It was in the summertime

I suspect that my mother was happier in the summer than in the winter. I think that she worried about our being gone all day during the school year - that it made her feel anxious and maybe even lonely. Whatever it was, as I sit here at my open window on a summer evening, I feel the contentment of all the years of being one of her kids in the summer time. It was good. She loved her home and her kids in summer, and on an evening like this, all buttery and mild as the sun moves closer to the horizon, we might all take a walk down to the school to toss a ball around, or my dad might take the small TV out onto the deck and pop a huge bowlful of popcorn, and watch the Boston Pops as the warm darkness crept in.

It was during just such a summer thirty years ago that my love story began. By the middle of August, I'd had a few conversations with the man I would eventually love and marry. A couple of weeks ago, I told some of our stories to a friend, and she has asked me to write them down. To collect them, and arrange them. To make a book of them. To tell my love story.

Night before last, I asked my husband if he would be okay with that. After all, it's his story too. "Tell away," he said. And so ...

I'm starting a new blog. Come and visit. Tell me what you think.

Not Exactly Unnoticed begins today.

Happy Birthday, Honey!

Happy Birthday to The Great Husband. Today, because it is his day, we shall eat carrot cake (after I make it in our new stove). Today, because it is his day, he shall watch his new, enormous, you gotta be freakin kiddin me that thing's huge, television, and I shall make sure all the laundry and ironing and such is all done so that tonight we can both sit on the couch to say repeatedly to each other, "That picture is really huge," and "We're all alone," and "Good grief, that television is enormous," and I'll try to get him to watch The 39 Steps with me quick, before the updated stuff arrives from DirecTV and all our recorded shows are lost. Today, he gets to take the garbage and recycling to the dump and recycling place, including the large pile of paper from my office clear-out, work on house remodeling projects with his brother, and peruse the hard-to-find book his daughter found in a university library, then found online, and then ordered with speedy delivery to be sent to him, because it is his birthday. No party (he's not a fan of parties), no balloons (because what would we do with them?), and none of his offspring in sight. Happy Birthday, honey. Today, you're all mine.

Fall

All out of proportion to the number of years and the distance in the past, today, with the rain and receding colors of fall, come all the feelings of being separated from the man I wanted to marry -- a long time ago -- a lifetime of raising a family together has come and gone since then, and yet here they are.

All of these feelings, just as if I'd never left them. Just as if we'd never married, or moved so many times, or seen each other through the fears of serious illness or the fears about our children -- just as if we'd never moved here, to where his great grandfather lived with his own wife and six children -- just as if we were still young, and still separated and still trying not to breathe deeply enough to feel the panic of our separation.

Odd. I wonder why certain emotional seasons never lose their intensity. And I wonder what perverse little sprite it is that devilishly dances to the gates and lets the memories flood back, and why the memories are scenes or feelings or moments, and not narratives. I remember the stifling feeling pressing into my chest whenever I thought of the distance between Seattle and Pensacola. I remember the desolation of hanging up the phone after a weekly phone call (in the days before cell phones and email and facebook and blogs and unlimited long distance). I remember barely being able to breathe as the plane carried me out of the Pacific Northwest's air space ... and breathing faster and faster as another plane carried me back into it months later.

One winter, on my way into the Portland airport in a plane full of college students and military personnel, the rain started pelting the windows of the cabin, and everyone stopped talking. The stillness vibrated for a moment, and someone on the other side of the double-aisled, fat-bodied plane breathed out, "It's raining!" Only someone from our wet wet world would ever say that with so much relief and longing ... and everyone laughed.

I was only gone for four school years, and I was only leaving and then waiting to come home to my man for three of those years, and those years were nearly three decades ago, and yet the rain and the cool air ... and maybe my reading for school now and my grappling with ideas of the sort my man used to talk to me about back then ... whoever or whatever has done it ... I remember it again.

To paraphrase Mary Catherine Bateson, we're still us. We're the us we've been becoming for all these years. Today I remember how we started, and it makes me cry a few of those ancient tears.

Who says men can't plan a wedding?

(hat tip, Susan! This is great!)

Because wedding pictures are forever

Twenty-eight years ago, when we were planning our wedding (and I do mean "we" - we were both in school, but on opposite corners of the country, and since we couldn't be in the same room, we did a lot of planning for when we could be) I got a good bit of advice from our pastor's wife.

"Pick a good photographer," she said. "When it's all over, what you'll have left is the man and the pictures. You got a good man. Get a good photographer."

