June 2003 Archives

LBJs

*For those of you who've been waiting with bated breath, the Atkins Diet seems to work on me. In the first week, I lost six pounds. So far the best thing about it has been that it's fairly easy to stick to. For me, at least, it's much easier to forbid myself certain foods than to hold myself to a certain amount of food; for one thing, I don't have to measure, write down, or keep track of anything. And man, it's nice to have regular access to cheese.

*The Atkins breakfast is still something of an issue for me; I don't much like eggs (except in omelets), and turkey bacon is losing something of its novelty. For me, breakfast has always been a meal of almost pure carbohydrates--a bowl of cereal, or a bagel, or a chicken biscuit from Hardees' or Bojangles if I was on the road. The main appeal of such carb-heavy breakfasts is their simplicity--you can prepare them for consumption without having to have a cup of coffee first. These days I'm drinking a cup (no milk, no sugar--sometimes a little sweetener) first thing so that I can wake up enough to figure out how to cook the actual food.

*By the way, that phrase "bated breath" is one that I'll often see rendered incorrectly in my students' papers--they often go for "baited breath." I try to tell my students that "bated" relates to "abate"--you're holding your breath, or stopping it. You can't bait your breath unless you're breathing on something in hopes of luring it into a trap. Or unless you're eating night crawlers.

*Good news on the book front: not only have the good reviews kept coming, but I got a nice write-up and photo in the Fredericksburg (VA) Free Lance-Star last Sunday. As a result of all the good press, Paul Dry Books is going to a third printing. Since this is ordinarily a sign of best-sellerdom, I must point out that best-sellerdom isn't the reason here: it's just steady sales of the first two printings, which were not large ones. The third printing is the same size as the second, and like the second, it's exclusively trade paperback. But they do add up over time, happily. (And if you want a hardback copy, make your move quickly--so far, only about 1000 exist, and I don't know if any more will be printed.)

*I'm listening to Midnight Oil's Diesel and Dust right now, remembering when they were poised to conquer the U.S.A. back in 1988. (My god, it's been fifteen years...) "Beds Are Burning," the big hit, still rocks along beautifully, as does "The Dead Heart." I still like "Warakurna," too, though a few of the tunes ("Put Down That Weapon," "Sell My Soul") strike me as filler. I'm a little surprised that their American career didn't go better; the follow-up to D&D, Blue Sky Mining, seemed to sell fairly well at the outset. Perhaps they simply didn't have an interest in sustaining their reputation outside Australia, where as far as I know they still rule the airwaves. They're not the only Aussie band to approach stardom here without quite achieving it. At about the same time Midnight Oil was getting heavy MTV play, the Church, INXS and Crowded House were drawing plenty of attention themselves. Heck, even a few years earlier, I would have bet on the Church to make it big--I still think "Just For You," from The Blurred Crusade, is one of the universe's few Perfect Pop Songs. But something held them all back. Distance? Bias? Cultural hegemony? Your guess is as good as mine.

*On Monday I worked out at the gym, lifting weights and walking a couple of miles on the treadmill. On Tuesday I went for a bike ride--about 19 miles, a bit longer than I would have liked for my first day back on the biki in six months. On Wednesday and Thursday I worked the Cub Scout day camp, which involved much standing, walking, swimming, and trudging uphill. And today, my Achilles tendons are giving me some rather strongly worded messages to the effect that they should stay put. You got it, boys.

*I'm happy to report that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix has finally arrived at the Cashwell/Dalton house. First into the breach was Thing One, who plowed through all 870 pages in about fourteen hours--in other words, in about as long as it would take me to read 870 pages. (Actually, it would probably take me closer to fifteen; suffice it to say that I'm not worried about his ability to get through the material in high school.) Kelly picked it up next and is blazing through. Thing Two has also cracked it open; I foresee a battle royal when the two of them want to read it at the same time. Me, I'm standing on the perimeter of the field like a hyena, waiting for the bigger predators to eat their fill.

5:37 PM

Interesting. I've been gone for a couple of days, helping out with Thing Two's day camp & overnight stay (which, I should point out, were directly responsible for the sudden heat wave in the mid-Atlantic states). In the interim, Blogger.com has done an update, so the page I'm now seeing is totally unfamiliar. Here's hoping I can figure out how to make this work. But of course, if you're reading this, I must have done so, right?

