Laundry, Lice and Writing

The universe played a joke upon me. A couple of days after that post on doing laundry, I've been doing practically nonstop laundry. Why you ask? Not because I love it that much. No, the answer is lice.

Yes, those awful parasites that suck your blood, and multiply. Ick. I kept my kiddos home for a couple of days so that I could de-louse, de-egg and de-nit them completely. Thankfully, it was sunshiny, so we sat outside to do this task. I scraped their poor little scalps so hard, skin flakes were falling onto the books they were reading. But by Sat. the kids were free of these parasites. Just thinking about them makes my head itch. I was surprised that I never came across a single louse.

I remember from my days as a schoolgirl in India that we routinely got lice and we didn't have nice-smelling pesticide shampoos like we have here. Nope. We had industrial soap that left our skin raw. And once I think my mom rubbed kerosene in our hair to kill the critters. Ugh. We would go through each other's heads. I didn't mind popping eggs, but I remember my revulsion at having to squash lice in-between my thumbnails. Double ick.

Needless to say, it's been very busy around here. But after all that's been said and done, I'm finally penning the first chapters of my new book. Woo-hoo! I hardly write more than 2-4 pages a day, but yesterday managed to write a whopping ten. This is very unusual for me because I revise and edit as I go and it's a terrible habit because there are some days I end up deleting everything I've written. This time, I'm going to let my exploratory draft be just that ... a place to explore everything, even though I'm scared half the time to go places.

Such is the writing life at times. They say when life hands you a lemon, you should make lemonade. But what can you make from lice?
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