A few more things

First: this is what the whole house looks like, for those who have been wondering if it's the same house they lived in. I hope it is the same house! I'd love to hear everyone's stories about it.

Also, the landlord was creepy when I lived there, too. At one point, before the front room was turned into a separate studio apartment, he dropped by to announce that he was moving in. His wife had left him, and he needed a place to live, and since nobody was renting that room at the moment he was just going to live there himself. He did own the place, after all! But we didn't need to worry about a thing – he'd be sure to give us plenty of bathroom time in the morning to shave our legs and curl our hair and put on our makeup and whatnot (he obviously wasn't looking too closely at any of us if he thought we were going to care about any of that).

Um, I don't think so, I told him. Oh yes, I do think so, he said. Luckily the BYU housing office had our back, and he did not move in.

(A brief detour about housing at BYU, at least when I lived there: They have really weird rules there. Every student is required to live in university-approved housing – meaning, no boys & girls under the same roof, which led to some bizarre apartment building designs, among other social contortions. Whereas in most places a "housing unit" consists of a whole house or apartment, which you can rent and live in alone or sublet to friends or whatever, there, you usually just rent a bed. Most places had three bedrooms, with two beds in each bedroom. If you could convince enough friends to move into the other beds in the house, great. If not, the landlord would move someone in there. You could end up sleeping three feet away from someone you'd never met!

Also, according to the official rules, at least as recently as the early 90s, non-BYU students are not allowed to live in BYU housing. Presumably their non-BYU ways might taint or contaminate the otherwise pure and innocent students of the Lord's university. I found this out when a friend's little sister came to me in tears, claiming the place she'd been renting all summer was refusing to renew her contract for the fall because she wasn't a student. Preparing to kick some greedy landlord ass, I called the BYU housing office to get the real scoop – and found out it was true. According to the agreement with the university, they were completely within their rights to kick her out. Why it was okay to let her live there during the summer, I never found out – probably just because they needed the money.)

Anyway: when I moved out of the Bauhaus, he tried to withhold my deposit. I still remember the amount: $75, a full month's rent. To me, in 1986, that was a lot of money. He claimed I had never paid a deposit, and I knew I had. Where's the receipt, then, he wanted to know. Well actually, I happen to have it right here, I replied. Then he claimed not to have the money – he was too poor! He wanted to mail me a check later. I told him that since he'd just tried to rip me off, I didn't trust him to send it (I can't believe I ever used to be that brave!) and asked for cash. Finally he pulled out his wallet and handed it over – he'd had it on him all along – sighing and rolling his eyes as if he was doing me a huge favor. I gave him the pathetic little handwritten receipt I'd prepared before I went to meet him, shook his cold oily hand, and never had to deal with him again. The scumbag.

(I remember that little square white wooden table, bigbrownhouse. I wish I had kept something, too. Actually – I did. A large blue and white porcelain dinner plate, which I still have. I've eaten dinner on it almost every night since 1985! Nobody else is allowed to eat on or even wash it, except me.)

And he still owns the place. The woman who lives there now with her husband is probably in her late 40s. They're both there for graduate school and can't wait to get out of Provo and move back to California. I don't blame them.

To me, the saddest thing is the loss of that big tree in front. It protected the house and gave it a feeling of warmth and ... hm, a kind of compassion. I spent a lot of time with that tree, and I always felt like it was aware of me, and watching out for me. I can't believe nobody's bothered to plant a new one in its place.

The forsythia is gone, too. The gravel driveway is paved now and the whole back yard of the house next to it, all the way back to the alley, has been turned into an enormous asphalt parking lot. Cars and ugly apartments everywhere. I don't know if all that junk is still in the back yard, though if that woman had not arrived when she did I would have gone back to look. I probably would have peeked in the windows, too, even with my mother sitting out in the car cringing at my audacity.

I only lived there a couple of years, but somehow I still feel like I own that house.

