For those if you in sunny AZ (okay, just the Phoenix/Tempe area), I will be in your neighborhood this week. If you happen to be home at 11:30-ish a.m. tomorrow, I’ll be on Good Morning Arizona on KTVK TV-3. (Of course by then you will have already seen my friend Tammy on The Today Show talking about her 105-lb weight loss!)

Tomorrow night the 11th, I’ll be doing a teen writing workshop (for teens) at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe at 5 p.m. and a reading and signing there at 7 p.m. Details here.

Tuesday the 12th you can catch me at Barnes & Noble, 21001 Tatum Blvd in Phoenix, 7 p.m.

Wednesday I’ll be back home and at the Sugarhouse Barnes & Noble, which is the coolest B&N in the valley – 7 p.m.

And then on Thursday, you can celebrate Valentine’s Day by listening to me on BlogTalkRadio with Mr. Media! And, you can call in with your burning questions. I will remind you about this closer to Thursday, but for now you can go to the site and set it up to remind you and the call-in number is right there as well.

Friday I will sleep.

In other news, we saw There Will Be Blood yesterday. Fortunately, there wasn’t that much blood. If you don’t know, the movie is based on an Upton Sinclair novel, Oil! Sinclair’s The Jungle was one of my favorite “assigned readings” in high school, though the last 30 pages or so fell apart for me as Sinclair was working harder at making a point than telling a story. Apparently, the same thing happens in Oil!because the last 15 minutes of the movie felt like that, too. However, Paul Thomas Anderson is indeed brilliant, and G. and I always find ourselves having days-long conversations after seeing his movies. The movie felt a little Flannery O’Connor-esque, too, with charlatans and family secrets and battles of will and personal demons. (Fortunately, for most of There Will Be Blood I understood more or less what was going on. I can’t say the same for the O’Connor novel, Wise Blood, that this reminded me of.) Daniel Day-Lewis is truly mesmerizing in the movie and I will not be at all surprised if he wins the Oscar.

Last, I’ll leave you with these pictures from the SF trip – the first is of Mark and me in front of our old grade school (which has an all-new building). The second is me thuggin’ in front of the old corner store near the school. We basically went in there and told the guy that we grew up in the neighborhood and that I stole candy from the store. Sorry! He didn’t seem all that surprised. (And by the way, if you’re looking for a mint condition VHS of Slimnastics you can find it there.)