Winston's latest

Bad monkey = me. I'm all backlogged on comment replies and even getting around to everybody's blogs. If you ever read the Little House on the Prairie books and remember the book where Laura's too busy partying it up at church socials and competing in spelling bees to study, that's sort of what my life has been like lately.

But please excuse me for one more day, and also please send some happy thoughts/vibes/prayers (however you roll) for Winston, who is having a minor surgery today for an ear polyp that was discovered over the weekend. It's not the polyp I'm worried about (I'm told they're mostly benign, and you could really drive yourself crazy speculating otherwise), but general anesthesia always carries a risk.

I'm also a little worried that this could affect the hearing in his left ear, but considering he's not a very good listener, I'm not going to lose any sleep over that for the time being.

It began when he gave a big old yelp at about 4 am Saturday, and then later that day proceeded to yelp whenever anyone touched his left ear. We went to the vet and they found the polyp.

So, I have no actual reason to freak out, but I still hate to have him put under. He's such a little guy.

I should put "little" in quotes, though, because he's back up to almost 20 pounds. (The container of sugar cookies he managed to find and decimate the other day certainly didn't help.)

Thanks, everybody. I'll post an update when he's out of surgery.

My life as a pioneer woman.

Two days ago, the unthinkable happened:

I had finally managed to lure the husb down to the sewing room. I often try to get him to come hang out with me while I work, but he doesn't particularly like going downstairs. But on this day, the top story of the house was very warm, and the basement level was nice and cool.

Almost immediately, my sewing machine broke. Something happened where the needle thread gets caught under the little plate where all the secret, magic stuff goes on. I tried repeatedly, but couldn't fix it.

Then, the next morning, as I was sitting at the computer, the husb comes in and says, "I need the computer for a shoot we're doing over the next two days."

I beg your pardon?

But these mythical "shoots" are apparently more importantly than my voting on lolcats over at I Can Has Cheezburger, so I surrendered the machine (with great misgivings and lots of whining to show how serious I was, naturally).

That night, I got home from work to find that the shoot was still ongoing, thereby robbing me of the third of the four essential items in my home (my husband--the fourth is Winston, but he was grouchy). Add this to our chronic lack of groceries and the fact that our DVR is full of high-def episodes of CSI: Miami (don't ask me why, I gave up on David Caruso a loooong time ago), and I was marooned.

I wandered around the silent house, occasionally pausing to look at the empty desk where the computer belonged. Then, clearly driven to madness by the starkness of my situation--

I went downstairs and started... cleaning. On a weeknight.

The big room downstairs has become a bit of a catch-all, especially with the new outdoor-type supplies that have to live inside. I rotated the couch and started organizing and making various little piles and putting things away.

Eventually, I hit a wall and went back upstairs. I found something random to eat and sat down to watch The Stepford Wives, feeling strangely like a Stepford wife myself. That movie is so strange. Especially now that it's so ingrained in pop culture--every time they say, "There's something wrong in Stepford," you want to shout at the screen, "What do you expect? It's STEPFORD! The place with the wives!"

Last night, knowing there was neither sewing machine nor computer nor husb waiting for me at home, I stopped and meandered around the grocery store a little. Then I got home and found that the DVR had made room for America's Next Top Model (which I am starting to have a problem with, as none of the winners actually go on to become, you know, MODELS). I prepped a little food, sat down on the couch, and watched Tyra Banks ham it up.

This morning, like a dream, I woke to find the computer back in its spot. The husb is also in his spot, and Winston is more sleepy than grouchy. The sewing machine has not yet been repaired, but I have a loaner.

Close call with reality, eh?

PS - Bath math:

getting conditioner for hair + looking at face wash = conditioner all over face

PPS - Winston is three years old! His birthday was Tuesday.

And so it grows...

(or, "Wishful Thinking")

We recently had some landscaping done in our backyard. What was once just ivy is now a terraced little yard, and what was once a deck that belonged to a monstrous 1980s party hot tub is now refinished and furnished with barbecue supplies.

Because of this, and also because of books like Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and The Omnivore's Dilemma, I have taken a keen interest in trying to grow some plants. Some edible, some not.

I have a history of killing plants. Or, more euphemistically, not keeping them alive. So I decided that maybe growing things from scratch would give me more of a sense of involvement and responsibility. I bought some seeds and planted bell peppers and oregano in a couple of little pots. Two bell pepper seeds sprouted, but the oregon was silent. So one day, when I was bored, I took a few garlic cloves that had sprouted in the kitchen and stuck them in the oregano pot. Naturally, four days later, hundreds of little oreganos sprouted out of the soil.

Last weekend, I transplanted some things and planted some new things, and now we're playing the waiting game.

I was right about being more invested, too. I water those little buggers every day.

Here's a tour of how things look right now.



This is my shade garden, at the side of the house where the hammock (a $15 cloth number, criminally comfortable) is... mostly shady, especially later in summer as the sun goes off behind the trees. This is all new planting. The tall guy at the back will be a fern; so will the terra cotta round pot. The two in the foreground should be begonias. No, will be! Will be begonias. Positive thinking.



This is a place under the overhang of the downstairs balcony where I dropped some of the oregano sprouts. I can't believe that so many of those seeds sprouted at once. Talk about an embarrassment of riches, and poor planning. I stuck this ball of dirt here as an afterthought, hoping it might decide to fill in the awkward area between the ivy and the little curb. That big green thing is new; it's not oregano. I don't know what it is. I am also trying to grow a leather strap, apparently.



These are my sunny plants. In the back are Peruvian Daffodil and asparagus; then some garlic (thriving! go figure), mint, and oregano (assuming they pull through); the rectangle is my bell peppers, although I'm losing hope because they've been that size for weeks now; and in front is another Peruvian Daffodil.

The front daffodil pot is notable because something has dug through it, and I'm not even sure the bulb is still in there. Apparently skunks will root around in pots and eat bulbs. This makes me exceedingly sad, but I don't know how to check without potentially destroying it, so I'm just going to keep watering it and then maybe eventually plant some basil or something.

So that's the excitement in my life. It's amazing how much more fun this stuff is when you're a grown-up than when your parents force you to do it as a child.

I'll provide updates occasionally, and if anything exciting happens. Cross your fingers, and we may have a full-blown leather strap plant before long!

Oh, and the big news, thanks to this post by Jemima Bean is that we have a peach tree! I saw the photo of the flowers and asked her what they were, because we had some. She replied that they were peaches, and sure enough when we looked more closely at the tree, there were fuzzy baby peaches on it! Hundreds of them, actually.

