My little sister is a total Roman Candle when she’s in her celeb mode. It’s really breath taking to watch, and easy to take pictures of!

Up in Palo Alto shooting Soleil for her new and happily chaotic web blog series. This time with gravity as we did a night of her book signing to support J/P HRO and their relief efforts in Haiti. The glitterati of Silicon Valley were there. And it’s funny, those big stars are so very, very down to earth. Their world of worth is based on merit, ideas and execution. The real stuff. Very refreshing coming out of Hollywood to that expensive little slip of the world south of SF, a college party with beer and a taco truck, and the minds that fuel Tech. Soleil has really built an impressive cadre of admirers. She is loved in her adulthood by all the right people.

We clean right up when there’s linen on the table.

CHICK party at Soleil’s yesterday. Ashton was their guest of honor and they gave him no shortage of attention. He ate it up.

While with Soleil and J and their daughters and ours at this very respected Pennsylvania Avenue establishment, I asked our hipster waitress if she ever got the urge to take the War Hawks she often served to task. Ilse added, “Or pee in their soup?”

What a beautiful meeting of the tribe tonight. Thank you so much for your generosity of gift and of spirit. I came home, jolly and spent. The rain is coming though and there was a 1/2 cord of wood filling the entire back of the pick up. I hauled up my girls, hauled up my booty of gifts, and then while Ilse put the babes to bed I went solitary into the job of trip after trip bringing up the wood. It was invigorating and relaxing, it was an assurance, among all the other lovely bits assembled in my life just now, that I’m a man, and not a broken or lame one at that. The back has been made strong again, and when it aches, I simply remember to lift with my belly. That’s really the trick, bear backward into that Chi center and it spurts back power, out into all the rest of you. And promise yourself the ice pack when all the activity’s past. And so now I’m here, bathed and oiled and am sitting with Miller, beginning again now from the start, from The Tropic of Cancer, because he began writing it all when he was 40, and the ice is wedged behind me and my feet are so gratefully in their new soft wool. What amazing slippers you’ve given me. By all these strappings I am a Prince indeed. And this is a courtly passing, the entrance into 40 and all the four decades under the belt entails. All hail the coming of the new age! All hail the middling of life, when life is as sweet as it may be. Hail! And read, and heal, and work the heart up into a pumping froth and see and enjoy and record it all and eventually get a little sleep. Thanks again, it’s wonderful turning 40.

A lovely celebration of the wee’est of all this heavily lady laden family’s ladies.