Where's Loki?

Is that a dog or a tumbleweed?? 

Try and spot Loki in each of these pictures from Joshua Tree.

It gets harder as you go along... 

Find him every time and win an amazing prize!!

Did you spot all the Lokis?

Congratulations!!!

Your prize is...

GETTING TO LOOK AT A CUTE DOG.

Neighborliness

Walking with Loki through the hilly streets today I heard someone yell, "Glad you got him back!"

I turned and saw a distant neighbor walking his German Shepherd and waving at me. "Everyone was so worried," he said, listing the names of neighbors I didn't know, "but then AJ said you found him the next day."

"Yeah, I did," I said. "Some nice neighbors had him, we got so lucky!"

I didn't know this person's name, but I knew he lived on a ramshackle house on a steep hillside about a half mile away. I'd often seen him in the heat of the afternoon, sweating through his bandana, blaring disco and oldies from his boombox while tending his enormous veggie garden.

I waved goodbye as our paths diverged and continued on my walk. It was a crystal clear day, and the mountains were sharp in the distance. I had one of my frequent "I love this place" moments as I ducked under an enormous bougainvillea to find some hidden steps down to the road.

As I wound back up the street toward my house I passed the neighbor sitting on a plastic chair at the foot of his hill. He waved again then held out a plastic grocery bag. "Here, have some squash and stuff. And these cherry tomatoes. I got a million."

"Hey thanks!" I said, taking the bag.

"Next month I'll have watermelon," he said, gesturing to the sprawling tangle of leaves on the hill.

"Awesome."

I smiled as I walked home in the sunshine.

I have a Neighborhood.

Independence Day

One sunny evening, a few days before the Fourth of July, Jared and I were hanging in the scrubby backyard of a friend, eating hotdogs and watching a band play a Bee Gees cover.

There were a few dogs at the party, some of them standing timidly between the legs of their owners, some casually cruising for scraps among the guests.

"Aw, I wish my dog was here," I said to the girl beside me. "Though, I guess he might be kind of freaked out by the random fireworks." In the distance, we could hear faint explosions. People were practicing for the 4th. I sipped my drink and thought of Loki, home alone with the windows open for the breeze.

As magical and unique as we like to believe he is, our dog is pretty standard-issue. Ferocious when it comes to squirrels and bees, (and annoyingly friendly to skunks and raccoons,) he is utterly terrified of fireworks. You'd think that being born in a barn in the middle of an Iowa blizzard and then spending the first 3 years of his life enduring its spectacular summer thunderstorms would have toughened him up a little, but alas, he's a trembling, crying, leash-pulling baby when it comes to explosion sounds. The worst part is, we are no help to him. He doesn't want to be held, or pet, or spoken to in a soothing manner, he just wants to RUN. I used to jokingly wonder, as the sky cracked open above us, where he would actually go if he got his wish.

With Loki safe at home, we stayed a few more hours at the party, first watching the sunset from on top of the roof, then moving to the front porch to eat an entire bag of "Touch of Lime" tortilla chips.

We drove back around 10:30pm, parked our car and walked up to our house. We glanced up toward our living room window as we approached, expecting to be greeted by two fluffy white ears, but the window was empty. "I guess he's asleep?" I said to Jared as we walked up our steps.

Upon opening the door, instead of the usual skittering of nails, crying and tail-wagging, we were met with a strange silence. Jared frowned, "Loki?" Silence. I looked at Jared, confused. Very carefully we began walking through the apartment, opening all closet doors, expecting any moment for him to come bounding toward us. "Loki?"

Then I noticed a slight flutter of the curtain that covers the sliding glass door in the office, then the breeze picked up and it blew into the room, revealing a slightly open door, and an enormous, dog-sized rip in the screen. My heart caught.

We stared silently at the ripped screen for a moment, the curtain innocently waving, unable to fully understand what had happened, and then we ran outside. The screen door leads to a fenced courtyard shared by four apartments, but in a panic he could jump that fence. He had. We dashed to the car and began driving through the neighborhood, up and down the winding streets, our heads through the open windows, calling his name. But he was nowhere to be found.

In a daze we made it back to the house and set out an action plan for the morning. We tried to sleep, but  found we couldn't. He hadn't been wearing his collar. He had never been missing before, and our darling neighborhood now seemed cruel, full of terrible strangers. I thought of the men who came in vans in the night to pull on car door handles and root through the garbage. I thought of the freeway, so near. I thought of the cars that raced through the narrow streets. We were no longer in Iowa City, where a lost dog could bound happily from one yard to the next until friendly neighbors gave him biscuits and walked him home. We were in this huge scary place. Who knows what they do to lost dogs here? My mind was on a loop. I couldn't shake the image of him, scared and alone, running endlessly, dodging cars and coyotes. It was too much to bear.