Six eighty four

Sometimes when I'm in Utah I like to visit places that were important to me when I lived there. Most of these are outdoor places – certain canyons, rivers, hotsprings, mountainsides and desert places I would go to when I needed to empty out my mind and let my soul re-emerge. I would ride my bike out to the end of the levy in the snow and take pictures of the sun shining through six-inch-thick plates of ice that stood all piled up on their edges like a gigantic traffic jam, where the waves had pushed the whole frozen surface of the lake up against the broken concrete of the levy. In the summer I would ride out over the mud flats, drawing giant picture and patterns in the mud with the tires of my bike, or sit on the rocks where the river poured into the lake and stare out across the water. In stormy weather you couldn't see the other side, and I would imagine a whole ocean out there, with other countries beyond it where everything was clean and quiet and beautiful and made sense. On the east side of the valley sometimes I would hike up to a certain large rock, half a mile in and a hundred yards up the side of a certain canyon, to sit on its smooth gray surface in the quiet, watching the empty black branches of a certain tree moving against the clean white snow. Sometimes birds would come. Whatever else was going on in my life, it was always quiet there.

I had a very comforting sort of vision of my grandmother there once. She said, "You're not alone. We're all right here, and life is shorter than you think."

Most of those special places are gone now, or ruined. People have cluttered up the west shore of the lake with houses and roads and streetlights. They've also built houses all around the mouth of that canyon so that you can't hike up into it anymore without climbing over people's fences. When I go to Utah now I stay with my parents, who live on the opposite end of the valley, and I rarely go down into my old neighborhoods anymore. I don't want to see what's happened to them since I've been gone. I like remembering them the way they were.

This last trip, though, I did drive by two of my old houses: the one I renovated and lived in for five years before moving back out to California, and the one in this picture. This is the first house I ever lived in on my own. All together, I think I only spent about two years in it – maybe not even that long – but in my memory it feels like I lived there forever.

We drove past it on our way to an exhibit at the BYU museum because I wanted to show it to Mr. A. I held my breath for the last block before we got to it, suddenly terrified that it would be gone – I didn't want the image of another ugly apartment building in my head. But the house is still there. Some things about it have changed – the big tree that used to shade the front yard has been cut down, and the place where I planted my first garden (the first garden that was really, totally, and exclusively mine) is now paved with asphalt. In place of the irises and roses I rescued and tried to take care is a handful of battered crocuses that are just starting to stick their noses out.

I knew it was kind of a bold move, but I couldn't help walking up closer to the porch – I wanted to take a picture of the door, for Julie. While I was standing there the woman who lives there now came walking around the corner of the house, and we spent several minutes chatting about the place. She loves it, too, and was glad to learn a little of its history. She told me the same guy still owns it, though possibly not for much longer – it's only a block from campus, and people are always wanting to buy the property and build something else there. Thinking of that makes me want to never drive by there again.

Anyway – for now it's still there, and I'm glad I got to see it. I spent so many hours sitting in the sun on that porch, reading or talking with friends or just watching people walk by. I spent a lot of time feeling alone in that house, too – a lot of time being alone – it was the first house where I ever lived by myself. It was the first time in my life I ever had the freedom to hermitize and hibernate and hide from the world the way I'd always wanted to.

The blue flowered bedroom I had there (which I know from a less recent visit has now been painted over, urgh) is, to this day, the best bedroom I've ever had. I loved to sit in the open doorway into the back yard in the morning, drinking mint tea and listening to Joni Mitchell and the Roches and writing in my journal and dreaming about how my life was going to be.

Sometimes I wonder how things might have been different if I'd felt secure enough to accept more attention and direction – or to ask for it – from people who knew more about how the world works than I did. Looking back on it, I think I really had no idea at all what I was doing, or what I was capable of doing. It's only in the last few years that I'm starting to get clear on all that.

Hm. I don't like thinking back on those times, suddenly. It makes me feel sad and lonely, like I missed out on something that will never come again. The funny thing is that even at the time, I felt that way.

I started out with the idea of writing a detailed memoir of that house, but now I don't feel like finishing it. Maybe another day. It might be interesting to write down everything I can remember about the life I lived there, and then compare it with what I actually wrote about my life at the time. When I've done this kind of exercise before, I've always been amazed – remembering only my supposed confusion and conflict in certain situations and relationships, for example – to see how extremely clear I usually was about what was really going on.

Insight is the easy part. What takes courage is making the leap from insight to action.

Gershwin? With bongos?!

Today I spent most of the day more or less knocked out with a killer migraine, though I did manage to get out of the house – out of town, even – to spend a few hours with Mr. A and his sister, checking out the county library book sale and eating lunch at my favorite Mexican restaurant.