The guy we bought the house from knew there was a peach tree but never remembered it bearing any fruit (probably because it used to be so shady in the yard). But now... peaches! Peaches! Peaches! We pruned the tree ruthlessly, as apparently is the way to maximize peaches, and now we are just waiting... waiting... waiting...

sad ending :-(

I just got a call from the kind people at the hummingbird rescue. The bird died. Apparently she had a back injury. So maybe it was a collision after all.

Nature is so mean sometimes!

Poor little thing.

Wednesday morning math

+



+


(yes, that is a hole cut out of our screen door)

+



+




+

the fact that I really should have learned my lesson by now about birds and our balcony

=


(meaning, this is all that will be hanging from my balcony from now on)

(the dear bird herself is now in good hands, and the fact that it latched onto our screen door and wouldn't let go likely has more to do with an illness than with any kind of collision)

Edited to say, the poor bird died. :-( At least she died in a warm, safe place.

Shopping: The Epic Saga

I typically purchase shoes at stores whose names include one or more of the following words:

city
village
outlet
universe
-o-rama
-less
-mart
bin
basement
bucket
barn

or, if I'm feeling fancy:

pavilion.

The most expensive pair of shoes I've ever owned were purchased at a bridal warehouse and subsequently dyed purple to match a bridesmaid dress. This was a painful purchase, because the store had botched the dye job the first time--gone a shade too indigo--and offered me the "off color" shoes for free. In this corner: free. In this corner, $69. Thinking, however, of the dear friend whose wedding it was, I ponied up the dough and took the correct shoes home.

*SIGH*

(My own wedding shoes were purchased for $4 from the clearance rack at the outlet store. Yes, I'm bragging.)

Yesterday, my friend Sue (not her real name) came over, and we went to lunch. Sue is très chic and très fashionable. When she comes to my house, I sometimes encourage her to examine my wardrobe and shoedrobe and either comment or select items to throw in the charity pile. One time, we were doing this in my clothes-closet, and she said, "I have to stop. You won't have any clothes left if I get rid of everything I hate." When I protested that I had a very nice array of clothing, she informed me that forty-five of these shirts do not a satisfactory selection make.

So we ate some lunch, and then I was like, "Well, there's a shoe store in this shopping center, should we stop in for a look-see?"

(Despite all that followed, we did end up shopping at a "warehouse", so at least I've stayed true to myself on that account.) I had barely had time to look for the "Women's, Serviceable" section when Sue appeared before me holding approximately twenty shoeboxes, which she piled on the floor. I slipped my foot tentatively into one shoe after another while she watched.

"These hurt the ends of my toes," I said.
"These are too flat on top."
"Doesn't it look like my little toe is about to pop out the side?"
"That one part is scratchy."
"These rub my ankle."
"The heel on these is really stiff."

Finally, I found a general complaint that applied to nearly every shoe: "I can feel it touching my foot." (You probably think I'm just saying that for comedic effect. You are so wrong.)

My typical foot apparel consists of: flip flops. So Sue went and pulled some fancy leather flip flops, with detailed top-stitching.

"These are too manly," I said. Sue raised an eyebrow and said, "Really?" in a tone of voice that made me glad I've never told her that one pair of my flip flops is actually from the men's department (it was an accident!).

Another fancy flip flop: this one had a little ring that encircled the big toe. "It's suffocating me!" I screeched, shaking my foot like a cat with scotch tape stuck on its paw. "I can feel it touching all of my toe!"

Sue wordlessly returned the shoe to its box.

You or I or any normal human being might, at this point, start to lose hope. You might take a good, long look at your friend and tell her that she is actually too difficult to put up with, and she can go ahead and wear her MEN'S flip flops--yes, you knew, you always knew!--and parade around town just as she pleases.

But not Sue. Oh, no, not Sue. Sue just went and got more boxes, and more, and more, and more. And I put each shoe on, felt it touching my foot or scraping my toe or sticking into my heel, and took it off.

And then, without warning, I put on a little black flat. "Oh," I said. "This doesn't hurt."

Sue's eyes popped open, and she verrrrrry slowly set the other one down. I put my second foot in the second shoe.

"Oh," I said, shuffling around and doing my fashion-model walk, arms posed as artistically as a Sears mannequin's. "These are very nice. How much do they cost?"

"We aren't worrying about that," Sue said. What she didn't say was: "How about you total up all of the crappy shoes you've bought over the years that you can't wear because they hurt your feet because you didn't try them on?" But I knew we were both thinking it.

So lather, rinse, repeat, for each of the six pairs of shoes I bought, including--after I had apparently worn down Sue's defenses--this AMAZING pair of soft white loafers with AMAZING tassels.

Then we came home and cleared out twelve pairs of useless (to me) shoes to be donated to Goodwill. Sue then had me try on various new shoes and imagine them combined with various items of clothing. "This is too depressing," I said. "I don't even have any pants that fit. I guess I need to get some new jeans."

I was too busy looking at my dumpy self in the mirror to see Sue's eyes light up, but I'm sure they did.

Then I told her how, every time I wear that particular pair of jeans to the office, my co-worker calls out, "Hike 'em up, Alender!" every time I hike up my pants, which is apparently about 35 times a day.

And then somehow, everything went blurry, and then I found myself in a dressing room with dozens of pairs of jeans hanging from the walls around me. (When we left the first store, I had the vague feeling that I had hurt the saleslady's feelings by saying, "Sue will tell me," when she asked what I thought, and saying, "Sue will get it for me," when asked if I needed another size or style.)

At the second store, I tried on somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 items, and bought four. It was strange (and a lot of hard work!) to actually try things on, in multiple sizes. But I learned a really valuable lesson--even within ONE store, the sizes vary wildly between items.

This is such a crock I can't even begin to describe it. I worked in retail clothing 13 years ago, and we had sizes that actually meant something. The company had "fit models"-- women who exemplified the company's size 6, 8, 10, 12. Clearly, that concept has been discarded, because at this particular store, I actually AM a 6, 8, 10, and 12, depending on the item and the year of manufacture.

As puzzling as that was, I did eventually find two pairs of pants (in wildly different sizes) that fit. Now I am a little in awe of the possibilities that lie ahead. I will wear my new jeans with some sort of shirt, and I will put on a pair of butter-soft loafers and I will walk around like I own the place.

And next time someone shouts, "Hike 'em up!", I will know that they are not talking to me, but to some other sad lady with saggy-baggy pants, and somewhere, Sue is looking up into the night at the shadow of a high-heeled boot on the moon, and she will take the secret exit behind the floor-to-ceiling shoe rack, climb into the Fashionmobile, and no doubt save the day.

Ant ya ever coming back, ant ya?

The husb heard some snooty-foodie radio show about parsnips. He told me they look like white carrots and are supposed to be delicious. I said, "Hey, they have those at the co-op grocery near my office." So I bought some parsnips, but they were actually daikon root, which I thought was a fancy name for "parsnips". I was, as usual, wrong. Unsure exactly what to do with them, we left the bag on the counter.

