This, by the way, is the point at which blogging experts say you shouldn't blog. You should always put your best stuff out there and dazzle the Internet multitudes. But I say... Um... Ah, whatever. I don't have it in me to come up with a dazzling response to that either. So, here, my friends, are your bullet points:

• I was working on a guest post for a blog on disability and spirituality that I think many of you will love: Amy Julia Becker's Thin Places. The post won't be up for a week or two. I'll post a link when it is, but do feel free to poke around and get to know Amy Julia in the meantime.
• I've been working on my 1st Step, in depth this time, which has consisted of writing up a history of my life and relationships. I've used a lot of blog material, and it's about (gulp) 50 pages long, which is awful and fabulous. Awful, because I need to edit it down to about 8 in order to present it to my 12 Step group and fabulous because I started this blog with the idea of writing a memoir about my marriage and I've found I have a really solid foundation for that. When I read it to my cosponsor, she and I both cried.
• I have been celebrating! My husband and I have 7 years in recovery, and since many of you know that discovery and recovery happened when I was very pregnant with my daughter, you can probably guess that we've been preparing to celebrate the anniversary of Janie's birth. We've also been celebrating a sobriety anniversary for my husband, who has 4 years since his last major slip. Yay!

I'm completely ashamed of this — what I now recognize as an attempt to control his addiction — but when I shared this with a friend, she said she thought it was brilliant. In her opinion, my control freakishness inspired me to an innovative approach to the problem. I was a codependent Thomas Edison. Of course, there was the little matter of it, you know, not working. I hadn't so much invented the codependent lightbulb as set up a sluttly cardboard cutout to sit beside me and try to harness lightning directly through our bodies.

But as I was flipping through a catalog recently, I found I'm not the only codependent with fabulous ideas. Someone has decided to create a product that will help prevent their alcoholic or drug addicted partners from driving under the influence: a picture frame that clips onto a car visor and sends the following message (I'm paraphrasing of course): "If you really loved your family, you'd drive sober." Sure, that's not the literal message and it has a wider appeal than just addicts — theoretically, it's for any unsafe driver — but partners of alcoholics and other addicts are veritable gold mine for the manufacturers of this frame.  (Come on, you Al-Anoners and Nar-Anoners know you would have wanted one!)

Like my alter-ego, this little frame brilliant in its own way, but it's also doomed to failure (at least on addicts).  What addicts do or don't do isn't about those of us who love them; it's about the addiction.  And a picture of someone's family isn't going to prevent what the family themselves can't control even when they're present.

Last year I participated in Neil Kramer's Great Interview Experiment.  In the process, I got to know two interesting new bloggers and was lucky enough to make a lasting friend in the absolutely fabulous Headless Mom.  Who could ask for more than that?  Well, apparently, me.  Because I'm doing it again this year.

Allow me to introduce you to Tifani who used to blog at Spoke-N-Sants, but recently moved her virtual residence to Hurricane Bait when she and her family moved their physical residence to Louisiana. I had a lot of fun looking through Tifani's blogs and want to thank her so much for taking the time to play along and let me (and now all of you) get to know her.  So, without further ado, the interview...

1. Tifani, you said you started blogging as a form of online scrapbooking. Has it replaced paper scrapbooking the way you expected it to or has it become something different you do in addition to scrapbooking? Have you ended up printing and binding hard copies of the blog?

I have slurped my blog over to Blurb, done some editing and printed it out. It was FABULOUS!! I can't say it has totally replaced scrapbooking, as there are still certificates and pictures and cards we keep from others that have to be put somewhere. But mostly, yes, this has replaced my scrapbooking and I LOVE it!

2. You have six children. What do you enjoy most about a larger family?

I enjoy ... that there is always someone to talk to and hang out with. I love the noise and chaos associated with all the different personalities. I don't love the laundry at all.

3. I take it from your blog that you are a member of the LDS church. I love to talk about both faith and family. How do you feel your faith has shaped the type of parent you are?

I am a member of the LDS church . This is a really great question - and probably the reason it has taken me so long to get this back to you. How does my faith/religion shape my parenting? How does it not? My faith is so much of who I am that it is hard to distinguish. I think MOST parents want their children to grow up happy and to be good, as do I. Because I believe in God and that He has a plan for me and each of my children and I believe that families literally can be forever (promise or threat you decide!) -that we will be reunited with our families after death - I feel that I am accountable to God for how and what I teach my children. I believe that they are my spirit brothers and sisters and that when the veil of forgetfulness that we live under while on earth is removed, we will remember the relationships we had before coming here. I am accountable to God for how (love, no coercion) and what (gospel of Jesus Christ) I teach them (but not their actions - they get to deal with that one!). I hope they will grow up to be honest, hard working people who have a lot of faith and bring goodness to this world, but additionally, I look forward to spending eternity with them and their children and so on and so on.

4. How do you incorporate your faith in day-to-day life with your family?

We incorporate religion with daily family scripture study, daily family prayers, weekly church attendance, and weekly Family Home Evening. I hope that I also incorporate it in my example of how I live - and my examples of what NOT to do, too!