The morning was a fog. Jared called the shelters from work and I made a million flyers. As they printed I put an ad on Craigslist and on some LA blogs. Then I set off with my cell phone, a staple gun and a roll of duct tape, following a few paths we liked to walk together, sticking my flyers to every telephone pole and utility box I could find. I carried a dull, cold feeling in my chest. It felt surreal to be walking these paths without Loki beside me, and I couldn't quite bring myself to understand that he might really be gone.

When I exhausted my stack of flyers I walked back home to print more. I frantically checked Craigslist and the blogs and my email, then set off in my car. My plan was to hit the local coffee shop, then the library, then the dog park. I parked at a meter a block away, stuck a flyer to a telephone pole, looked at the picture of Loki's happy, trusting face, and then, I looked up toward the coffee shop to see that same, real-life face looking back at me.

I had been looking at his face all day, and for for a split second, what I was seeing didn't fully register. Was that really even him?

The dog was being walked by a girl about my age, and from a distance, there was a chance it was a different samoyed, hers, and so as I charged toward them I actually worried about scaring her, and I took out my stack of flyers and sort of waved them in the air as I ran and began babbling incoherently about I'm sorry I don't mean to be weird but is that your dog because if not I think it's my dog and see here are the flyers I made cause we lost him last night and I've been going around trying to find him and- the girl's eyes got huge, Loki was crying and wagging and jumping up on the end of the leash. I grabbed his fluffy face in my hands, tears in my eyes. "I can't believe it!" the girl said. "I'm here with my husband, he's inside hanging Found flyers in the coffee shop at this very moment!"

It was a doggy miracle. They were our neighbors two hills over, they lived along one of our walking paths. He had run into their yard the night before and they had taken him in, given him water and cared for him. I hugged her. I was overwhelmed. They walked with me to my car and told me how he kept staring out the windows and whimpering all night, presumably looking for us.

(In my flustered state I didn't even buy them a cup of coffee or get their full names or anything. I felt awful about this later and I actually tried to find them on Facebook by typing in "Maggie," which was the girl's name, but did you know there are a lot of Maggies living in Los Angeles?)

I drove Loki home and he ran up the stairs to our house. I gave him a slice of turkey and a dog treat, and we played tug of war with his toy skunk for a while until he fell asleep next to me on the floor.

He was exhausted. As he slept, he twitched his little feet and yipped loudly, and I couldn't help but wonder if he was dreaming about his wild adventure. I petted and hugged him, waking him up gently. He opened one sleepy eye and looked at me, lifted his head slightly, looked around the room, and then, with a flump, fell back into sleep.

Welcome home, good boy.

Morning Awesomeness

I was sitting having my coffee this morning and eating my breakfast dessert in this really warm beam of light that was just hanging out at our dining room table and I thought, there is no way I could ever want to live anywhere in the world but here.

I could hear birds singing over the rushing sound of the freeway ocean.

The dog was snoozing in his own sunbeam.

My view through one open window looked like this:

Through another like this:

and through another like this:

I mean, c'mon!

Have I mentioned to you how I love this place?

P.S. I'm not the only one who eats some form of dessert after every meal, right? Right?

On Working from Home Without Losing What's Left of Your Mind

I am writing a book. I have been writing this book for what seems like the entire history of time.

At some point, the wonderful people at Scribner decided they would take a chance and agreed to publish said book, so long as I finished writing it within a respectable framework of time.

And so, when school was done, Jared and I left behind our normal-person teaching jobs and our easy Iowa life and moved back to my homeland of California. Here we started a new life, one comprised of Jared leaving every morning for his normal-person teaching job, and me staying behind for the abnormal-person work of writing a book.

Now, I think that there is a certain type of person who is perfectly suited to the bizarro-world that is having an enormous chunk of completely unstructured time with a deadline planted waaaay down at the end of it, but that person?

She is not me.

BUT! All that really means is that I have had to develop strategies to get my lazy, distractible, procrastination-prone self to do the work that needs to be done. And so, since I think that the best people to take advice from are the people who are naturally bad at something themselves, I present to you my time-tested tips on working from home without turning into a toothless hermit muttering into the darkness and plucking on a one-stringed fiddle.


Tip One: Shower and brush your teeth! This may seem obvious, but let me tell you, when you roll out of bed morning after morning to an empty house where there is no one to see you or be offended by your slovenliness, it can sometimes be hard to remember why such things are even important. Don't fall into the trap! For Heaven's sake clean yourself.

