Gone: An Alex Delaware Novel.   (I own this, so okay.)

The Sociopath Next Door (Non-fiction – I might actually check it out.  I DO have some weird neighbors.)

The Mysterious Benedict Society – Kindle Edition.  (This is a kids’ book!  Do eight-year-olds even own Kindles? I do have a Kindle, but I have never downloaded any children’s fiction on it.)

Evil at Heart by Chelsea Cain. (Okay.  You caught me.  I’ve been checking my ranking, and Amazon clearly thinks I must be VERY interested in this book since I look at it several times a day.  Well, Amazon, sorry to disappoint you, but I already have a bunch of copies.  However I might buy some more, just to boost my ranking.  Plus, I hear it’s great!  Thanks for suggesting it!)

Hi, Everyone.  I’m blogging at www.thelipstickchronicles.typepad.com today. Check me out. 

The best poem about a clown I have ever read, from the current issue of The New Yorker:

If a Clown
by Stephen Dunn

If a clown came out of the woods,
a standard-looking clown with oversized
polka-dot clothes, floppy shoes,
a red, bulbous nose, and you saw him
on the edge of your property,
there’d be nothing funny about that,
would there? A bear might be preferable,
especially if black and berry-driven.

I was not going to watch the Eric Dane “sex tape.”  I really wasn’t.  I made it an hour and a half.  Then I googled it.  A moment later I was watching it on gawker.  That’s the kind of thing you can count on gawker for – posting celebrity sex tapes.  For those of you who aren’t refreshing TMZ every five minutes (and you are fantastic), I am talking about a tape featuring Eric Dane of Grey’s Anatomy, his wife Rebecca Gayheart, and a former Miss Teen USA named Kari Ann Peniche, in a naked, addled haze.  There’s no actual sex.  And they are all claiming that they were, you know, just hanging out, like people do sometimes, naked, with friends.  I don’t hang out naked with my friends.  But if I spent as much time dieting and working out as these people clearly do, I might. 

My daughter is taking swim lessons.  She’s four.  (And “a half,” she’d add.)  And she’s a goldfish.  In the parlance of community pool swim lessons, the goldfish is at the bottom of the pile, under the more amphibiously gifted (and less domesticated) penguin, seal, etc.  She didn’t notice.  “I wanted to be something gold,” she said. 

So I just finished signing my name 1000 times.  This requires five days and nine Sharpies.  Also an ice pack for the swelling.  Here is my tip for aspiring authors: if your name has more than ten letters total, change it.  

Also, after much experimentation, I settled on the extra-fine Sharpie.  Fewer fumes.  (They’re fun for awhile, but a problem when you start misspelling your name.)