When I should be working so hard on my book and on a treatment for an animated feature a producer and I are developing, instead I have been obsessing over a cotton candy machine for Ava and Chet's joint birthday party. How hard could it be to find one in the city of Los Angeles? In fact, it turned out to be damn near impossible. Finally, however, I did find one almost down in San Diego and they're too busy to deliver it. I so want to make this party special for them, but I can't afford to spend thousands on it. Compounding matters, I just returned from Ava's last day of school pool party at the home of a very nice and obscenely successful TV and feature writer-director. No cotton candy machine, thank God, but a snow cone maker (that also made mid-afternoon Margueritas for some like me) a popcorn cart and a hotdog cart. Not one but two lifeguards, a staff of maybe four setting out and clearing mountains of food. And oh, a lovely pool and a huge jumper in the back with a surfboard mounted on a spring and a paid staff to take digital pictures of the kids pretending to ride a wave.

Our party the day after tomorrow will have pizza, water and Pepsi. I splurged at Cosco for the Arrowhead water 35-pack ($5.19) instead of the Cosco bottled water ($3.39) because I'm a hopeless snob. As much as I say I don't care what anybody thinks I do. And as for entertainment, no clown, no magician no nobody. Ava's too old for a dress-up character to show up and Chet would only be interested in Spiderman. A very cute ex-girlfriend of a friend of mine used to play Ariel from the Little Mermaid at kids parties. She said some horny dad would invariably insist on helping her lug her gear out to her car.

As Groucho Marx used to say, "I resemble that remark."