Tip Two is related: Dress yourself in some halfway decent clothing, maybe even dab some makeup on your face. Again, it's tempting to feel like it doesn't matter what you look like when you are all alone, but I'll tell you, working from home is a mind game. Looking like someone who might be seen in public is a trick that will give you a psychological edge. Besides, the UPS man will see you. He sees all.

Do you see where I'm going with this? Working from home is just like having an actual job. It's just that you are the only one around to enforce the actualness of it. It's sort of like how you have to set aside tax money from your advance because there's no one to withhold it from your paycheck and you do that, right?

<cough> moving on...

Tip Three: Designate a fixed portion of your day to the work at hand and then stick to it. Start your work when it is supposed to start, and, perhaps even more importantly, END IT when it is supposed to end. This is actually the most crucial point of this whole lecture besides brushing your teeth. Before I figured this out my entire life was lived in a fog of guilt-induced anxiety. I couldn't take pleasure in anything I did because deep down a voice would be scolding, you could be writing right now! Nothing is worse for your creativity than that stupid voice.

So, figure out what time of day you are best at what you do and then stick to that time. It will probably not be eight hours. It must be manageable and realistic if it is to work. The important part is you are not allowed to watch puppy videos during that time. You are not allowed to read blogs during that time. But when the time is up, you are to wrap up what you are doing, and then you are to leave work.

"Leaving work" is such a crucial point that it deserves its own tip. Tip Four: Dedicate a section of your house to your work that is not related to the other things that go on in your house. Best case is you have an office with a door that closes, but I realize that may be a bit of a luxury. So. If you must work on the couch in the living room, try to do your TV and puppy video watching in a chair. If you must work in your bedroom, set up a little desk for yourself, don't work in your bed. Boundaries can be very tricky to manage when you work from home, but they must be maintained if you are to hold on to your sanity and not fall into believing that every minute of your day is about your job.

work-free zone

Tip Five. Keep your house tidy, and spend some time getting it set up to be as pleasing as it can be. You are going to be spending a LOT of time in this space. Do whatever you can do to make it a place of calm and not chaos. The chaos will get you down and the UPS man will judge you.

Tip Six is the happiest. Get a dog.

Then you can walk him. This is a very very good thing to do. Moving your stiff, chair-addled body, feeling the sun on your pale face, looking at things that are three-dimentional and not part of your computer screen, these are the things that will keep you from going off the deep end. You can also talk to your dog, if you feel like it's strange that hours pass every day without the sound of any human voice.

Which brings me to Tip Seven: During the parts of your day that are not your working hours, try to have some form of human interaction. This could mean walking to a coffee shop or going grocery shopping etc, but it could also mean simply opening up your gchat window and making jokes with your sister Olivia, who has a real job in a real office, or with your friend Matt, who is also a crazy home-based writer like yourself. Just don't let these chats bleed into your working hours like I sometimes do. Be vigilant!

Tip Eight. Don't allow your online Scrabble accomplishments to stand in for actual accomplishments.
Am I the only one who does this? Don't do this.

Tip Nine. The weekends are weekends and should be treated as such. Is it Saturday? Get out of your house! Go! What are you doing sitting here looking at a computer screen? You have all week to do that. Go be around the actual people! Go on a hike! See some music! Go to a nerdy party! Whatever. Just don't let me catch you here.

Tip Ten. When the walls are closing in on you and the words you are writing are all meaningless drivel, and your dog looks like he has lost all respect for you, and you feel like throwing it all away, do two things. First, lie on the floor of your living room for ten minutes with your eyes closed and play this song.

Then pick yourself up off the floor and read this.

Then get back to work, you old so and so.

You can do this!

(top photo by Shelby Duncan)

P.S. Below are my four favorite books about the writing process. I cannot recommend them highly enough. I've also heard great things about Writing Down the Bones, but have yet to check it out. 

Happy 3rd Birthday, Loki!

Here's to the best little floofball I know!

eight weeks old and sleepy  

total polar bear

just chillin' so hard

just sliding face-first into a mud puddle

stone cold digging

being an ewok

frolicking with his BFF Winston

 wearing the cone of sadness 

so gonzo

so noble 

so river-dipped

the Falcor to my Childlike Empress

a prince among pups

the best-looking member of our family

You're a good boy, Loki. 

How to Survive Black Friday

Put two very furry dogs in a car:

(one might wear the other as a hat)

Take them on a pretty hike:

If one dog gets tired, give her a lift:

That's my little brother, Kief

Observe some fall foliage:

(bougainvillea totally counts)

"Detox" from turkey day with an epic smoothie:

Take pictures of yourselves at magic hour *without* a camera shadow on your face:

(whoops!)

(much better.)

Admire your handsome husband:

Pose interestingly:

 Finally, cuddle with Loki on your brother's couch 'cause he's not allowed on the couch at home.

Success!