The best thing I got at the book sale was not a book but a short stack of ancient LPs, mostly from the 50s and 60s. There was a time when I had a great collection of old records I had picked up at thrift stores and yard sales, chosen primarily for the great titles and/or cover art. I specialized in pictures of ingenue torch singers with dramatic hairdos and tiny-waisted jewel-colored dresses. I left them all behind when I left the ex, along with almost everything else I owned. And I've never missed them. But today at the library I was so inspired by the selection that I decided to get a few, just for fun. Here's the breakdown:

Records with great cover art AND great titles:
• But You've Never Heard Gershwin With Bongoes (from the back cover: "Don't cheat your ears. They deserve this.")
• Drink Along With Irving (Songs and Nightcaps for the Man of No Distinction), featuring a really fabulous early Andy Warhol-esque pen and ink illustration on the back
• Ira Ironstrings, The best damn dance band in the land, which has an amusing story on the back cover and claims to have been recorded "April 11 and a hunk of April 12, 1930, in North Crumble, Macon County, Georgia, without benefit of clergy," though the actual copyright is 1960

Records with great cover art of the wide-eyed ingenue variety:
• Music of Desire
• They Say It's Wonderful
• Art Van Damme Swings Sweetly – the New Sound of the World's Greatest Accordionist (what can I say, I love accordion music)

Records I thought I might actually like listening to:
• Let's Dance The Bossa Nova (missing its instructional booklet of dance steps, unfortunately)
• Some unnamed jug band record
• Beatnik-looking Indian guy singing hits from Hindi go-go movies

And finally, for nostalgia's sake only:
• Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews' My Fair Lady, which I had to get because as a kid I spent countless hours leaning up against the baggy stretched out black and gold fabric on the front of our stereo cabinet speakers, listening and quietly singing along to my parents' copy of the exact same record.

Any records that come from the library sale are bound to be scratchy and terrible-sounding, but to me, that only adds to the appeal. And if the cover and title are cheesy enough to attract me, there's almost always at least one song I like, as well. I can't wait to get the turntable hooked up and listen to them.

Over lunch at the Mexican restaurant Mr. A's sister started talking about her son's page on MySpace, which led to a discussion of online communities and related ideas ... and once again I found myself wondering if Mr. A knows about this blog or not. I've never told him about it, but I have heard him refer to "tinarama," and a few weeks ago he encouraged me to continue "writing stuff on the internet." So maybe he does know and just doesn't bring it up because I never bring it up – though I almost always end up talking with him about whatever I write in here anyway, because if it's important enough for me to want to keep track of here, it's important enough that I want to share it with him.

All this makes me think about something I don't think about much anymore: why do I "write stuff on the internet," anyway? Especially if I feel anxious about being read by people who know me – why put it out there where anyone in the world can read it? Do I really think anyone else wants to read about my heavy bleeding, or my anxiety attacks, or my occasional existential crises, or any of the other embarrassingly self-indulgent crap I write about? Isn't it crazy to expose all this stuff to strangers, or even to the unwelcome attention of certain people who do know me? For example, my ex-husband found my tinarama email address by googling, and if he found that, why wouldn't he have found this, too? Is he reading this? What do I care if he is?

Why not just write in my own private journals and keep it all to myself? That's the way I did it for years and years – more than 25 years, in fact.

I first started blogging as a way to extend my journaling practice. I had got into the habit of using my journal as a safe place to store memory. I would write down exactly what I was really seeing, doing, thinking, feeling, as truly as I could in the moment, as a way of keeping real with myself. Because I don't know how it is with other people, but with me, the good things are the only things that seem to stay fresh in my memory. It's one of the reasons it takes me such a long time to get out of bad situations – because as soon as the bad moment passes, I start to forget how bad it really was.

For example, as soon as I finished my tantrum over the email from my ex-husband last month, I immediately started berating myself for being so hard on him. Then I went back to the journals I was writing the last time I spent any amount of time with him, and rediscovered something I had forgotten: that as recently as a month or so before I met Mr. A, the ex actually suggested we consider having a baby together. In other words, he was completely out of touch with reality and continuing to mess with my mind and emotions in some really creepy and disturbing ways. Remembering that helps me know that it's okay to have strong negative feelings about him sometimes, and that I don't have to be mean to myself when that happens.

