport a fully grown palm tree from wherever palm trees belong to Kansas City, let along FIVE OF THEM.

And you know what? I smile every single time I drive past that house due to the undying optimism of these transplanted beach lovers.

Optimism: Go hard or go home.

Today I wrote this post over on BlogHer:

Let's say you're walking around SXSW cursing the lack of wifi on 6th Street. And then, suddenly, salvation: You see a woman wearing a t-shirt that says, "I'm Susie, a 4G hotspot. SMS HH Susie to 25827 for access wwww.homelesshotspots.org."

Susie herself is a hotspot, complete with all the necessary equipment. A walking, talking hotspot. A homeless hotspot. Hot damn, aren't you in luck!

Want to read the rest? 

I've been here in Austin at the first Dad 2.0 for two days now, and so far my take-away is how good my husband and I have it. Both our fathers are alive and active in our lives and our daughter's life. My husband is a world-class father and an amazing example of how to bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan. He has friends who are dads and indeed capable of talking about parenting with him, if he really wants to (I suspect they talk more about work and sports, but these guys are well-rounded awesome men married to powerful, well-rounded women). I don't know how Beloved feels about his support network, but I feel really good about it. My vision of modern fathers is one of an engaged, enlightened generation of guys who come home from work and talk to their kids about their homework or get on the floor with their babies. It's easy to forget it was just a generation or so ago that wasn't necessarily the case as a cultural norm.

What I'm learning from the men here is that they're as WTF about beer commercials as I am. They are tired of being portrayed in the media as inept cavemen incapable of diapering a baby or ignoring a hot twentysomething. 

They're trying to change the way they talk to their sons about being a man. Instead of squishing emotions, they are facing them and writing about them. They're -- along with moms, I believe -- open to recognizing just good parenting rather than good mothering or good fathering. Men and women do bring different elements to the table as we talk to our kids about puberty or heterosexual relationships, but the act of making dinner for your child or reading her a bedtime story or dropping her off at a friend's house -- no different. There's nothing gendered about most of parenting. 

Having these conversations with fathers who are also writers has been really fun for me. Writers tend to be a different breed just in general, more likely to talk about their feelings with total strangers. I'm accustomed to having these breakthrough conversations with women having been a very active member of the BlogHer community for the past six years, but prior to this conference I've only had those conversations with men outside my family and close friend group with two or three male bloggers, one of whom was in Sleep Is for the Weak. It's not lost on me the same guy who was one of the first guys to talk to me frankly, honestly, as a friend, with no weirdness, about parenting, is the same guy who co-founded Dad 2.0.

It's been a great conference, so far, and I'm excited to meet more of these guys today and tonight. I'm here with BlogHer.com editor-in-chief Stacy Morrison, as well as Polly Pagenhart and Shannon Carroll from the BlogHer conference team, and we're having a great experience. Way to go, Doug and John, and especially you, Doug, old friend and dad blogger extraordinaire. 

It's interesting -- David Wescott tweeted at me this:

@dwescott1 #dad2summit, great mombloggers are here, "rooting for" dads. would be the same if dads had a 5yr headstart?

I didn't say anything much on Twitter, but when I ran into David yesterday I said, "Well, look at Congress." And we stared at each other for a second, both sort of dismayed about that. I wasn't blaming him and he wasn't pitying me, we were both just sort of WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY is more than half the population so underrepresented in power positions in America? And WHY WHY WHY are we still acting like a penis disqualifies a man from being able to make a dentist appointment for his son?

I hope women and men as we go forward can look at parenting just as parenting and look at working just as working and recognize that all people bring something valuable to the table based on personality, not on gender. The world is changing, and I want to see it move toward true partnership between men and women instead of one-upsmanship and competition. Who's with me?

As the Corolla sits stinking up my garage, Beloved is back in the Ozarks. And it's occuring to me I don't actually even know where. Have I learned nothing? I mean, I talked to him last night and this morning, and I forgot to ask both times. He was somewhere last night and he'll probably be somewhere different tonight, and after ten or twelve different times of him road warrioring his way across Missouri every week, I've grown more accustomed to this new life of ours. The only problem is my absent-mindedness. I have my head in my novel, and that means I forget to do stuff like turn on the coffee pot and ask my husband where he's sleeping.

There. I just texted him.

And printed my boarding pass for my flight tomorrow to Dad 2.0.

My parents will be here soon to be here for the little angel when she gets home from school because Beloved will get in late on Thursday.

I worry about my parents driving down here. I worry about Beloved driving around Missouri. I worry about me flying to Austin. But that's what people do. They move freely about, even though it's a dangerous world out there. It does no good to sit in your house and hide from that world.

When the worry comes, I try to imagine a big windshield wiper sweeping across my thoughts and pushing them away. Sometimes it helps.

Sometimes I just crawl back into the novel in my head, where I control whether or not there are tornadoes.