It’s been a busy week.

Last Friday I baked 48 cupcakes for Simon’s birthday party. (Why? Because it seemed like a good idea at the time.) 24 chocolate, 24 vanilla. Then early Saturday morning I made vanilla and chocolate buttercream frosting, dividing between the cupcakes such that we had vanilla-vanilla, vanilla-chocolate, chocolate-vanilla, and chocolate-chocolate. Something for everyone.

I was already exhausted, and I hadn’t even gotten to the party yet.

The birthday party was quite a success, despite my fears that everything would go wrong, from no one showing up to parents saying, “Cupcakes???” We had it at a nearby park. 15 of Simon’s closest friends showed up to eat chicken nuggets, play on the playground, do crafts, and eat cupcakes. The craft was painting and putting stickers on wooden picture frames, and the kids really got into it. (Michael’s Art Supply is a wonderful place to get stuff for a kids’ party.) The kids got horribly dirty, which they utterly loved. I had a box of baby wipes so parents could make an attempt at cleaning up their kids.

When I put Simon’s birthday cupcake in front of him, several kids leaned forward and blew out the candle. He didn’t care—moved him that much closer to eating the cupcake.

(I tried to make a joke for the parents: “Don’t worry! The cupcakes are low carb!” Instead of a laugh, I got, “They are?” Waaah.)

Then Darin’s parents arrived for a visit, which is always great—the kids love Grandpa and Grandma.

Then we all got sick.

The kids had been sick for a couple of days. Sophia had a one-day cold and fever, and then Simon got it much worse, with fever on and off for a couple of days. The excitement and strain of Simon’s birthday party may have weakened his immune system, although he’s always gotten colds a lot more easily than Sophia has.

Then Darin got sick enough to stay home from work—trust me, that’s sick—and I woke up one morning going, Ennnnnnhhhhhhhh.

Not that that has stopped us: kids need to do stuff, and when grandparents are in town we need to do extra stuff. So there was the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum, which is the kids’ newest favorite spot:

(No, I don’t know why whenever I tell them to sit together for a photo, Sophia decides they must hug. I guess next time I try to take their picture somewhere, I will have to enforce separate seats.)

And we went to the park in town that has a fountain for playing in:

(This is them post-frolic. They were wet and exhausted and very happy.)

The grandparents’ visit is almost over, the kids have only a residual cough, and I think I’m getting better too. Darin even went to work today.

I haven’t been having a good week. I’m rapid-cycling, which always makes me fun to be around. I’m stalled in the middle of my rewrite, and when I finally sat down to figure out why, it was like, Oh. Duh. I felt like I’d violated a few tenets of Fiction 101 and I was going to have to give back my MFA.

Then there have been a few incidents that normally wouldn’t have bothered me instead have me on the phone to Darin, asking him to pleeeeeeeease come home already. The dark nights of the soul are not supposed to happen during the daytime, when the kids are at preschool and you have a few hours to get cracking.

I’m just glad people I know have had good weeks of late.

The weather hasn’t helped. Hello, it’s May; hello, we live in California. What’s with all the cold temperatures and incessant rain?

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Cute Kid Story Alert: The other day I asked Sophia, “Are you a kid or a kiddie?”

“A kiddie.”

“Are you a cute kiddie or a pretty kiddie?” (Say that five times fast.)

“A fancy kiddie.”

I am so in over my head with her.

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Cute Kid Story Alert #2: Tonight at dinner, Simon took a break from inhaling polenta like we’re about to have a trade war with Italy to listen to the roar of the kitchen fan I’d left on at the stove. He then announced, “I like that sound not.”

Shakespearean? Or yet more promotion for the latest Star Wars nonsense? You be the judge.

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A few years ago in LA, I went to see Author A do a bookstore reading. We went out for beers afterward, and during the rest of our get-together, A gave me gossip gleaned from the author escort who was taking her around town. The escort said Author B, who’d gone through on tour right before A’s visit, was amazingly insecure and needy. B has a blog, one of my secret treasures, and all this week the neediness has been bleeding out, making it one of my favorite guilty pleasures. I’d love to point you to it, but…well, that would just be mean. I’m trying not to be mean. It’s a new thing for me. But I’m still checking in hopes of more freak-outs.

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Recently Author C posted something so vile in their blog that I was flabbergasted. C is having career difficulties, and I kept coming across other blogs supporting C, rapturously describing their work. I was like, Hello? Do you approve of the sorts of things C has said (in the blog, not in the books, although let’s face it—one does influence the other)? I’m glad I didn’t like the one book I’ve read by C (in contrast to the glowing reviews I’ve read, I thought it was all that and a bag of chips). Yes, what you post in your blog can affect what readers think of you. Just so you know. No, I won’t tell you who this is; just the thought of getting out that URL again gives me hives.

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Blacklist, the MT plugin to prevent spam, is failing. I don’t know what’s going on—I’ve had a couple of regular expressions that caught 95% of the cases coming through (URLs containing “poker” or “casino” or “sex”) that were working for…I dunno. A long time. Months.

Suddenly, they’ve disappeared.

Disappeared. As in, no longer show up.

What happened? Did they expire or something? I re-added a whole bunch of them yesterday.

As of today, they aren’t there any more.

I’ve been considering moving to Word Press for a while, and this might just do it. If there’s one thing I hate more than creating a list of keywords of sites to ban, it’s creating it twice.

And frankly, given the way I’ve felt this week, I’m just not in the mood.

I went to the ATM today, as I haven’t been in a while. The branch of my bank I went to had a snazzy new ATM setup, with Hi Tech Graphics and touch screens and everything but a back massage. Neat. I put my card in, I type in my PIN, I go through the rigamarole.

While the ATM counts out the money and prints my receipt and all, I glance at the picture of the ATM card that they put underneath the card slot and I think, “That’s not the card I put in there.”

The cash door pushes money at me and the receipt prints out and then my card comes out. Indeed, I did not put my bank card in there; I put my regular ol’ Visa in there. I have no idea what my Visa’s card PIN is; I have never used it for cash. The receipt in no way mentions that this was a Visa cash advance, although of course it doesn’t have my bank balance on there either.

What happened?

1. Dude! You got lucky! Free money! Where’s that bank?
2. In fact, you have beaten the 1-in-10000 odds (probably slightly less than that) and, in fact, your bank card and your Visa card have the exact same PIN.
3. The bank could frickin’ care less as to whether you have the PIN for a Visa card. Have Visa card, get money. In which case: where’s that bank?