Third best nap: I was about six years old and fell asleep on a cow. Really. He was more like a calf, I guess, and being a 'he' would have been a baby bull, not a cow. He was a pet though. My father delivered him from his dying mother and we handfed him and named him Lucky. We had a nap together on a sunny day, with him lying in the grass and me leaning against him.

But that was back when the world was young.

The first best nap was not all that long ago, in the scheme of things. I'd gotten up early to deliver Nate to school, then drove directly to Jadyn's place. It was when we'd first met and neither of us had a job to get to, and PB was in her bed asleep, so we snuggled up on the couch together -- both pleasantly drowsy. Somehow, we ended up soundly asleep, her mostly on top of me, her weight and warmth providing the perfect conditions for a nap. The very best one ever. I can only hope to meet its equal one day.

There was a day when my heart was heavy and my skin was brittle. She sat with me on the sofa and gently took my hand in one of hers, and with the other, began to buff my nails.

She said, 'they're going to be so shiny...see?'

I felt something move inside me. Some broken part shifted closer to its proper position.

I leaned my head against her shoulder. The late afternoon sun shining through the window warmed me while she kept up a steady rhythm with the nail buffer.

And I fell asleep.

Peace.

And that was the second best nap I ever had.

In the immortal words of Roberto Duran, "No mas, no mas."

Or more accurately, no mas mass.

The MASS is gone. I don't know what it was...might never know what it was...but my follow-up MRI showed that it's gone.

Personally, I think maybe it was a trill. Everybody watched Deep Space Nine, right? It was probably just an alien symbiote that decided it really wasn't all that into me after all and beamed back to the mother ship.

And speaking of folks who really aren't all that into me after all...Jadyn and I seem to be going our separate ways. I've been really reluctant to post that news because then it seems so real, and I wish it wasn't. I am consoling myself by thinking that if my life was a movie (and isn't it really just one long story, starring me?), I'd have to change partners from time to time. It keeps the story interesting. Adds drama. And in the movies, if it's meant to be, then we'll weather incredible adversity... one or the other of us will be imprisoned in a deep dark place and finally escape; one of us will fight a battle all alone against a superior force; we'll travel through snow and ice; and then, in the end...we'll come back together in a reunion that's so achingly sweet that there won't be a dry eye in the house. And if it doesn't happen that way, no doubt I'm destined to accomplish a great feat...and while I'm off climbing a mountain or painting the ceiling of a chapel, maybe that girl I didn't notice from a few scenes ago will catch my eye at last.

Because if my life is a movie, I'm sure it's not one of those awful sad movies - it's high adventure and emotional derring do. Like Helen Keller said, 'life is a daring adventure, or it's nothing'.

There you go. Two quotes in one post.

Another entry in the 'Weird Boy' column.

For the last two years, I've been driving Jadyn to drop PB off at daycare or kindergarten every morning before work. This has been a generally tedious, sometimes unpleasant task. When the boy is sleepy, his feet disappear. He can't walk. He can't stand. You must carry him. Please refer to my earlier post regarding our adventure with a shopping cart for an approximation of his weight. But generally after we get him in the car and buckled up, he'll finally wake up. That's when he's 'hungwy'...nevermind the breakfast that he declined before we left the apartment. Or he might be chatty, which has generally consisted of repetitions of the word 'chicken' or whatever the new strange noise of the week is.

But the real fun doesn't start until we get to school. The way it works is that a line of cars forms up to the front door of the school. When it's your turn, you pull forward, and some kind staff member will come out and relieve you of your bundle of joy. I've seen other people do this...it seems a fairly straightforward proposition. Pull up. Open door. Extract child. Drive away.

With PB...not so much. He refuses to be hurried. We pull up. The staff member opens the door, greets us, greets PB, and tries to coax him out of the car.

He stretches languidly.

Twice.

He puts on his jacket (fastening every zipper) for the three foot walk to the door.

He remembers something about Godzilla that he simply must tell his mother.

He stretches again.

Languidly.

