Happy Valentine’s Day. Or Galentine’s Day, a new term I just heard.

Picture below is a 3am selfie (selfy?) taken by Emily. Great picture, and good illustration of why having kids is for the young. At 3am I wouldn’t be smiling like that.

In political news, the cockroach scuttled away again. No conviction. Not surprising, the Senate is a cesspool. This illustrates just one more way our democracy is broken due to votes being based on land mass rather than population. From Ari Berman:

“Insane stat via @atausanovitch: 34 GOP senators representing just 14.5% of population can block conviction of president who tried to violently overthrow American democracy. US Senate & American politics deeply broken.”

Some odd and sad news about The Boss. It seems Springsteen was sitting atop a hill in a park in NJ, on his motorcycle. A fan pulled in beside him and asked to share a shot of tequila with him (yeah, that happens to me all the time), and Bruce obliged. A cop saw it and when Springsteen drove away on his bike, the cop pulled him over and arrested him. His breathalyzer test showed him at .02%, way below the legal limit of .08%, but they still booked him. You’d think the officials in Asbury Park would give their most famous citizen a break and move on, but…apparently not.

Good news and bad news on the basketball front. Good news, UK men’s hoops team finally won one. They tried hard to give the game away in the final six minutes, but survived. The bad news was I somehow failed to record the game and tuned in at the six minute mark; I missed the first 34 minutes of the game. Cats were up 12 when I tuned in, and in only a couple of minutes it was 77-77. Maybe I shouldn’t watch the games at all?

Last week was exhausting. My “retirement” schedule finally caught up with me. Work deadlines and meetings from two board positions and two consulting gigs, plus an online writers’ conference, plus setting up and then tearing down a quick trip to KY via airlines (longer story there), plus not enough sleep…it all added up. No golf, no exercise. Typical of life – you need exercise the most precisely when you don’t have time for it. This Sunday finds me badly in need of a recharge.

One real positive was that I did my first-ever agent pitches as part of the writers’ conference. That was a little nerve-wracking, but it went well. Both the agents I pitched my novel to said they would like to see it. I don’t know what the stats on that outcome are, but it’s certainly better than their giving a polite “no thanks, that’s not my kind of book” or similar. So that tells me I’m doing something right. And that I need to get busy and finish this latest draft of the book.