Nattering

And almost R&Red back into a Person with Firing Neurons, courtesy of our lovely, leisurely time in Northampton.

And Thai food and a good night’s sleep and I feel almost like my brain is working again. Almost.

We played with Holly and Theo’s wii last night (despite the fact they are last-minutely out of town) and I want one! I want one! I want to make miis, many many miis!

Now I’m going to finish reading the new A.L. Kennedy story "Wasps" and have some leisurely. Then, writing?

(I do plan to attempt to finally get caught up on e-mail, but I make no promises.)

I don’t know that those of you who’ve never been through the exhausting, entirely overscheduled whir of a residency can understand how discombobulated you are by the end. Or at least, how discombobulated I am.

But the final day will be here soon, and Christopher will get here late this evening (yayayayayay!) and — despite a whole bunch of stuff today and tomorrow’s 8 a.m. lecture on the art of being a flaneur followed by a two-hour final workshop and scads of paperwork to complete — things are winding down, and then we’ll head out to Kelly and Gavin’s for the rest of the week.

I imagine I’ll pop in at some point, but probably not too often, since I’d like to get some writing done and decompress and reset and that sort of thing. Some of you have to still be busy reading HP, anyway, right? (Though it seems almost all of you have finished!)

Next week I’ll be back home and posting again. I’ve been reading the Scott Pilgrims — they are wonderful. Now I better shake it if I want to get Betsy pancakes for breakfast. And I do. The pancakes are the best pancakes I’ve ever had and it would be tragical not to eat them.

ETA: Damn, it’s a french toast day. (Delicious, but not my favorite!)

Well, if 31 is anything like yesterday, it’ll be a lovely, low-key kind of year. I got wonderful stuff — Buffy comics and Season Four on DVD (hush, now, it’s the first season I watched, so I love it), a GORGEOUS framed print of one of MAS’ killer digital media pieces, a massage gift certificate and a bottle of Veuve and a fabulous C-made dinner — and hung out with people I adore and ate delicious, homemade, gluten-free cupcakes. It just don’t get much better than that. And the hangover gods have seen fit to (mostly) give me a pass this morning.

Thanks to all y’all who sent birthday wishes via e-cards, e-mail and the comments section. Much appreciated.

Today I’m playing catch-up and prepare-for-departure, so I’ll be answering e-mail and hopefully managing a post about a couple of recent books I read that I want you to. Back later today with all that.

Updated: Um, did I say today? Today has been the day of No E-mail catch-up, but I will get to it all before the residency kicks in on Sunday. Promise.

cket.From the last week and to come this week, mostly inspired by Jules and Eisha’s weekly kicks over at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast.

1. Hosting Ms. and Mr. Tingle Alley for a night of pizza, beer and rootball stories last week. And Emma only ate a little bit of Mr. Tingle’s hat.

2. First tomatoes from the garden. Need I say more? YUM.

3. A hike yesterday afternoon through the Tom Dorman Nature Preserve to see the cliffs of the Palisades. Aside from the long uphill climb and the murderous daggery plants near the river, pretty much perfect. The dogs would agree.

4. Putting in my pre-VC MFA residency Godiva shampoo order at Amazon and having it only cost 23 cents (gift certificate!).

5. Two excellent days of work on revising le novel that got me entirely back on track. I should be all caught up on revision by the end of this week and on to new stuff just in time to get in a groove before the residency–where I actually hope to get some writing done this time. (Perhaps overly ambitious, and I may just succumb to the summer charms of wine and iniquity, but we’ll see.)

6. A day off on Wednesday.

7. Three excellent mornings of ninja trainingyoga in a row.

8. Simmone Howell’s Notes from the Teenage Underground. I LOVE this book.

9. Oh, and sometime last week, I hit 1,000 posts at this particular incarnation of ye olde Shaken & Stirred, but forgot to say anything to mark the occasion. So, happy 1,012th post. Y’all rock.

On my lunchtime walk today, I found myself wishing for fall to be here, cool and the other kind of dead and brown. And it’s only the first fogged with humidity day we’ve had, really.

I could blame Cat Power’s cover of "Wild is the Wind" and Dave Van Ronk’s "Hang Me, Oh Hang Me" — both fall standards of mine, both came up on shuffle. Surely that’s it.

Because it’s fun, my favorite recent random search strings that brought people here:

• boil an egg for 24 hours and alien appears
• Aztec Goodness of the Moon
• mean women
• how to write porn (interestingly enough, I’m the second hit on this — it goes to the write porn index, which makes me laugh and laugh)
• dangers of yoga + full Moon (I’m the first hit on this one; yay!)
• yoga and hangovers (same person?)
• fake name + ysabeau wilce

I have now officially proven myself capable of self-sufficiency once more, as we have just had what fellow dog owners will recognize immediately from the following descriptive title: A Great Dead Bird Incident.

For whatever reason, for one time only, Emma’s Golden Retriever side kicked in and here she trotted to the back door with a tiny beak hanging out one side of her mouth and little claw feet out the other. I ran through my options: wait until Christopher and Barzak arrive home and hope she hasn’t eaten it; go over to the neighbors’ and get them to deal with it; or do something.

I’m unwilling to dip too far beneath the surface of Lake Helpless Female it turns out, so I got a trash bag and a bag of newly-purchased Greenies. She’d deposited the bird on the mat at the door. I could have kissed her, were it not for the dead bird breath and her being a dog. I distributed Greenies to all three dogs (ours and the neighbors’ puppy Pickles), scooped up the bird in the trash bag and put it in the dumpster.

And the orchestra swelled…

Christopher can deal with disposing of it properly when he gets home.

Now I work on final revisions of a loooong-overdue short story.

Three things that happened today to illustrate the difficulties I now have keeping the household, er, myself together solo:

1. Stopped to get gas this morning and pulled up the wrong side of the car to the pump. Twice. Then drove away in shame as the man at the pump between the two I’d flirted with laughed and laughed.

2. Was given a pity supper by someone at the office concerned about what I was eating with Christopher away — literally, I am like a hapless widower that the community decides to bring casseroles to.

3. Got two-thirds through dog walk — which was taking place during our city’s crowded gallery hop — before realizing that my T-shirt was on inside out.

Not to mention, I only managed two yoga mornings. Luckily, Mr. Rowe returns tomorrow.

Tonight was the night for the other kind of phenomenon you only have to notice in passing when accompanied: the scary weirdo hanging out on your street.

Puck and I — spylike — took a back entrance so they wouldn’t know where we lived. And that wasn’t even the guy with the umbrella under his arm at the odd angle who kept pirouetting at the corner and told me "purty dog." Definite serial killer vibe.

To beat all, guess what my husband is getting ready to do on the mountain with the other smarty-pants writer types? That’s right. Play Dungeons and Dragons. I blame Holly — my sixth sense tells me she’s the ring leader aka dungeon master! (I shoulda totally asked her D&D questions in her interview. Except I don’t really know any.)

Now I’m going to go read more of Austin Grossman’s Soon I Will Be Invincible, which turns out to be perfect fun post-semester reading (even if I am pretty sure I’ve figured out a big twist already).