By the time he's been dragged from the vehicle, the people in line behind us are honking and throwing rotten vegetables at us. And that's on a good day. I've seen him actually clutch the seat belt with both hands and refuse to let go until his little fingers have been pried off one at a time.

But isn't it funny how love will change everything? PB has developed a crush on Miss Andrea, the staff member who usually gets him out of the car in the morning. She's sort of cute in a Pillsbury DoughGirlish sort of way, but he adores her. We first noticed it one day when she got him out of the car (with no delays on his part) and he said to her "your hair STILL looks pretty!" The next day, it was her shirt. Then her pretty pink flip-flops. Yesterday, she got a double: "I like your purple shirt and your necklace!".

This is apparently becoming a part of the day that he looks forward to. I watched him this morning as he was watching her coming out the door for him. He was scanning her up and down, no doubt looking for her next compliment-worthy attribute. He had to fall back on 'shirt' again today, but he didn't neglect to mention something.

As for Miss Andrea, she seems pleased and of course who wouldn't be happy about getting all those compliments from a handsome young gentlemen, but I think ultimately their relationship is probably doomed to be mostly a teacher/student kind of thing. That's what's great about being six though...he won't even mind. And I don't mind either. It's made the morning drop-off routine something for me to look foward to also.

Energy = MASS x the speed of light squared

Force = MASS x acceleration

The coneheads consumed MASS quantities of food and beer.

Those are all examples of ways you wouldn't mind hearing the word 'MASS' in a sentence. It's only when you put the word 'mass' together with words like 'pelvic' and 'MRI' and 'biopsy' that it starts sounding kind of scary and sinister.

Apparently I have some unidentified 'thing' in my pelvis that is going to have to be biopsied in the near future. My doctor has no idea what it is -- it doesn't look like anything she'd typically expect to find in that region. A friend of mine has helpfully pointed out that it's better for her to say that she doesn't know what it looks like than for her to say, 'hey! that looks exactly like a cancerous tumor!'. I have to agree with her on that one.

You know what else is scary? When someone schedules an appointment for you to go over your test results and suggests that you bring your Significant Other along with you. Apparently this is not entirely unusual -- I know because the second time someone said that to me, I asked 'do you say this to everyone?' and was told that yes, they do say that to everyone - which I think they should mention to you right off the bat. Like so: "Now don't freak out because we say this to everyone, but bring someone with you to your appointment."

Don't Panic.

Panic would be counterproductive anyway.

And do you know what else I've learned? I'm not sure it's possible to maintain a state of panic or even high anxiety for a very long time. It's exhausting. It's been about a week now since my doctor first discovered the MASS, and I still don't know what it is...but I'd say my anxiety level has steadily dropped -- well, after peaking about an hour before I got my MRI results. I hope I never have a reason to discover whether I'm right in my theory that you can't panic long-term.

I'll keep you posted on what happens.

Wish me luck.

How was my weekend, you ask?

Well, Jadyn and I went out to a local club Saturday night to meet some friends of ours and have a few drinks, and I learned what it actually takes to keep a group of 30ish to 40something lesbians entertained for hours.

Angelina Jolie in a bikini?

Hmm. Nice, but really, that's overkill.

Women's basketball?

Also a perennial favorite, but there just wasn't a court available and no game on tv either.

And nope, we didn't disassemble a car engine and discuss carburetors.

We played The Balloon Game. Now, you may think that involved scantily clad women, but you'd be wrong. It involved a literal balloon, and a table full of lesbians trying to see how long they could keep it up in the air. The scantily clad women were all up on the dance floor, sweating and grinding, but we paid them no attention. It was all about the balloon...for about an hour. Then, just when it was starting to get boring, someone came up with the idea of using these little glow sticks to bat the balloon with, rather than our hands. This added an element of skill to the whole thing and we were off and running for another hour or so.

I'm not sure who won. I did hear someone at some point say, 'that's a point for us' when the balloon hit the floor, but I was never clear on whether I was part of 'us' or 'them'. I just know that when the balloon came my way, if I failed to bat it in a timely manner, I would be reprimanded.

