And the winner is! / + some other stuff

Shelby, "pick me randomly, please." I did! How weird is that? Shelby email me your details, and I will forward them to Storey.

And wow. Thank you all so much for your enthusiastic feedback on the book. I know that Emily is totally thrilled. You really are the most generous people.

In other random news:

Photo taken by my beloved high-school friend (and the fantastic photographer) Ben Marks. Finally I have a picture of his that's not of me with some or other boyfriend of yore.

• We've been having a total jacks renaissance around here. And let me just say [shrugs modestly]: I've still got it. I can get to tensies and back in one turn. Unless I've had more than two beers, and then it takes some unpredictable number of turns between one and a hundred.

• Frankie turned two. Two! (For newer readers, Frankie and his mom Anni lived with us when he was a wee baby.) And I celebrated with a lunatic fit of obsessive crafting. I swear, I was just going to make two pieces of bread and a piece of cheese. But then, before I knew it, they were honking at me from the car, threatening to go to the party without me, and I was still in my pajamas, sewingly deranged.

Most of the patterns came via the apartment therapy master list of felt food tutorials.

The bag of chips, right?

• Oh, but were you like, felt food, whatever, tell me about that pink velvet bench? This old thing? This old thing in perfect condition? That we got by the side of the road in Providence for $20? Score! Even the legs are upholstered. It is truly spectacular.

• I got invited to be a California Raisin Ambassador! A title that must, apparently, make its own glory, since it turned out not to be an actual paying gig with payment and paidness. Sigh. But it is now my favorite thing to say around the house. "Is that how you talk to the Raisin Ambassador?" and "Sorry, but the Raisin Ambassador is too busy to cut your toenails." Even though I'm not actually the Raisin Ambassador. On account of how I didn't do it. Which is probably just as well.

• I dreamed that I looked and looked for a bathroom, finally found one, and then realized that I was pooping in a pebbly Zen fountain in a doctor's waiting room.

• I read two amazing and wildly different books. One is Song of Achilles, which I worry you might have to be a total classics geek to appreciate. Given that I was, like, the only person in my Latin VI class, while the rest of my classmates were busy wearing cool jeans and laughing and going to our senior prom and stuff, this was the novel of my dreams. It's strangely pulpy (the metallic-embossed cover makes it look like a gay, martial, ancient Greek Harlequin Romance) but it's also this incredibly moving and romantic story about the Trojan War, told from the point of view of Petroclus, the lover of Achilles. The fact that I just wrote that like it was a boring book report should not at all dissuade you from reading it. The other book was So Much Pretty, which is about girls and violence and is as inspiring and wonderful as it is horrifying and dreadful. That book has some of the best descriptions of friendship that I have ever read anywhere, and I loved it.

• I googled "how to make an owl costume for a stuffed animal" (Birdy is going to be Harry Potter for Halloween, so that leaves Strawberry to figure out) and was shocked not to find what I was looking for. But there is a Hedwig costume for kids, which gave me such a pang. I love the child that wants to be not Harry, not Hermione, not even Ron Weasley or Malfoy, but Hedwig. Dying.

Have a wonderful weekend, my friends.

xo