Eleven-thirty on a Friday night, and I just finished a little revision session with my picture book WIP. This is the kind of thing a delightfully deprived girl does. The fun part was that it was . . . fun! Not work-like at all. I hadn't looked at this manuscript in about a week, so the experience had that perspective going for it. But I do believe that my mind is less gunked up than usual right now, which sharpens my Revision Vision. Always a pleasure to do business with that!

Before I forget to say so:

The weekend is about to test my commitment. The weekend and my just-home-from-a-three-week-trip husband, that is.

Tonight was easy to handle because the husband couldn't keep his eyes open much past nine. But I will want to spend lots of time with him Saturday and Sunday, and I think that could take me out of my deprivation element and cause vulnerability. Then again, maybe having him home will make it easier to sail on through. We shall see.

Random observations and details from Deprivation's Depths Dailies (a lame riff on my all-time favorite album title):

• A big hindsight clue that it was time to redo this exercise was my uncharacteristic impatience with absolute nothings related to normal media consumption. Examples—
• An inability to read The Descendants without hearing George Clooney as narrator. (I have not seen the film.)
• Annoyance with distinct types of incendiary political/sensationalized entertainment headlines that made me want to tally examples to support a point I wasn't making about articles I wasn't reading.
• Slower-by-mere-seconds browser performance on the home wi-fi network versus the router connection.
• Newly restricted fast forwarding with On Demand programs.
• Not being able to control exactly how a single thumbs-up/-down tap affects a Pandora station's playlist.

• This week's experience makes me want to read more than I already do. More of the so-called good stuff. But I know that more of that is not "the" more I really need.
• It did not fly, but I spent several minutes attempting to justify watching the movie Young Adult. (It's "work related," people!)
• I made a cool cover collage for my writing notebook.
• Seemingly out of nowhere today, I caught myself singing along with the car radio. Please note that I had NO memory of turning the thing on.
• Instead of the traditional three morning pages, I've been routinely doing five . . . and needing to make myself stop there.
• I've been eating less this week. That wasn't a goal — it has just been happening.