Deb! How wonderful! (Though it does take some of the oomph out of what I'm about to post.)

Rejoice with me, and let us make merry, for that which was lost has been found!

On Monday I took an important section of Chapter 2 of Lucy to writers group. I got useful comments and marked up my copy of the pages heavily. As I was going home, I stopped by the QFC adjoining the Starbucks where we meet to get a loaf of bread for dinner. Today I could not find the pages and was sure I'd left them, along with a notebook containing any number of irreplaceable addresses, business cards, and notes, at QFC. I drove over and checked their lost and found. No luck. I was beating my breast with woe.

As I was about to settle down and try to edit the section from my memory of the Monday discussion, I paced around the house in frustration. As I walked by the bedside table, something under Dylan's current book and some magazines and catalogs caught my eye--my blue notebook, with the manuscript pages tucked neatly therein!

How it got on the bedside table I haven't a clue. Not a logical place at all. But my mourning has been turned into dancing.

Susan! Are you kidding? I think I could sense the relief from here.

Whoooeeeee, woman. Don't be losin' that stuff.

I think I could sense the relief from here.

No doubt. I'm just amazed I had enough presence of mind and self-control to jump for joy and dance up and down the hall quietly, since Annabel is asleep.

Is she a light sleeper? For all that I used to get murderous toard a fly on the window when Joanna was asleep, she actually slept very deeply, once she got there.

I'm still astonished by the enormous carton of manuscript boxes. It's just - damn. A bit humbling. All that work...

Is she a light sleeper?

Not especially, but unfamiliar loud noises tend to startle her. She woke from a nice nap this afternoon when the repairman fixing our door used a power tool in the next room, for example.

Jeez, Rip Van Freakin' Winkle would wake up under those circs - did you rip his head off and spit down his neck? Way to wake up a sleeping infant...

Well, as power tools go it was fairly quiet. And this door repair process has taken so long that I'm not going to complain too much as long as it's done.

In writerly news, edits have been made, and I'm going to enter this puppy in one more contest and start submitting to agents again.

Excellent! I've got Matty out to my beta readers, and am awaiting pass-pages for FFoSM. If they arrive tomorrow, here's hoping it happens before I head out to my MIL's to do a day's work in the garden.

Me for bed. We have damned near emptied this office today, and I'm just reeling.

Another shot at Silence There’s a new kind of silence to be dreaded in American life these days, even as we get noisier. We’ve gotten spoiled, information flying across the globe like it does, that we expect it.Ok, I expect it. I sigh like a teenager when asked to leave anything after the beep, even though I remember when the only guy who had a machine was Jim Rockford on TV.And I expect everyone I e-mail to be as intoxicated by the printed word as am I(The reality is a Practice on living with disappointment a lot of the time, what with IM-speak.”thx but no thx, U know?” )

You Get What You Need

At my first job out of college, I sat in the middle of a news room. It was loud: Phones ringing all around me, coworkers constantly gabbing about TV and diets, a boss who expected frequent progress reports.

I hated it, wasted afternoons fantasizing about an office with a door and coworkers who would mind their own business.

Then I got what I wanted.

The silence overwhelmed me, drove me to inactivity, to depression, to -- in the end -- termination.

I have a new job, with a new loud office. When it distracts me, I remember the past, and give thanks.