I do hate to be reprimanded.

Another little sidebar to our evening out Saturday was what I like to call The Battle of the Femmes. A friend of mine, who is somewhat of a femmey type, was admiring Jadyn's fingernails. Then Jadyn admired the friend's fingernails...but since Jadyn's were two toned with a design on them and hers were just one color, the friend, needing to make points in The Battle of the Femmes, whipped off her shoe to show off her toenail polish. Jadyn, not to be outdone, tugged her shoe off and attempted to put her foot on the table where her toenail polish could be appropriately admired.

Unfortunately, she didn't quite get her foot ON the table as much as she pushed it INTO the table...which resulted in an entire Long Island Iced Tea crashing into my friend's lap, pretty well drenching her. This ultimately led to the friend ending the evening with her wet underwear in her purse. (I've heard of that happening before, but I think the circumstances are usually a bit different).

But I'd say that Jadyn won the battle, by forfeit if nothing else.

I think next time we go out, I'm going to bring a softball and a couple of gloves to pass the time. Oh, and I'll also remember to wear my raingear.

This blog has been hi-jacked by the Queen of the Ferrari's so I can say.....






I love you
..kytti..

I am a regular visitor to salon.com -- a site I highly recommend. They have an advice column that I read regularly, written by a guy who's advice I sometimes think is spot-on, but other times I think he just enjoys hearing himself talk. Or seeing himself type. Whatever.

Today, in response to a letter from a 40ish guy who has realized that his life is not at all what he wants it to be, he wrote that the guy should make a list of things he wanted and things he would have to do to make those things happen, and the point he kept making was 'don't rule anything out'.

I'm just mulling on that right now. I think I'm going to continue to mull for a bit.

Don't rule anything out.

If you want to read the letter and response, here's the address: http://www.salon.com/mwt/col/tenn/2005/01/27/failure/index.html. You'll probably have to watch a commercial to get to it, but they're usually brief.

Last night I performed a Difficult Extraction, and I'm not even a dentist.

PB got himself stuck in a shopping cart. Firmly.

First he got bored walking around the store. Then he got bored sitting in the back of the cart. I'm pretty sure that's why he decided to wedge himself into the front of the cart...you know, that place where SMALL children ride while their mothers shop. PB is not a small child. He's only just turning six, but he's big for his age; tall and very solid. I'm not even sure how he managed to lever himself in there in the first place. The leg-holes were barely big enough for him to fit in, but once he got in there, there was no getting him out. The back of the seat was pressed firmly up against his butt and there was no wiggle room in the front either.

First we tried encouraging him to get himself out. He looked like he really wanted to be helpful, but he couldn't manage much more than swinging his legs and wiggling his behind a little -- none of which was effective at all. Then Jadyn tried to lift him out. I'm not sure what he weighs these days (he's not overweight, but he is, as I mentioned, SOLID), but lifting him is akin to trying to heft a small pony.

So no luck lifting him out the front.

I tried parking the cart against a wall and dragging him out from behind. No go. Then I tried lifting him from the front, which I knew was going to be futile because I'd seen Jadyn try it already. No surprise there -- still no go.

I asked him to get himself out again. Uh huh.

I tried pulling him out the front again.

I was just about to call for the Jaws of Life when Jadyn suggested that I just tip the whole cart over.

I reassured PB that I wasn't going to drop him and told him to hang on to me while I started lowering the cart onto its side. Poor kid clutched onto me so hard that he nearly succeeded in ripping the front of my shirt open, but through the sheer force of my amazing strength, I managed to lower the cart until it was on the ground, and PB slithered out.

And that's why I rock.

Also, I beat my phone at chess again.

Speaking of primates...

I spent nearly three hours last night grooming my mate. I removed a couple hundred microbraids from Jadyn's hair. It was tedious, yet strangely gratifying. I had to take scissors and snip off the ends of the braids, then unravel them with a hairpin, and finally pull the 'Not Jadyn's Hair' out from betwixt the real hair and throw it in a trash can. My hands were aching by the time I was done.

