The Kid is on her Christmas Vacation, but since there is no way that I can handle having her at home while I’m trying to write AND do pre-Christmas stuff, I enrolled her in “Christmas day camp” at our gym. This day camp had the added benefit that they do a lot of physical activity, and the kids are returned in a state of utter exhaustion. Woo! Early bedtime!

As soon as I dropped her off this morning I had to head to the Verizon store to deal with the crisis du jour, which actually happened last night when Anna threw a stuffed dog at her daddy and tipped half a glass of wine onto my cell phone. Fortunately the phone itself was not damaged, which meant that I was able to pull all of my data and settings off, but the keyboard was completely non-functional. Also fortunately, the wonderful woman at the Verizon store took excellent care of me (especially after seeing how much I send Verizon every month!) and was able to deal with the insurance company and hook me up with a replacement Blackberry right then and there. Cost to me: $50 for the deductible. I know that there are many people who say that the insurance isn’t a good investment, but I know that I’ve had to use it several times for various people on my account, and it’s more than paid for itself.

After I took care of the phone issues I went to the coffee shop to get hot chocolate and maybe get some writing done. I wasn’t really in the mood to go back to the house, which turned out to be fortuitous since I ran into Erica Spindler at the coffee shop. She’s an incredibly friendly and absolutely delightful woman, and she seemed very excited to hear about my book sales. And, I managed to reach my 2000 word goal for the day in about two hours. Go me!

Then it was back the house for a bit more writing, as well as dumb things like house cleaning and laundry. However, in the evening we once again made use of the supernatural creature known as The Babysitter, and Jack and I went to a really terrific cocktail party type thing at another house in the neighborhood. The incredibly cool thing about this party was that apparently the host had been talking up the fact that I was a novelist, and thus during the party I had no less than a dozen people ask me about my writing and the book. (This is why it’s good to have an “elevator pitch” of your project. It’s terrific for explaining the book to complete strangers!) Even cooler was when the woman who puts together the newsletter for the country club asked me if I would be interested in being interviewed and featured in the June newsletter, just in time for my book’s release. Yay! Free publicity rocks!

Very full and productive day, and now I am going to bed.