I Thought I Would Be Counting The Days Since my last swig of Diet Coke, but I've been too busy for that. Admittedly, there are days that I remember my longing, when I just wish I hadn't decided to make a healthy and environmentally good choice about my drinking habits. Giving up caffeine was equally hard, though it only took about a week before I could get up and go without an intravenous java supply. Blogging is supposed to be a regular activity, in which I have failed this last month. It is not that there haven't been things to write about, subjects are aplenty: tent trailer camping, daisy rocks, signatures gathering to put our dignity and civil rights on the ballot again in Oregon, beginning the school year with a bang when two days in our four-year-old became another statistic in the astronomic rate of preschool expulsions in America. Preschools have the highest expulsion rate of any educational level--more than high schools, colleges, community colleges or Catholic schools. Apparently it is useful to come to your first educational experience ready to follow rules, sit still, and socialize successfully. Despite filling out the student profile without hiding his Sensory Integration Disorder diagnosis and treatment, the director and teachers made no effort to discuss how that might impact the classroom and how we might create a successful transition; I'm not sure the director ever intended our son to stay. Now, with every preschool in Portland full to the brim, we are navigating the waters of special needs, special ed, expert evaluations, and educational accommodations, a sea new to us and complicated. Not surprisingly, this has zapped my sense of humor into oblivion, and sucked me into a maternal vortex in which creative activity and anything akin to fun is hard to wedge in. Yet this week I finished a portrait commission for a man in Los Angeles, yesterday I was interviewed about my book by Ed Goldberg for KBOO (more later on when it will be aired), and we have spent two giddy evenings wallowing in DVD episodes of last year's Smallville. But blogging is back, and I can't wait to spin tales of tent trailers, mystery blisters, rocks with flower formations, and rants about the state of our society.