We started off with me on the coffee table and Jadyn sitting in the floor in front of me, taking the ones in front out herself, but then my back started to hurt so we relocated to the couch, with her head in my lap. I think I would have happily carried on with the process most of the night if not for the fact that I finished up by 10:30 or so and there just wasn't any more grooming to be done. It was very relaxing. Jadyn commented later on how slow and steady my breathing had become while I was working on her.

All in all, it was very companionable and somewhat intimate.

It's good to be a primate.

So...earlier today I was on this planet somewhere in the vicinity of the Orion Nebula with some of my friends, and we were having a rumble with this other guy and some of his friends...an important rumble. The fate of the planet was hanging in the balance.

Now, I'm trying to sneak up on this guy (let's call him Bruce), but he's got his twitchy little friend Percy standing lookout, and his other friend Hoss between me and him. I know Bruce is a wimp, but I'm a little nervous about Percy and Hoss ganging up on me. What I need is for Hoss to go for a walk, and to block Percy's view of Bruce...so I come with this great idea...what I'll do is send my buddy Jimmy Liverpool out to distract Percy, and then I'll get my friend Rocky to lure Hoss outside. It wasn't a great plan because Rocky was almost definitely going to get killed, and Jimmy Liverpool didn't really stand a chance against Percy if Percy realized what he was doing.

What happened was this: Jimmy Liverpool goes out and starts jumping up and down making so much noise that I'm sure Percy's going to run right over him, but instead, Percy just stands there laughing. And then -- get this--Hoss goes off to take a whiz!! Right at the critical moment! Which is great because then Rocky doesn't have to go under fire, and then a couple more of my friends, Beulah and Dave gang up on Bruce while Percy's distracted and Hoss is off draining the lizard...and Bruce just gives up! Surrenders. He knows no matter where he goes, we got him.

And that's how me and my buddies saved the planet earlier today.

Ok, ok....it was actually about chess, but I figured everyone might be tired of hearing about chess.

A truly amazing thing happened last night. I beat my phone at chess! And it wasn't even set on 'VERY EASY', it was on plain old 'EASY'! I guess all I needed to do to win was blog about how I can't beat my phone at chess. It was like magic.

Maybe now I should start blogging about all the other things I can't do...like win the lottery, or look like Angelina Jolie, or be appointed President by the Supreme Court.

I'll let you know if all those things happen by tomorrow morning.

You know I'd make a great President.

I am obsessed with chess. I wonder where it's been all my life. I'm 40 years old, and have just recently discovered how much fun this game is -- how intricate, how many possibilities there are for ways things can play out.

At first, I sucked. I mean truly sucked. I sucked with the sound of a thousand suckings. I lost EVERY game that I played, even against others who sucked. My main problem is that I tend to focus too intently on whatever nefarious plot I'm hatching against my opponent's king. Or queen. Or rook. Or whatever other piece seems to be in my way. (I know, I know...the only piece that really matters is the king!). But I get so focused on carrying out what I'm doing that I forget to watch what my opponent is doing. For example, maybe I'm thinking that if I could just get my bishop to spot A, then my queen on spot C can move to spot E and THEN I'll GET 'EM! Only problem is that while I was trying to get my bishop to spot A, my queen got captured on spot C, and not only that, it got captured WITH the thing I was trying to clobber on spot E, which is now sitting over there on spot C! But hey...I got my bishop to spot A, and that's...something...to be...proud of? sigh.

So I kept losing. EVERY game. But I kept at it. I was playing two or three games a day, every day, and reading up on everything I could find about chess and chess strategy in the meantime. Now I only lose a little over half of the games I play (which pretty much means that if you suck, I can beat you -- if you're any good, you can distract me by dangling your queen in front of my nose and I'll totally go after it and let you checkmate me while I'm not looking).

Jadyn beats me most of the time. I give her all the credit for getting me interested, and teaching me enough that it got to be fun. And she keeps me humble too. No one is better at dangling a pretty little queen in front of my face than she is. (She's also pretty good at dangling other things too, but that's a subject for a different post).