Of course, this was the same woman who must've been a bit ... uh ... relentless? fussy? in her youth. She also once told me that on her wedding day, while she was getting dressed for the ceremony, she suddenly realized that she was missing either something old, something new, something borrowed or something blue. I don't recall which thing she was missing, but it was one of those. So someone brought her something, but she was merely confused by it.

She asked the giver, "What am I supposed to do with that?"

To which, the giver replied (through clenched teeth), "Why don't you eat it?"

Wedding days can be a bit frazzling.

Even for the pastor's wives whose reputations later become all about the kind serenity and the calm and all of that. But I digress.

We did get a good photographer for our wedding in the summer of 1983. Two, actually. One for the "pre-bridals" done for a picture in the paper (that's what this picture here is from - and we tamed the daisy head maisie flowers before the wedding day so they didn't look like they were sprouting out of my head), and also a team for the day itself.

On the day itself, this guy and his mother were the two left out of the team of three of their photography business, because his dad had passed away. And a truer team you never saw than those two. She arranged the people, and he took the picture, and he only took one with each arrangement. No kidding. One take was all he needed. And the album is beautiful.

And permanent.

The album is permanent.

Our pastor's wife was right. I have the man and the photos. I still wish I'd had my hair and nails done that day or the day before. Right there, in that permanent album of permanent pictures, pictures of such high quality that they will be here until kingdom come, is a record of everyone's appearance on that day of days - including the mother of the bride.

And this is where my thoughts have traveled of late. My mom looks good in all the wedding albums of all her kids - even the photos taken in the early 70's, with the ubiquitous chignon - the extra hair with a braid around the base of it, that lived on a white Styrofoam head on her bedroom dresser when she (my mom) wasn't all dressed up and wearing it. Back in those days, people thought that my mom, my sisters (8 and 10 years older than I am, and all shorter than I am), and I were all sisters. My mother looked really young for a really long time.

But all her kids were married by the time she was my age. This means, in case you're not following, that I will be older in the wedding albums of my children than she was in her kids' wedding albums. When the wedding days come, I mean. Okay, if the days come. But I'm telling you, I see winking and blinking lights over there on the ocean's horizon and this boat isn't showing any signs of stopping out here at sea, and those lights might not be what I think they are, but they might be, and if I don't lose some weight and get a more flattering hairstyle soon, I'll be caught forever in wedding photos in the very un-pretty appearance I seem to have taken on lately, and when my kids have their spouses and their photo albums, there I will be. In this condition. Because wedding pictures are forever.

Not dead yet

Our vacations, as a couple, always involve many, many movies. Many. Movies. Three or four a day, and it used to be more than that, when the kids were little and our brains needed more relaxation. We used to drive about an hour so that we could get through the mountains that are in the way from here, to a condo my parents owned. There was a huge tub, two insanely comfortable armchairs, and a large screen television. We were also not that far from our favorite video store, and so if we had a whole week, we'd get two tall stacks of VHS tapes in the space of those days. Aaaahhhh.... bliss.

For some reason, though, every time we went, the many, many remote controls that lived on the table at the condo were always - always! - all screwy. At every vacation it was necessary to take about an hour to re-set everything so we could embark on our movie-watching marathon that was (still is) our couple's getaway. We're geeks, okay? It's what we do.

Well, our children do not believe that we old people have ever been able to tame the remote controls. In fact, they are sure we're of the Remote Boat generation, and have no clue about technology in general.

And why? Why are they so sure we're a dying breed? Because they (the little pills) can always do things with the remote that we can't do. We can do everything we want to do, but there's always some oddball command. One of the young giants will be home, and one of us (okay, it's usually the dad) will have the remote, and then the uppity youngster will say something like, "just go to the settings," and the dad will not know (nor wish to know, thank you very much) what the kid's talking about.

I've got news for those uppity infants. Yesterday, our ultra-fantasmagorical remote arrived via the UPS delivery guy. One remote for all our stuff - stereo, TiVo, DVD player, TV ... all of it on one remote. We hooked it up to the computer, and programmed it, and now we're USING it. See? We're not dead yet.

And I'm sure I can figure out how to turn off the TV when I go to work today. Just gimme a minute.

(bad word warning - it's Python, after all)

When a living language spawns

I have just sent an "instant message" to my husband, asking the following question:

"Why won't my USB hub let go of my thumb drive?"

So ... am I the only one whose eyes cross every once in awhile at the words and phrases that have meaning these days?

