He Favors His Wah Wah Fresh Flushed

I took Scooter to the vet today for his annual checkup. Scooter's, that is. I have no idea how often the vet gets checked up.

It took fifteen minutes to get Scooter into the carrier. We reenacted much of The Miracle Worker during that time. He was Helen Keller and I was Anne Sullivan.

Scooter screamed all the way there and all the way home. At the vet's though, he didn't make a sound.

For those of you keeping score at home, Scooter weighed in at 13 pounds 4 ounces. His stool sample was negative, his ears were clean, and he didn't bite once. And I don't have to take him back for a year (thank goodness).

Once I got him home, I raced back to my car, and drove to Walmart. A couple of months ago, someone at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt told me that Walmart was going to be carrying one or more of my books. She wasn't sure what though, whether it was just going to be Life As We Knew It or the dead and the gone, but she did say they'd only be carrying the paperbacks.

I went to the neighborhood Walmart a few times since then to see if the books were there, and they weren't. I considered the possibility that I'd hallucinated the whole thing. Stranger things have happened.

But recently I've gotten a couple of emails from people saying they saw This World We Live In in their neighborhood Walmarts. One person even sent me a photograph.



So today I went back, and by golly, Walmart had all three books. I took it upon myself to tidy the display, and inspired by the email I'd been sent, took a picture.


Then, when I came home, I found a package containing the Maryland Black-Eyed Susan Book Award that Life As We Knew It won. I knew it was coming, but I wasn't expecting such a beautiful silver platter.




I took many pictures (it's hard to photograph a silver platter). At one point, Scooter suggested that the file cabinet might be a good place to put it (I begged to differ).

What I haven't taken a picture of is the revised first draft of Blood Wounds. However I'm delighted and somewhat relieved to report it's done. Two bad things happen in the first 70 pages or so, and I changed the second of the two bad things after I'd written the first draft, so I had to rewrite a good amount. I also completely rewrote (well, I recycled about five pages) of the third section of the book.

I will now ignore it until after I get back from Missouri, where I'm going next week to get the Truman Award for Life As We Knew It. Then I'll polish that sucker like it was a silver platter. And I'll hang up the silver platter, which I don't want to do until I see what the Truman Award looks like.

Between now and then, Evan Lysacek will be doing a tango on Dancing With The Stars, the New York Yankees will have their home opener, and Adam Lambert will be mentoring and performing on American Idol.

If Scooter knows what's good for him, he let me do all the screaming!