An old school vid… by request. (Could not, for the life of me, figure out how to properly upload this to Facebook… so you get it here again.)

The kids played Cops and Robbers with the neighbor kids this evening (yes, I guess kids still actually play that). Every kid was either a cop, or a robber.

Except Zoe.

She designated herself the “Idvice Guy”.

Capitalizing on her natural ability to boss people dish out helpful advice, she wandered around the yard and shouted things at the other kids as they ran past. Things like: “They went that way!” And: “Run faster!”

Because everyone heeded her helpful advice, neither team had a clear advantage and it ended in a stale mate. The cops and robbers just decided to agree to disagree (plus, they wanted popsicles).

Zoe’s final piece of helpful advice: Now’s the time to invest in real estate.

I try not to be jealous of other people. I try not to covet. Really.

But this chick sorta blows me away. And I wish that there was some kind of magic serum she produced that I could drink, or rub on my scalp, or pour into my bathwater that would give me just a portion of her talent. (Hmm, that last sentence may have sounded slightly weird and stalker-ish.)

But anyway, wow.

She’s just finished writing her fourth book. I’ve read two of them, and plan to read the other two. Also, she’s artistic… with both paintings and doodling. And I don’t mean doodling like how I do it: drawing a stick figure and putting horizontal lines behind him to make him look like he’s running fast. Nay, I mean absent-minded freehand Sharpie to your Fender guitar while you watch Harry Potter kind of doodling. And music? Oh yeah, she does that, too. Bagpipes, harp, tin flute, guitar, piano, and probably a few others that I can’t think of or have never heard of.

Ridiculous!

She put all of this talent to work and made a trailer for her newest book. So: she wrote the book. Then she wrote a score for it, playing many of the instruments. Then she did all kinds of paper cut-out stop animation to make a cool trailer.

Again, ridiculous.

Maggie Stiefvater’s “Linger”, ladies and gentlemen:

And now excuse me… I have 500 words to eek out today and a really fast running stick figure to draw on the phonebook cover while I sort through medical bills.

We all have our own talents.