Camps are always an odd blend of the routine and the exhilarating, but they teach you things you don't learn elsewhere. I went to YMCA day camp when I was in the second or third grade and learned some things that I would never have learned otherwise: that you could make a good-sized rocket ship out of chicken wire and papier mache, that I enjoyed performing in front of a group, that tie-dying looked cool but wasn't that easy to do, and that I was a hopeless incompetent when it came to braiding a lanyard. I also learned how much fun Capture the Flag can be, and got good and familiar with swimming in lakes.

In 1972 and '73, I went to Camp Gwynn Valley, an overnight camp in the Smoky Mountains near Brevard, NC, and there was much more learning to do. I took my first real hiking trip that first year--two nights and three days near Shining Rock, with two counselors, Frog and Marion, and about ten boys. We passed bald-top mountains, saw deer bounding almost within arm's reach, and were entertained by the names on the map; I've certainly never forgotten the vaguely threatening and thickly forested Dog Loser Knob. That night we learned how important it is to store foodstuffs off the ground, as we were visited by just about every mammal in western North Carolina; Frog dubbed our campsite "Varmint Holler," "'cause the varmints are makin' us holler."

On the second day we hit rain and lots of it--we were actually walking through a cloud. I'm sure the distance wasn't that great, but it seemed like we were walking a marathon at the time. And carrying packs along, at that. When we finally stopped, in a high meadow between two peaks, we discovered how hard it is to set up camp in the rain. By the time the tents were up, we were all nearly mutinous with hunger, but getting a fire going was a whole new challenge. Since the campsite was after all a field, fuel options were limited. There were occasional birches, most of them dead, and Frog and Marion spent roughly forty-five minutes attempting to coax wet birchbark into flame. Then we got to work boiling water in order to prepare each camper's dinner, which took probably another half-hour. Shivering and miserable, I was finally handed what remains one of the two or three best meals of my entire life: a steaming-hot bowl of Lipton's Instant Beef Stroganoff.

Life at the camp itself was also instructive. Aside from the basic education in self-reliance that being away from one's parents provides, I learned how to ride a horse, did some copper enameling, played string bass in a junkyard band (my first public musical performance), fished for bream and bass with balls of bread (though at the time I didn't appreciate the alliteration), and had one less pleasant life lesson: for the first time I had people throw an ethnic slur at me with intent to harm.

"Hebe" was the term, used by a group of girls from another cabin and one boy from my own cabin that I had thought of as a particularly good friend--he was actually the harmonica player in our junkyard band. Somewhat to my surprise, I burst into tears and stormed back to my bunk.

I'm still a little surprised. In the preceding eleven years, I'd been teased for everything from my name to my love of books, so it now seems a little odd that I'd be so sensitive to name-calling about my Jewish heritage, something that I'd always celebrated. In fact, in fourth grade, my crowd had gleefully nicknamed its members according to ethnic background--I was "Jew-Baby," Mark, who was Asian-American, became "Chi-Baby," etc. But at camp I learned that not everyone celebrates the differences in background that make America so vital and interesting--and that the multicolored, pan-cultural neighborhood of Morrie Turner's "Wee Pals" comic strip was sadly nowhere near where I was living. It was a shock, and I cried, and I wanted someone to comfort me, but I had to deal with it myself.

And yesterday, as I watched my son and his friends haphazardly fishing for bluegills (using worms, not balls of bread), I overheard one of them cheerfully teasing him. Usually he's teased about his advanced and highly original vocabulary, or about his his height, since he's one of the shortest kids in his class (largely because he's one of the youngest). This time his friend, in a playful tone, was teasing him about his Jewish background. His friend called my son "Hitler."

And I chose not to say anything. I'm going to be wondering about that choice for a long time.

3:12 PM

Well, they've finally done it.

After four years of peace and quiet, four years of feeding birds without interruption, four years of dodging the bullet that pierces every birder's flesh eventually, they've done it:

The squirrels have come.

