Today, the house is decorated in hibiscus flowers, fake grass and leighs. Walk up our front walk and you’ll be welcomed by an army of lit tiki torches standing at attention. Walk in and you’ll smell pork and pineapple (but she drew the line at SPAM). And after this day, our lives are changed forever. Because on this day, our little perfect Gabrielle becomes an adult.

In the life of a child, all birthdays give you reason to pause and reflect on what’s passed and how fast it’s happened. But I’ll tell you, birthday No. 18 is a big one to wrap one’s mind around.

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Last Tuesday, my couponing career took off and crash-landed within an hour.

I was sitting in a church gymnasium, bathed in gray light, surrounded by 30 other women, with a stack of fliers in front of me. We’d all gotten reeled into this place by the same thing: We’d heard that someone, somewhere, had bought 20 big bottles of Tide for $2.99 apiece. And they knew how to do it by taking the couponing class that was about to start.

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After a 10-year absence, I’m happy to say that I’m back on the land of the living. And by living, I mean I can once again enjoy a tall glass of cold milk any ol’ time I want.

Returning to the homeland all started with a reluctant trip to Walmart. Kroger has stopped selling the cheddar cheese I like (Cabot extra sharp), so I’ve been forced to brave my way through Wally World every few months to buy a few bricks. Once I’m already there, I generally elect to do my other grocery shopping, since even I can’t see the value in leaving one grocery store just to go to another.

Recently, William and Gabrielle asked to switch to 1 percent milk from skim, and so I was in the milk aisle looking to fill their request. As you might know, some Walmart brand milks are different from Kroger’s, so I was simply looking for 1 percent and not paying much attention to the other labels.

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So, there I was: a desperately seeking Susan searching for a new name for my new business. It was Day 5 of the hunt and I was showing signs of wear and tear. My notebooks were scribbled with hundreds of words paired with the word “essay.” My hair needed a wash. My conversational skills were nil unless it involved pitching names.

To recap from last week, I was about to launch my new editing service for students who need help writing their college admissions essays (plug, plug!). A day before I was set to launch savvyessay.com, I discovered there is an essaysavvy.com, which provides the identical service. And so, I needed to find a new word to pair with “essay,” preferably one that ended in Y so, when fused with “essay,” it would form the word “yes.”
“Make colleges say yes” is my tagline.

Also, it needed to be a domain that wasn’t already taken.

As I said, my brain had started to not only fry, but explode so if you sat closely beside me, you’d hear it emitting these radical pop, pop, pop sounds every so often.

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So, there I was: all ready to launch my new business. The website was designed. The copy was written. The business cards were approved. And I was pleased, so very pleased, with all of it.

So, hours before I was about to announce all of this to the world, I decided to do a search for my new website to see where it was falling on Google’s standings. Brilliant Julie, who’d designed my site, had just recently turned it “on,” meaning that it would undergo Google’s indexing analysis and that process would decide its, for want of a better word, ranking.

My new business is an editing service for college admissions essays (plug, plug!). The goal is to help college and graduate students write their personal statements and other essays required for their applications.

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So let’s just say it, in the village of Olympic athletes, you’ve gotta think the luge girls aren’t the ones most likely to have a good time.

I was thinking this while I was watching a German lady adjust her face shield into her helmet last night before she clawed (literally) her way off the starting line. Her claw was accompanied by a mighty, beastly call that kind of sounded like “Yawwwwwww,” which could have been spoken in German or could have been spoken in Wolf. Then she tucked in and drove that sled down the slippery course like a boss.

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So I’m headed to my friend’s house to learn how to do Facebook and Twitter because I have this new project that requires it, but I’m not very smart. When she comes to the door, Fallula, let’s call her, greets me in Uggs, sweats and a fleece and I think, but don’t say, “Good for you, girl. Good for you for embracing the I-work-from-home outfit.”

So she is schooling me on the ins and outs of Tweet comments when I notice a space heater by her desk. It’s then she tells me that, since she’s been working from home, their heating bill has increased by a whopping $150 per month. As a result, she and her husband, as an experiment, are trying to keep the house at 67 degrees during the day and increase it to 69 degrees at night. Hence, the Uggs.

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So I was sitting in bed on Sunday reading David Sedaris and eating a chocolate bar, which automatically made it about the best Sunday one can possibly have. As I giggled over Sedaris trying to figure out how to retrieve a lozenge he had accidently sneezed onto a sleeping woman’s lap, I would break off a piece of the bar, savor and swallow.

The bar was the artisanal type that comes in a cardboard box.

I just started a new paragraph here so I could give you a chance to absorb that last sentence and get your envy in check. Because, yeah, I said cardboard box, which we all know is what separates the men from the boys in the chocolate bar world.

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Right now, I’m listening to a song called “Cry of the Earth” on a CD entitled “Living in Harmony.”

It is playing, of course, on Pandora’s Yoga station, which I listen to nearly every time I write, which (and I know you’re not supposed to have two whiches in a sentence, but two witches is fine) has given me a lot of time to contemplate what makes a good and solid Yoga tune.

First off, water. Nearly essential in the Yoga music world. Water lapping and waves crashing (but not too aggressively) are commonly employed, as is falling rain. Occasionally, very occasionally, you’ll get thunder, but not that often because thunder can imply doom. Generally, the rain used sounds like it is falling on some very happy, quenched greenery. Like wet (but not soggy) ferns or perhaps a good rhododendron, though rodo leaves can sound slappy if you’re not careful.

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