Anyway: I was working for a web development company in the late 90s, spending many hours researching various things online, and had started reading people's online journals. My first connection with the concept came after I emailed a woman who'd written a thoughtful article about parenting and mental illness. She emailed me back, and her email signature included a link to a website – her online diary. From there I discovered a whole community of people who were writing about their own challenges with mental illness (which I was dealing with myself at the time), as well as all kinds of other things. These were not professional publications or scholarly articles, but actual personal narratives. I loved seeing how insightful and candid and courageous and compassionate they were willing to be, and it made me feel good to see some of the inner workings of people's lives who were struggling, like me, and surviving. It made me feel like I was going to be okay, too.

At the time I still didn't have many friends here and so the emotional intimacy people were willing to share online was really attractive and intriguing to me. I felt so grateful to these writers for putting themselves out there – and I had been writing my own life down in the same way for such a long time – that I immediately started writing my own stuff online as a way to pass along the favor. I felt safe saying anything I needed to say, because I never used my own name or any other information that could identify me or anyone else I was writing about.

I always told myself that my goal with this process was to gain more confidence in speaking my own truth to other people. Eventually, I thought, I would be able to talk openly with people close to me about anything I needed to talk about, just as freely and easily as I was learning to open up to strangers in my online journal.

That hasn't happened yet, although there are several people who know me who also know about this journal. That's a good thing, because it sort of ups the ante in my crusade against self-censorship. Inviting people I know into this space, and then changing my writing so I only talk about things I think they will be interested in, or not grossed out by or horrified or bored at, kind of defeats the whole purpose. Still, I worry. I worry that if I don't write about my big bloody period, in ten years I might not be able to remember what my period was like when I was 40. And at the same time, I worry that if I do write about it, people will think I'm disgusting or an exhibitionist or in some other way disapprove of me. Maybe they'll think it's fine for me to write about those things if I want to keep track of them, but that I should restrict my online writing to topics of more general interest. Maybe someone will write a mean comment making fun of me for being neurotic and self-absorbed and inappropriate, and for lacking any sense of discretion or common decency. Maybe they'll tell me to get a life! Maybe I should show a little more self-restraint. Maybe I should limit myself to amusing entries about how I had to dose up the dogfood with caesar dressing and toasted pine nuts today, because we'd run out of pup soup (the delightful melange of leftovers we mix in with their dinner each night) and they refused to eat their kibble plain. Or about how I almost crashed the bike the other night when I reached down to adjust the headlamp and rode right into an enormous pothole I hadn't seen, because the headlamp had been pointing off in the wrong direction.

But, well, sometimes I just need to write about personal, embarrassing things. This is a personal journal that I'm writing for myself, to document things I think will be useful or interesting or funny or in whatever other way worthwhile to me, to remember in the future. Sometimes it might be entertaining to other people too; sometimes it's just plain old documentation. In any case, I don't have to please anyone else but myself here.

Ugh. Enough self-examination for one day. I'm starting to feel all defensive, and nobody's even attacked me yet!

They're starting to love me

Do I know my cows or what? After several weeks of dinging the bike bell and shouting cheerful greetings to my five new neighbors every morning – having given up on trying to get them to come over to me in the evening, when they can't see anything very well – they're now cautiously approaching the fence when I stop to tempt them with generous fistfuls of the luscious long meadow grass that grows just ever so slightly beyond their reach. This one actually accepted a mouthful from me the other day, thus initiating the next step in the glorious cycle of life: I feed you, and someday, maybe not so very long from now ... you will feed me.

Not that I'll ever eat any of these actual cows. But I do eat cows, on occasion. Given that, it seems like the least I can do is to take the time to get to know a few cows personally, and try to make their lives a little more enjoyable. Although as cows' lives go, these guys seem to have it pretty good, at least for now.

Sigh. Someday I do hope to be a vegetarian again. Maybe even a vegan. Or a raw food person! That would be the best and most ethical of all, I suppose. But for the moment I'm having a hard enough time keeping my blood healthy even including red meat in my diet. I'm also eating everything else I can find that has iron in it, plus continuing to take my supplements. And I finally dug up the tattered lab form on which my doctor, last October, wrote the instructions for the blood panel I'm supposed to submit to, to figure out why I'm always so anemic even though I eat pretty well. I will be going in for the tests next Tuesday morning.