5. You recently moved to Baton Rouge from Spokane. What prompted the move?

I'd like to say it was because my husband's company needed him to, and while that is true, the main reason we did it is because it felt like the right thing to do. It has been one of the hardest experiences of my life, though. Doesn't mean it was the wrong thing, I've sure learned a lot but it has been hard.

6. What's been the biggest source of culture shock in your move so far?

Absolutely the schools. There are SO MANY RULES and instead of creating better behaved children they are mostly not! I have been volunteering in schools for 15 years and 6 different schools before coming here and I have never seen such angry and mean teachers and careless administers who do not respond to parents. I have never seen teachers belittle and criticize in public like they do here. There have been a few exceptions to this rule (love you Ms. Davis, Ms. Samson, and the others!), but for the most part - not! OH, and if your elementary school child's lunch balance drops below zero they give them BREAD AND MILK for lunch. Talk about humiliating! AND (you've got me on a rant here) they nickle and dime you to death! Twenty dollars for this field trip, ten dollars for this dance (kids who don't pay get to sit in the detention room), three dollars for smoothies (once a month), five dollars for a free dress day (instead of uniforms), five dollars for this class party, twenty dollars for the teacher's birthday, etc. Really, it is just CRAZY! Times it by six kids and it equals always broke.

Another shock is that there is NO COSTCO IN LOUISIANA! It's a terrible fact. Yes, we have Sam's Club. It is not the same thing.

7. What do you miss most about Spokane?

Everything. Spokane is the perfect place to live. (Except for the economy.)

8. What do you like most about Louisiana?

Swimming in the winter. The people in our church have been very nice. They made us feel welcome as soon as we moved here. My plumerias are still blooming and that is awesome! There are so many pretty flowers and trees.

9. How are your kids adjusting to the move?

Teen 1 - fine, Teen 2 - NOT fine, Teen 3 - GREAT! Preteen 4 - fine, Child 5 - Great!, Child 6 - fine. Child 6 is going to get some speech therapy here, which I find HILARIOUS! In any case, we have good days and not such good days. The good days are getting more frequent.

10. Is there anything else you'd like to share that I didn't think to ask?

I can't think of anything. Thanks for the questions!

Spiritual inspiration can come from the oddest bits of serendipity.  I was at a talk a few months ago by a Zen Buddhist who talked about making each moment sacred, about how we could light incense before doing the dishes and make the washing of each dish a meditation and a part of our practice.  That's a nice goal.  I like that image.  Instead, every day I engage in the totally unspiritual practice of washing dishes while playing yesterday's episode of the Colbert Report on my laptop: sometimes watching, sometimes listening, sometimes popping over to my e-mail.  And it turns out, that led me, well, maybe to the same place anyway.

A few months ago, Colbert's guest was AJ Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible.  The premise of the book sounded like a take on the humorous e-mail that circulates periodically mocking Biblical literalists for calling homosexuality an abomination while ignoring passages that condone things like slavery and animal sacrifice.  It sounded interesting, but because my hands were wet and covered with dish soap, I didn't jump right over to Amazon to buy it.  And then, I'll admit, I forgot about it.  Until a few weeks later, when my husband and I were out on a date night and decided to use our last few minutes of babysitter coverage to browse in a bookstore, where I noticed the book and decided to buy it after page one made me laugh out loud.

I loved it. It was much more than a take on a joke e-mail. It was spiritual and funny, reverent and irreverent.  It reminded me in many ways of my own spiritual journey.  (And what's not to love there?)  It even (unknowingly) contained some commentary on what recovering sex addicts face in our culture (but more on that tomorrow).  The bit that inspired me was the author's relationship to the Sabbath.  At first, leaving work aside for a day and resting is an anxiety producing chore for Jacobs, who can't make it through the first evening without checking his e-mail.  But it gradually becomes his favorite day, the one around which the rest of the week revolves.

I thought about my own tendency toward constant work: how hard I push myself, how difficult it is for me to make time for rest and how overwhelmed with guilt and fear I become whenever I am not being "productive."  I thought about how freeing it had been when my computer was in for repairs recently, and I couldn't do some of my work.  And I thought the idea of a Sabbath, a day of rest devoted to spirituality, might be good for me.

I don't formally belong to any organized religion, so I can choose any day for my Sabbath and honor it in any way that works for me.  So I've been thinking about what it would look like to spend one day a week dedicated to my spiritual life and wondering how I can make it happen.  I don't have it all figured out yet, and I don't need to, but what I do know is that I've decided I'd like to make it part of my spiritual journey to find out.  And I suspect that will mean that, at least one day a week, I will turn off the Colbert Report and light some incense when I do the dishes.

As of this moment, I have a backlog of 283 messages (and 608 Google Alerts) in my e-mail inbox. (Maybe there's one there from you!) So, I've decided that rather than writing today, I'm going to try to dig through at least some of that virtual clutter.

While you wait for me to finish, you can feast your eyes in envy on the lovely piece of art that will soon be gracing my "home office" (ok, a corner of my bedroom where I have a chair I sit in with my laptop). The multi-talented marta slices up drafts of her novel to create this new kind of art from her words. You can take a look at this and other pieces at Words Are Art.