Two days later, the ants arrived.

I have a history with ants. I hate them. They always seem to show up just when I'm at some breaking point or another.

Incident 1:

I was in seventh grade, ugly and unfashionable and unpopular and all zitty, and we had just left our old house to live in our new house. Life in the new house was super stressful, because the people who lived there before us somehow hid the fact that they were horrible slobs. The day we showed up to move in, they were like, "Oh, our daughter needs to stay another day, is that okay?" And they left so much crap in the house, including dirty dishes in the dishwasher--that we were all a wreck. I hated my bedroom, which was dirty and gross and the closet was filled with these creepy tiny glass animals.

So, I woke up one morning, feeling all defeated (this was a daily occurrence), and found that there were GIANT ANTS swarming in my bedroom. They were on the walls, on the bed, in my clothes, all over the floor--canvassing the place. We called this type "carpenter ants", and they were 1/2 inch (1.25 cm) long. I couldn't even get dressed because they were in my open dresser drawers. I even remember what I wore to school that day: my denim vest/shorts combo, over a turquoise faux polo (fauxlo?), with my turquoise Minnie Mouse socks, which I had totally intended to stop wearing after sixth grade. They were the only "safe" clothes, and I was quite aware that I looked even more unfashionable than usual.

Just another day of feeling ugly and gross (I believe the clinical term for that is "middle school"), made 100 times worse by ants.

Incident 2:

The day I moved to California--flew across the country, anxiety eating me alive (because I am not really a wandering spirit, and pretty much moved out here because the someday-husb was moving, and I couldn't think of anywhere else to go after college), I got to the apartment complex where he'd found a one-bedroom, and it was in the ghetto and there were a lot of ladies of ill repute living there (although the place was fortress-like and nicely kept, but let's face it, don't go outside the gates at night, and if you are one of my friends who makes fun of me for not liking to leave my house, have some compassion because I think it all started there)... so I went to put my stuff away--

And my suitcase was FULL of ants. Just overflowing with them. Ants everywhere, in and on all of my clothes, etc. And it was horrible, horrible, because I didn't even know where to start to get rid of them. I ended up soaking everything in the tub and then laundering all of it. And getting bitten.

Incident 3:

(Present day.) So anyway, there's this never-ending line of ants, and we have no bug spray in the house (that stuff is noxious anyway), so I went online to look for natural remedies.

#1: Cinnamon. Sprinkle some cinnamon on the ants, and in their path. They dislike it and will go away.
I don't know if they loved the cinnamon--they definitely didn't sit around eating it or anything--but as a deterrent, it was roughly as effective as a rousing rendition of "Happy Birthday!" would have been.

#2: Vinegar. Mix a solution of 1 part water and 1 part white vinegar and spray it in their path. They dislike it and will go away.
I enthusiastically sprayed not only the floor and counter but also each individual ant. This technique did not seem to please the ants, but it did not deter them.

#3: Soap. Make a solution of dish soap and water, and spray lightly on the ants' path.
As an added bonus, this may ruin your floors and also create a horrible slipping hazard. Floors slippery? Check! Ants gone? Nope.

#4: Baby powder. Sprinkle baby powder liberally in the ants path.
At first, this seemed not only incredibly messy but also silly. Like the cinnamon, the ants seemed intent on avoiding the baby powder, but did not seem to take it as a message to turn around and go home. But as I sat there, watching individual ants, something amazing happened--

It worked! One of the most fascinating things was that you could dip your finger in baby powder and trace a circle around an ant--it could even been so faint that you couldn't see it. But the ant in question would be like, "Whoa! Don't want to go that way! Whoa, don't want to go that way! Whoa, don't want to go that way... wait a second...!"

So I sprinkled it liberally (understatement alert) all over the path the ants had taken. I sprinkled it on the wall they were walking down. Then I went to bed.

The next morning, no ants. None. And since then, no ants. None!

Baby powder wins. And then you just wipe it up with a damp paper towel. Who knew?

Ultimate nerd confession bonanza!!! + a little rambling.

(Winston photos dedicated to Tom; please note that they do not reflect the tone or content of the preceding and successive paragraphs.)



First of all, I lied a little, inadvertantly. I did finish the draft yesterday, but then this morning I went back and re-finished it. I figured it doesn't break the two-week wait rule for revisions because it was the end. It turns out Tom was right, and less leprechauns needed to be squashed than I'd previously believed.



I ended up adding a thousand words, but seriously, don't ask me how. But now, it's done. For real. For real real.



The party last night was cool. The young woman being feted was turning 24, and being around a bunch of 24-year-olds reminds me how easy it is to feel old. Like, "when the timer runs out and the kitchen light goes out, everybody scream! AAAAHHHH!" I am young enough yet to appreciate the high-spiritedness that prompts this behavior, but too old to actually join in the screaming.



I ended up leaving rather early, mother-in-law in tow, which worked out nicely. Although it's so windy here! I hate this kind of wind. It feels spiteful. And Winston spent the night at daycare, because I had no idea I'd be such a party wuss. So I missed him. Apparently I am a pack animal.



Happily, the giant tree next to our bed didn't crash into the roof (it never does!) and the pieces of destroyed hot tub in the backyard did not fly through our neighbors' living room windows, so that's cool.



The husb had told someone I was late coming to the party because I'd finished another book, and the very kind recipient of this information congratulated me heartily, which made me feel like I was cheating. It kind of feels like I've finished clearing the rubble at a construction site. "Congratulations! You did it!" It's kind of like, well, I made this mess, I had to clean it up eventually.



But I do appreciate the sentiment, for sure.



Now I shall confess my ultimate nerd-dom, and for anyone who wonders what it takes to make someone complete a whole novel, I say: make yourself a chart.

What? A chart? Yes, a chart. Preferably with some graphs and some mathematical functions.

Be ready. Put on your pocket protectors.

Here is my chart.

Column A is the date.
Column B is total word count.
Column C is the number of words I wrote on any given day (Excel does the math for me)
Column D is the average number of words written at any point, based on the final daily average word count, which can be found at the top of Column C

The first graph reflects both actual words written and the average slope of words written (column D), and I still don't totally understand that violet line, but the husb wanted to see it. And I am nothing if not accommodating. The second graph is words by day.

Let me tell you, nothing will motivate you to write more words more effectively than seeing that your word count for the day looks like a ranch house next to a bunch of skyscrapers.

Okay, I'm feeling a little loopy, so I'm going to go now.

My dog is a grouch and so am I.

Winston and I are in a funk.

You know how you'll be at the store and see something you desperately want, and then you're like, "Oh, but that costs $75 and I don't want to spend that kind of money! I'm saving up for [a rainy day/groceries/gallbladder surgery/a trip to Hawaii]."

