It is finally feeling like summer here. Wednesday we drove an hour and a half to walk on the beach and the wind was so hard and cold it blew sand into my teeth and hair but the water was so blue, the sky was cloudless. We lost twenty degrees driving out to San Francisco, what seemed like dramatically too-warm clothing at home felt too skimpy near the water. We went to the San Francisco Zoo at the Golden Gate park, the zoo is shabby and not updated except for the fantastic meerkat-and-prairie-dog exhibit which is open to the sky and has wonderful heated rocks all around. Still, though it was a sad zoo, otters showed off every time I walk by, as river otters do. The most beautiful otters. I still miss being able to go out and see otters every day on the dock at my Port Townsend beach.

For a long time I resisted twitter. Now I have an account and you can follow me there if you look me up under “Jeannine Hall Gailey” or find me @webbish6. Later I will tell the story of how twitter helped me find and fall in love with my new publisher. I actually signed up to “follow” a bunch of my favorite poetry book publishers!

My heart still hasn’t slowed down from the time I got the news about my book. I don’t think it will settle down until the book is in my hands, until then, I’ll just be a skitter mass of nerves. All things to get in order: blurbs, cover art, maybe a new author photo. I have to proofread, proofread, proofread. I’m changing order, adding new poems, deleting lines from old poems, reshaping the MS. You think it’s finished, then you realize you weren’t.

A shout out to the lit mag 5 AM as I am always pleased with the reading experience whenever I am lucky enough to get a contributor copy – the magazine falls towards the quirky and funny, along with the occasionally heartbreaking, so I guess maybe my poem “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter [circuits]” fits in alongside the “quirky” in Issue 31 with other poets such as Marge Piercy, Michael S. Harper, Charles Harper Webb, and Denise Duhamel. Buy it! Read it!

Continuing to celebrate National Poetry Month with even more poetry-related social events this weekend. Hopefully they will be fun! The sun has finally come out and finally visible are the products of spring – bunches of red-and-orange roses (this must be a Napa Valley obsession – red and orange roses are everywhere – on the walls of restaurants, in front of run-down homes, on street corners) – my primary care doctor’s office has become picturesquely draped with wisteria blossoms – and pink dogwood bloom in the tiny yards of of row houses. Thin asparagus is cooking on the grill, along with bulbs of fennel, almost every night. The minute I get diagnosed with a gluten intolerance, the local cupcake shops starts carrying gluten-free cupcakes, a week before my birthday. I mean, how could things not be looking up?

I wrote a poem I am really proud of this last week, but I’m not ready to send it out anywhere yet. I’m ready for another book to be published, I’m downright impatient actually, I’m ready to take on more work for more money, I’m ready to be healthy and get on with things in general. I feel madly in love with my husband – we’ve been married for 14 years, so you know what? That’s pretty cool. And I’m happy with my weight for the first time in a long time (I’m such a chick, but guess what? I cut out gluten and I lost a significant amount of weight in a matter of weeks. I recommend it! New weight loss/health advice book by me: figure out what the hell the foods are that you can’t digest and stop eating them. If you need to see a nice gastroenterologist who specializes in immune-system-related gastro problems like I did, so be it. It’s worth the time and trouble.)

So how much of my life do I have control over? I can try to get more freelance work, I can send out queries, I can send out my book manuscript in a poetry world surely crammed with the manuscripts flooding in after AWP. I can go and read new books of poetry and get inspired, go see poets read and get inspired, do things – like reading and writing – that reaffirm that I actually like poetry. That’s what I’m all about in this last week before I turn – gulp – 37. I’m going to do the things I can do and try to enjoy those things and not worry about the things I’m not in control of. I’m going to write new poems, they will be poems that take risks and allow me to try new things.

And if you haven’t entered my book giveaway yet, leave a comment here.