Good God, what happened to most of November?  It’s almost time to start brining the all-natural, free-roaming, $4.00 a pound turkey!*

And for that matter — what happened to October?

Uhh…  School book fairs and the attendant volunteering demanded by them?  A random fever or two (right now, Younger Girleen’s, which has her home from school)?  A couple of cold snaps, a couple of colds come and gone?  Life, with its ability to nibble at good intentions until all that’s left are the bitter rinds?

Like clockwork, I tend to start “setting goals” for myself as soon as school starts for Elder Girleen in August, disregarding the fact that her younger sister isn’t even in school five days a week yet and meeting goals of any sort will require burning the midnight oil and arising before dawn —  or at least arising more before dawn than making breakfasts, packing lunches, brushing the teeth of a four-year old, and coaxing a seven-year-old out of pajamas and into the back seat of a car before Chorus starts at 7:30 a.m. currently requires.

If I was a true professional,  of course, all those things would be a piece of cake.

Instead, here it is, the middle of November, and though I occasionally make cake (or granola bars, from the vegetarian cookbook, with Younger Girleen and her “playdate”) and I occasionally eat cake as a furtive nightcap after the children have gone to bed, finishing one piece of fiction and whipping out a first draft of another (the goals I told myself I’d meet by November 30) — not a piece of cake.

In fact, that last paragraph was interrupted 24 hours ago by a phone call from Elder Girleen’s school to me know in no uncertain terms what a fool I’d been to just a few hours earlier decide we’d dodged the bullet and only Younger Girleen would get this particular bug.

So that’s where November went.

* Jeez louise, is she really buying a 60 dollar turkey?  Don’t look at me for the answer.