FOUND

Well, Sabrina did a lot of crying, but turns out she also did some praying. In between tears, she closed herself up in her room, knelt down at the foot of her bed, and prayed for God to keep kittie Leia safe and bring her home.

And after we had walked the neighborhood multiple times, with Lee knocking on every door (most people didn't open their doors but spoke through them... it's that kind of neighborhood, unfortunately), the kids went to bed.

Almost immediately after that, Lee heard meowing. Outside.

He went out to look, and who did he find, shivering and petrified, hiding in the garage, but Leia, home from her walk on the wild side.

I wish I had a picture of the joy on both kids' faces. Sabrina was ecstatic. Cory did his "happy dance."

One would hope Leia had learned her lesson. But no. While she's quite clingy, she still spends an inordinate amount of time in the window, straining outside, looking for something to kill.

I guess us prodigals never learn...

But we are grateful to have her home, smelling funny apparently (according to her brother Luke, who couldn't stop sniffing her for a full day), but safe and sound.

Thanks to God for restoring what was lost.

LOST

One of our big Christmas presents to the kids last year was our lovely little kittens, Luke and Leia. They turned one-year-old last month. Luke is the gentler one, Leia the born killer who stalked birds and lizards through the window and killed every bug she could get her claws on. The place we adopted them from asked that we guarantee they remain indoor kitties, and so they have never been outside.

Until today.

Lee stupidly shut a door to the outside last night without checking to make sure it was latched. It was a windy day, and the door blew open. At about 1:30, our pool guys, doing their job in the back yard, noticed Leia running back and forth by the back fence. We arrived home from a meeting about 20 minutes later... and she was gone.

We have walked the neighborhood calling her name. We have printed a hundred flyers, which Lee is distributing door to door right now. We have prayed for her safe return. We have left doors open (with Luke safely locked up). We have left food accessible.

But we have not found her. And we live in the hills. The same hills where coyotes live... Many, many years ago, when we first moved into the hills (different house, different cat), we were warned, "If your cat is still out at sunset, drop everything and find him. Because if you don't, you will never see your cat again."

It's well after sunset. We haven't found her. We doubt she could even find her way home, given her lack of experience with the outside world.

Sabrina has spent much of the evening crying. So has Luke, wailing his "Where's my sister?" wail (the one she never responds to) from behind his locked door.

It's one thing to go after a lost sheep. But a lost cat is much harder to find... And pretty soon I will start crying, too.

FUNNY WORDS

I get sent a lot of funny word-related e-mails from various folks, but here's one I actually hadn't seen before.

Evidently the Washington Post has an annual contest in which readers are asked to redefine common words. The winners from whatever year this was were...

coffee, n. the person upon whom one coughs.

flabbergasted, adj. appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained.

abdicate, v. to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

esplanade, v. to attempt an explanation while drunk.

willy-nilly, adj. impotent.

negligent, adj. absentmindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown.

lymph, v. to walk with a lisp.

gargoyle, n. olive-flavored mouthwash.

flatulence, n. emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller.

balderdash, n. a rapidly receding hairline.

rectitude, n. the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.

pokemon, n. a Rastafarian proctologist.

oyster, n. a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.

Frisbeetarianism, n. the belief that, after death, the soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.

circumvent, n. an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.

...Hope these were all new to you too!

HAPPY THANKS GIVING

As I've said before around this time of the year...

Many years ago I started a small spiritual discipline that doesn't take much time, but it tells me oh so much about the state of my heart.

At (more or less) the beginning of every month, I sit down and make a list of 50 things I'm grateful for from that last month. My list goes back well over 12 years, back to before Cory was born. (I have "thank you's" listed from when he was still 'inside,' referring to him as Attila because of his remarkable beating-up-on-mom abilities.)

I've had one or two whole years where I simply abandoned the discipline, and had to pick it up again. I can always tell how I'm doing spiritually by whether I look forward to it at the beginning of each month, or dread it.

So here are some "thank you" thoughts from last December through to this month, chosen at random in reverse chronological order.

And with that, I wish you all a very happy Thanksgiving.

