My hand feels better today. Yesterday, I woke up feeling as if I’d been bowling all night long. My palm ached. Welcome to middle-age.

Speaking of middle age, my birthday is coming on Sunday. I’ll be 42. When I was a girl, my parents divorced and after my father remarried, my mother married a man who was 42. I still remember the outrage and skepticism that my mother was marrying this “older” man. My dad could not stop mentioning that this other man was 42, and he said it as if 42 were a dirty word. (She was about 35 at the time, I think.) And now I’ll be 42.

The birds have been raucous outdoors ever since the ice melted. Yesterday, I spotted the first Robin of the year, which is a sure sign of spring. I know! Spring! After Christmas ends, I am absolutely ready for spring to arrive and I don’t care that we still have to get through January. Sometime in February, the first green shoots of the crocuses will appear and I will start to imagine warmer breezes and sunny skies. False starts.

My day-to-day life has been very busy lately. I’m babysitting another baby, a 4-month old, during the afternoons. He is the sweetest baby ever with an easy-going temperament. All the kids are thrilled to have a new baby around here. Soon, I will no longer be watching the other two little ones, so the new baby will be our only extra kid around here, unless you count the parade of neighborhood kids who track Douglas fir needles through my house.

I finished “The Prince of Tides” and am deep in to P.D. James’ “Children of Men,” which is oh-so-much better than the movie.

I spent Saturday scrapbooking and finished up my album of pictures from 2002. I had a baby in 2002 and my life, as I knew it, came screeching to a halt. Although she is a delight, my daughter required me to hold and carry her close for the first two years of her life. I am only now regaining my equilibrium and saying to myself, “Okay, now where was I?”

Speaking of that daughter, she whistles now. Wherever she goes, she whistles a jaunty little non-tune, which is endearing and amusing.

I’m registered to go to a writer’s conference at the end of March. I am struggling with the decision to go, though, because it costs quite a lot of money, lasts for five days and it seems silly for me to invest that kind of time and money in something that very well may amount to nothing. On the other hand, why not me? Why not invest some time and money and see what comes of it? I’m so ambivalent . . . and I’m on the verge of talking myself out of going. I don’t know what I’ll do.

Meanwhile, I’m going to finish reading this novel.

What are you reading?

Remember when I had that mysterious photo shoot?

Yesterday, I was in Fred Meyer picking up a few items on sale when I checked the magazine racks to see if the new issue of “First for Women” was out yet. It was! I grabbed the issue, flipped to the table of contents and found the article, “What Stress Did To My Body.” I turned to page 46 and there I found it: (Click for a better view.) I snatched four more copies of the magazine to save for posterity (“Kids, one time your mother appeared in a national magazine on the same page as Mariah Carey!”). The woman behind me commented on my buying five copies of the same issue, so I said in a stage whisper, “I’m in it!” She said, “Congratulations!” and then, suddenly embarrassed, I said, “It’s not a big deal or anything.”

And it’s not, but at the same time, how surreal it is to be featured in a national magazine, even though I happen to be featured as the poster-child for stress-eating, a former stress-eater who gained 75 pounds. And the quotes aren’t exactly words that I uttered. And actually, now I weigh 172, not 180. Oh, and the name of my blog isn’t “Diet Naked,” but still. Start the clock. My fifteen minutes of fame have begun ticking.

Saturday morning found me heading north on I-5 by 8:30 a.m.  I needed to be in Ballard by 10:00 a.m.  According to Mapquest, the journey would take an hour and twelve minutes and I did not want to be late. 

Traffic through Seattle was light, despite the pockets of fog which obscured the city skyline.  I concentrated on staying in the correct lane, which is tricky with all the sudden “Exit Only” signs as you hurtle along the freeway. 

I found the house (“last of three mid-century brick homes on the right”) easily, but since it was only 9:30 a.m., I retraced my route and stopped at a Fred Meyer where I bought a People magazine and gum.  By the time I returned to the house, it was 9:59 a.m. 

