First, a name change. After today, please visit pamelagwynkripke.wordpress.com to read my blog. Same content, same tone, everything you’ve come to expect. Except the flowers across the top.

And second…and this is nifty…I’ve been invited to blog about education for The Huffington Post. If you don’t read it already, go to huffingtonpost.com, click on Education, and you’ll find me. Soon. I’ll let you know when I’m up and flying.

Meantime, thanks for reading, and writing.

I have been busy, having taken on an additional task. When I am not tending to kids or writing, I now teach English at a city school here in Dallas. The experience, in a few short weeks, has given me many ideas. I am taking notes. What I am writing down speaks mostly to the failures of a large urban public school system. There are a lot of failures. Students lose out, continually. These, impoverished middle schoolers, have been losing out for years.

More later. Here and elsewhere. For now, a roomful of 15 year olds are asleep on my daughter’s floor (Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday) and Grandma’s in the back house. From New York. More later, yes. Did you know that they put sequins on sweatshirts? Anyway, hello again. 

Why do I do this, I wonder. I should say that I don’t always do it, but when I do, it is consciously. It is decided upon. I will tempt the window. I will laugh at the tightening deadline. I will hope that I don’t trip tomorrow and require stitches in an elbow, or toe, which will monopolize the actual minutes that remain. Usually, I tell myself that something in me, something in my artistic soul needs the extra breathing room. The brilliance that will make the particular assignment that much more magnificent needs to germinate this exact amount of time. Then, it will be ready to sprout. Then, it will emerge, glorious, at 9:12 tomorrow morning. It is germinating, now, all by itself. I can feel it. So, in essence, I am working, yes, I am.

This is the kind of thing I tell myself when I just need a day off.  Why can’t I just take a day off, polish the toes, eat a normal lunch? People with regular jobs get regular days off, and they don’t tell themselves their ideas are whirring around in their brains right then, when they are doing relaxing things, so that they don’t feel guilty. They just eat the normal lunch, happily, and paint the toes, angst-free. 

It is now 2:09, which is pretty darn close to 2:21. I don’t have much time left, though I probably have more to say. I could have done more with my day off, I am thinking. More day-off things. But I guess you have to know it is that kind of day before it just becomes one. Aaarggghhhhhhh.

I’m sick of driving. We don’t have school buses in our little community. Instead, moms drive their own school buses, with nine seats and wheels that surpass my head height, even when standing. Even when we know the deal with the oil and the Mideast and the global warming. Anyway, that is something else. Today, we are talking about the quantity of driving, rather than the quality. My quantity is too big.

So, when I don’t have to drive to the tennis courts or the lake (for rowing, not to jump into), or the schools, or the supermarket, or to cover a story, I just sit at my desk and look at the car, out the window in our driveway. Not yet, I say, through the glass. Simmer down. 

Not too long ago, though, she got to go far….(Click here)

Yesterday, school began. It is now 12:22 pm. I have just experienced my second day of not making lunch in the kitchen. It feels like a vacation, not that I don’t enjoy feeding my children. I do, I just don’t like the plates, and the dishwasher. I’d rather keep bees than empty the dishwasher.

Anyway, here is a story about that weed lady I told you about months ago…(Click here)

When the house gets stale, I leave, in search of a place that might do the mental trick. Often, I will go to the bookstore nearby. At the bookstore, you don’t have to feel guilty about not buying coffee. Coffee turns into another substance when it is not made in my kitchen. So I go to the bookstore, where there are big upholstered chairs set amongst the stacks. 

“Try that book,” they seem to say. “Here, sit here and read it, or some of it. C’mon.”

But I do not go to read. The literature section has three chairs, and they were all occupied today. That made me pretty mad, since the occupiers were not writing anything. One was talking…talking!…to another person who sat on the floor. The second was reading. Imagine, reading in the literature section. The third was sleeping. I felt like a pregnant woman on a bus, hanging onto the strap. Look at me, will you? I’m a writer. I’m dying here. Get up, will ya?

I walked around the store until I found the chair that ultimately became mine. I was not motivated, tucked in between guides to Asian walking trips and dictionaries of generic drug names. I debated whether to go back to the shelves where the real books were, and to haul the non-writing people up to standing. But I realized that might be a neurotic choice. Instead, I picked up a “Fast Fact Review for Algebraic Equations” and settled in. 

If I were the one hosting, here is what I would do: First, I would invite people who did not/could not contribute $50,000 to his campaign, even though the purpose of the event is to rally people who did and can, again. Okay, so I wouldn’t fill up the room with them, but I’d sprinkle in a few. Like me. I’d sprinkle in me. After all, I have other things to contribute to the party, well both parties, the one with the hors d’oeuvres and the political one. I can, for starters, inject unexpected and thought-provoking conversation into the conversation. I can play the piano. And I don’t eat too much. I am the perfect guest. Oh, I always bring a fabulous hostess gift, if they are accepting them at such a soiree, I don’t know.