My PHONE beats me ALL the time. I downloaded a chess program for it and I play it whenever I'm waiting for Jadyn to come out of a store -- you have no idea how much time I spend waiting for Jadyn to come out of stores. I can't beat it. Not even when I set it to 'VERY EASY'. My phone scoffs at me. It has no respect me for whatsoever. My goal now is to beat my phone. Just once. On 'VERY EASY'.

But I don't want you to think it's all about winning, because it's really not. I enjoy playing even when I lose - especially when I learn something. I am almost always thinking about some chess game that I've played recently, running through different scenarios. It's what I'm thinking about when I'm falling asleep. It's akin to the post-coital analysis I tend to want to do whenever the sex was really good. 'Hey...you really seemed to like it when I did that one thing...and my god, what were YOU doing when I made that noise'? Only now it's 'Hey...did you know what I was doing with my knight when I took that pawn? And wow...the way you brought your bishop into play! Amazing!'

I am, in fact, in the middle of a game right this second - which I seem to be losing...so I'm going to concentrate on that for a while. And I'll let you know when I beat my phone.

If anyone is interested, I'm usually on yahoo games at lunchtime, under the name charlotteredman. Come play with me.

I got rid of the chapters from my novel. I don't really think anyone was reading them anyway and they just took up too much space. If there is someone out there in the vast, murky, internet landscape who actually was interested, drop me a line and I'll send you the rest of the story. For the most part, I think anyone who wanders through here knows me already and has likely already read it.

We should probably catch up. I was offered a new job recently (bigger company, a little more money) and turned it down at the last possible moment to remain here in the basement. The new place wasn't going to allow me to have coffee at my desk. That was a deal-breaker for me. There were other factors as well, but suffice to say that the grass isn't always greener, and I've gained a new appreciation for what I have here.

Jadyn has been very up and down lately with the MS. Mostly down these last few weeks. The new doctor has turned out to be pretty great, though, so that's a good thing. Jadyn finished up a course of steroids right before Christmas that was supposed to allay the symptoms she'd been having, but it doesn't seem to have had an effect so far. Maybe it will yet. In the meantime, she's in the process of getting approval from her insurance company to be her doctor's first patient to get the new wonder-drug for MS. I have high hopes that it will be helpful for Jadyn, and also some fears because it's such a new thing.

I love Jadyn.

I worry for her. I hate that I don't own a magic wand so I could get rid of the MS.

It sucks.

What else is going on? Nate worked at Toys-R-Us over Christmas and they're keeping him on full-time. He'll do that until he gets something arranged as far as school. He seems to be making friends and finding lots to keep him busy up here in the frozen northland, but he still misses his friends and girlfriend in the south and is planning a trip in the near future. I think it's likely he'll end up going to school down there.

And speaking of school, PB has had a whole host of problems with kindergarten this year. It's a long story, but the upshot is that the local public school system is failing him and his mother has contacted a lawyer. In the meantime, he's switched schools for the remainder of the year. The thing that sucks most about all of this is that he was SO excited about starting kindergarten and so eager to learn. He's a very bright kid, but he's learning not to like school. I think I'll write more about this, maybe tomorrow, because like I said, it's a long story, but maybe one worth hashing out here in blogland.

So that's my rambling for the New Year. My resolutions? To help Jadyn stay on schedule with her MS medicine, to buy groceries instead of eating out all the time (bad for the budget, bad for the size of my ass), and to be more the strong woman that I know I am.

Oh...and to blog more often. :)

Anyone else make any good ones?

Just kind of feel like writing about my Jadyn this morning. I was thinking about all of this during our drive in to work this morning and wanted to get it down, if I can.

Jadyn is, apparently, having a flare-up of her MS. Among other things, she has a twitch in her face that pretty much doesn't seem to stop. It's subtle -- you wouldn't see it if you were having a casual conversation with her, but it just keeps on going, and she says it feels like an electrical buzz under her skin. The first medicine her doc prescribed for this made her so foggy and tired that she was almost non-functional. She couldn't lift her arms, but the twitching stopped. Now she's on a different medicine that doesn't make her feel so bad, but the twitching is continuing along merrily.