And you're all good and feeling great about the money you didn't spend, and then you go home and the plumbing in your kitchen explodes and it costs like $500 to fix it? And you're like, "Dang, I could have afforded that thing at the store after all... of course, I really can't buy it NOW."

That's how I feel on the time management front. I never knew how much free time I had until NOW. I never thought, during all the time I spent sewing skirts and tiny quilts for dogs and even a very low-cut yellow and orange cocktail gown, that at some point that ceaseless supply would dry up, but here we are with a dog show to produce, a manuscript to revise, hundreds of loads of laundry to finish, and thousands upon thousands of special edition holiday calories to consume.

And I have no time to sew. Or to read, really. I get to listen to podcasts in my car, but that's pretty much it. At work, I'm -- how unfair is this?? -- working all day. On the weekends and every morning at 6 am and every evening after I get home, I'm finishing up revisions.

And when I'm not doing all that, I'm obviously whining about it.

Phooey. Winston and I need a week on the beach in Hawaii. With a sewing machine.

Where I am this week.

At the big show. If you're in Los Angeles, you should come out and see the dogs. I'll be there all weekend. (The husb and the guard dog will be home, though, so I wouldn't try anything unless you want Winston's gigantic teethmarks all over your lower legs. To say nothing of the husb's teethmarks!)

Anyway, I have two hours to get ready, pack, finish the pants I'm making (whoops, can't fit last year's suit), and hit the road.

Happy dog show to you all!

Thankful.

Our internet access was out yesterday (operator error), so I didn't have a chance to post this.

First of all, I'm so glad everyone enjoyed the green links and found them useful. I hope people will continue to dig around for more little ways to make a change in their own lives. Baby steps are small, but they do make you more aware. I've found for myself that the awareness trickles down (and up) into other aspects of my life.

I hope the Canadians can track down some similar services!

And now:

Fiddler Jones
The earth keeps some vibration going
There in your heart, and that is you.
And if the people find you can fiddle,
Why, fiddle you must, for all your life.
What do you see, a harvest of clover?
Or a meadow to walk through to the river?
The wind's in the corn; you rub your hands
For beeves hereafter ready for market;
Or else you hear the rustle of skirts
Like the girls when dancing at Little Grove.
To Cooney Potter a pillar of dust
Or whirling leaves meant ruinous drouth;
They looked to me like Red-Head Sammy
Stepping it off to 'Toor-a-Loor.'
How could I till my forty acres
Not to speak of getting more,
With a medley of horns, bassoons and piccolos
Stirred in my brain by crows and robins
And the creak of a wind-mill--only these?
And I never started to plow in my life
That some one did not stop in the road
And take me away to a dance or picnic.
I ended up with forty acres;
I ended up with a broken fiddle--
And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories,
And not a single regret.

-- Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology

Happy belated Thanksgiving. I'm so grateful to have a chance to connect with all of you.

No, YOU take the dog out.

"When I was at your house last week," the landscape contractor says to the husb, "I saw the weirdest thing."

A bobcat? No. A coyote? No. A dog? No.

"It looked like a black panther. Only I don't think it was a black panther. Except that's what it looked like."

Does jogger spray work on panthers?

I'm going to get my Great Pyrenees yet. And then I'm going to make him a harness and let Winston ride around on his back.

A black panther. If only a political joke could be made from this! Or a squirrel joke.

Not that the squirrels around here are pushovers.

That's all, g'night.

I mean, really really dark.

Saturday night, we went to Opaque. It's called a "dining experience", not a restaurant, because it's hosted in the ballroom of a hotel on the Sunset strip. The basic idea is that you eat a meal in pitch blackness. This is supposed to challenge the rest of your senses and also help you realize how much we rely on visual cues when we eat.

Also, it's supposed to be fun (and it was!).

I had read a couple of articles and reviews, and the idea of it made me kind of nervous and giggly. Thinking about it gave me butterflies in my stomach. I just didn't know what to expect.

What's funny is that I had pictured, in my mind, what I thought it would be like... right down to how the place would look. Now, obviously, I have really no idea whether I was close or not, because I didn't get a look at the dining room. You do get a sense of the size and geography of the room, though.

We were introduced to our server, Michael, in the lobby. He was, as the website says will be the case, blind. Our party of four lined up behind him, right hands on right shoulders, and started our little choo-choo procession into the darkness. The entrance is a series of turns that eventually block any trace of light. There's a wall you can touch with your left hand, and fortunately, our table was right at the end of that wall.

It was dark. Darker than dark. But your eyes don't believe it, at first. You keep getting the vague feeling that you can see shapes and shadows articulated out of the blackness, and then you realize that you're just seeing the shapes and shadows of your own vision. I do think there were two really faint lights across the room, but they didn't do anything for our table! And they were behind me, so I didn't fixate on them.

We'd ordered in the lobby, so they brought the drinks in, along with a basket of bread and a cup of butter for each side of the table (somehow the girls ended up on the same side, and so did the boys). N, the girl next to me, kept saying, "Oops, I just touched the butter with my fingers!" and eventually we decided that we're good enough friends just to scoop the butter directly out of the cup using our bread. The boys, more stubborn, tried to use their knives. K, across from me, ended up actually slathering a large amount of butter directly on the tablecloth. We know this because over the course of the evening, he kept sticking his hand in new butter.

Drinking wasn't very hard, but it was anxiety-inducing suddenly to have something on the table that could be knocked over (when we first got there, I couldn't get over the feeling that there was an invisible candle that I would somehow burn myself on). It seems, however, that my many years of pouring drinks for myself have paid off in the ability to blindly pour wine without looking.

When you're in the darkness with people, you find yourself wanting to interact with them by touch. The husb, to get his refill, would set his glass down "by the bread basket". First of all, there were two bread baskets. Second of all, I hated the feeling that I was reaching out for something and that it wasn't reaching out for me... does that make sense? I liked the brush of fingers, knowing that someone was actively grabbing something out of my hand or setting it in my hand.

At first, everyone said they felt more comfortable with their eyes closed, but after a minute, you just relax into it. And after maybe an hour, the swirling, muted colors and shapes in my "vision" seemed to calm down.

Eating in the dark is rather interesting, as well. The salads were great, and I muddled along with my fork as long as I could. Finally, I broke down and used a fork-finger combination. When it came time for the entree, I pretty much gave up immediately. The food was very good, except for what I assume were carrots, which I don't really like (unless they're covered in peanut butter or ranch dressing). I kept finding new food on my plate... while digging around for another piece of macaroni, I'd happen upon a large slice of chicken. I took to giving my extra chicken to K because I wasn't hungry enough. But I used the, "Hold out your hand" technique, because I thought it was Highly Amusing to just stick a piece of chicken in someone's hand.