When I was in Utah I asked my brother, who's a doctor, whether he thought it was possible I actually am eating enough iron, but just not absorbing it properly. He said it could be that, or it could be that I'm not getting as much iron as I think I am, or that I'm consuming and absorbing it okay, but losing too much each month with my period.

That had never occurred to me, but now that I think of it, it makes sense. Not to go into all the gruesome details, but I have always been a pretty heavy bleeder, and over the last three or four years have become even more of one. Like, to the point where I literally danced a little jig in Long's drugstore last week, because they have FINALLY started carrying the ultra-absorbent o.b.'s – which means that now, with one of those and a big fat night-time Gladrag, I should at last be able to sleep through the night without waking up the next morning in a pool of gore that would put Carrie White to shame. (Oops, I said no gruesome details.)

An aside: I know, I know about cloth pads vs. disposable products. Also the keeper, diva cup, sea sponges, bleeding into mother earth, and all the rest. I used only reusables for about fifteen years and am still kind of an evangelist for them. But when I moved in with a man who had never lived with a woman before, and who gets extremely woozy at the sight of even his own blood, I thought I'd break him in gently. Part of me thinks, hey, I'm a woman! And you know what? Women are bloody! But of course he already knows that. And he's so kind and protective of me when I'm bleeding, feeding me special vitamin-rich meals and warming up hot water bottles for me and rubbing my belly and feet – I just kind of feel like, why get all up in his face with the actual blood? Plus, now that I live in a house that has its own washing machine, there's really no need to leave them lying around soaking in big bowls of bloody red water.

Hrmm. All this makes me lonesome for my old cloth pads. I hardly ever see my own blood anymore. Maybe it is time to go back.

But the point of this whole discussion was that yes, I do lose an inordinate amount of blood each month, and it's possible this is why I'm anemic. My brother told me about a new-ish outpatient procedure in which they sort of heat up the inside of your uterus – not cauterization, less heat than that – which causes you to bleed less when the lining sheds. Or something like that. He also mentioned that it does not seem to affect fertility.

So it's good to know there are options, but in general I'm not a big fan of surgery. I underwent a cervical LEEP procedure about 13 years ago and it was the most painful thing I've ever been through – not the LEEP itself, but the big giant shots they gave me just before. I thought I'd prepared myself by spending hours in the university library reading medical books that told me I could expect to experience "some discomfort." I was going to breathe calmly and regularly, meditate on soothing images, take homeopathic doses of relaxing herbs, etc. ... all of which worked great until the foot-long needle went in, at which time I shocked myself and everyone else in the room by screaming like a grizzly bear getting its head cut off, and shaking so badly it took two people to help me stay on the table. Not too excited about going through anything like that again.

Anyhoo! Didn't this start out as a sweet little pastoral piece about feeding the cows? How did I end up here?

This is a test!

Why do animated GIFs work when the content is text, but not when it's photos? It's the same type of file! I uploaded this one to Blogger and it seems to be working fine, but when I uploaded the Elvis GIF, Blogger converted it to a JPG. If I store the files on my own server this doesn't seem to be a problem. Must investigate.

Here's a slightly modified GIF I uploaded to my server. I tried loading this one into Blogger, and it converted it into a JPG too, even though it includes both text and an image (the original of which is a GIF). And why are they different sizes, when I told Blogger to make them the same size? And why, if I put the photos on the left instead of the right, is there no space between the copy and the right border of the image? Freaky deaky!

Ain't nothin' but an Elvis impersonator(also, hair)

Last night, instead of our usual Tuesday night Nepalese food, we went to Mr. A's sister's thirtieth anniversary party. Her husband had planned the whole evening as a surprise, staging everyone in a back room at their favorite Chinese restaurant, and bringing her in at the last moment to thunderous applause. The highlight of the evening, for me at least, was a 20-song set by this great Elvis impersonator – featuring my favorite Elvis song of the moment, Rubberneckin', which I am listening to right now. Hooray for iTunes!

