I have to admit this book tour has been kicking my butt. It doesn’t seem like I’m doing much. Just throwing up a graphic every weekday and then resting on my accolades but I don’t know…I’m not really doing so great at it. I got my schedule all mixed up. I missed emailing some key players, I’ve been getting people the secret sentences at the very last minute and sometimes even hours after that. I’ve been dropping the ball, regularly. Work, books, life…everywhere. I was even late to pick up Bug from kindergarten today and I had promised myself I would NEVER do that.

You should see my desk right now. It’s a complete mess. Maybe I’ll take a picture tomorrow when it’s daylight because I probably won’t have it cleaned up by then. That’s the way the days have been going. But in a way, I’m thankful. I prayed for work and I got it. I’m not rolling in paychecks but I’m making ends meet and I’m busy. It’s a lot to be thankful for.

Winter has been hard on my sense of optimism as I’m sure it has on yours too. The days are so short! It feels like it’s eight when it’s FOUR! How are we ever supposed to get anything done? Well. At 3am of course. That’s why I drink coffee.

But coffee is killing me.

I tried to take some Christmas photos for a card that I was going to print up this week and mail out next but I couldn’t get a single shot of Bug and me where I didn’t look like a hot mess. Of course she is darling in every single shot but I look like I’m old and drunk with bloodshot eyes that even photoshop can’t fix. I know I could just put a photo of her on the card and call it a day but I vowed to embrace getting older. I don’t want to hide from my wrinkles and gray hairs. Women can be beautiful at any age, I’ve always thought.

I just didn’t know I would look so scary at 39!!

(I like this one the best.)

So I gave up after a while and vowed to drink a lot of water, drink less coffee and get more sleep. You can see how well that’s working for me. I’m typing this at 2:58 am.

Anyway! The book tour is chugging along. I am so grateful for all my friends and co-bloggers who are saying such nice things about my books. I really don’t deserve it or them. And before you correct me and say that all my hard work is paying off let me correct you and say that my work is nothing in comparison to how kind my friends (and family!) have been to me lately.

They’ve picked me up when I’ve been crying. They’ve given me attitude adjustments when I felt like a failure. They’ve pushed me when I just wanted to give up. They’ve watched Bug for me when I had deadlines. They’ve let me stay at their houses when I had nowhere to go…They’ve nodded when I didn’t have the words. They’ve fed me and Bug when we were hungry. They’ve told me that it’s been a hard year and it’s okay to feel like this. Sometimes I guess I need to hear that because I keep wondering why I’m not doing better than I am.

The autographing party went off smashingly! I didn’t actually autograph any books though. Funny how that happens. You set a date, you get everything ready and then you get in a room with your good friend, good food, a glass of wine and next thing you know you are spending the night talking instead of working.

This is Calee, my publisher, friend, book-maker extraordinaire.

She made soup. That’s kind of awesome, isn’t it? I thought I would order a pizza but she said she had some vegetables that had needed “souping”. How funny is she? Vegetables that needed souping. I wasn’t going to say no to that. If vegetables gotta be souped, they gotta be souped! She saved me $20 and got me to be healthy at the same time. It was quite tasty. I wish I had the urge to soup vegetables now and then. I might have to work on that.

Bug was a little disappointed at the soup instead of pizza (and potato soup at that, the crime of it!!) but it was nothing a few thousand olives couldn’t fix.

Besides all the soup-eating, olive-eating and merry-making, we did get a lot of things organized and the kids had a blast painting.

A little too close to the books for my liking but thankfully no books were marred! A few paypal invoices might have taken one for the team but what can I say? It kept the kids busy and happy and out of our hair!

Today I actually did autograph all the books and I sent them off as promised (yay!). Bug worked very hard at hers. I love that a few readers requested her signature.

She takes it very seriously, adding flowers and hearts and clouds. She is an eternal bright spot. Talk about God knowing what you need when you need it….

Did you know she makes me coffee? She might be a bit of an enabler but who could say no to that face and a cup of hot steaming coffee with just the right amount of cream and sugar? Not me!!

You should see her holding the cup with a towel so it doesn’t burn her and walking so slowly to my desk so that she doesn’t spill. My heart explodes every time.

I went on a field trip with Bug’s class today to the pumpkin patch. It was really fun outside of the five thousand times I stuck my foot in my mouth with the other parents. I don’t know what my problem was. Nothing too terribly serious but I did wish I would just not ever talk again.

Thankfully, Bug is still young enough not to be embarrassed by me. That time clock is ticking though.

She loved feeding the goats. They were so cute. Until a big one put his front legs up on Bug and knocked her over. That wasn’t so cute.

Baaaaaah nanny nanny.

They had some pretty great pumpkins. Of course we didn’t make it out of there without buying two. We are having a fall party this coming Monday after all. We have to decorate!

I think my favorite part was the corn maze. After waffling quite a bit, Bug decided to stay with me instead of riding the bus back to school so we got to stay and do a few more things that her class didn’t. Like the corn maze. I have to admit I’ve been in a bit of a funk (book tour jitters? gloomy weather? pms? probably all of the above) and it was nice to just spend time with my girl.

I don’t think any other kid is as patient as she is. So many times I get frustrated with her because she won’t keep up with me but the flip-side of that slowness is that she is perfectly content to walk a corn maze with me for 45 minutes. Any other kid would be whining and complaining of boredom. Not Bug. We walked and walked and walked. We did the whole thing twice and then left, perfectly content that we had seen everything there was to see.

I never told you guys about how I joined a gym. I was going to but then my Grandpa died and the nieces came to visit and it got shelved. It’s probably a good thing I waited though because my opinion of the whole place has changed. On a daily basis. You could say I have a love/hate relationship with the gym.