To the other party, I can rally support, among 13 year olds, anyway. I can write things that say why the President should be re-elected. I can make brownies, with little “O”s iced on them. 

I do not know when the event is scheduled to begin. It’s all a hush-hush. Clearly, I will not crash. I think the admin is onto that sort of thing now. But I will make a final plea here–and I know you advance team folks are reading (Hi there, advance team folks!)–to just add me to the list. Just another name, no big deal. Just another supportive citizen with a really nice personality, and a pair of heels waiting by the door. And if it will make the difference, okay, I won’t play the piano. I can live with that. I guess.

I have completed the final revision of my novel, and am very pleased with the outcome. The Book People have expressed interest in seeing it, now, following this last brush-up, and tomorrow, I will be sending it into the ethers. Kiss kiss. Bon chance.

I learned a long time ago from a musician friend that keeping ones equilibrium in the face of judgment is critically important, particularly for a creative person, particularly for a writer. Thank you, Ira. I learned this when I did not keep my equilibrium, becoming way too ecstatic when granted an acceptance, too dejected when not. Now, I am like a canoe on a docile lake. No, a canoe on a piece of carpet, inside a house. I am so full of equilibrium that I could be a brick layer.

Okay, I lie. That equilibrium stuff is sort of not true. I like to say that I’m a canoe, but really, I am making it all up. I will say that I am better than I used to be about rejection/acceptance and their accompanying ranting/delirium. I mutter now, when told No. Bake, when it’s a Yes. It’s not difficult to tell which way it went.

For this, The Sending of the Book, I am as prepared as I could be. Confident. Hopeful. Determined. You are supposed to visualize the goal, I’ve read. I can do that, and have been doing that. I’ve been on Oprah’s set. I’ve seen store windows full of copies. I’ve answered reader questions at signings, determined to wear the pants, not the skirt. I have no baking products in my pantry. None.

So, wish me luck. LUCK! And cross your toes, and chant something in an obscure Pacific Rim language. Hooray for the creative process.

They began yesterday at 6:59 am, one minute ahead of schedule. Twelve of them, in orange vests and drapey hats, like bugs on a hill, each with a tool in hand or under foot. Several drove, whirling like dervishes in miniature tank-ish vehicles, scraping and loading, lifting and passing. Reminding me of something Balanchine would have choreographed, the display of coordination in the street was mesmerizing, if not beautiful, on some level. Not my level. My level was desperate. Noisily desperate. Climb into the dryer desperate.

For the entire day, they produced sounds that I had never heard before, a gutteral, snarly audiotrack of destruction too abrasive for a mammal such as myself, a mammal who was trying to form literate sentences at a desk not twenty yards away. I formed two, maybe three, and then, realizing the futility, decided to clean out the kids’ bathroom cabinets. For hours, I sorted ponytail accessories–elastics from the kind with the balls on the end, fuzzy from sleek–as well as barrettes, clips, bobbies, headbands and ribbons, contact solutions, dental flosses (is it flossi?), lotions–for itchy skin, sensitive skin, vanilla skin, strawberry skin–and the ever-critical battery of sunscreen products. I emerged lathered in cream, headbands on my head, cotton balls in my ears.

By sundown, I had performed similar service on several closets, baskets of magazines, the pantry and the aforementioned head, as my bangs needed trimming. Alas, the racket ceased. In my door, a note. NOTICE, it said. Please remove your car from your driveway before 7 am tomorrow morning and do not return it to your driveway for three days, until after the cement we are pouring is cured. I needed curing. No, they needed curing. What was wrong with the street anyway? 

I set my clock for 6:58 and went outside in my pajamas to find the men waiting. Waiting for me. “There she is,” one said, in a different language that I did not understand, though I know that is what he said. “Finally,” said another. 

Yeah, right. Out of my way, Mr. Bobcat. 

I parked a mile down the street and traipsed back, still in my pajamas, yes, mumbling like tired crazy people do when they are outside in their pajamas. On the way in, I noticed in the window’s reflection that my hair was sticking up like a carrot in one place on my crown and that another section was plastered sideways onto my cheek. It could have been worse, I thought. I checked to see that I was, in fact, wearing my pajamas.

The clattering began as soon as I shut the door behind me. I showered, dressed and left the house, sound waves twitching through me as I trekked to my car. When I returned hours later, the noise had stopped, only to begin again tomorrow, when it will be my neighbor’s turn.