And here's another question. It's been awhile, I think, but I do still hear, "Don't touch that dial!" from the television. Who has a "dial" any more? I don't think my kids would even recognize a dial. And we can't call the remote (which is a remote control device) the "clicker." Seriously. That's too stupid.

And what are we going to call it when we back up in a movie? It's not "rewind" anymore because there's nothing winding in the first place. "Fast forward" still makes sense, but what is the backward direction supposed to be called? Back it up? Go back? Reverse?

And the weirdest of spawns - spores - language oddities - whatever this is: The other day I asked my sons to "friend me." Okay, so I made a joke of it because both they and I know better than to use the word friend as a verb. It's worse than "party" - as in, "let's party." But still. I've been friended by my sons.

Anyone have a time machine? I need a vacation.

What makes The Great Husband great

I guess every couple has a thing like this - some essential element that is present in both people, and is also part of the "we" that is neither person but is the two of them as a unit. Ours is sensitivities. Sounds namby-pamby when I put it like that, but it's true. We resonate to literature and art and music as if it plays on strings strung somewhere deep within us. He doesn't cry as much as I do (poor man), but we both feel it.

That's why we take stacks of movies with us when we go out of town on vacation. Sometimes we watch movies we've already seen (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Trois Couleurs (all three of them, but Red is my favorite), some things we don't cry over - like The Prisoner (slightly disorienting, but not a tear-jerker), or The Avengers (ditto, plus funny), or To the Manor Born (plain funny)... and we rent other stuff we haven't seen yet, and we watch these movies. And I cry. Sometimes we cry. It's beauty that does it to us. Beauty and love. Courage. Sacrifice. The good stuff.

And sometimes, sometimes we find passages in books that do it to us too. Right now I am taking a Modern Lit course - and one such passage has just appeared. In Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, the young clerk Septimus has been swallowed up by London, just as "London had swallowed up many millions of young men called Smith; thought nothing of fantastic Christian names like Septimus with which their parents have thought to distinguish them."

He makes his way for awhile, Septimus does ... reads incessantly - determined to educate himself on the classics - and then he enlists. He goes to France. He comes home shattered, like many men did from the first European War, which "smashed a plaster cast of Ceres, ploughed a hole in the geranium beds, and utterly ruined the cook's nerves at Mr. Brewer's establishment at Muswell Hill." He comes home from a war that has changed him irretrievably. But he had to go. You see ...

Septimus was one of the first to volunteer. He went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare's plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square.

He went to France, in other words, for the sake of England's soul - and for it, he paid with his own. What makes The Great Husband great is that this exquisite sentence awed him too - and he knows why I cry.

How I know it's time

1. When the phone rings, I flinch. Recoil. Feel slightly panicky. There is nearly no one I have the energy to talk to, but I am still waiting to hear from my soldier.

2. When the clock says it's time to wake up, my body resists every effort of movement even though I'm not sleepy and slept just fine.

3. The outdoor thermometer has been stubbornly, persistently, implacably stuck for weeks. I may never see 40 degrees again, and I know I'm not encased in ice and snow, but I'm not at sprouting temperature either. Not frozen. Just chilled.

4. Absolutely no project, with the occasional exception of academic work for the quarter, looks even remotely interesting.

5. We got a really, really good deal on our favorite hotel - for a whole week away.

And that is how I know it's time to plan for our winter's vacation at the beach. In less than a month from now. Salt air, and ocean light, and the sounds of gulls and other shore birds ... a record crab harvest this year, and I intend to eat my fill ... a large soaking tub and a stack of foreign films and some fruit and stinky cheese ... no web access, no ringing phone, no course work for the week ... the Great Husband all to myself for a whole week.

Man, oh man, is it ever time.

Draft

I couldn't sleep past five in the morning, so I started writing. By seven, the first draft of the 10-page paper was laid down.

Last night, I made fresh leek and potato soup for dinner - with several different kinds of tiny potatoes, and since there was no red wine in the house, we drank champagne. It's all improvisation, really.

Elements

It's like planning a garden. Or ... um ... making a complicated recipe ... or, maybe it's more like balancing the five elements. It's like anything that has parts which interact with each other, each retaining its own identity and having its own effects, and together making a thing which could not be made without the collection of the whole.

That is what my Augusts are.

The planning and adding and subtracting of elements, the envisioning and what-iffing, the discussions with the people who will be effected -- the balancing of the elements as I set up another year of my life. They seem to me to be balanced like a tire is balanced. These elements are the spokes of a wheel in motion.