Since we moved here in the summer of 1999, my main feeder has hung in our backyard, about seven feet up and ten feet away from the trunk of our weeping cherry tree. I hung it using a short chain (which looped over the branch) and some discarded nylon hay-baling cord that I found at the old farmhouse just before we moved. The combination of lateral distance from the trunk, vertical distance from the branch, and perhaps a dose of dumb luck (or dumb squirrels) kept the feeder safe from rodent invasion for years. Instead, I was treated to an uninterrupted stream of cardinals, chipping sparrows, downy woodpeckers, mourning doves, indigo buntings, white-breasted nuthatches, goldfinches, white-throated sparrows, house finches, slate-colored juncos, black-capped chickadees, and even red-bellied woodpeckers. But no squirrels.

Oh, sure, they lived in the tree, and they cheerfully cleaned up the seed that the birds kicked or let fall to the ground, but they never bothered the feeder itself. But then, about a week ago, I saw something I'd never seen before: a squirrel squatting on the bottom rim of the feeder, greedily snarfing down everything it could reach. I ran out to the deck and scared it off, but I had a bad feeling about it--the dam hadn't given way yet, but there was certainly a big crack in it.

And from there it was only a matter of time. Every few hours, I'd discover a squirrel on the feeder, often with a few henchmen lurking underneath, waiting for spillage; the only question was how I might stop them. The first thing to establish was how they were getting access--were they jumping? Climbing? Parachuting? I had a pretty good idea from the increasingly frayed nylon cord that supported the feeder: signs of squirrel clawing, I was willing to bet. Eventually I saw one shimmying delicately down the chain to the cord, and that sent me off to the tool box.

If there's one thing an experienced birder knows, it's that squirrel-proof feeders usually aren't. Squirrels are just too creative, too acrobatic, too relentless to be discouraged by baffles, wires, or anything other than active human intervention, usually involving firearms. Nonetheless, I wasn't letting this pass without at least token resistance on my part. In my house are a number of tools, and some useful materials from which I felt sure I could construct a squirrel baffle; mine was constructed from vinyl, twelve inches in diameter, with a center spindle hole approximately 1/4" across.

OK, it was an old copy of Paul McCartney & Wings' Red Rose Speedway. A few years back, I had grabbed it off a pile of albums that a colleague was throwing out; because of the artsy-but-irritating 1970s habit of putting absolutely no information about songs on the cover (a gatefold cover at that), I had been under the mistaken impression that it contained "Helen Wheels," one of the half-dozen or so post-Beatles songs of Paul's that I actually like. (Others include "Band on the Run," "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey," "Live and Let Die," and "Ballroom Dancing.") Unfortunately, as I later found out, the only familiar song on the album was "My Love," which is one of the far-more-than-a-dozen post-Beatles songs of Paul's that I find saccharine and annoying. (Others include "Let 'Em In," "Bluebird," "Ebony and Ivory," and "The Girl Is Mine.") In short, I had found the perfect album to turn into a squirrel baffle.

Alas, it was not the perfect squirrel baffle. Oh, sure, I saw it send one hungry young rodent on a one-way trip into empty space, but even in the process, the squirrel's claws did more damage to the nylon cord. If the baffle couldn't protect the cord from further damage, I knew the whole shooting match would be coming down before long.

And this morning, as I gazed out my back door, I was proven right: the chain still lay across the branch, and strands of nylon still dangled from the ends of the chain, but the feeder lay helpless on the ground, its bottom rim popped off from the impact. Three squirrels were hunched around it, nibbling at their ill-gotten gains.

They scattered as soon as I came through the door to retrieve the remains of my fallen comrade in the bird-feeding wars. I poured the remaining seed out, hoping the ground-feeding birds would at least get one more meal out of the feeder, and sadly returned to the house.

It is a black, black day.

4:58 PM

LBJs

*Thing One spent last night at a scouting overnight--the first night it hasn't poured in weeks, I think--and managed to win oodles of prizes in the various games the boys played. Thing Two starts his scout day camp tomorrow, with Kelly chaperoning Monday and yrs. truly chaperoning Wednesday & Thursday (with an overnight stay on Thursday). I'm anticipating sunburn and mosquito bites, but with any luck we'll have some kind of fun.