Dessert was good, but very rich, so I didn't finish it. Finally, we choo-choo trained our way back to the lobby, where we found that for a few minutes, we didn't really look directly at each other. We'd be talking and all kind of staring off in different directions.

I really, really enjoyed myself. The folks I was with were glad they went but said they didn't need to go back, but I kind of want to. I kept trying to think of ways to do something like that at home, but I honestly don't think it's possible (in the first place, who would serve the food?).

So I have to say, if you ever have the chance to experience this kind of dining, go for it. It's a little pricey (although N and K paid for us -- nice friends!), but it's such an interesting little push out of one's comfort zone.

Happy Monday!

Don't try this at home.

Foibles, a list.

Home remedies. Okay, so when I walked Winston yesterday, he somehow managed to pick up and carry home a seedpod from some palm tree, in addition to his rawhide stick that he has to carry when we go out in public. Then he ate the seedpod. I know from past experience that these are not digestible. I know also from past experence that you have approximately three hours to get something before it passes out of the stomach (unless, of course, it just bonks around in there for a week and eventually gets thrown up... in the lobby of a bank... while a little deaf girl is having a really good experience interacting with the nice lady and her puppy... until the puppy vomits all over the place). So, on the advice of a fellow Cavalier owner, I went to the store, bought some hydrogen peroxide, and spoonfed two teaspoons to Winston. He licked the air for a minute, then sat down, then laid down, at which point I thought, "Oh, great, I have the only dog who doesn't throw up from hydrogen peroxide, and now I have to take him to the vet, and they're going to tell me I should have just brought him in --" when suddenly, fireworks. A few unpleasant minutes for both Winston and myself (worse for him, I'm sure), and then the seedpod made its return to the world.

(Note: this technique should NEVER, NEVER, NEVER be used when the object is potentially caustic, like a chemical, or damaging, or sharp, or otherwise suspect.)

Consumer rights. Back in August, when I ordered The Year of Living Biblically by AJ Jacobs (author of The Know-It-All, and who, by the way, claims to be an obsessive Googler of his own name, let's see if we reel him in), I also ordered some other books from Barnes & Noble online. Their shipping solution was to hold them all for two months, until the AJ Jacobs -- this should really turn up some good hits -- book released. Yesterday I got an email saying the books had shipped -- MINUS one of the bargain books in my order. So this morning I fired off a disgruntled email accusing them of all sorts of shenanigans and saying that they should hold the books out of the stock if they're going to sit on the order for two months blah blah blah, and what is waiting in my inbox for me a minute ago? An email saying that last book has shipped.

Let me point out that since it's two separate shipments ANYWAY, they could have shipped the rest of the books in August, but let's let bygones be bygones. Meanwhile, I'm waiting for my reply from customer service, which is sure to be something along the lines of, "Hey, moron, what was that about a missing book???"

Hiatus high jinks. Bosslady called me the other day and said they wanted to push my start date back a week and I was all, "Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!" because to be honest, I love my hiatus with a fiery passion. It was cool for Bosslady because she thought I might be mad. So then as the conversation winds down, she says, "So we'll see you on the 22nd?" and I'm like, "No, the 29th!" and she's like, "I had your start date as the 15th!" and I'm like, "WHY GOD WHY?"

So after all that happiness and excitement I'm right back where I started.

Don't get me wrong. I love my job.

But I looooooooooooooooove my hiatus.

Happy Thursday! Doesn't 30 Rock debut tonight? Yeehaw!

PS - Just in case, let's punctuate: A.J. Jacobs

PPS - AJ Jacobs, if you're reading this, I'm excited about your new book.

Wow, this one is about writing!

Yeah, for real. Only because things are going well and today I had a little mini-breakthrough that I really like.

I was thinking about this yesterday, because sometimes I stop to think that (with the pushed pub date), when this book comes out, it will have been seven years since I started it.

Yeah.

That's a lot of years, isn't it? Seems that way to me, anyway.

But what I realized is this: you always read agent blogs or authors' blogs where they talk about having your two first books hiding in a box under the bed, or in a drawer, and I realized: Bad Girls Don't Die -- it IS my first two books. This especially hits me anytime I reach a passage that I know has been rewritten multiple times, getting better each time. I can recite the original, or the v. 2, even while staring at a page that contains a completely new version.

I basically think of this book as "Book-Writing Class". I've learned so much about structure, pacing, characters and their motivations etc.

Of course there's plenty more to learn, isn't there?

I guess I'd better get back to work. Although I have to say, the construction next door (going on month... 16...? To build one house...?) is especially horribly loud today.

Also, in the "huh?" category, our mailman last week asked if we could move our trash cans -- or our mailbox, which, by the way, is a slot in the wall of the garage -- because our trash smelled. In the first place, it's, what, four feet of trash cans that he has to pass? In the second place, maybe -- just maaaaaaaybe -- the smell is coming from the port-o-potty just over the property line? To which he said, "Maybe they can move the port-o-potty."

Yeeeeeah, I don't know. These are the "why on earth can't we park in front of your driveway as we chuck our chocolate milkshakes at the house across the street?" type of construction workers, not the Boy Scout kind.

Deliberateness: Part 2

"Tomorrow" is such a flexible concept, don't you think? That's why I used it three days ago. Because I knew that every day is a new tomorrow, and by saying I would continue that thought "tomorrow", I was giving myself freedom to ruminate for a few days.

(That's the official story. The unofficial story is, I need help with time management.)

So. We know a little about my food journey by now. I have to say, I met the husb and some friends for dinner at a pub last night, and looking at the menu left me in a daze. Finally I ordered a Cobb salad and some mozzarella sticks (just picture a field of free-range mozzarella sticks grazing peacefully), and of course ended up with heartburn, probably because of the deli meat chopped up in my salad.

Oh well.

Now, on to the next segment.

On October 1, I am starting a project/experiment/what-have-you called Wardrobe Refashion. The basic idea is, for two months (four or six for the brave souls) you avoid buying retail clothes. Undergarments, shoes, and work-related items are okay. Everything else is either thrifted, made from scratch, or refashioned out of the resources available to you at home. You get a couple of screw-up allowances, maybe one per month. And you're supposed to report in on the group blog, either to post your alternative clothing or to confess to a transgression.

I'm not a clotheshorse. Regardless of what I may spend on food and wine, most of my clothes come off of sale racks (or from Mormon websites whose shirts are long enough to reach past the tippy-top of one's jeans). This is good, in that I'm not obsessed with what I wear, and bad, in that I buy a lot of clothes that don't fit well, don't look good, or are maybe cute but turn out to be poorly made (cough ** anything from Urban Outfitters ** cough).