The wheel has turned a full revolution since high school and that first college experience. The first time around, I planned for me. Then, for a short time, I planned for classrooms full of students. Then, for a longer time, I planned for my family - for my own growing, changing kids, while we lived at various addresses and during various times in our lives, absorbing all the shocks and bumps and surprises because that kind of planning is as much life planning as education planning. Now the kids are outa here - and the wheel comes around to planning for me.

Only, along the way, the wheel has covered so much ground that it's not the same. I'm bigger inside. More of me interacts with and effects and is effected by the world around me. It's as if the travel has added strength to the spokes even if the outer rims have sustained a bit of wear and tear. The elements matter more than they used to.

Water, wood, fire, earth, metal. Color, line, shape, value, texture, form. Parish, work, school, home, writing. The elements aren't static. They play with each other and threaten each other and feed each other. What they make together is a life. My life.

"The Interdisciplinary Studies program is designed with serious students in mind - students with eclectic interests, a clear sense of academic mission, and high expectations for their undergraduate experience."

It's August. The wheel is turning.

Did you know that there is a new model for the periodic table of elements? It's not a chart with blocks stacked in order of atomic weight. It's a galaxy in motion. That's what we are. People are galaxies in motion. The creator of the galaxy chart is Philip Stewart.

Philip Stewart decided at an early age that he did not want to choose between arts and sciences. After taking degrees at the University of Oxford in Arabic and in Forestry, he spent seven years in Algeria working in forest and soil conservation. In 1975 he returned to his old university, where for 31 years he taught Economics to Biology students and Ecology to Human Sciences students, occasionally also taking Arabic pupils.

Philip Stewart sees the elements like this. "The intention is not to replace the familiar table, but to complement it and at the same time to stimulate the imagination and to evoke wonder at the order underlying the universe."

Exactly.

(click on any of the images to go to their sources)

Is it time?

I just wondered. Is it time to start worrying about this? This doesn't look like a dangerous project at all - nossir. What could possibly go wrong? Oh. What are they doing, you ask? The brothers are plotting the repair of the barn roof. Most of the bracing under the metal roofing is rotten, all metal roofing slices like a butcher's blade if it's grabbed by bare hands, and the wind in our area of the world is the reason wind-surfers love it here. So ... I ask again, what could possibly go wrong?

Soundtrack

If someone made a sound track of my marriage, part of it would be this sound. It sounds like all the vacations, and foreign movies, and all night-watchings, and stinky cheeses, and wine. This is the sound of tears of happiness, and it is the sound of longing. It sounds like the beach. It sounds, to me, like my marriage.

The Great Husband does it again

Yeay, husband!!! He has rescued this keyboard from the brink of death. He took it apart and cleaned out all the soy-creamered coffee that was resting stickily inside of it ever since I up-ended my morning coffee into lap, keyboard, and desk calendar earlier this week. And it's working grrrreat!

(And if you click on the "male superhero." you can find a coloring page for getting one of your own. I doubt yours will fix keyboards at a single bound, but who knows?)

In other news, I had to work today, and there were too many things to do here for us to attend a family gathering at the beach. The beach would be a lot cooler than it is here. But on the bright side - the very bright side indeed - I saw a view of the side of Mt. Hood today that took my breath away. I'm taking my camera with me next time I drive to Parkdale to be the card lady at the store up there.

News from our Afghanistan soldier: This is the magazine worth reading if you really want to know how things are going over there. (She's borrowing Major Curtis's copies - she said she knows he doesn't have time to read them right now, so she volunteered to do that.) She says the enormous scarf she sent me for my birthday is a pashmina, so now I'll know how to clean it. It's such a gorgeous piece of fabric - woven in shimmery golds and burgundy in an intricate pattern. It will be wonderful when the weather cools down in the fall. She also says this is the book keeping her sane right now.

And I've gotten a few more chips off the huge block in the road that seems to morph into The Great Unscalable Mountain every time I think I might write something and send it to a real live editor. But what about? But what about? You can't. Not yet. Wait. Wait. Wait. Over and over, like a kind of nasty, mean-spirited crossing guard who never does want anyone to cross at her corner. At work at the library this week -- Reality Dude pointed out that the demented crossing guard doesn't have any real authority over me and I can cross whenever I want to.

I did cross at the Sartorial Crossing this week. For once, when I tried on something that fit perfectly, I didn't second guess myself and I actually bought the thing. Maybe that's a good sign. Dress today, essay tomorrow - or something like that.

(Man, it's nice to be able to type again! Did you know the computer has an on-screen keyboard you can use with your mouse? I'll try that again someday if I want to imagine being seriously injured and unable to use all my fingers.)