1. Our new manager Jon
2. Sabrina's birthday party
3. Sabrina getting a good part in the church Advent musical
4. Cory's easy and cool Halloween costume (identity crisis)
5. The parents' breakfast at the Harvard-Westlake school
6. Cracking the story on "Pompeii"
7. Gregg helping me prep for my interview at USC
8. Encouragement from our headmistress re middle school applications
9. Coffee with our old friend Rick
10. Getting Sabrina's sewing machine working again
11. Cory not getting badly burned by the dry ice at a dance party
12. Sabrina memorizing all her memory verses plus extras at Family Camp
13. People saying Cory and his friend Max should cut a CD of their Family Camp songs.
14. Ice on a hot day
15. Our friend Andrea's new script
16. Re-reading "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" to the family
17. Our friend Kitty saying she's praying "thank you" for us, not "please"
18. Cory getting off the wait list for summer camp
19. Sabrina getting a spot at summer camp
20. People blown away by Sabrina singing at the school talent show
21. Writers group BBQ at our friends Nancy and Bob's house
22. Getting a sizeable residual check
23. Swimming on a hot day
24. Co-Girl Scout leader Kate's hard work on our backyard campout
25. Grandma's caregiver back from the Philippines
26. People praying for us
27. The "American Idol" finale
28. Hanging out w/ the kids w/ no agenda
29. Confidence that God will come through for us
30. Making the kids' travel scrapbooks
31. Cory's wit
32. Fasting for Lent
33. Being almost done writing "Shakespeare's Curse"
34. The 'Da Vinci Code' "othercott"
35. Finishing the pitching workship for Act One
36. Our friend Marion
37. Sleep
38. Rain
39. Our Oscar party
40. Lee doing great story work on "Shakespeare's Curse"
41. "Dancing with the Stars"
42. Sabrina buying me a silver bracelet in Mexico
43. Grandma's long term care insurance
44. Adopting our new kitties Luke and Leia
45. Sabrina being such a huggy and kissy girl
46. Playing the 20 Questions handheld game in the car
47. Christmas
48. Singing the Hallelujah Chorus at church with Sabrina
49. Magnificent sunset at our Christmas party
50. The "Narnia" movie doing so well at the box office

Happy Thanksgiving, all!

WHAT KIND OF PIE ARE YOU?

I'm happy to be apple pie, I guess, but could we at least make it French apple?

Personally, while I love pumpkin, we have always found that chocolate silk pie is what goes over best at Thanksgiving. Unexpected, I suppose. Apple, we have leftovers. But never chocolate silk...

And by the way, why pie for Thanksgiving? Why not cake? Anyone know?

You Are Apple Pie

You're the perfect combo of comforting and traditional Those who like you crave security

What Kind of Pie Are You?

THE "CHRISTMAS WARS"?

I was very glad to read a news report last week that Wal-Mart has decided to celebrate Christmas again this year, rather than the anemic "holidays." Under pressure from upset patrons, they will again use the greeting "Merry Christmas" instead of the generic "Happy Holidays."

Now, I don't object to the use of "the holiday(s)" to refer to the general time, or to the kids' vacation period... as in, "What are you doing for the holidays?" Because there are other other holidays going on, Hanukkah (big at my kids' school with its sizeable Jewish population) and New Years...

But the idea that we must avoid the word "Christmas" for fear of offending people, when the vast majority of people in this country celebrate Christmas in one form or another is simply ludicrous. (We went to a New Year's party last year at the home of some Jewish/Buddhist friends -- and they had a Christmas tree up.)

We definitely celebrate Christmas, not "the holidays." Our party is labeled as a Christmas party, we send Christmas cards, etc.

So I was quite surprised at a little throwaway remark of Sabrina's the other day.

I keep the Christmas cards I receive for a year or so. It just seems so heartless to throw them away when cleaning up after the holidays. They sit in a little pile in a cabinet in my office. But every year or two, I weed through those old cards and dump the ones I no longer care to keep. That extra time makes it easy to decide what few I do want to save.

A few days ago, one of the cats managed to wedge himself into that cabinet and came out trailing Christmas cards all over the floor. Sabrina noticed and said, "Mom, why do you have holiday cards on the floor?"

"Holiday" cards? From my own daughter? In my own house?

I know it's not even Thanksgiving yet, but maybe I'll break out the Christmas CDs a bit early this year...

HELP ME SPREAD THE WORD...

I'm trying to get the word out about my book, WHAT WILL HARRY DO? The Unofficial Guide to Payoffs and Possibilities in Book 7, which you can buy here.

But I'm pretty close to running through my own contacts in the Harry Potter webiverse. If anyone out there has thoughts on how I can get it posted on other appropriate blogs or websites or message boards, please let me know how I can follow up. After all, Christmas is coming!

(And thanks to those of you like Travis and Beth and Barb who did so before I could even ask!)

Thanks, everyone!

THE "DEBATE" OVER MIDDLE SCHOOL

We are in the middle of Middle School applications and interviews for Cory. Applications, you say? Interviews, you say? For Middle School?

