Happy April, Fool!

It's not technically April Fool's Day anymore. It's now April 2nd, and I have just finished a rewrite of A WALK THROUGH THE WINDOW. I think it's more in a place where I want it to be, now. Ready to fly out into the real world, I hope.

I have been working on this manuscript to the exclusion of everything else for awhile, so it was not until last night at roughly two-ish, that I remembered the date. All that came to me at that hour, in the messing with kids's minds department, was to turn off the power to their most loved appliances. So I searched for the right buttons to push on both the circuit breaker boards in the house, and duly disconnected the power to both the TV and the X-box. I was anticipating a lot of teen anguish over the mysterious phantom power outage that killed their appliances but not the fridge or my computer.

Of course, things did not go as planned.

First of all, my son awoke around 5 to discover his clock was not working. (I'd had to turn the power off to all the outlets in his room.) Of course, he felt compelled to wake me with this news. Strike One.

When I finally emerged from my own bed in the morning, I could hear the tv going downstairs. My daughter just arched an eyebrow at me by way of greeting. I trooped all the way downstairs to find my 'April Fool's!' note, left tauntingly taped to the circuit panel, had been defaced.

'Never underestimate my brain,' it read. 'I figured it out right away.'
Strike Two.

On the front door, she left me her own cryptic note: Happy April Fool's Day. The note was accompanied by a little sketch of a pair of boots.

I glanced out the front door to see, stepping delicately down the 45 or so steps to the street, a single shoe on every riser. Each belonging to the perpetrator's mother.

Strike Three. April brings baseball with it, too, at least to one Fool who thinks she can pull something over on her children.

Also managed to squeeze in a great planning meeting with the Most Excellent Spring Book Hatching Planning Committee today. More on that soon.

All in all a very satisfactory April Fool's Day.

~kc