Joon - please take a note (because I can't find my notepad)

Ever see Benny & Joon? One of my top 15 movies of all time.

Sam: You don't like raisins?
Joon: Not really.
Sam: Why?
Joon: They used to be fat and juicy and now they're twisted. They had their lives stolen. Well, they taste sweet, but really they're just humiliated grapes. I can't say I am a big supporter of the raisin council.

The month of Joon has begun, and so far, here's what's on the schedule. Here's the reason my new motto is:

AS SOON AS YOU THINK OF IT, EITHER DO IT OR WRITE IT DOWN

Seriously. It's the only way I'll make it to the end of Joon without losing my mind or my keys, or overdrawing my bank account so badly that we have to take out a second mortgage to cover the overdraft fees. Today is Saturday, June 6.

Sunday, June 7: Trinity Sunday, first Sunday of the Month, which means Evensong & Benediction, and the last Sunday of the Sunday School year. I'm planning on getting my barely-readers to draw this, but with symbols instead of words:Wednesday, June 10: final paper for the Lit course, and that means final paper for the year, and that means I've acquired forty credits this year. Feels good.

Friday, June 12: daughter soldier brings things to store from garrison to our house.

Saturday, June 13: taller, curlier young giant home for the summer (we go get him that day)

then ... Mon-Wed, learn the card lady job. Friday, go to the battalion's ceremony because they're deploying on Father's Day. (Doesn't that sound a bit ill advised?) Mon &/or Tues, old card lady shows me the paperwork for the post-Dads&Grads displays, and I take over the job. Wed, haircut and party for PLA students. Friday/Saturday, Earnst&Young gala in Seattle ... and I have jury duty in July.

So here's what I need. I need a waterproof, downloadable, voice activated, engrafted into my body somewhere, notepad. That way, as soon as I think of something I'll be able to take a note or do it. If I don't do either one, the idea (or bank transfer) disappears into oblivion never to be seen or heard from again. Until we get the bank statement.

I was only gone for three hours ...!

Some

things

never

change.

Once, I went to Seattle for a day and a night, and when I came home, there was no floor in the living room. They had pulled it out of the house. Yes, really.

But today I was only gone for three hours. Three. I just got home.

Car to the right of the picture: my car.

Ditch across the middle: between my car and the door into the house. Deep ditch.






Ditch made by large machine in background.

This means that tomorrow morning, on the way to church, I will need to walk through ridiculous ground all the way around the house to get to my car.

I'm wearing flats.

The same only different

I should have kept these notices throughout the years. There are some things in life that are the same only different - a phrase that normally makes me twitch a bit. But think about it. We had bookshelves made of planks and cinder blocks -- we had those things in twelve addresses during the first fifteen years of married life. And if you saw a picture of those shelves, you'd be able to tell where we were and what we were doing if you read the spines of the books.

We had a couch too. A goldish sort of yellow/brown couch. It is a very solid and good quality couch, and we hefted it in and out of moving trucks over and over and over. We've got it in an attic awaiting new fabric because the old fabric kind of came to pieces at the seams, but still. Pictures of that couch will show you babies at different stages, and various living rooms, and backgrounds of artwork - home made and otherwise. Here, for instance. That's baby number two threatening to make his appearance and his parents resigned to waiting for him until he got good and ready. (Good old couch. Even with that weighted front side, I didn't sink too far in for getting up again to chase my 18 month old. -- Wait. That was the kid who didn't need any chasing. Oooh, yeah! She used to stop at the threshold of the front door in that apartment in California, edge her pudgy little toes to the outside of the metal strip, and bend waaaay over to peer out. But it was an edge. She never fell off and she never went across it. Then this next kid came along and we bought a gate.)

So here is what I should have saved. This was in my inbox today. These are the books that will have my name on them at the library today, and I will bring them home tonight. Don't you think these lists of library holds say an awful lot about a person? I'm a far cry from What to Expect When You're Expecting, or Your Two and Three Year Old.

HOLD PICKUP NOTICE -- Material you requested is available.

***You'll now find items on the hold shelf by the first four letters of your
last name + the last four digits of your library card number.***

Contact library staff if you need more information.  Please do not reply to
email notices.  You can view or update your holds from the catalog at
http://catalog.fvrl.org/ or http://www.ci.camas.wa.us/library/.