At first, I thought that it probably wasn't so bad. I've had twitches before...they're annoying, but they don't hurt, right? But I'm thinking now that it's probably pretty bad for a couple of reasons. First, even though it's subtle when you look at her, I'm sure it's like when you have a cold sore or a zit or something on your face and you're sure that whoever you're talking to sees it just like it's got a big red bullseye around it. I'm sure it feels to her like a big blinking neon sign saying that something is wrong; that she has MS. Your face is what you show to the world. Jadyn's face is beautiful. Yeah...I'm probably biased, but strangers stop her to tell her that she's beautiful. She's radiant. That's the kind of thing you want people to notice, not that half of your face is spasming.

And this is on top of the physical irritation and discomfort of it. I know it bothers her because she's mentioned it several times. Jadyn is the very definition of 'stoic', so that means something.

We're going to a new doctor tomorrow morning. Her current doctor is kind of hard-headed and enjoys hearing himself talk, whether or not he's answering Jadyn's particular questions. We've heard really good things about the new one and I have high hopes that she'll be helpful.

In the meantime, I'm thinking about my girl, who is struggling with this awful disease (facial spasms are just the newest symptom, and are unlikely to be the last). Sometimes she seems distant to me and cold, and sometimes when I just want to be a girl in love and laugh with her and hold her, and she is only partly there for me, I forget that she's probably doing all she can just to hold herself together.

You ever have one of those things that you feel bitter about even though years have passed and you know you should have let it go long ago?

My mom has an entire list of those things. There are some subjects we just don't bring up to her...like how my father's siblings wanted him to pay taxes on a farm they all owned and on which he did all the work...that'll get her spitting mad almost instantly, and it happened about 35 years ago.

Turns out I have one of those things too, and I just feel like writing about it. You know...because writing about it will make me feel better. Or because I'm shallow and just can't let it go.

I was with my ex-girlfriend She-Ra for about three years. I loooooved her. We fought all the time, she had a terrible temper, we rarely had sex, but I adored her and would have walked over hot coals if I thought it would have made her happy. So naturally, she left me for another woman.

Oddly, this is not the part I'm bitter about. Really...she did me a favor. I realize that every morning when I wake up beside Jadyn.

When I was with She-Ra, we had a little business together. Basically, I was self-employed doing an art-sign-ish type thing, and she helped me. When we broke up, I continued with my business, but she was essentially out of a job. I tried to continue working with her, but it was ultimately too painful and I had to stop for the sake of my sanity. Thereafter ensued several months of bickering and unhappiness with her threatening to sue to prevent me from plying my trade (something I could do without her but she couldn't do without me), and me giving her money when I could (I did, after all, have Nate to support), and just generally being about as miserable as I'd ever been.

So about nine months after we broke up, Christmas rolled around. By that time, we'd managed to get on more or less civilized speaking terms again. She began campaigning for a cowboy hat. She desperately wanted one and let me know that she didn't think her new girlfriend was going to provide this cowboy hat. She also let me know that she didn't have any money to buy christmas presents for her parents.

So I gave her about a third of my earnings for December (my busiest month), and bought her a very nice black cowboy hat.

She did buy presents for her parents, but also spent a good bit of that money buying presents for the new girlfriend.

This is still not the part about which I am bitter. As it turns out, I've always liked her new girlfriend and begrudge her very little.

She invited me to come to her parent's house so that we could exchange gifts (so that I could give her the cowboy hat). She loved the hat. It looked great on her. Very sexy. And then I opened her gift to me.

And here's the part that still grinds my ass unto this very day: It was a cassette tape. To be exact, it was Cassette 3 of a motown collection. I'd seen that tape and the other dozen or so that were part of the collection in pretty much every gas station I'd stopped in during the previous few months. They weren't free with gasoline purchase or anything, but my guess is that she bought that tape with change from a twenty after she'd filled her tank at the gas station.