*The Atlantic Coast Conference continues to irk me by pursuing expansion to thirteen teams, even in the face of political machinations, lawsuits, and more bad publicity than I can ever recall the league generating. Frankly, I think the current nine-member conference is too big, as it necessitates a useless 8th-seed-vs.-9th-seed "play-in" game at the ACC Tournament every March, with the winner getting to face the top seed in a state of exhaustion from the night before. Obviously, my outlook is entirely basketball-centric. I don't mind ACC football one bit, but I frankly don't think the sport has any business dictating to the other sports; on the gridiron, Florida State is the only school that's a perennial contender, and Duke is the biggest joke in Division 1A football. I also worry that the league is foolishly pursuing football programs that raise red flags in both ethical (Miami) and academic (Virginia Tech) arenas; it seems like a Hurricane or two is in the headlines every year for drug use, assault, or some form of larceny, while the Hokies' on-the-field success under Frank Beamer has been accompanied by a disturbingly low graduation rate. So far the best thing about the entire story has been that UNC Chancellor James Moeser has been resolute in opposing the proposed expansion to twelve (or even thirteen) schools. Unfortunately, my pride in my alma mater is somewhat dimmed by the fact that the ACC Commissioner, Jim Swofford, is also a UNC grad--and a former Tar Heel football player. This may explain a lot.

*It's actually sunny outside. Damn--what are we supposed to do when it's like this? I forget...

*Kel and I are in one of our periodic cleaning modes. (Yes, they do happen, thankyouverymuch.) In our house, of course, any cleaning must begin with books, which occupy the majority of the house's space. We weeded some books through a clever psychological trick: instead of going along the shelves and pulling the ones we didn't like that much, we went along pulling everything we didn't want to keep. There's a subtle difference. Both Kelly and I thoroughly enjoyed David Remnick's biography of Muhammad Ali, King of the World, but we decided we didn't need to keep it in the house, especially when we could give it to the library or keep it in my classroom for my students' independent reading sessions. We've got a lot more work to do, but hey, it's a start.

*I also weeded out about 40-50% of the old spiral notebooks I used in college. I'd kept some around because they had notes about classroom theory and management that I thought might be helpful; now that I'm entering my 13th year of full-time teaching, however, I decided that I know enough about what I'm doing to let them go. I did keep all the ones with my notes from my various Dungeons & Dragons games over the years, plus the ones in which I'd written stories, lyrics, poems, etc. And there's no way I'm going to throw out the ones from my creative writing classes. A plus: I discovered the roughs of several stories & books I'd thought long lost, so I may be able to make something useful out of them.

*I've been taking this week off, basically, in order to start on the diet (weigh-in is Tuesday; we'll see how things have gone) and recover from the touring. I haven't done a damn thing in terms of writing, publicity, or anything book-related at all. It's been great. (Well, actually, I have been checking in on my Amazon and B&N.com rankings, but that's it, I swear.) Tomorrow morning, though, I have to get cracking on my next project. What will it be? Good question.

*The GameCube is an occasional distraction to me, which is one reason I've limited myself to learning only a few games: The Simpsons' Road Rage, SSX Tricky, and Animal Crossing. I haven't played the first two in a long while, but I still have an iron in the fire on Animal Crossing, which is essentially a kiddie version of the Sims: you move to a town & buy a little house. You earn money and things by gathering fruit, catching fish, digging up fossils, or running errands for your neighbors, a collection of brightly-colored anthropomorphised bears, cats, apes, sheep, rabbits, frogs, birds, and other miscellaneous critters. (All vertebrates so far, though an octopus is rumored to exist.) I've paid off my house and put 750,000 in the bank (would that real life debts played out this easily...), but I'm still trying to accomplish one thing: to catch a fish of every species and win the Golden Angler award. There are 40 species in all, and they appear in the town's bodies of water according to season, location, weather, and time of day. I've now caught 37 of them. The last three are rare and appear in very specific situations: the arapaima arrives in July, the jellyfish appears only during the first two weeks of August, and the elusive coelacanth can be caught only at night when it's raining. (Ironically, on most nights when I've been playing, it's been raining in real life, but not in the game.) I'm patiently waiting for the calendar to turn over, hoping and praying I can wrap this up over the next six weeks--I need my life back.

