Before I tell you the story I'm about to tell you, I feel it's important to preface it with a piece of information that you might find shocking. Or maybe laughable. Or maybe a bit shocking and also a bit laughable, but here it is anyway: I believe in ghosts. 

(Oh wait, I've told you this before. So much for my big confession!)

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This has happened unwittingly and against my better judgment but I have somehow become a person who says, with a straight face—or with the equivalent of a straight face when one is communicating via IM—"I'm really into banjos right now." 

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Of all the things that I'd anticipated might be an impediment to my enjoyment of working out first thing in the morning, crying my way through the previous night's Olympic coverage while stuck on a treadmill wasn't one. But the Today Show was playing a reel of Olympic parents watching their kids winning and I didn't have the remote for the overhead TV, so what do you expect? I'm not made of stone! 

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I haven't had a Diet Coke in a couple of weeks. I wish I could say that I had an epiphany about the chemicals I was putting in my body and decided to drink only local organic mineral water collected in rainbarrels by Trappist monks, but really what happened is that we just ran out of Diet Coke and I never got around to buying any more. 

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Look, I don't often get excited about physical activity, but have you ever done Zumba? I LOVE IT. I love it! And yes, I think that's probably about as cool as admitting I love fannypacks—"bumbags" for my British readers, who've probably just spat out their tea in shock (Americans, I'll let you google the VERY DIFFERENT MEANING that doesn't seem to have crossed the pond)—but I don't care. I am obsessed with Zumba. It is my New Thing. Well, if by New Thing we're allowing that I've only done it twice. But I did it twice with passion. 

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Our house has been a bit of a hotel recently, which is why it feels like I've disappeared off the face of the earth. In the last week, we've had my parents, my sister, and Sean's brother staying with us—staggered mostly, with only minimal comedic overlap—and next week we have my brother, followed two weeks later by my other brother (plus two friends, one of them apparently so good-looking that his nickname is "Catwalk," I mean I'm a married lady and all but STILL). I have made up a lot of sofa beds lately, is what I'm saying.

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Sean had an 8am meeting this morning, which meant we had to leave the house at 6:50am. I'm probably going to get laughed out of town by everyone with kids—"6:50am? You think 6:50am is early? 6:50am is a WEEK IN MAUI WITH GEORGE CLOONEY"—but considering it's an hour later than we normally leave, I thought 6:50am was fairly barbaric.

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I really like throwing parties. I know it's not a particularly noble pursuit, but I get a huge kick out of—to borrow a term they use frequently on House Hunters (at least when the wife isn't making jokes about the husband giving her all the closet space)—"entertaining." Even before Pinterest made two-bit Martha Stewarts out of all of us, I always liked throwing parties.

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I got catcalled on the street the other day by a busker outside a bar. It was just your garden variety catcall, complete with the sort of questionable grammar—"you sexy!"—that surely always gets the ladies whipping out their dayplanners to take down your phone number immediately, but it was notable for the fact that it was prefaced by two very, very, very unexpected words. 

Hey, mom! 

That's right. Somebody tried to get my attention on the street by shouting "Hey, mom! You sexy!"

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