So there it is. My ugly underbelly, displayed for anyone cares to view it.

You know what makes me feel really bad about still being bitter about this? We really are good friends now. She-Ra and her girlfriend (who once said I should call her Wiz or Diz or Fiz on my blog) are two of my very best friends. They've supported me through some rough times. And the real irony is that Nate and I have spent a couple of christmases with them, and they couldn't possibly be warmer or more generous.

Which just goes to show...well...something, I guess.

It's alright...no need for panic...I've hijacked my blog back.

I am not, in fact, having any sort of obscene relationship with a book. A little fondling is not so terrible, is it? After all, it's filled with all these wonderful illustrations...I couldn't help myself.

Actually, I am in the midst of a big reading phase these days. I've always been a bookworm, but here lately there seem to be so many wonderful things to read that I can't bear to finish one book without the next already in hand and waiting for me.

Right now I'm reading Stephen King's 'The Dark Tower', which is the last of the gunslinger series. As I mentioned before, the illustrations are beautiful, and I'm hoping the story is equally good. I'm actually almost afraid to read this one, because my expectations are so high. How could they not be after reading the previous six books in the series and mostly loving them? What's going to happen? Will Roland breach the Tower? Will the Crimson King fall? What of Jake and Eddie and Susannah? And Oy? Will there be an ultimately satisfying ending for them? And how is Stephen King going to deal with the fact that he killed himself off in the last book? And what about the little teasing threads of the Tower series that have appeared in his other books? I am anxiously awaiting an appearance by Jack from 'The Talisman' and 'Black House.' I'm afraid I'll be disappointed if he doesn't show up. I will post a follow up to this, wherein I won't answer these questions (don't want to spoil it for anyone else), but I will indicate my general level of satisfaction with the outcome.

The book I just finished is called 'The Passage' by Connie Willis. It was excellent. I blew through about 800 pages in record time, even for me. This one was about a couple of people who were researching the Near Death Experience and what it's purpose might be. It wasn't a 'light at the end of the tunnel' kind of cheesy thing, either. It was more scientific, and very compelling. Kept me turning pages.

In addition to that, I'm also in the middle of reading 'Blow Fly' by Patricia Cornwell. I put it down to read 'The Dark Tower'. I don't have a very high expectation for this book, but I'm reading it because I used to love Patricia Cornwell and I'm giving her one more chance. Basically my problem with her is that her character, Kay Scarpetta, a medical examiner, has gotten progressively more depressed and the degree to which her life sucks has increased significantly over the course of this series of books...until after the last book, 'Black Notice', I just wanted her to go throw herself under a bus. I don't know how this character gets up in the mornings. But...being an eternal optimist, I'm hoping things will be looking up for ol' Kay. We'll see. There's yet another book in this series which is out in hardback now, and if this one turns out to be less relentlessly miserable and depressing than the last few, I'll buy it.

Another series of books I'm really enjoying are Janet Evanovich's 'One for the Money', 'Two for the Dough', etc. series. These are great! They are the literary equivalent of potato chips and you can't eat just one. There are ten of these, and I'm up to the fifth. As soon as I finish with Stephen King and Patricia Cornwell, I'll be returning to Janet Evanovich. With this author, it's all about the story and the characters. She doesn't bother much with flowery language, but the story will grab you and drag you right along, and the characters are so quirky and fun that you end up really bonding with them. Stephanie Plum, Evanovich's main character, is a fledgling bounty hunter, who has an entire array of unlikely sidekicks to help her out -- chief among them is Lula, an ex-hooker, but there's also a drag queen, a dwarf, a hamster, and Stephanie's crazy grandmother -- and who knows who else will turn up in the next five books. I can't wait.

Another writer I've recently discovered who deserves a mention is Lisa Scottoline. She gets compared to John Grisham because they are both lawyers and write legal thrillers, but I actually prefer her stories to his. Firstly, her main characters are pretty much always women, which is fun, but secondly and most importantly, her pacing is incredible. Don't pick up one of her books if you aren't prepared to be engaged right from the first page. Her stories start off fast and only speed up as they go. Go to www.scottoline.com to see what I mean - she has first chapters to most of her books posted online.