I walked up the steps and knocked on the door.  Actually, Kathryn may have opened it before I knocked, come to think of it.  Both she and Tara welcomed me as if I were a friend, not simply the subject of the photo shoot they’d been hired to do.  They both had shoulder length brown hair, teeth that would make any dentist proud and wide-open smiles.

I felt at ease, which surprised me.  I kept waiting to feel nerves, to blurt out something stupid, to develop a facial tic.  But I didn’t.  Kathryn suggested we first look at the clothing she bought and so I followed her down a short hallway to a bedroom.  The bed had an array of blue tops and two pairs of pants, one gray with pin-striping and one khaki.  She draped two shirts over the pants and asked me to try them on.  “They want to show off your figure,” she said.  

I joked that I’d brought industrial strength undergarments, so she laughed.  It was a good thing I’d brought them, let’s just say.

So, we decided on an outfit.  (Rather, they decided.  I just followed their suggestions.) 

Then, Tara began her magic.  We sat facing each other while she smeared and dabbed and painted on my face.  I couldn’t help but notice her toothpaste-commercial perfect teeth.  She wore little make-up, if any, but had a dazzling smile and a zest for her job. 

And so we made small-talk for an hour and a half while she concealed and enhanced and made me look natural. 

Tara mentioned she was 44 years old, though I never would have guessed that from looking at her.  She told me that she’d worked in road construction and as a model earlier in her life.  Kathryn chatted, too, while she set up lights and a backdrop and checked settings on her camera.  She occasionally disappeared into the kitchen to fuss over her elderly, immobile dog.

I am sure I was just a job to them, but I savored the chance to glimpse into these lives so different from mine, and yet parallel in some ways.  (We live in the same area.  We are similar ages.  We’ve found work we’re passionate about.  We are all mothers.) 

The worst part, of course, was standing in front of the camera, trying to look natural, happy and photogenic.  Kathryn would crack a joke or I’d relay a story or Tara would grin her perfect smile and I’ve laugh and the camera would click.  Then, “okay, relax left leg . . . chin forward and down . . . can you clasp your hands behind your back?”  Or they’d both rush at me to smooth my hair or fiddle with my pant legs or pull up my sleeves ever so slightly. 

Oh!  And the funny this is that I didn’t wear my newly purchased mid-rise, boot-cut, lighter-washed jeans or my new boots . . . because they were brown.  I wore Kathryn’s black boots which happened to be my size.

So, I tried to grin.  Kathryn stood on a little stool, so I told her about having my son stand on a ladder to take a picture of me from above so I’d look thinner.  (She wore a wide black belt with a sturdy silver buckle around her size-8 jeans and a black shirt.  Bare feet.  I doubt she’s ever insisted someone stand on a ladder to take a picture of her so she looks thinner!)

I stood in her living room, a clutter-free, bright, cheery room with a giant photographer’s light on my right and a fill-light reflector (I think that’s what it’s called) on my left.  Pinkish rug under my feet, faintly Asian themed.  Luminous wood floors, not a hint of dust anywhere.

Our lives intersected in those three hours and then, she was done.  I changed back into my baggy black shirt and lavender sweater and Gap jeans and thanked them.  As we said good-bye, Tara said, “You are so pretty,” which I took with a grain of salt since she’d told me earlier about seeing beauty in whatever is before her.  (Which is a lovely way to view the world, I have to say.)

All in all, I have to say that meeting both Kathryn, the photographer, and Tara, the make-up artist, was a great pleasure and I’m not just saying that because I told them I write a blog and they may someday find this.  Honestly, spending a Saturday morning with strangers in a Ballard brick home was fun.  Who’d have guessed?

(She showed me one picture in her digital camera and I felt revolted, but perhaps they’ll Photoshop me and I’ll be unrecognizable and as pretty as Tara said.  And I will tell you where you can see those pictures, too, at a later date.  I promise.)