*On the way home from our most recent trip to NC, our Taurus wagon went over the 100,000 mile mark. We were a bit surprised to realize that there are six digits on our odometer; instead of having all the dials go to zero, we had the five dials on the right go to zero while the one on the left turned slowly to one. I was a bit disappointed, but I'm looking on the bright side: clearly the manufacturers expect this car to go over a million miles...

*The household has a new addition: Emma, our new goldfish, purchased by Thing Two in order to keep his other fish company. Earl, the original fish, did get something out of the deal besides companionship: a new ten-gallon tank and rainbow-colored underwater mountain/castle thing in which to lurk. Kelly has done some reading up on the subject and reports that the typical goldfish bowl, such as the one in which Earl previously resided, "is basically a torture chamber." The new one's certainly cleaner, at least, and that's how we'll try to keep it.

*If the 5th season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer doesn't come out on DVD soon, Kelly's going to lose her mind. We've now seen everything up to the end of season 4, thanks to the generosity of friends who are giving us their VHS tapes as the discs come out, but Kel's jonesing for some new episodes. And I don't think I'll be able to distract her with Strong Bad E-Mails much longer...

*Oh, what are Strong Bad E-Mails? Well... there's no point in even attempting to explain. Pay a visit to www.homestarrunner.com and meet the characters if you like. Or if you prefer, just click here and let Strong Bad teach you how to draw a dragon. You won't regret it. He makes drawing FUN!!

6:23 PM

And now I'm REALLY home. Back in Virginny, that is, with the dog lying on his pillow behind me and the kids slaughtering aliens on the Gamecube in the other room. There are goldfinches on the feeder and small patches of sunlight, suggesting that we might actually be able to go to the pool later today. I'm in the middle of Glen Duncan's I, Lucifer, a delightfully recounted tale of the Devil's occupation of a human body, provided for him as a test run to see if he's got what it takes to be forgiven and allowed back into Heaven. All this and there's a new Fountains of Wayne album out. Whoo hoo!

Of course, this also means an end to the road-warrior lifestyle I've led over the past eight weeks. (Final score: nights in my own bed, 20 - nights in some other bed, 40.) I've spent waaaay too much time sitting, either in an airplane seat or behind a steering wheel, and waaaay too much time eating in restaurants or behind a steering wheel, with the result that my weight has bubbled upward like a fart in a bathtub, to use an indelicate simile. So: yesterday I got on the bike--the one in the gym, since it was pouring down rain all day--put in about four miles to reintroduce my calves to the whole concept of exercise, did a one-rep run-through of the upper-body machines, slurped down around 96 ounces of water, and started with Kelly on the Atkins diet. My parents have had good luck with it, particularly my dad, and I'm hopeful that it will work for me in a way that Weight Watchers can't. It's my own fault--I'm not good about measuring what I eat, and I'm not good about writing down what I eat. I've long done my best dieting at the grocery store; if I buy something I shouldn't be eating, I'll eventually eat it. My hope is that Atkins can work with my natural laziness in a way that other diets never have--and I fervently hope I can make it work in the toughest spot of all, the Woodberry dining hall. I'll note my progress in here from time to time. Expect bulges around the holidays, though.

One big plus about all the travel: not only did I get to visit face to face with online friends, not only did I get to reconnect with some friends I hadn't seen in years, not only did I get to meet strangers who've enjoyed a book I wrote--a definite charge, though still kind of freaky in many ways--I also got to see one hell of a lot of birds. I picked up two lifers in one day back in the fall of 2001, but since then I'd had a long dry spell. (Too much writing to do, not enough time to bird, methinks.) The drought in birds ended in roughly the same way the real drought in these parts ended, with a veritable flood: since April, I've seen nearly forty new species. The most recent, the Yellow-breasted Chat, turned up near Jordan Lake outside Chapel Hill, leaving me with a life total of 291.

Yes, I'm closing in on 300, just like Roger Clemens. Here's hoping it doesn't take me quite as long to go over the top.

4:42 PM

Next appearances:

*Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh, NC, Friday, June 13th, 7:00 p.m.

*Park Road Books, Charlotte, NC, Sunday, June 15th, 4:00 p.m.

I'm trying to write these entries at least once a week, but it's sometimes hard to do when I'm on the road (as I seem to be almost constantly these days...) Luckily, my charming hostess, Mary Jane Price, has let me use her computer, so I can gather at least a couple of thoughts on this Bad Luck Day. (As Churchy La Femme would say, "Friday the thirteen come on FRIDAY this month!")