Sigh. Yes. That's sort of what it means to live in the L.A. school district and care about your kids' education. Complicated by the fact that, if you start in private schools, transferring over to public schools and actually landing in a place you wouldn't be frightened of is close to impossible.

So we're writing the essays and visiting the campuses and prepping for the entrance exam... I fully believe that applying to college will be a breeze compared to this process.

One of the schools we wanted to consider was a highly-regarded Christian high school. It's not near us, but we assumed there would be a bus, as most of these private schools tend to offer bus service to most general areas. We checked it out this weekend.

The place was beautiful, by far the most outstanding campus we'd seen. The teachers were clearly caring and dedicated. We liked them immensely. The students we met were bright and kind and excited about their school. I felt this would be a very happy place to go to middle school and high school.

But we're not going to apply.

Part of it is certainly the distance. At current gas prices, it would cost us over $100 a week in gas, not to mention the time. (There is no bus -- all the buses run away from Los Angeles, not toward us... symbolic of the greater issue.)

Part of it was the relatively low academic standards for admission. The other schools we're applying to require scores of 7 to 9 (on a scale of 9) for admission. This school wants 4s and 5s to get in. Hm. Now, I don't think that means Christians are stupider. I think it just means that, because they restrict their student body according to religious belief, they have to cast their net wider in terms of academic achievement.

But the final straw for us was the attitude that popped up from time to time. Talking to other prospective parents at the open house, we heard comments about how they had "made a conscious choice to remove themselves from the culture" of Los Angeles. That certainly threw us off step. We've made a conscious choice to engage the culture of Los Angeles, of Hollywood, and as a consequence, of the world. Would we end up, as a family, out of step at a school where we should feel at home?

Apparently so. Because, keeping our own feelings out of it, when we asked Cory how he would feel about going to a school where everyone shared his beliefs (expecting him to say he thought it would be cool), he got thoughtful. Then he said he didn't think he'd like it that much, "Because where's the debate? I like debate!"

We were proud of him. At 12 years old, already he's got a taste for engaging the culture. Good for him.

So, with some surprise, we are withdrawing our application to the one major Christian high school around. Cory could have gotten in without even trying there (they want 4s and 5s? he gets 8s and 9s on those tests). It would have been a guaranteed fallback choice, at the very least. But we're going to walk the middle school tightrope without a net.

Because all those other highly-academic, hard-to-get-into private schools are just the right place for a kid who likes debate. And if Christian students don't go to those schools, that's a side of the debate which will never be heard there.

When next March comes and we're waiting for fat letters or skinny letters in the mail, we may be desperately hoping we'd kept the safety net in place. (We haven't got the connections or the big bucks to make any of these high-end schools a lock. All we've got is a really, really smart kid who loves to learn and does well on standardized tests.)

But no safety net for us. Off we go, to engage the culture, starting at middle school and working up. "Where's the debate?" indeed....

MOVIE THOUGHTS: FLUSHED AWAY

I have never understood the attraction of keeping rats as pets, so really wouldn't be keen to see something like Flushed Away were it not for two things: (a) It comes from Aardman Animation of Wallace and Gromit fame and (b) My kids insisted.

But I'm really glad I saw this movie. Not because it rocked my world or because it broke new ground in movie-making. Just because I really, really laughed. A lot.

The story is basic animation fare: An "uptown" rat (living in a gilded cage -- literally -- in Kensington Gardens) ends up down with those messy sewer rats, gets involved in an adventure with one of them (involving a stolen 'ruby' and an insidious plan to flood the sewers -- but really, it hardly matters), and falls in love with a girl from the wrong side of the tracks... um, drain.

Half the charm of this movie is in the performances -- Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Ian McKellen as the most dastardly of villains, Bill Nighy, Andy Serkus... All perfectly performed.

The other half of the charm is in the visuals. How can you not love a movie where a cockroach is discovered reading Kafka's "Metamorphosis" -- in French, no less! And even though this is a computer-animated movie, the characters keep the distinctive Aardman look that we all know from W&G, which feels very right somehow.

It's not a movie that will stay with you a long time. But if you need to laugh (and these days, that's a lot of us), then you could do far worse. This is a funny movie. Go see it instead of seeing Borat for the third time.

THANKSGIVING QUIZ OF THE WEEK

Well, this one came out perfectly! The stuffing is my favorite part of Thanksgiving, to make and to eat. I have a marvelous recipe which I fiddle a bit with every year. A cornbread base, with cranberries, figs, sausage, pecans... I can't wait!

You Are The Stuffing

You're complicated and complex, yet all your pieces fit together. People miss you if you're gone - but they're not sure why.

What Part of Thanksgiving Are You?