I have two laundry baskets full of "condemned clothing". Some of it is set to be dyed (whenever I decide that I'm ready to commit 30 minutes to sitting there, stirring clothes in hot water), some altered, some combined, etc. And some will just end up at Goodwill.

A valued blogfriend (who can out herself if she likes) and I had a little discussion the other day wherein we pondered the merits of living "on purpose". To me, this is about making conscious choices about what we eat, wear, do with our time, allow into our thoughts, how we treat the people and places and things around us. How we find and process happiness.

Historically, when I'm feeling bogged down by drama, I tend to try to put things into the context of "100 years from now". A hundred years from now, is someone going to care that I weigh 10 pounds more than I want to? Are they going to care that I left the house in non-matching blacks? Are they going to care that one of the construction workers keeps shamelessly littering on our street and I have to clean up after him?

I doubt it.

Conversely, if I picture a person from a hundred years ago... what is important? What would I rather learn about an ancestor -- that she was funny, smart, cheerful, resourceful? Or that she weighed exactly what she thought she should weigh, for her whole entire life, because she had the discipline to put down the fork before she finished her cake?

The easy answer is, the first one. Just like with our friends -- we don't measure our affection for them by how well they look in a swimsuit.

The harder answer, though, is that very little matters over a span of 100 years. This is not to say that people can't bring about change in the world, for better or for worse, but that the day-to-day events of people's lives really, in the end, are most important to them, and them only. Or their family sphere, or circle of friends, or community. One person can provoke a ripple effect, but most of us spend an awful lot of energy dog-paddling around in our own little ponds.

What conclusions do I draw from this deceptively pessimistic worldview?

I suppose this: that if my life isn't going to matter on a global level, or even if it does, if time will eventually be shaped by the effects of my work but turn my name to dust, then what really matters right now is... right now. It's exploring my values, and living within my values, and taking my place in the community according to those values. It's seeing every moment and every person I encounter as its own consequence.

It's finding integrity, knowing that I'll never actually be the person I hope to be ("wherever you go, there you are" or possibly "mo' money, mo' problems"), that maybe in a hundred years even my descendents won't remember my name or know anything about me. That my most brilliant writing and most impressive stitchery will eventually melt back to dust.

I won't speak of any of this in the context of eternity, as I'm still working out what I think about all that. But I will say that I believe what we do now on earth is both inextricably linked and totally irrelevant to what goes on once the eyes shut for good.

What's the link?

You have to find it yourself.

My way of looking involves opening my eyes and suddenly seeing the details I've been glossing over for decades.

The bonus is, I'm kinda having a blast.

Much love and (I swear) a lighter tone in the posts to come.

Trickledown.

News! Got a call from the Delightful Editor yesterday about the revised chapters I sent... she liked them! Hurray! We had a very nice discussion about some possible tweaks and then we both watched this:



(Thankfully, our relationship is nothing like that. Although the rest of the phone call was filled with saying something and then adding, "Or not.")

Abrupt topic change:

OMG, the rain. The rain the rain the rain. It doesn't help that we have an abandoned hillside lot at the top of our street that spills dirt out into the road, and it doesn't help that our house is downhill at the perfect point at the curve that sends all the water rushing into and then back out of our driveway. Last night at about 11:30 pm, I was in the garage searching for things to brace a little protective dam I was building to redirect water from the front steps (which are also downhill), and stumbling around getting soaked, hardly able to see out of my water-soaked glasses.

I hate to draw a writing analogy, but here it is (for you, Erica). Every object in the path of the rushing water, even the seemingly random ones, like a recycle bin or a small pile of leaves and debris, influences the flow of the water as a whole. I moved one recycle bin that had been left a few feet from the curb, and immediately a huge new flow of water hit the driveway. Yikes! A neighbor came out because water was rushing down her outside stairs. She also moved a trashcan, and twenty feet away, the water changed direction.

It's not pretty, but sometimes in a story you have to make a change that changes everything beyond it. And as a writer, you either panic and put the trashcan back, or you suck it up and adjust the rest of your water containment strategy (i.e., "book") to deal with the new flow.

Okay, so that was a stretch. I just had to tell about my exciting fifteen minutes of hauling pieces of our stone pagoda around and using them to brace a 2x4 in order to protect my house.

Yes, it's true what they say: Southern Californians are wimps about rain. But we have good reason. When you only get rain for two weeks a year, it gives the topography the rest of the year to shift and modify itself in such a way that rushing water causes, say, a mudslide. The hillside pouring into the road up yonder should have been a lush, green, stable hill. Except we didn't get any rain this year so nothing took root.

So next time you think about making fun of a Los Angeleno for freaking out about the rain, remember this:



(Everything a foot beyond the boards is water. Dirty, gross, fast-moving, probably gave me foot-ebola because I had to trudge through it in my flipflops water.)

Wishin' and hopin' and thinkin' and prayin'...

In ninth grade, the school bus stop was a mile and a half from my house. I had to leave at 5:50 am to walk there in time to catch the 6:26 am bus. My school day was 8 hours long -- from 8 am to 4 pm. Every afternoon, the bus dropped us off at about 4:30, and then it was a mile and a half home from there in the South Florida heat, wearing long sleeves and jeans or a long skirt and tights, because for some reason I thought I was so pale and hideous that I wouldn't even show my bare arms.

The morning walk wasn't great, but at least it wasn't sweltering at that time of day. In contrast, the afternoon walk... o, such miseries! O, such sweatiness! I only got through it thusly:

"I am home," I would say to myself. "The next thing I know, I'll be standing in my parents' room in front of the VCR, programming it to catch Star Trek: The Next Generation."

And every day, I proved right: there I was, standing in front of the VCR, programming "ST: TNG" to record in SLP mode on one of many videotapes I filched from around the house (a new videotape was GOLD to me... what can I say, we didn't have a lot of money at that point).

And I continued to employ that strategy through high school and college, whenever something was boring or painful or annoying. Until one day when I remembered the feeling of just wanting those 30 minutes of walking in the heat to pass me right by, disappear from my life, and I felt like the world's most wasteful person.

Here's the problem. I am actually mad at myself in retrospect, because now I think, "Not only did you blink and you made it home to record your TV show, you little twit, you blinked and you're 30 years old and your youth is gone, gone, gone!"

(DIGRESSION: Someone is listening to very, very strange music in their parked car, right outside my window. It's so loud that their eardrums must be blowing out, and I wouldn't think someone would want to waste their eardrums on muzak like this, but what do I know?)

So anyhoo, now that I'm older and December melts into December and I haven't finished writing 2002 on things and all of a sudden it's almost 2008, I have come to realize that what I did was wrong, was bad. I know I didn't actually shorten my life, but I got lazy. I wanted the progression of having lived those minutes without the responsibility of living them, and with the bathwater I threw away the baby, which is to say, the privilege of being aware enough to appreciate every single minute we get on this, God's green and beautiful earth.

