Update

Thanksgiving this year we will be in Chicago, with Amy and Jamison, Brett Betsy and Ethan, and Jackie Joel and Blythe. A&J are in a new place, a studio apartment which they said reminds them of Harry Potter (don't know why yet, but wouldn't it be cool if it was house elves? Maybe not, if you remember Dobby).


Rob and Nicolle have found a new apartment in the Aves, and even though Rob has a previously scheduled gig in New York (working for JetBlue makes the cross-continent commute possible), Nicolle is moving on her own this weekend. So I''m taking the truck to Salt Lake tomorrow morning and I'll bring the babies back with me in their Nissan, and then in the afternoon John will come home from his wilderness writing trip to Moab, and we will have a lot of fun. R&N's new place is only a couple of blocks from their old place, only a couple of block's from Brett and Betsy's, only a few feet from the babysitters, and across the street from a chocolate shop! And a block and a half from Smith's. So very good. I can't wait to see the apartment tomorrow.

Chris and a mixed group of his buddies are watching Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure after the THS state football victory over Springville this afternoon. It's always been my favorite Keanu Reeves film.
I'm trying to get the motivation to tidy up my office (cleaning it is beyond me). Then I want to organize my (electronic) Blood Practice files to take on our trip to Chicago, where I hope to have some quiet time to work on the novel. I'm committed to a writing group start-up in January, where I'll be working on the Mormon werewolf story, so before that I want to have the vampire novel out to whatever reader-critics I haven't already exhausted. If you haven't met my protagonist, she is here. The writing group requirement is 2500 words/week. Yeah right. And if I can work it into my schedule, and BYU allows me to matriculate, I'll go to John's novel-writing class winter term (T Th 12-1:15, when I'm usually doing psychotherapy at the care center in Pleasant Grove). If I can be super-organized and productive this month, I'll use the werewolf novel for the class--if I'm slow I'll do what will hopefully be the final rewrite of Blood Practice. The tentative title for the werewolf thing is The Werewolf Solution, but it's sort of evolved away from that. We'll see what happens.

I am sad and anxious about Tena moving to Houston. What will I do without her support and encouragement in our biweekly PWA-S meetings (Professional Women's Alliance--South Chapter)? I know things will work out for them and they will be happy in east Texas, but I sure will miss her and her family. I will have to use Rob's partner flight benefit to go visit them. Her job headquarters is close to the Woodlands, and they might even end up living there. Wouldn't that be weird! But a house like the one where we lived would be perfect for them.

I keep trying to balance the four main jobs in my life--that is, 1) home & family, 2) psych, 3) writing, and 4) personal & health--and as usual, doing 2 1/2 of them at a time. I'm continuing with the gratitude exercise whenever I remember, which is about every other day. Today I'm grateful that my little ASUS is up and running (and thanks to B&B for helping me clean it up); for water, which really is amazing, in that we can drink it, bathe in it, wash things with it, look at it, and get rained on by it; and I'm grateful that Amy got her phones fixed. And also grateful for green pens. And Belgian chocolate. And that my Bike o' Death is working again. And for my cats. And grandbabies. OK, time to quit for the night.