1   What every BODY is saying : an ex-FBI agent's guide to speed reading
  people / Joe Navarro, with Marvin Karlins.
  Navarro, Joe, 1953-
  call number:153.69 NAVARRO                              copy:1
    Pickup by:5/25/2009
  hold pickup library:Stevenson Community Library                       



2   The lively art of writing / by Lucile Vaughan Payne.
  Payne, Lucile Vaughan.
  call number:808.042 PAYNE                               copy:1
    Pickup by:5/25/2009
  hold pickup library:Stevenson Community Library                       



3   The craft of research / Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M.
  Williams.
  Booth, Wayne C.
  call number:001.42 BOOTH                                copy:1
    Pickup by:5/25/2009
  hold pickup library:Stevenson Community Library                       



4   The company we keep : an ethics of fiction / Wayne C. Booth.
  Booth, Wayne C.
  call number:174.98 BOOTH                                copy:1
    Pickup by:5/25/2009
  hold pickup library:Stevenson Community Library                       



5   Jane Austen for dummies / by Joan Klingel Ray.
  Ray, Joan Klingel.
  call number:823.7 RAY                                   copy:1
    Pickup by:5/25/2009
  hold pickup library:Stevenson Community Library                       



6   Homosexuality and the politics of truth / Jeffrey Satinover.
  Satinover, Jeffrey, 1947-
  call number:306.766 SATINOV                             copy:1
    Pickup by:5/25/2009
  hold pickup library:Stevenson Community Library                        

Really good story - and jazz!

"Tell me a story .... pleeeease?"

These days I'm insatiable, and the stories I want to hear are the ones about soldiers who come home and have lives that benefit from their time in the military,

and the stories about people who make a living with a combination of things they do at home, on their own land, in their own homes, and do it as a second career (but it's a bit late for "second" around here ... twenty-second, maybe ...),

and the stories about women in universities, women who've joined the chorus with their own voices and done something significant - after the age of 50,

and the ones about really inventive young parents and young adults who figure out oddball ways to make things work in ways no one else ever figured out,

and the ones about up and coming artists, composers, film makers ... (although, I gotta say, I'm a bit worried about that film maker one -- my Young Giant could go hungry for a lot of years going down that path -- but he'd be okay. I know he'd be okay. He'd be good at it too. (oh.) I just figured it out. I think I might be worried that I would not be able to figure out what he's doing. Yes. Well. Been there, and I know I'd be okay too. So ... where was I?)

and the stories about musicians. New musicians. Talented musicians. Musicians from HERE who do all kinds of stuff! Got a good one today. This musician is sooooo "Portland" - and then she went to Berklee in Boston, and that's what my Young Giant wants to do, and this is a verrrrry good story indeed. Click here to go to the NPR interview and story, and click on the picture to go to Esperanza's own gorgeous and exuberant (bilingual!) site. This up and coming generation just makes me so danged HAPPY!!!

I'd like to order a Keeper

Seriously. I need a Keeper. On this morning of fog and drizzle, the damp before the warmth and sun, on this morning which is a prelude to another round of PLA writing and online Lit course, on this morning which is a Friday in a calm and cheerful week (mostly - there is the issue of the son-in-law deployed this week) ... on this morning I rose to see The Great Husband off to work, make my coffee, and eat my yogurt.

And I opened the container of Trader Joe's Greek yogurt - fig today because I ate all the honey yogurt.

But the plastic seal was missing, and the yogurt was partially gone already.

Uh ...

"Did you eat some of this?"

"No. I figured you did. I don't eat partial containers of yogurt."

But I cannot remember. Honestly and truly, I do not know if I was the eater of the yogurt. And if I did not eat it, then I brought it home from the store that way. (eeew!) And if I did eat it, why can't I remember that?

No yogurt for me this morning.

No brain either.

I need a Keeper.

Somebody give him a medal!

Ladies and gentlemen, I LOVE MY HUSBAND! The Great Husband has done it again. He returned home from work this evening to find a nearly hysterical wife who knew full well that yes, she had saved her work. Repeatedly, thank you very much. But that document is supposed to be eleven pages long, and not four. Look. Here's a printed sheet of paper. See? It's from a later version than the four-pager you're looking at. Where IS it???

(this went on for awhile - me lamenting like a crazy woman, him clicking keys and hunting through drop down menus)

And he FOUND it! I'd saved an academic journal article I am using as a reference, and apparently while saving that, I'd opened a "temporary" file folder, and my longer document - my first PLA essay of the quarter - was in there.

Now I don't have to collapse - or ... I don't have to stay collapsed.

I am nearly recovered.

Time to write.

And think of some really good way to thank The Great Husband.