You can't live from success to success, from deadline to deadline, from failure to failure, or even from success to deadline to failure. You can't look too far forward or back, or you'll miss the happiness you could be working on now.

You can't take any time for granted. Life is too precious. It means too much.

Let us not say, "I will screw my eyes shut until (I have an agent/my book sells/my release date)." Let us instead say, "I will live today, this day, to the fullest, and if I find success in the future, so be it."

There is true joy and contentment to be found in this life, but not by the people who only wish they were somewhere else.

A strange combination of slacking and not slacking.

I hesitate to apologize for my scarceness, because I don't know if anyone has really felt my absence very keenly (except my lovely mother).

It's the kind of thing I guess you don't announce in advance on your blog, but we went to Seattle last weekend (Bainbridge Island, to be exact) for a family wedding. It was really sweet, and it was really something for me to be someplace where everyone dresses in the soothing colors of the forest. I wore a yellow shirt one day and felt like the Easter Bunny.

(Speaking of maritime Washington, I've just finished Pat Wood's Lottery, and I highly enjoyed it. Speaking of fellow blogger books I've read, last weekend in Washington I scooped up Robin Brande's Evolution, Me & Other Freaks of Nature and also highly enjoyed it. It's been a great week for blogger books!)

Since we got back, I have been dealing with Winston's mysterious bowel ailment (I will mercifully omit any details), which means being up 4-5 times a night to take him outside and then getting to the vet in the morning. Fortunately, the diagnosis has been made and the treatment is helping and last night he slept the WHOLE night, which felt like a blanket of blessings to me. Today may be the first day I'm not completely dazed.

I'm on hiatus now, which is fantastic and wonderful, even though we're pretty busy on the weekends. I am devoting much time to revising my book and to sewing. I've found that traditional slacker activities, like zoning out in front of the tv, don't hold much appeal. Oddly, the only show I can bring myself to watch is America's Next Top Model. This has always been my laundry-folding show, and luckily I had so much laundry and organizing to do yesterday that I was able to get through most of the marathon I found. I feel weird about being so susceptible to that particular show, but what can you do?

I'm still making my way around the blogosphere, but I'm slower than usual (although as Gram says in Lottery, there's nothing wrong with being slow). The first bit of hiatus is always spent in a kind of whole-body, whole-mind exhale, and I guess that's what I'm doing.

Happy Sunday!

Hmm.

The husb and I are having a fairly magical day, listening to "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" and pausing it to discuss approximately every 30 seconds. However, we experienced this interesting development after making some orange-water and sharing a bit of orange with the dog:

ME: Man, he really liked that orange.

THE HUSB: Yeah.

ME: I wonder if oranges are bad for dogs?

(Fifteen minutes of iPhone Googling produces no results.)

ME: Well, I guess he's okay, since he... (pauses) ...Why is he licking the wall?

THE HUSB: I don't know.

ME: That orange was kind of squishy.

(I know from March that fruit that sits too long becomes alcoholic. I probably could have figured this out for myself but I didn't have to because I learned that the Cedar Waxwing, a migratory bird that looooooves to eat fruit, can sometimes eat fermented fruit and get drunk and -- ulp -- die. So it is not outside the boundaries of reason that a slightly softish orange could make an 18-pound dog tipsy. I am sure that a more science-oriented person could speak with authority on the subject. I mean, after all, the husb and I also drank the orange water, and I am not licking walls... that I remember.)

Here is a Cedar Waxwing, and let me tell you, these birds are cool. They stopped in our yard for a day during their migration from Canada back to Mexico, a whole bunch of them. If you click the picture, you can find a picture with more of them somewhere in my Flickr gallery. I am sorry to say I don't have the energy to look it up myself.



The moral is, did I get my dog drunk?

I don't know. We're going for a W-A-L-K to see if we can walk it off.

PS - Here is something that blew my mind from Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle": baby carrots are just shaved down big carrots. I felt like yelling, "SHUT. UP." at my iPod. I think I yelled it at the husb instead.

PPS - Here is another random and mildly interesting thing I found about oranges. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's not going to change your life.

Winston is a real man now.

Note: Winston is completely unharmed.

Winston got in a FIGHT yesterday! A co-worker brought her Miniature Schnauzer, Peanut, to the office, and they ended up brawling over the idea of Charlee Bear treats, which are apparently made with doggie crack. When I say "the idea" of these things, I mean they got into it about three feet away from the counter on which the treats were sitting. No humans were making any gestures that even hinted at actually giving these treats.

I must say, I was shocked. Up until now, I've always said, "Winston is a lover, not a fighter." Mostly to explain his tendency to pursue romantic relations with anything made of fabric that comes within two feet of him.

But now what am I supposed to say?

So Peanut awoooo-woooed and snarled at him, and instead of rolling over and showing his belly, Winston decided that Some Things Are Worth Fighting For. So he kind of snarled back, and then both of them backed off for a millisecond like, "Are we going to do this for real? YES!" and then they were back at each other, snarling and slapping and pulling each other's hair and squealing, "John Tucker is MINE!"

They were separated without having the chance to injure one another, which is good for Peanut because she would have been laughed out of the vet's office for fighting with a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, a breed which, on the scale of dog-to-wolf, ranks somewhere behind "Beanie Baby". I made Winston lie down on his side for a minute, and then I forgave him and had to hug and smooch on him for a while. The co-worker took Peanut back to her cubicle and demonstrated the following hilarious trick:

CO-WORKER: Baaaad girl, Peanut!
[Peanut's ginormous rabbit ears droop... pause... spring back up!]
CO-WORKER: That was very naughty, Peanut!
[Peanut's ginormous rabbit ears droop... pause... spring back up!]
And so on.

Here we are -- I look prouder than I ought to, don't I? (And strangely tan.)


In secondary news, we had an earthquake last night. It was enough to wake both the husb and myself, but not Winston.

Minor earthquakes are scary on many levels. The actual shaking happens rather quickly and then ends. We didn't have anything fall off of anything. (Although if anyone asks, the sewing room was immaculate until that durn quake hit! All my hard work organizing and keeping the place pristine, and one little quake just turns the whole place into a regular pigsty!)

The really scary part is that you suddenly realize all the common-sense preparations you blithely ignore on a regular basis. Such as finding a way to keep the glassware from dumping out of the kitchen cabinets. Getting the earthquake supplies out of the garage, into which you cannot currently go if the power is off in the house.

That kind of thing is what keeps you staring at the ceiling after the quake.

Then again, it could have been worse: Tornado Hits Brooklyn. Geez.

In writing news, the Delightful Editor's notes opened up a couple of really interesting doors in ye olde brain. I think I've found a way to make the story tighter. So hurray! This weekend, I'll be collecting all of those thoughts on paper. And next week... time to dig in!

