Patti and John had a really good dad. It’s terribly sad that he’s gone.

We spent so much time with their family that no one ever thought to take pictures. A different era.

I don’t have a single picture of Big John, which is what we called him to distinguish him from John, his son. Although we didn’t call him that to his face, my sister reminds me: for years, when speaking to him, we addressed him as Mr. Long.

I took this pic on a special occasion in 1978, when Little John and Patti took 3rd place — admittedly, out of 4 — in a local canoe race. It’s a reminder that Little John actually was once little.

I remember when Big John’s father passed away. I was eavesdropping, I must have been, poised on the stairs from the kitchen down to the rec room. Now that his father had died, Big John said, he wasn’t John Vincent Long Jr. anymore; he was John Vincent Long II — there was no longer anyone to be Junior to. I couldn’t imagine him being junior to anyone.

R.I.P., John Vincent Long II.

That table sat in my parent’s house in Rhode Island. It was at the end of the entryway; it’s where we threw the mail. I always liked it, and when they did that we’re-moving-put-your-requests-in thing, the table became mine. It’s a game table — pull it away from the wall, fold out a leg and you’ve got a perfect circle.

But I don’t play games on it, because sometime later my father, after catching an episode of Antiques Roadshow, informed me that the table might just be the most valuable piece of furniture our side of the family owns.

Uh oh.

Now when I have parties, I hide the table. I put it in the room with the shut door and the pets, shelter it in a closet, pushing aside the coats. Which is of course ridiculous.

I try to leave it out. But I don’t put anything on it, and I put things (read: books) on every other horizontal surface. And then women who stop by drop purses on it, because you have to drop a purse somewhere. Which is totally anxiety-making. I mean, they probably don’t have viscous fluid leaking through their purse lining at that very second, but YOU NEVER KNOW.

Right. Not rational.

So on the edge of turning the thing into a neuroses-laden cherished secret hideaway table, I came up with a new plan. It’s in my office. I think it’s going to hold something. You know, it may not be all that valuable; it’s not as fancy as the one on TV. It’s old, but I don’t think it’s mahogany; maybe the Antiques Roadshow twins would see it and shrug.

And that chair? I fished it out of the basement of my parents’ house when I lived in NY and needed furniture. A corner of the seat has teethmarks from one of our dogs who liked it down there, and found the chair first. My parents said it was broken, but I was desperate. And all it needed was a caster.

It was so hot at the West Hollywood Book Fair that the astroturf reflected heat and light back up at you; I got a suntan from the feet up. Then the next day: hottest ever in LA, 113 degrees before the thermometer broke. So dry the tips of my fingers are cracking. I feel like Ringo Starr with a laptop instead of drumsticks; at any minute, the hands are going to go.

The duck doesn’t much like them, either.

I just got back from New York, where I interviewed John Waters on stage, thanks to Word, the bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn; spent all day Saturday in the board meeting for the National Book Critics Circle; attended the Brooklyn Book Festival Sunday; and talked to a literary figure Monday for an upcoming piece in the LA Times.

I also took a ferry across the East River at sunset — can you see the teeny tiny Statue of Liberty?

If I tried to list everything I’ve done since my last post, though, this would get a little long. I’ve written lots and gotten out of the house every now and then. I’m now a staff writer at the LA Times. I’m doing laundry. I’ll see you at the Jonathan Franzen event tonight, and back here soon.

I could have sworn I had another week. But I bought the ticket to see John Irving and never put the details in my calendar, so when he was across town being interviewed I was sitting cozily at home, reading. Clueless.

Perhaps I was slightly distracted by my fabulous orchid. When the American Orchid Society held its conference in town recently, my dad, who’s a judge, came into town (I managed to get his flight info into my calendar) and showed me around. He helped me buy some orchids that should be happy in the LA weather, including this one. I love its crazy spidery blossoms, which opened up during a sweltering day. I don’t know its name.

And I feel like I should — my family is given to taxonomy. My grandmother kept an Audubon book or two next to a set of binoculars near her picture window, to figure out exactly what each bird was. Naming the bird was as vital as watching the bird. So, too, walks through the woods would involve the names of trees, of bushes, of creeping vines. I can tell you how to distinguish Poison Ivy (shiny leaves that come off the stem in threes), although I suppose anyone who went to summer camp can do that, too. But anyway, I feel like I ought to know the names of things, like this orchid, but all I can do is show it to you.

You’d think with my varied responsibilities that I could get away with wearing the same pair of jeans without encountering any of the same people two days in a row. But not today; I’m heading to the same office as yesterday, and the pants, the pants they are the same.

This used to make me crazy, crazy enough to fill closets with pants and skirts. In fact, I have lots of eligible skirts, but they’re all wrinkled, because I don’t have quite enough skirt hangers, and while the ironing board is now set up right in the middle of the living room I haven’t quite gotten around to using it, other than as a resting place for clean laundry. I could buy more jeans, if I could make more time, if I didn’t bail from shopping errands when parking becomes a drag, if I really just cared more about the jeans and the skirts and the clothes, which I did used to care about. Like I said, it made me crazy, once.

Because when I was 13, the absolute worst age for a girl to have to wear the same pair of jeans two days in a row, I didn’t have enough pants and skirts to make it through the week. Although then it was pants, really — I wore pants: the skirts weren’t cute until high school. Then, I only had 4 pairs of pants, which meant I had to recycle one pair during the week, which took lots of planning as it was 8th grade and some classes met every day and others didn’t, so then it wasn’t so much that no one would see the doubled-up pair of pants as simply minimizing the exposure without repeating the pattern enough to get noticed, because getting noticed for something like not enough pants in 8th grade would have been just about the worst thing ever, other than all those other worst things ever, which there was, honestly, a really long paradeful of when I was 13.

Did I mention that, of my 4 pairs of pants, one was bright yellow?

This was of course my own doing. Like a crow, I am drawn to the shiny. But when faced with an inadequate supply of pants, a BRIGHT YELLOW pair is an added complication.

Today, my jeans are not yellow. But it’s possible they’re coming off. Maybe there’s something clean that I overlooked — time to go check the ironing board.

My sister blew into town last week for my birthday (she’s the taller, blonder one) and we did much walking around LA, particularly from one happy hour to the next. That’s the Edison behind us, which was not my favorite of the downtown bars we visited, but which did have the cheapest drinks — early on Thursdays, you can get the house cocktail for 35 cents.

In non-birthday, non-drinking news, I talked to the Irish Independent (more on authors coming back from the grave) and to the Guardian again, this time about the former husband of Elizabeth Eat Pray Love Gilbert getting a book deal for his story about finding himself after the end of their relationship. I do wish his story was something like whoring and brawling and turning into a slovenly, porn-watching bachelor, but it sounds like he traveled the world to find his spiritual center. Ah well.

I turned in a book review at the LA Times. I’m building a website for a literary agent. I went to the Getty last week — not to work, which I often do — but to eat and drink like a Roman.