When I first joined they set me up with a free complimentary session with a personal trainer. I said, Bring it on! I love personal trainers! I used to have one back in the day when I worked at the junk mail factory (an awesome company perk) and I loved it. Working out always goes better when you have someone else nagging you to do lunges correctly.

It turns out the free complimentary session at the new gym was more of a hard sell in disguise for their bazungo crazy expensive personal trainer program. What a crock. First the guy broke me down and pretty much made me eat dirt and admit that I was in much worse shape than I realized. He had me lifting all kinds of crazy weight in super slow sets that had my knees shivering like a little girl.

I know this method of working out is usually effective so of course I let him abuse me. I embraced the pain. But then the machines were so complicated. I was doing leg lifts backwards on something you usually use for your abs and something swung around and smashed my index finger in a way it should not have. It hurt. Bad. I still have a blue nail to prove it.

Blargin’ Trainer Guy. I hate him.

After about forty-five minutes of brutal humbling, we headed over to his desk to “talk about my options.” I admit it. I was sold. Not because I loved the work-out but he pretty much had me convinced that there was no other way to get in shape other than to hire him to whip me. My future looked pretty bleak. Even with his program it would probably take me six months to a year to lose the twenty pounds I need to lose. And let me tell you, those pounds were the ugliest pounds I’ve ever looked at. I’m sure he had me working out in front of a mirror for that exact desired effect.

We talked and talked. He complimented me on my knowledge. I learned about his struggle with MS and how he holds some kind of trophy belt for being the best trainer in all of California. It was a happy little talk and then right as the short hand reached the hour mark, he slid his laminated rates page across the desk.

Sixty dollars a session.

SIXTY DOLLARS A SESSION!!!! Plus a hundred-and-something-or-other for initiation.

Say what?!!

I’m not made of money. I can’t afford sixty dollars a week. Is this guy crazy? I live in a depressed town where everyone is on welfare. How do people afford this?!! Do their insurance companies cover it? Does the government offer programs for this? I saw plenty of people working out with trainers. They must be coming up with the money somehow. How do they do it? I pretty much emptied my checking account to join the gym in the first place.

Then the worst thing happened. The ugly cry came over my face. I didn’t mean it to. I never cry in public, well hardly ever. I hid under my bangs but once it started I couldn’t stop it. I guess I was a little more stressed out than I realized. Work had been tricky, money has been tight, my house seemed like it would never stay clean (thanks to my brother who was making it his personal mission to mess it up), everybody thinks I’m uptight because I’m a control freak about my house, Bug didn’t like their dumb kid’s club daycare and well, the whole navigating a dissolving marriage thing…you know, maybe it was just too much.

I put my hands over my eyes, got up from his desk and walked backwards. I hid behind a column that was near his desk and then just split. I didn’t even try to explain myself. What could I say? This guy doesn’t know half of what is going on in my life. Who knows, maybe he makes people cry on a regular basis. I’m sure his services are well worth $60 an hour. I charge more than that for what I do. But you just can’t spend money you don’t have.

So that was that. I haven’t talked to him since. I see him from time to time and I’ve been meaning to stop and apologize but I just haven’t gotten the guts up. He has my phone number, he could have called me but I think he’d rather wash his hands of a weepy over-weight middle-aged frump monster. I don’t know. I’m moving on.

I went home and thought a lot about the whole experience. In the end I decided that this guy doesn’t know me. He has no idea how I work out and how much willpower I have. I can get in shape without him. It might take me longer but I’m not a failure before I even start.

So far I’ve gone to the gym at least two times every week for about a month, often more. It’s too early to be patting myself on the back but I feel pretty good about it. I might not ever lose those twenty pounds. I’m okay with that. I just want to be healthy and not hate myself when I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror.

Figuring out a good routine has been a little more challenging. I hate to go to the gym in the morning because that’s my peak creative time and I really like to devote my overly-caffeinated brain cells to my work BUT it seems like if I don’t go work out in the morning it doesn’t happen at all. I’ve tested this over and over for years. So I work out in the morning and it evens out because on those days I seem to have more overall energy anyway and I can work longer at night.

Finding a class that works for me in the morning is a whole other issue. I tried their yoga class but Barbie the Yoga Instructor drove me nuts. She was bendy alright but when she started swinging herself by her wrists and flirting with the very interested jock in the front row I got tired of it real quick. Which is too bad too because I love yoga.

I tried water-aerobics and loved it. It’s fun splashing around in a salt water pool with a bunch of grandmas. I felt like a super star when I could run under water and kick all their butts. Not that I was showing off or anything but sometimes it’s nice to not be the slow poke in the back of the class for a change. I even took my dad to a class. He loved it too. But the time slot was a bit late in the day so I’ve not really been going regularly.

Then I tried step aerobics. It’s perfect for me. It’s just complicated enough that I’m constantly confused and stepping backwards when I should be stepping frontwards. One day I forgot to drink my coffee before class and that day did not go well at all. I couldn’t get the hang of anything. It’s funny because while I have pretty good rhythm and love to dance, I’m terrible at taking instruction.

When the teachers says exit left, I exit right. Crossovers and step-behind grapevine-thingys have me tripping over my own feet. I’m a clutz like no other. But at the end of the work-out, I am exhausted and I haven’t thought one thought about how uncomfortable I’ve been. My brain is so tired from trying to keep up with the complicated routine that it has no idea that my body is sweating bullets. I love it. The teacher is excellent too. We stretch and use weights and everyday I am sore in the good way.

So I guess I could say I love the gym now. We’ll see how it goes.