He wore a one-piece white polyester jumpsuit with pirate laces up the chest, and superlong fringes strung with multicolored plastic pony beads. And he had copies for sale of his own CD of non-Elvis songs he had written. The front cover was a studio portrait of himself wearing a St. Patrick's Day green pullover sweater, leaning forward on folded hands next to an adorable blonde Golden Retriever puppy. I kind of wish I had bought a copy of that. He was the sweetest Elvis impersonator I've ever met.

(A technical aside: Will someone let me know if the Elvis photo switches to an alternate view after 5 seconds? It's not working for me in the Blogger window, but when I click on the photo, it loads fine. Does Blogger not support animated GIFs?)

Another Elvis-related item: During our trip to Utah last week my six-year-old niece showed me a computer game where you create your own character by clicking on the face, clothes, hair, jewelry, etc. that you want and dragging them onto the body you've chosen. There's an enormous selection of variables for each category and I wanted to encourage her to have fun mixing it up. So when I saw her pretty golden-haired high-heeled princess emerging, I suggested, "Let's give her those gigantic red sideburns!"

"What are sideburns?" she wanted to know.

So I went to Google and showed her how to search for them. And somehow today my results are different, but on that day last week one of the first results took me to this (you have to scroll almost to the bottom to see it): the Gigantic Elvis Wig, including the world's most gigantic sideburns! There's also a mullet Elvis wig, one made from real human hair, and (actually, I think this one was on a different site) the Elvis Afro. Yow!

I love everybody's facial hair except my own. Possibly I have already given this link at some time in the past, because I've been a fan of this site for several years, but here it is again – the ultimate facial hair website, at least to my knowledge – the official website of the World Beard and Mustache Championships. Even if you've already seen them, it's worth another visit because they've recently posted a great new photo of the 2005 champ.

And finally, thanks to Julie for turning me on to Jennifer Miller of Circus Amok, a bona fide real live woman who proudly sports a gloriously bushy black beard. Even if I stopped plucking my chin-hairs I would never have a beard as full and luxurious as hers, but still – I find her inspiring.

When I was younger I was a lot more comfortable letting my freak flag fly, but even then I was deeply mortified by and protective of my beard hairs. In my late 20's I endured the agony of electrolysis, which helped for awhile, but left me red-faced and sore for an hour or so after each appointment. The damage was so obvious, I decided to just come out with it. Yeah, I know my chin is red. I just got out of my ELECTROLYSIS appointment! You know, to get rid of my BEARD!

I was amazed at how many women at my office and elsewhere would furtively approach me to confess their own possession of beards and hit me up for advice, once they learned what I was up to. It turns out, tons of women have facial hair. Some, like me, think the Frida-style heavy black mustachio'ed look is totally sexy and hot. Alice B. Toklas is also noted to have had this type of hair. But women who are willing to let their chin hairs grow and flourish unmolested by tweezers, blades, and chemicals are much fewer and farther between.

There's also the whole phenomenon of leg and armpit shaving. I wonder why so many of us – even the comfortable-with-my-body, free-thinking hippie alterna-chicks – are so desperately at war with our hair?

Missing

Last night I spent a good 40 minutes looking for my glasses. I almost never wear them – the prescription is more than 15 years old – but I got a speck of something in my eye and wanted to take out my contacts.

I never did find them, which I thought was weird because I never lose anything. Like, never. At some point in my childhood I acquired a disturbing inability to function without "a place for everything and everything in its place" – which still may at times look like clutter to other people, but the point is, I know where things are.

My dad thinks this is because I inherited his borderline obsessive-compulsive personality. I think he's right. It was interesting to discover during my visit last weekend that we both have strict rules about certain things relating to numbers. For instance, there are only six allowable times that I can set my alarm clock to: 5 minutes after the hour, 10 minutes, 20, 25, 40, or 50. I've tried to branch out to other times – 7:15, for example – and have come so unsprung over it that I literally cannot fall asleep until I get up and change it to either 7:10 or 7:20. As for 7:14, or 7:16? Out of the question.

What strange quirks do you have, gentle reader?

Anyway: Living with other people, especially when they are less meticulous than I am about these things, has always been a challenge. Because when something goes missing, I always know that I was not the person who misplaced it. It's hard not to blame. But in this case I knew that Mr. A wouldn't have moved my glasses – he doesn't even know where I keep them. So it must have been me. Only it wasn't me!

