Happy Belated Thanksgiving! My husband came back from Florida & we had a nice holiday with my family in Dallas. My extended family wasn't thrilled about the outcome of the Cowboys game, but at least they liked the football-shaped cake I made for the occasion...and the Texas Longhorns game yesterday rocked!

Now we're home with too many things to do, but I'm killing time online (call it denial). I saw a blog meme asking you to alphabetize the songs in your current music rotation & share the first song beginning with each letter, without repeating artists. I've got an iPod so I just went by the songs that are on my iPod right now--it was kind of an interesting exercise. Here are mine:

A Campfire Song - 10,000 Maniacs
Baby, I Can't Please You - Sam Phillips
Cader Idris - Bruce Cockburn
Daddy Untwisted - Over the Rhine
Easter - Raspberry Jam
Face the Change - INXS
Gardening at Night - REM
Hall of a Hundred Doors - Trout Fishing in America
I'd Run Away - The Jayhawks
Jamboree - Guadalcanal Diary
Keeping Awake - The Innocence Mission
La La Land - All Star United
Make the Music Go Bang - X
Name - PFR
O Sole Mio - Men Without Hats
Pain of the Next - The Throes
Quadrophenia - The Who
Rabid Child - They Might Be Giants
Sad Face - The Choir
Tainted Love/Where Did Our Love Go - Soft Cell
Unable - Harrod and Funck
Van Diemen's Land - U2
Wait - Wang Chung
X&Y - Coldplay
Yellow is a Happy Color - Charlie Peacock
Zerox - Adam & the Ants

I noticed that the iPod puts all songs beginning with "The" under the letter T, and alphabetizes punctuation before letters (putting "I'd" before "I Am," for instance). If I correct for those things, and also correct for songs that begin with the word "A," the songs for A, F, I, L, Q, & S all change:

About Love - The Choir
(The) Face of Beauty - The Violet Burning
I Am The Sea - The Who
(The) Lady Don't Mind - Talking Heads
Quiche Lorraine - The B-52's
Sal - The Connells

It's not that I have nothing to blog about lately...I actually have so much I can't narrow it down. And no time to do it.

Some of the things on my mind lately: faith, death, relationships, and modern retellings of classic children's stories.

What should be on my mind: getting my house ready to move out of!

What I have to do now instead of blogging: take my younger son to the Thanksgiving lunch at my older son's school.

Stupidest (and scariest) thing that happened to me today: Getting my coat zipper stuck in the slot where my seatbelt buckle goes, so that I couldn't get unbuckled or get out of the car. It took about 10 minutes of concerted effort to get it out, while my 4-year-old looked on. Now the seatbelt thingy has a chip out of it, and several parts of the zipper broke off of my coat. It's always something!

As of today, my husband is in our new rental house in Florida. He starts his new job tomorrow. This is starting to seem rather real! Except of course that I'm still in Texas, with a house not at all ready to move out of, and with two very loud, active children currently making me wonder how anyone can handle being a single parent! We plan to join my husband in Florida around the end of the year (with him coming back a few times in between, I hope!).

With the upcoming move, I have approximately 83,422 things to do, so obviously I'm not doing any writing. But I did submit something this week.

I also just took a little test about my sense of humor: It says I am the Wit (57% dark, 15% spontaneous, 36% vulgar):

your humor style:
CLEAN | COMPLEX | DARK
You like things edgy, subtle, and smart. I guess that means you're probably an intellectual, but don't take that to mean pretentious. You realize 'dumb' can be witty--after all isn't that the Simpsons' philosophy?--but rudeness for its own sake, 'gross-out' humor and most other things found in a fraternity leave you totally flat.

I guess you just have a more cerebral approach than most. You have the perfect mindset for a joke writer or staff writer.

Your sense of humor takes the most thought to appreciate, but it's also the best, in my opinion.

You probably loved the Office. If you don't know what I'm talking about, check it out here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/theoffice/.

PEOPLE LIKE YOU: Jon Stewart - Woody Allen - Ricky Gervais

Link: The 3 Variable Funny Test written by jason_bateman on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test
I'm surprised I came out dark (and especially that I scored higher on darkness than 69% of women my age!). I do appreciate dark humor, but I also write some of the lightest humor around. Some of my stories are so light it has been a real liability, considering it's for YA & adult audiences! But the description is pretty much on target.