1. This has become a ghost blog. Or it’s felt like that the past week, anyway. I didn’t consciously set out to ignore the internet and get so behind on everything, but it happened. I’m getting a little burnt out, I think (obviously: I’m too lazy to do a full Friday Five, so I’m abbreviating it to Friday Four). Not to mention, as soon as I sit down to do anything, I feel an overwhelming urge to take a nap.

2. That said, posts will probably be a little random (or not at all) over the next couple of months. You know, because of the BABY. He’s not out yet, but there isn’t much room left for him to grow in there. My skin is stretched to the breaking point, belly button is in a freakish flat-nearly-an-outtie stage. Maverick’s head is down, locked & loaded, ready to go. With so little time left, I want to focus on the more important things, like visiting with friends and family, reading lots of stories to Z, and revising my manuscript for the eleventeen-hundredth time. Oh, and napping.

3. The show “Hoarders” is really effing with my nesting instincts. I don’t usually watch reality television of any kind, but for some reason I find myself repeatedly sucked in by “Hoarders,” often when Homes isn’t around to make snarky comments about my viewing habits. It’s really hard to want to collect things for Maverick, and revel in the onesies I so cleverly/tightfistedly/hoardingly saved from when Z was a baby, when I see mentally ill people making similar decisions about tax books from 1998 and bags full of unworn clothing and five-year-old containers of yogurt. I’m compensating by throwing out old magazines, but I usually flip through them first, which puts me into another, yes, NAP.

4. Maggie tagged me with this Lucky 7 Meme, and it sounded like fun.

Open your novel-in-progress and do the following:

• Go to page 77.
• Go to line 7.
• Copy down the next 7 lines, sentences, or paragraphs as they are written.
• Tag 7 new authors. [I’m not doing this step, because I’m a (lazy) jerk. But if you’re a writer, feel free to  post your lines in the comments below. Or if you prefer, put them in a blog post of your own and link to it in the comments.]

Here are some lines from my newest work-in-progress:

After we find my van and Kyle finds my keys in my purse and gets me settled in the passenger’s seat, I chatter to him the whole way to my house. I have no idea what I’m talking about, but he’s a really good listener.

“Is your mom or dad home?” he asks.

“Yeah, my mom.”

“Will she be mad that you’re sloshed?”

“Nope.” [In the interest of parallelism, I very much wish this excerpt ended in the word Nap. “Nope” is close, but not quite it, so I will just have to cheat.] Nap.