It's hard to feel as though my luck's been bad so far, however, as I'm near the top of a pretty crazy ride through the Amazon.com rankings, thanks to yesterday's appearance on Martha Stewart Living. I checked my rank at 10:30 a.m., just before the show aired here in the Research Triangle; I stood at #37,313.

At 5:00 p.m., my rank had moved up to #281.

Yeah, I'd lost two whole digits.

This morning at 10:30, only twenty-four hours from my first check-in, The Verb 'To Bird' was #123.

It was also Amazon's #1 Outdoors & Nature book.

Now that it's dropped to #126 overall, I'm a bit calmer, but I'm still checking the ranking waaaaaay too often. I'm well aware that Amazon rankings don't tell you much about actual sales; the rank can be inflated very suddenly if you sell a few books in a very short time, and since it reflects only those sales made on Amazon, your book can be doing really well in stores and the ranking won't change one bit. Still, it's sort of hypnotic, kind of like watching traffic patterns in time-lapse photography--a Koyanisqaatsi for your publishing life.

My readings here have allowed me to see many familiar faces. Some are people I saw only weeks ago. Some are old friends I haven't seen in decades. Some are the parents of my schoolmates, or friends of my own parents. I've had a number of moments where I knew I knew the person, but the name just wouldn't come to mind--deeply embarrassing. I've also had the chance to drive around my hometown and marvel at the changes time has wrought upon it. Trees have grown huge and begun to overhang the roadways, playing fields that stretched to the horizon have become compressed, and the zombified remains of restaurants stand silently, undead in new funeral garb, daring me to call them by the original names: Pyewacket, Bullwinkle's, the House of Chu.

But some things haven't changed in Chapel Hill, where the trees are green and so are the people, where Hector's is still "Famous Since 1969," where the sound of dribbling basketballs fills the winter months, and where the color of the sky is Carolina Blue, to match the uniforms of the only team that matters. All this was made clear last night, when after my appearance at Barnes & Noble a few friends and I went for drinks & pub food. I was tired and drained, having tensely watched myself with Martha, having ridden the Amazon roller-coaster, and having read and signed for nearly an hour in front of people whose judgment meant something important. I felt like the day had thrown me into a whole new place, and when I sat down at Bailey's to drink my stout, I was still blinking hard from all the unfamiliar glare and motion.

But then I got brought back to Chapel Hill, right when my friend David looked at me across the table to ask me about the day's celebrity encounters and asked me, "So--was that really Coach Guthridge at your reading?"

Home sweet home.



6:38 PM

Next appearance on TV: PC and Martha will be discussing The Verb 'To Bird'
on "Martha Stewart Living" this Thursday, June 12th.Check your local listings for times.

Next appearance on radio: "The State of Things" on WUNC, Chapel Hill, NC, 91.5 FM, this Monday, June 9th, Noon-1:00

Next appearances in person:

*Market Street Books & Maps, Chapel Hill, NC, Wednesday, June 11th, 7:00 p.m.

*Barnes & Noble Booksellers, New Hope Common, Durham, NC, Thursday, June 12th, 7:00 p.m.

*Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh, NC, Friday, June 13th, 7:00 p.m.

*Park Road Books, Charlotte, NC, Sunday, June 15th, 4:00 p.m.


Whew.

This week will be busy. So was last week. I'm realizing that since April 19th, I've spent more than fifty percent of my nights in a bed other than my own. Tiring.

Not that I'm complaining. The Italy trip was, as you can see from past entries, an absolute wonder, and last week's California experience was full of delights in its own right. At the same time, there's no denying that the pace is getting to me. I landed at Dulles on Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., and less than forty-eight hours later, I'll be heading to North Carolina for ten days.

