I missed Day #2 of Cynthia Lord's challenge, because I am often lame, but here is a picture of my high school alma mater, William Penn H.S., in New Castle, DE. It's the high school used in all of my Lara books (as opposed to the Lola books, which are thus far set in Fort Wayne, Indiana), only for fictional purposes I renamed it Haley High, home of the Comets and not the Colonials.



And since this is technically Day #3 of the challenge, I offer you this shot of the iconic Charcoal Pit sign.



I have to admit that I'm cheating a little here. See, the Charcoal Pit is actually in Wilmington, not New Castle. But it's a very Delaware kind of place, and it does appear in a couple of my books, so I don't feel like I'm straying too far from the rules.

Now.

There's this show on A&E called INTERVENTION, which I used to be totally addicted to (no pun intended - okay, well, maybe slightly intended). Anyway, I stopped watching it for a while because each episode was such a harrowing experience. Will the 19-year-old meth head get clean, or will he end up dead in a ditch? Oh, look, the middle aged alcoholic decided to get help - wait, why isn't she boarding the plane? Oh no! But for some reason I DVR'd last night's episode, which was about Sandra, a thirtysomething mother of who who'd spent the last 10 years addicted to prescription drugs. Watching her addiction wasn't so hard. It mostly consisted of her begging for pills, falling asleep mid-conversation, or talking in the kind of random sentence fragments that you expect from someone who probably hasn't had natural sleep in a decade. No, the really hard part was watching her 11-year-old son Dakota sob himself sick over his junkie mom. He was the one who found her during one of her overdoses. He was in the car with her during one of her many under-the-influence crashes. He was the one who'd come home from school to find his mother passed out in bed, and not know whether she was dead or alive.

Then, during the actual intervention, Dakota was the first to read his letter. He started talking about how he had no positive memories of his mother, and how he remembers this one time when he had an asthma attack and she was passed out and he would've died if his older brother KC hadn't saved him. It was absolutely heartbreaking. I started crying so hard my stomach clenched up and I thought I might be sick. This poor kid! And I won't even get into the aforementioned older brother, who held his emotions in so tightly that whenever he got pissed off, he'd make holes in walls and stuff.

Thankfully, Sandra went into treatment. She's still there, apparently, and sober since February. So at least it ended on a positive note.

Up next: more hometown pics, a GCC tour, and my (belated) take on the Massachusetts teen "pregnancy pact" scandal.