Today I am toothstrong!

Elaine's room is certainly very peaceful with little white butterflies flying about, perching on the grape vines. Let's hope the vine starts producing grapes soon, so the arbor can serve its purpose.

Elaine can walk with only one adult hand to help her balance now. As a reward, we thawed out the packages of lady bugs and butterflies -- yellow lady bugs and cabbage white butterflies. The grape vine is growing pretty quickly, despite the heat, so I figure it'll support the little critters okay. I'm not handling the heat quite as well as the grapes...

It's amazing the difference three degrees can make. I'll be fine while the house is 80, but, once it hits 83, I feel like my brains are made of ice cream and they're melting. Fortunately, we keep a lot of ice cream in the freezer, so I was able to replenish my cranial supplies. Today my brains are french silk and raspberry cheesecake. Tomorrow they may be cookie dough and banana.

Trudy's a deadbeat. She had the whole weekend to get the grape shoots planted, and she never lifted a paw in their direction. The leaves were starting to look wilty this morning, so I just went ahead and planted them myself. I coiled the vines around the crib as far as they would go, but they're not very long yet. So, it doesn't look like much. But it will.

Elaine and I picked up the supplies for her grape arbor today. We got shoots of the standard seedless green variety of grape; Elaine liked some of the wine grapes, but I wasn't sure they were appropriate for a nursery arbor. Besides, they were a lot more expensive. I also sprang for a few optional packages of lady bugs and butterflies. Elaine wants to break into them right away, but the packages say the little critters fare best if kept frozen until their new environment is ready. Trudy's going to help plant the shoots and tie the vines; she says she feels bad about not having her shave ice stand in gear yet and wants to make up for it. We'll see.

The child likes eating grapes at 2am. While I can sympathize with this proclivity, her preference is proving inconvenient from a parental perspective. So, I'm thinking of growing a grapevine along the railing of her crib. I think it would prove a perfect grape arbor.

The last few days have been really exciting for me with regard to my writing. On Thursday, two of my pending publications suddenly became available: an audio version of "Forget Me Not" in Clonepod and A Field Guide to Surreal Botany, the anthology containing my piece about "The Kitty Willow." The authors for the field guide have been following its progress in a bunch of emails from the editors over the last few months, so I've been able to see how gorgeous it is for a while now. It's exciting that other people can finally see it too.

While "The Kitty Willow" isn't a normal story -- (the field guide entries all had to fit a specific structure, but I tried to make as much story-like as possible) -- it is an idea I've been playing with since I was ten. So, it's really nice to see it illustrated by a professional artist and be able to look at what I've been imagining for all those years.

The other exciting progress with my writing is that I finally broke my main character out of the bar she's been stuck in for months in "Otters In Space." The editing process should speed up now since the missing sister I've been editing in doesn't actually appear on stage again until the end of the book.