The mystery was solved this morning with a voicemail from my mother, who said she had found a pair of glasses downstairs in their house, and was wondering if they might be mine. The question of how they ended up loose in my parents' basement, when I could have sworn I'd left them in the same place they always live – my little purple travel bag – was answered when I remembered that Mr. A found my green vacation toothbrush lying on the floor in the same basement, just an hour before we left to come home. The toothbrush lives in the travel bag, too. So I think one of my little nieces or nephew must have seen the bag on the bathroom counter and decided to do a little pillaging.

Why am I telling this fascinating story? Glasses missing, then recovered; toothbrush defiled but easily replaceable ... what's the big deal?

The big deal part is that in the same voicemail, my mom also mentioned that my baby sister's first really serious boyfriend just broke up with her. I never met the guy, but I'll say this for him: his timing seems kind of cruel. The day before Valentine's Day, and only a week before she goes in for a tonsillectomy she's very nervous about.

I've actually been a little wary of this guy all along, primarily because he lives on the East Coast and if she married him we might never be able to convince her to move back out west again. She has friends there too, of course, and a job she loves, but I still hate to think of her going through this all alone several thousand miles away, especially with the hearts & flowers holiday and her surgery coming up and it being the middle of a bitter cold winter and all. I've been sort of heartaching for her all day, and remembering how it felt to go through my last big breakup (aka, the divorce) out here away from my family, all by myself. My mom is flying out there next week to be with her at the hospital and spend a few days helping her recuperate after she gets home. I wish I could go, too.

Glasses, toothbrushes, hearts – things get lost, things get broken. Order becomes disorder. She was six years old when I moved away for college. I wish I had made more of an effort to know her better while she was growing up; I never really got to be there for her, for anything. So today I sent her a box of little presents to let her know what I've learned: that it all comes back together again eventually. Of course, then it all falls apart again in new and different ways ... but we don't really need to dwell on that right now. For now, let's focus on what still feels good. A card, a book, a red down blankie to snuggle up in, and of course a little box of really good chocolate. I hope it helps.

Out of the frying pan, into the fire(wait, that's no fire, that's my hair!)

Never one to leave well enough alone, last week I once again acted on an ill-advised hair-related impulse and hennaed my hair. I already have red hair to begin with, and my past experiences with henna (there have been a lot of them) have always turned out pretty subtle. Not this time. For several days my hair was a horrifying bright carroty orange, eventually oxidizing to a deep auburn that is (whew!) much closer to my natural color. Or at least, what used to be my natural color. So far I still don't have any gray to speak of other than the occasional random single hair. But the color is definitely not as red as it was when I was younger. Except that of course now, it is. At least for awhile.

When I was little there was this lady at our church who'd once had hair the same red as mine, or so she said. In her old age it had turned a fascinating shade of champagne pink, possibly by way of some kind of mysterious rinse. We would meet in the foyer and admire each other. I aspired to my very own airy pink halo of delicately curling hair, perhaps, someday ....

In other news, the cafe next to my office has suddenly and inexplicably closed. Nobody seems to know exactly what is going on. I had my usual bagel in the morning, and when I went back for my afternoon decaf soy chai latte, the gate was locked and a big sign in the window announced "Closed for the season."

The scuttlebutt around here is that they're not reopening, though I have high hopes that someone will soon see the opportunity there and figure out a way to make something happen. Something that involves food, is what I'm hoping. Otherwise, where am I supposed to eat? The next closest place is a whole block away! Which does not seem like much, but if it isn't close enough to just zip over there and back in under five minutes it might as well be on the moon, since I very rarely have time to take the elusive state-mandated 10-minute break.

I have a lot of more interesting things to write about one of these days, as soon as I have time. Here are my top ten upcoming topics, just so you have something to look forward to.

1. My 80-year-old bicycle riding friend: fixing her bike, picnic in the park, she brought me apples.
2. Utah vacation, including a selection of bizarre scenes from the airport.
3. Followup to my ex-husband tantrum, and how journaling helps me maintain my perspective over time.
4. Grizzly Man obsession (with mention of Christopher McCandless and Everett Reuss).
5. New developments at work.
6. Tater's foot.
7. Cows: First Contact.
8. Essential gear for small-town all-season bicycle commuting.
9. My recent crippling attack of blog comment envy.
10. Seven Days Later: Vacation photo analysis, or, Why I Must Immediately Lose The Weight I've Been Talking About Losing For Oh, About Ten Years Or So Now.

