Friday Five

I've been a fan of other people's "Friday Five" lists on other blogs, and thought I'd try doing a little Friday Five of my own. I like a little structure/routine but not too much, so this will be the kind of feature that involves talking about five things in some kind of context that will vary from week to week and won't really have any limitations/requirements beyond that basic set-up. Sort of like the structure of beginning readers, where you've got a basic format you've got to stick to, but the variety of content you can play with inside that structure is wide open. (See how I tied it into children's book writing, there?)

Anyway. Thought I'd start with a nice happy one:

FIVE GOOD THINGS THAT HAPPENED THIS WEEK

1. I met up with two nice writer friends for a writing date on Monday. They've been meeting up with each other for some time, and have often invited me to join them, but it kept not working out for me for various reasons. This time it worked out, finally (partly due to a looming deadline that made me feel a writing date was particularly necessary and partly due to my shiny new laptop and my desire to take it out for a spin) and it was great. We had coffee, discussed a plot problem one of us was struggling with, and sat and wrote and got a lot done. We agreed on a regular Monday writing time and place and will continue to meet up every week. I feel very good about this.

2. I picked up the Girl Scout cookies I'd ordered from my friend Jen's daughter. OMG they are very delicious. Yay for Thin Mints! And yay for Jen's husband who very nicely brought the cookies into work with him so I could stop by and pick them up.

3. I took a lovely long walk in Prospect Park on Tuesday afternoon, enjoying the beautiful weather and listening to Neil Patrick Harris reading Beverly Cleary's Henry Huggins.

4. Yesterday I went out to NJ to visit one of my best friends who I don't get to see often enough. We had lunch and I got to see her beautiful new house and her parents and her kids and we went shopping and caught up on a lot of things and it was great.

5. Late Wednesday night I bought a super-cheap leather jacket on eBay. This was my second-ever eBay purchase (the first being a Buy-It-Now purchase of the CD single of Baltimora's "Tarzan Boy" in 2004—no, seriously) and I have already won another auction since then for something else and I'm a little concerned about how fun it suddenly seems to shop on eBay. But that's not the good part—the good part is that the leather jacket is to wear while riding on the back of my boyfriend's motorcycle, because it is no longer winter, really, and I am very excited to go for my first ride of the year. Hopefully this weekend (hint, hint, boyfriend, if you are reading this).