My husband the hero

Last night around 11 pm, I went into the bathroom to get ready for bed. There's no ventilation to speak of in that room, so we always leave the window open in the summer. I'd gotten both contacts out when something caught my attention -- the sound of dogs barking.

The husb and Winston were already in bed, but, being the busybody I am, I rushed out of the house with a flashlight.

The barking came from across the street and a few houses down. The interior lights were all off. The backyard was lit up. I climbed up through another absent neighbor's labyrinthine steps -- we live on a hill, so you can't just look into the yard.

So what do I find back there? Two Yorkies, barking their heads off.

Now, these are rumored to be the meanest dogs in tarnation. Just the sight of Winston through their car window sends them into a raging tantrum. But immediately I knew that something had to be done -- our hills are well-stocked with coyotes, predatory birds, even bobcats. (And not just the odd coyote here and there -- they run in packs.)

People don't simply leave little dogs outside at night. For instance, if I were out and about and received a psychic premonition that Winston were somehow traipsing around the backyard at night, I would first have a heart attack and then call every single person I know and beg them to go collect him. We've known people who had cute little dogs who lost them to coyotes -- and fierce yapping, even being the meanest six-pound dogs in tarnation, will not help.

I came home and called every neighbor whose number I could find, waking them all up. Everyone understood -- no one expressed even the remotest annoyance that I'd called. But no one had a phone number for the missing pet owners.

Finally I heard a "shhhhhh" from the house on the other side of the dark house. I called up to the neighbor, who said they didn't have the necessary cell phone number. The wife came down and told us that there was a dogsitter watching the house and dogs (ha!), and that he usually came around 5 am. I was ready -- though not thrilled by the prospect -- to stay up all night, sitting by the gate, sending the dogs into spinning hissyfits, and somehow trying to defend them from coyotes.

I mean, come on. It's somebody's dogs.

Dogs are important.

So the husb got dressed and came outside lugging one of Winston's crates and a leash. There were rough wooden steps leading up to a gate on the side of the house, but you first had to climb up a ladder to get to the landing at the bottom of the steps. Our plan, should the gate open, was roughly to catch the dogs and keep them in a crate until someone came home. I ran home to get my contacts back in (nothing messes with depth perception like glasses) and to change out of my pajamas into something that would hopefully resist Yorkie teeth. (Oh, and to procure a pack of turkey dogs for bait.)

By the time I got back, the husb had climbed over the fence and taken stock. There was a doggie door that was propped open, and one of the dogs went right in. They did not, because he was not walking a Cavalier with a melting expression and an addiction to bellyrubs, attack him.

He spent another ten minutes trying to get the other dog inside, finally did, and then shut the doggie door.

The nice neighbor who had been outside with us offered to write a note to the dog walker.

That's probably good, because any note I would come up with would probably include a lot of four-letter words -- and I don't mean W-A-L-K, either.

The whole thing took about an hour. The husb had to be on set super-early this morning, so it was extra heroic of him to give up sleepytime (not to mention risking life and limb by scaling a six-foot chain link fence at the very crest of a steep hill).

It makes me realize -- if you're going out of town, blanket the neighborhood -- the people you trust -- with your phone numbers and contact info.

And it makes me realize that Winston will never, ever stay home with a dogsitter.

The one where I realize what a nerd I am.

** A teensy bitlet of cool news tomorrow... like, really teensy... maybe only cool to me! A Moody Coaster and pop panties to anyone who can figure it out before I post it. **

(I mean teensy like teeny-tiny... nothing about a book deal or being accepted as a contestant on Project Runway -- not that I've applied -- or anything like that.)

I'm not going to blog about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, because many have done it before me and better. I finished it last Sunday and I thought it was pretty good. Especially considering all that Ms. Rowling was up against -- how much information she had to share. Man, I want to sell enough books to be a billionaire. That would be cool. Even a ten-millionaire would probably be good enough to keep me from complaining.

So this won't be a long post. We're actually going to try to see the new Harry Potter (ha ha ha, first I typed "Pooter", I'm such a fourth-grader at heart) movie.

One of the great features of Los Angeles is the presence of our fantastic outdoor amphitheatres. There are four that I know of within ten miles of my house. No, five. I've only been to two -- the Hollywood Bowl and the Greek. Just this past Thursday night, we went to the Greek to see Lyle Lovett and his Large Band. kd lang opened, which was awesome. She has The Voice, in my opinion.

Lyle and his band put on a great show. He is the consummate performer -- he makes you feel like you're in good hands. The lighting was gorgeous, the musicians were grand, the repartee was clever.

See, despite whatever else we have or don't have in LA, we don't have mosquitoes. And we do have a desert climate that means all but the hottest of days will cool into a criminally pleasant evening.

So if you're ever here in the summer, I exhort you: go to the Hollywood Bowl. Or the Greek. Or the Ford. Or the Starlight Bowl. Or that one at Universal Studios.

Oh! And, while at the Greek, I had one of those rare moments of self awareness. I saw a woman at the condiment station wearing a jacket that seemed to be made out of one of those Franklin Mint throw blankets. The back was a full-color illustration of a Papillon (a small, active toy breed whose ears resemble the wings of a butterfly).

I thought to myself, "Oh, dear. Now here's a character for you. A woman who goes to a Lyle Lovett concert wearing a jacket with a picture of a dog on the back."

And then I paused.

And then I realized that I was wearing my hoodie that Sue made for me.

And here is what Sue screen-printed on the back of that hoodie:



That's all.

Have another girl cheese sandwich!

The other day I came across this absolute gem of a website: I Used to Believe. It's a website where users submit beliefs from their childhood. Looking over the highest-rated submissions had me literally crying and shaking with laughter at work the other day.

I also learned something from the Common Beliefs page. I am not the only person who thought that:

Getting fired meant they set you on fire.

They handed you a baby on the way out of church after your wedding.

You lived to be exactly 100 and then died.

You can get sucked down the plughole (the tub drain).

I also thought that bathing suits were called "baby suits" and grilled cheese was "girl cheese" and boys weren't allowed to eat it.

Ah, youth.

On a totally unrelated note, we went shopping yesterday for a birthday card, and Hallmark has an entire section now devoted to cards that play sounds! They have tons of them, everything from music to dialogue from movies and TV shows. The husb wouldn't let me listen to many of them because he thought it was embarrassing to stand in the store and make all that noise. So we moved on to Shoebox, the old standby. But apparently some people ARE allowed to listen to cards in the store, because two of the cards at the party we went to were of that variety.

I never get to have any fun.

We went to the beach prior to joining the party, and Winston had a marvelous time. He started out digging for a giant rock and barking at it, then moved on to chasing the tennis ball down the beach, then keeping