Bonus topic: Looking forward to Lent, and I'm not even Catholic!

Animal talk

In my fervor to discover, this morning, whether winter will be lasting another six weeks or not, I ran across an interesting piece of information I had never been hip to until today. Did you know that Punxsutawney Phil is not the only weather-predicting groundhog? It's true! He has colleagues all over the hemisphere – all over the world, for all I know! These include Wiarton Willie in Ontario (an albino, and I fear, a possible mass murderer!) and Shubenacadie Sam in Nova Scotia, Canada, as well as Staten Island Chuck, and my favorite, General Beauregard Lee (scroll down), who, according to the world wide web, lives in a groundhog-sized antebellum mansion in Georgia. CNN reports that Lee predicted an early spring this year after "game ranch officials roused him with an antique farm bell and the scent of Southern yams."

I want a groundhog-sized antebellum mansion.

Around here it's raining, which I think is supposed to mean spring is on its way. I love, love, love the rain here. Mr. A has been riding to and from work with me the last few days, and last night we took the extra-long route home, just because it was so lovely and warm and fresh-smelling. I made him stop at all my usual spots – a certain sewer grate through which you can hear the thrilling rush of a mysterious underground creek; a curve on the bike path that has a delicious-smelling flowering something-or-other growing near it (I haven't yet been able to identify the source of the smell); a low spot next to the neighbor's hay field that when full of water has so many frogs singing in it you can hardly hear anything else; the place where the edge of our road collapsed into the creek, where you can now stand just a couple of feet from the edge of the water and listen to it flowing by, and smell that wonderful fresh water smell; and finally, our neighbors' pasture, which has five new calves living in it as of about three weeks ago, presumably being grown for beef.

These same folks had three cows last year and I only got to talk to them twice (the cows, not the people) before they suddenly disappeared. All summer, the pasture was empty. Then these five new girls showed up, and I'm determined to make friends with them before they, too, go the way of hamburger. So far I've only met with them at night, because they're never in the field when I go by in the morning. I learned the first time I stopped to see them in the evening that they are very young, and shy, and afraid of the lights on my bike. So we're taking it slow. I turn down the light and park the bike across the street now before I go over to say hello. Progress is slow, but steady. They used to leap to their feet and bolt across the field every time I came by. Now, they just take a couple of steps away.

Soon they will be eating out of my hands.

What the Gliz?

I didn't even know they were having the Olympics again until I saw these weird characters on a graphic designers forum website. Neve and Gliz are the official mascots of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy – otherwise known as Turin, the place where that ancient shroud was found with what was claimed to be the real live face of Jesus Christ seared into it by unknown methods. The shroud of Turin, surely you've heard of it. And I thought that was creepy.

According to the official marketing statement,

"Neve is a gentle, kind and elegant snowball; Gliz is a lively, playful ice cube ... [They] reflect the spirit of the Italian Olympic event: passion, enthusiasm, culture, elegance, and love of the environment and of sport. They are the symbol of a young generation that is full of life and energy."

Well, whatever. I took an instant dislike to them and cannot purge from my mind the image of two skaters encased the Neve and Gliz versions of those giant foam costumes, performing a gentle, kind, elegant, lively, playful lovers' dance across the ice in celebration of the passion, enthusiasm, culture, elegance (again) and love of the environment (?!) and of sport ... Blech.

Speaking of sports, I don't like the Superbowl either. The last time I watched it was the year of the infamous wardrobe malfunction, which, by some bizarre fluke of the universe, I happened to glace at the television just in time to see. I'd been in the kitchen for an hour with Mr. A and had just walked into the living room to turn off the noise, when there it was: a flash of skin. "Hey, I think something really cool just happened on tv!" I yelled to Mr. A. It's one of the only historic events I've ever actually witnessed first hand, at the actual moment it occurred. I usually don't hear about these things until the next day.

Fun Fact: Before the year of the wardrobe malfunction, the last time I really watched the Superbowl was 1987.