California offered an incredible variety of experiences. I spent the first three days in Los Angeles at the BookExpo America, the publishing world's annual convention and Festival of Schmoozing. There I got to sign books for dozens of people and chat with booksellers, authors, publishers and critics. I watched Paul Dry engage perfect strangers and persuade them to pick up books--a remarkable performance. I went to the Emerging Voices panel and got to hear readings by terrific writers, such as Russell Rowland (In Open Spaces), Danyel Smith (More Like Wrestling), Gayle Brandeis (The Book of Dead Birds), Laura Ruby (Lily's Ghosts), Rosemary Graham (My Not-So-Terrible Time at the Hippie Hotel), and Amanda Ward (Sleep Toward Heaven). I picked up scads of freebies, including a couple of graphic novels for Kelly and the kids. I also got to dine with some chums from Readerville.com, including Russell, Laura, Katharine Weber, Keith Chaffee, and the irrepressible CKDexterHaven, whose saga of attempting to buy a kosher Coke in Birmingham, Alabama, had us all cackling through most of the dessert course.

I stayed with my cousin Michael, whose spam-blocking software for Earthlink has been making the national news of late. He treated me to stops at Fatburger and In-N-Out Burger, plus a terrific sushi place around the corner from his apartment. He also put up with my desire to get some western species on my life list, driving me to Griffith Park on Saturday morning so we could poke around the L.A. River. I got eight new birds: Spotted Towhee, Bullock's Oriole, Black Phoebe, Cinnamon Teal, Wrentit, Scrub Jay, Bushtit, and Nuttall's Woodpecker.

From BEA I got the ride of my life: Randall Stickrod, publisher of The Readerville Journal, drove me to the Bay Area in his black Porsche Targa, sun roof down, engine purring, Randy Newman on the CD player. I got a nasty sunburn on the left side of my face, but it was worth it to see the scenery along Highway 101: Santa Monica Beach, Malibu, Santa Monica, the Salinas Valley... stunning. And I got a Western Gull and a Western Bluebird from the passenger seat to boot.

Randall passed me off to another Readerville friend, Karla, who had pretty much demanded that I stay at her place, since that was the only way I'd get to see redwoods. Luckily for me, I listened to her. Karla and her fiance Howard, a prodigiously talented cabinetmaker and fine tortellini chef, live in the Santa Cruz Mountains south of San Jose, and their property is a mix of forest and chapparal--a huge attraction for birds. She'd designed a hiking itinerary for me, but when I woke up, staggered into the front room, and saw three life species on her feeder in the first five minutes of the day, I soon realized there was little reason to do much hiking. I put on coffee and went back to the front room. After a while I walked to the end of the driveway. Then I went to sit on the porch for a bit. After a day of such frantic activity, I'd logged the Chestnut-backed Chickadee (very active, more than our eastern species), Acorn Woodpecker (stunning), California Towhee, Steller's Jay, Black-Headed Grosbeak, "Oregon" Junco, Lesser Goldfinch, Pacific-Slope Flycatcher, Orange-Crowned Warbler, California Quail (which appeared as I was chasing a squirrel off the feeder), and just as Karla got home, a Wilson's Warbler that flitted out of the redwoods and into her ornamentals.

From there we headed to Menlo Park, where Kepler's hosted a trio of Readerville authors: Amanda Ward again, plus Roxana Robinson (Sweetwater) and the inimitable M.J. Rose (Sheet Music). Better still, there was a Readerville party afterwards, so I finally got to meet many of my imaginary friends: hosts Kat Warren & Mr. Fuchsia, Ellen Sussman, McLinda, Joel, Jesse Wiedinmyer, Bob B, and Anne Ursu (Spilling Clarence and The Disapparation of James), who is incredibly funny and lively for someone who claims to spend most of her time under the bed. Karla, Randall, Russell, Rosemary, Danyel, and Laura were along, too. Best of all, I finally got to meet Karen Templer, proprietor of Readerville and one of the all-time most wonderful people ever placed on the planet. She has done me more favors than I'm ever going to be able to repay, so it was great to finally see her in person, however briefly.

The rest of my stay was mostly an exercise in nostalgia. I spent two nights with my old buddy Ken Buck, whom I've known since 7th grade, and also got to visit his sister Nan, another old friend, and her family. We threw darts, ate Cuban food, watched The Big Lebowski, drank cider, told stories about our friends from Culbreth Junior High, and made a good showing in the Rose & Crown's trivia contest. I even picked up two new birds (Anna's Hummingbird and the Plain Titmouse) in Nan's backyard.

All in all, a wonderful trip.

But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep...

3:48 PM