Hurry, take the quiz before you start cooking (or before you get on the plane)...

MOVIE THOUGHTS: THE QUEEN

When I first heard The Queen announced, my first thought was, "Well, it's a good thing Helen Mirren is already Dame Helen Mirren, because after this, she'd never be knighted!" In our post-modern, hyper-cynical age, my assumption was that any take on Queen Elizabeth II would be a negative one.

After seeing the movie, I'm not sure my initial assumption was correct. QEII could possibly appreciate this movie a lot -- or hate it a lot, of course. We'll never know. And that's part of the point.

The Queen is a fascinating, push-in-the-camera-as-close-as-you-can-and-see-all-the-blemishes look behind the scenes at Buckingham Palace during the week Princess Diana died. It's "Upstairs, Downstairs," if you will, with the "upstairs" being the royals and "downstairs" being Tony Blair, the brand new PM.

In making The Queen, Stephen Frears chose very very well in picking that one week to focus on. Too often these incredibly intimate movies tend to be about nothing, and that's what would have happened had they chosen any other week. We sense that from seeing the Palace's attempts to keep going forward as if nothing of consequence has happened in Diana's death. And we see, in their actions, the sheer boredom of the royal life at most times. As we tell our writing students, something has to happen for your movie to be worth watching.

Well, something did happen that week. And can we blame Elizabeth for being a big blind-sided by the truly immense reaction to Diana's death? Weren't we all surprised to learn we felt so deeply about the Princess? I sure was, and when it happened, I was surrounded by people who were equally surprised. I was at the Telluride Film Festival, in my condo, getting ready to go to a party, channel-surfing on the TV, when I heard the words "Diana's death" coming from a news channel. I kept surfing -- then froze. How many "Dianas" were there whom a news person would call by first name? ...Everything seemed to freeze as well at the Film Festival. Parties ended early, people just drank and talked about the death and watched the news. And all were surprised at their own reactions.

The following week, our pastor got an enormous amount of flack for preaching about Diana's death (as well as Mother Teresa's). I wondered at that: Why shouldn't he preach about something that had so emotionally rocked so many in the world? ...And I began to think through: Why did her death matter so deeply to so many? I believe it's because we all have in us an innate longing to see royalty set aside its crown and come down among the people. Think of the many fairy tales wrapped around that concept. This longing is, of course, a reflection of our longing to see the King, who did indeed leave His throne to become an ordinary person. In our democratic age and place, we wouldn't recognize this longing if we saw it -- but it sprang to life in Diana's death.

Back to the movie... Because it focuses on a week we all remember, the movie has to get it right. And it does. The intercutting of the news footage with the movie footage is flawlessly done (including roughing up some movie footage to make it look physically like the news footage, which helps the blend immensely). We are allowed to revisit the emotionality of that week while looking at the pure lack of understanding within the royal family, where only Charles seems to have any emotional reaction to his ex-wife's death. (Frears wisely keeps the young Princes offscreen.)

As for Ms. Mirren, well, just go ahead and mark your Oscar ballots now. Her performance is perfection. And it's a difficult performance, as this is a performance where none of the emotion can come out, where we have to understand what a character is feeling and thinking with no hints given. Masterful.

The Queen is one of those small films that seems to be about so little yet gives us so much: An understanding of the place of the monarchy, a questioning of why royalty matters, a look into a private world that comes off as non-voyeuristic (when it could have been very much so). And ultimately, a sympathy toward and understanding of the very visible yet very private Queen of England.

An excellent movie without a single false note. Don't miss it, especially if you love great acting.

MY SO-CALLED LIFE

It's official. I have no life.

At least no social life. Or not much. Or so it would seem.

I was chatting with a school mom the other day, and we were, as moms do, playing the "I have no life" game, talking about how all our time is tied up w/ our kids or various obligations. And I began to wonder: Is that true?

So, just for the heck of it (and because I really like making lists), I went through my calendar for the year, and just looked at all the "events" marked down on it. Since I work at home, this basically amounts to the times I had to actually put on presentable clothes and leave the house. I subtracted out time spent on what we might call "maintenance." You know, doctors, dentists, haircuts (and kids' doctors, dentists, haircuts...) And of course, I do leave the house to run errands, but that doesn't count either. I'm talking things that would end up on a calendar.

And I learned that my life may or may not be quite out of balance, depending on your point of view.

46% of my "away-from-home" time is spent on volunteer work. About half of that is entertainment-industry related (mostly for Act One and the Alliance of Women Directors. A good chunk of that is teaching, but less than you'd think. Of the other half of my volunteer work, 2/3 of it is related to my kids -- I'm a Girl Scout leader and a room mom, and do other volunteer work at their school, too. And the final 1/3 is volunteering up at our church. I've probably spent in the neighboorhood of 500 hours on volunteer work this year so far.

