Rachel, Tim and I were delighted to be invited to the authors@google series today at company’s headquarters in Mountain View, CA. We told the story of the making of Not Quite What I Was Planning to a crowd of Googlers who we presume were not also going to see the tennis star James Blake later in the day, or didn’t have a massage scheduled (Google: they’re not like us). We’ll post the video once it’s on YouTube.

A beautiful bonus was that just a few days ago we learned that two of the book’s contributors, Jenn Shreve (“Blogging is easy. Writing is hard”) and Charles Warren (“On the playground, alone. 1970, today”), worked at the company; both joined us and graciously read their words aloud. We toured the company’s groovy campus, learned that 40 percent of the place’s electricity is provided by the solar panels in the parking lot, suggested they cut a deal with SMITH for six-word text ads (kidding! sort of…) and ate our weight in organic food and all-natural smoothies. I even managed to work in two shots of wheat grass within our two-hour visit (my memoir for this week? “On book tour with bronchitis; bleck”). But the highlight of the afternoon? Balls. We got to play in a box of balls.