Is it only Wednesday?

I found a bike! I'm not sure there are many places I can bike with my 2YO, but I can with my other kids, so we'll see. I found it at the thrift store and it looks almost new. It's missing a few bolts/nuts that hook the chain/back wheel on, but I don't think it will be too hard to fix. I'm getting a lot of bike fixing practice around here. :)

I also have planted the garden. Which involved buying a tomato plant and a strawberry plant in a preprepared planter and sticking them outside my house. And planting a few other things in the ground, yes. Um...I am not a gardener. Actually, I find it extremely stressful. Every person in my family (except me and my husband) looooooves gardening. Well, plants just die for me. Plus, we move every couple years to an entirely different climate (where we don't own the land, so we can't change it too much), so anything I might learn doesn't carry over. And gardening with enthusiastic small kids can be er, creative, too. However, I feel a moral obligation to plant a garden (Mormons believe in gardening: fresh, cheap food! healthy outdoors! a great way to teach your kids to work!), so I do it. Yes, I realize that making yourself do worthwhile things outside your comfort zone is good. But I'm actually a lot better at stuff like learning obscure languages and funny old handwriting and stalking 18th century ancestors in eastern European countries.

Anyway, that's done, and now it's just the paralyzing lineup of end-of-school activities. At this point, the five choices I had for 7 pm tomorrow night aren't such a problem (I can only go to one, after all), but the simultaneous events at different schools on Friday is stressing me out quite  a bit. I agree with robinellen --they are trying to make you look forward to summer.

The bright spot in all this is that the snow we had in the forecast never showed up, and it's in the low 60s right now. Hopefully, spring can just keep hanging on.

More on getting close to characters

I realize that not everyone has difficulty with getting the reader inside the main character's head, and with any writing advice, you can always go overboard. But to follow up to the link I posted the other day, here's another one that's related that I found on agent Mary Kole's site. It's about the difference between telling and interior character reactions, and I thought it was just excellent. Sometimes I find myself trying so hard to show and not tell that I do leave out the mental conclusions a character comes to because I'm afraid it will sound like the character just doing a bunch of telling. So I appreciated Mary's discussion on this. The article is here (sorry, something's up with LJ and I can't do a hyperlink): http://kidlit.com/2011/05/18/interiority-vs-telling/