But of course, kids require more time than just volunteering for their various involvements, and another 16% of my "away-from-home" time is spent attending their activities: football games, birthday parties, playdates, school presentations, etc.

11% of my "away-from-home" activities were work-related meetings of various sorts. That number is much lower than it should be; in part because we were holed up at our computers writing for the first few months of the year, and in part because our agents were derelict in their duties.

10% of my "away-from-home" activites were church-related that had nothing to do with Sunday morning or volunteering.

Leaving a mere 17% in the "other" category. Now, it'd be nice to think that all of that was pure fun. And a lot of it was: We've thrown about 10 parties of various sorts this year (though some overlap with other categories, for instance, we hosted a barbecue for Act One, we hosted a pool party for Cory's church youth group, we hosted a backyard campout for the Girl Scouts, etc.).

Also included here were our 2 trips out of town: 4 days in Baja California with our writers group in February, and our church's Family Camp in August. Also included here are the meetings of our writers group itself, which I can't quite categorize as "work" (even though it sort of is) or "church" (even though it sort of is) or "social" (even though it sort of is).

So when I try to figure out how much of a purely "social" life I have... 6% of my activities of this year could be classified as 'social.' By which I mean coffee or lunch or the movies with friends. Or an invitation to a party that doesn't have a "purpose." And only one evening out, in the whole year, with Lee with no kids, no obligations, no place we "had" to be. (But remember, because we work together, we're together all day, and we can go to the movies, etc., during the daytime.)

Now, I don't regret (most of) how I spend my time. I'd rather spend time on volunteer work than on partying, for the most part. But I do look at those numbers (rather compulsively gathered, I admit) and wonder if I should be having more fun. Or would that just be too selfish? I really don't know. Maybe I should start thinking this over to get ready for next year's New Year's Resolutions.

At any rate, the next time I'm in one of the perenniel "I have no life" conversations with a bunch of school moms, I will certainly know whereof I speak!

"WHAT WILL HARRY DO?"... THE COVER...

Just thought you might like to see the cover of my new book, "What Will Harry Do?" -- the better to motivate you to buy a copy here!

"WHAT WILL HARRY DO?"

Yes, folks, at long last, my book: "What Will Harry Do? The Unofficial Guide to Payoffs and Possibilities in Book 7" is published and ready for purchase!

It should be available on Amazon and other online retailers soon, but right now, you can purchase your very own copy here. You can see the snazzy cover art there too -- I haven't quite figured out how to post it here, but will do so asap.

Every Harry Potter fan should have it. And can you even think of a better Christmas present for your Harry Potter fan friends?

Click on over to get your own copy. And while you're there, feel free to make a comment or leave a review. (Hmmm... I guess you'd have to buy it and read it first for that, huh? Well, easy to do by clicking here!)

Let me know what you think.....

RETROACTIVE PRAYER

Thank you to those who posted comments below, praying for our script going out. (Three passes-but-we-love-you-let's-talk, so far. Still waiting to hear otherwise.)

I smiled at the several people who said they'd pray "retroactively." Smiled especially at the use of that specific phrase.

When I was a freshman in college, I had a prayer partner with whom I met 3 days a week, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Believe me, you get some very specific prayer in when you're meeting that often, and we were very faithful about it.

And then the summer came. I took an apartment with some girlfriends by the beach, and my prayer partner headed home to northern California for the summer. In a pre-cell phone era, when "long distance" was still a phrase with some meaning (and cost), we certainly weren't going to call to pray together.

So we decided to send postcards. We bought stacks of the pre-stamped ones from the post office, and sent them faithfully with prayer requests to each other every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Now of course, if I sent a postcard on Monday, saying "Please pray about my job interview tomorrow," there was no way my prayer partner was going to get it in time to pray for it. But we decided, just as people posted below, that because God was outside time, it was still a good idea to pray about things that had already happened but where we didn't know the answer.

God, being outside time, would be able to factor those prayers into the whole scheme of things, we reasoned. After all, through most of history, people couldn't even communicate with the speed of a postcard, much less a phone call (or an e-mail or a text message) and they still managed to pray for each other across time and distance. So we decided we would pray for things that had already happened.

And we called it "retroactive prayer."

So that's why I smiled when I read the same phrase in the comboxes. I do appreciate your retroactive prayers, and I also appreciated the chance to remember the person I was way back when, studiously reasoning out how this new-to-me God stuff worked.