A friend forwarded me a link to a wonderful blog post by Christopher Niemann full of minimalist Lego representations of all things New York. The heading, above photo after photo of clever little scenes and objects, reads:

During the cold and dark Berlin winter days, I spend a lot of time with my boys in their room. And as I look at the toys scattered on the floor, my mind inevitably wanders back to New York.

Now at first, I'll admit, I felt terribly jealous. It's such a compelling scene: Christopher Niemann sitting on the floor of an apartment in Berlin with his children. The bleak and barren forms of buildings stand cold and dark against the ice grey sky outside. But inside the room is warm and cheerful, and the floor is littered with colorful plastic blocks. Mr. Niemann gazes out the window at the unfamiliar German cityscape and is overwhelmed with longing for the familiar skyline of Manhattan. He idly picks up a block. Then inspiration hits, and he recreates bits of his old home within his new one. He describes each piece to his children, who -- captured by delight -- wax rhapsodic, then eagerly join in the fun. "Ah, father. I love the way your 'Plastic Bag, Caught in a Tree Branch' encapsulates the angst of urban living. Oh, I have an idea. Let's do one about the Mets and the Yankees now! I'll make a Mets cap and you do the Yankees."

It's a scene that (while certainly vivid in my imagination) has never actually taken place in my house. My first thought on seeing all those Lego creations was: This guy actually gets to play with Legos? No fair!

Legos were one of those things, like pretend play, that I really looked forward to doing with my kids. I thought that I too would make cute little projects like "Lego Empire State Building on St. Patrick's Day." But the number of Lego projects I've been able to design and create is holding steady at zero. It's not that we don't have Legos; we've got bins upon bins of them. And it's not that my kids don't like Legos; they themselves have made some fabulous creations. I have pictures of them with Lego trains, Lego trees, Lego houses, Lego dinosaurs: all of their own design. My son even built a Lego Mama almost entirely from blue Legos. (And I have to say, I looked pretty damn good with a blue pixelated face.) But I still have yet to make a single creation of my own.

I thought the problem might be that the kids had no interest in forwarding my designs. I mean, apparently even Christoper Niemann didn't want to make "Lego Bagel with Lego Lox." So, I tried switching tactics and attempting Lego versions of the things my kids do like: "Hey, look kids, I'm going to make a Lego Pikachu!" But I'd never get beyond one little yellow toe before life happened: someone got hungry or stepped on a Lego and needed a kiss or got tired of playing with Legos or started fighting or (more often) wanted my Legos to build their own Lego Pikachu because I was Not. Doing. It. Right. It turns out my kids like playing with their Legos themselves much more than playing with Legos with me (or even letting me play with the Legos myself). The nerve!

The only time I get to build anything at all is when we are pretend playing school and it's pretend choice time. Then I get to build with regular blocks. But not Legos. My pretend teacher won't let me.

Then it occurred to me that Mr. Niemann may not have children who are wonderfully indulgent of his own creative urges. I mean, my kids don't sit here and watch me blog. Maybe he does the same thing I do: watches the kids, gets inspired and then waits until they are asleep to work his magic. I picture him, like me with my laptop, sitting up late at night hunched over the Legos he's stuffed in his pants pockets during bedtime and smuggled out of the kids' room creating something that is of and for them, but in which they don't yet have an interest.

But then another thought occurred to me: maybe necessity is the mother of his invention. Maybe his three piece Lego Manhattan or four piece Lego Long Island are not a genius of economy and scale, but something born of his own kids' refusal to let him play with Legos for more than 15 seconds either. When I looked at the little objects a second time, I smiled, because this time they screamed not "What enviable family fun!" but "No, Daddy, I want that piece!" And then those little pieces of Manhattan, made in Berlin, started to look a lot like a vision of home to me too.

Wait. What's that holding us up? Could it be our very own All That Is Dazlious magnet from Marla Baltes? It is indeed! If you don't know Marla, she blogs at All That Is Dazlious, where she shares her photography and writes about autism and her beautiful and vibrant daughter Maizie.

I left some Happy Thanksgiving wishes way back on, um, Thanksgiving and Maizie herself picked my name from among the commenters out as one of the magnet winners. I felt a little queasy when I told her how to contact me to send the magnet, as I always do when I let someone a little closer to my real life self, but it was such fun to get the magnet and see Marla's real life handwriting.

I love my new magnet!  Thanks, Marla and Maizie!

Image credit: Photo by beachblogger on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

I have mentioned a few times that I'm working the 12 Steps with an online group, and several of you have asked where you can get in on the action yourselves. The group I'm working with is at The Junkies' Wives Club. We are currently on Step 9, so we're not taking anyone new in at this point. However, the Junky's Wife is working on setting up a new online space for people looking to work the Steps online and I'll certainly make an announcement when it's up and running.

There is also a new group starting for those who want to work the Steps online around compulsive overeating, but you will have to be a member of the Junkies' Wives club and send a message to R for an invitation in order to join.

CoDA (Codependents Anonymous) has online meetings (although not, as far as I know, Step groups or a specific process for working through the Steps online). If anyone else knows of any other 12 Step online groups, please let me know.