What's everyone else reading? :)

This site has been hijacked by none other than the Queen of the Ferrari's.

I thought I would let the public at large know that Charlotte is being held hostage by Stephen King and his newest book which arrived by Amazon Messenger at my front door yesterday.

I am offering a HUGE ransom for the safe return of my darling wife before I am submerged in the gloom of weekend turmoils by my lonesome.

Why......it was just last night she could be found in a GROCERY store of all places FONDLING the book! Sniffing it even! Her eyes were wide with anticipation! She just stood there! Transfixed! Licking her lips! Her heart was racing!

Good God! It was almost obscene, I tell you!

And, then, out of nowhere, out of the blue, just at lunch today..... He's got her in his grasp!!!

::faint::

What is a worried wife to do?!

So, this morning I'm walking from the car to go into the building where I work. (Oddly, I do that almost every day) There's a big old-fashioned wooden door that is the particular entrance that I use. It's always locked, and I do have a key. But THIS morning, I walked up to the door, all the time clicking the electronic clicker thingy that opens my car door. I wasn't even thinking about it, just expected it to open the door for me in much the same way you expect the door at the grocery store to open as you step on the black mat in front of it. You know if that door didn't open, you'd walk right into the thing and break your nose.

Well, I would anyway.

I know this because of The Time I Walked into a Door Carrying a Basketful of Laundry. It was at this apartment complex where I lived with one of my many ex-girlfriends. We'll call this one She-Ra (she was, and is, very strong). I was carrying a basketful of laundry to the laundry room, which was in the building adjacent to the one we lived in. There was a foyer I had to pass through with a wooden door with decorative moulding. The doorknob had been broken for months -- you didn't have to turn it, just push on the door and go out. Unbeknownst to me, they'd finally gotten around to fixing the doorknob. So I go trucking through the foyer with my laundry out in front of me and try to open the door by pushing it with the laundry basket. The fact that the door failed to open in no way slowed my forward motion. I kept right on going. The basket crumpled. My bottom lip met the decorative moulding and split open. To add insult to injury (a recurrent theme in my life), I was sporting a very painful cold sore on my bottom lip already. Actually, that might be more like adding injury to insult. Or injury to injury. Whatever. It hurt. She-Ra was inappropriately amused.

I have also been known to walk right through a screen door. We lived in Canada for a while when I was a kid and had a sliding screen door out onto our patio, When it was dark outside, you couldn't really see the screen. The first time, I merely walked into it, stretched it, bounced back, felt stupid, opened the door and went out. The second time, I walked through the thing. When I walk, I go like I'm going somewhere. I have a lot of momentum. I walked into the door, stretched it, briefly registered that there was some resistance, and kept right on walking. Tore the screen right out of the frame. This all happened in just a fraction of a second. I got this really cute little abrasion on my nose with the pattern of the screen door.

The good news is that before I banged my face into the door into my building this morning, I realized that the clicker wasn't going to work. No insult, no injury.

This time.

On a completely different subject, I've been asked a couple of times where the link to Jadyn's blog went. I lost it when I got rid of that picture of myself that never would display. I'll put it back as soon as I figure out how.

My Life Against the Wall

Boom

boom

boom

beating

my blood against my veins
my feet against the ground
my fists against the wall

my body against your body

my life against the wall

beating
old as death

ceaseless.

a womb enclosed me
and I beat my head against it
until I emerged
bloody
gasping
into a box
surrounded by a wall -
covered by a stone.

I beat my life against the wall.

And my heart wants blood
or love
or both
and your body against mine
beating in a rhythm as old as death
while my feet beat the ground
and the wall doesn’t move

My bones break
but the wall doesn’t crumble

My heart breaks
and the wall doesn’t move

I beat my life against the wall
in a rhythm as old as death

knowing
somehow

that in the wall is a door…

and somewhere…

there is a key.