Let me tell you what I did not do yesterday.

Yesterday I went to church. I taught my class on the gospel according to Harry Potter, and I sang in choir, and I got a chance to talk to some friends, and I ended the day feeling pretty bleh as another round of the winter crud took a hold of my throat and nose.

But yesterday I did not watch the Super Bowl. This is because I could really not care less about pretty much every major sport out there, and most certainly I could not care less about football. The only thing remotely useful about Super Bowl Sunday, for me, was when I had my paper route back in Junior High, back in the days when we still would collect the money door to door each month. Super Bowl Sunday was great because everyone was so desperate to get back to the television to watch grown men scrabble around in the grass for a lopsided ball amid much grunting and yelling and testosterone-infused stupidity that people were willing to toss large bills at me and exclaim “keep the change” as they slammed the door in my face.

But I am digressing. So let me repeat myself. I did not watch the Super Bowl yesterday. So I was perhaps one of the few people in this country who did not see Janet Jackson’s bared breast during the split milliseconds in which it actually happened, real time.

Not, mind you, that I have been lacking in opportunity since the great Nipple Escape occurred. The uproar that has ensued has been nothing short of laughable, if it weren’t for the fact that people seem to be taking it so seriously. An outrage, it is called, a moral outrage that such a thing would be shown on prime time television. And in case any of us missed the initial titillating shot, there have been all manner of news spots happily willing to show it to us, again, and again. See? See? If you weren’t outraged before, aren’t you outraged now?

Well, as a matter of fact, I am. But my outrage has absolutely nothing to do with Janet Jackson’s star-studded (literally) bosoms. So she bared her boobies on prime time. So. What. Big. Deal. Who the hell cares? It’s not as if we don’t see things even more blatantly seductive in other programming. After all, one doesn’t have to look too hard to find other examples of nudity on prime time, although I suppose in Survivor’s case, they oh-so-carefully blurred out all the naughty bits so you have to use your imagination a little bit more in order to figure out that one of their contestants was prancing around in his birthday suit.

No, my outrage about this whole thing is in how it is being blown so completely out of proportion. A woman accidentally flashes a nipple on television and suddenly everyone is in a tizzy. Hell, the FCC is being called in to do an investigation. No mention at all of the streakier who ran across the field itself, baring a lot more than just one teeny nipple to however many people were present at the game. No mention of how those skimpy little outfits the cheerleaders for the Super Bowl contenders usually wear leave practically nothing to the imagination. All of those are just fine and dandy. But one little accidentally bared breast and you’d think the world was coming to an end.

Never mind that we’ve got a man in the White House whose administration is dragging this country down with his sorry, useless ass. Never mind that our soldiers are still dying daily fighting a war in Iraq based on intelligence that was being questioned even before it was used as ‘proof’ for a war that the Shrub wanted long before he ever made it into office in the first place. Never mind the continuing hemorrhaging of jobs to other countries and the continued erosion of personal liberties. Never mind anything that actually *matters*. No, the big news of the day is that Janet Jackson flashed America.

Sometimes it’s not so comforting to be reminded that just when you thought the media couldn’t get any worse, they prove you wrong yet again.

Every year for I’m not sure how many years now, Richard’s mom helps put on a play at an elementary school in her area. She’s actually the director (and Richard’s youngest sister has been doing a majority of the choreography for the past few years), so it’s the sort of thing that becomes all consuming for their family at this time each year.

Richard’s aunt came out for the play, since this is a yearly event and Richard’s mom has been involved in it for quite some time. So since she was out for a visit, and since the rest of us females in the family were all available the same weekend, and since the Almost-Twin’s maid-of-honor-to-be was also available it suddenly because prime time to do a little estrogen-soaked female bonding. And what better way to do that than for all of us ladies to ditch our guys and go out for tea.

Most of the group had been there before (almost exactly one year ago today, and for precisely the same reason, in fact – well, except for the whole bridal part), so we knew what to expect, but it was a surprise for at least a few of the group, and there were enough new things to find and admire amid the clutter of beautiful decorations and things for sale that we all spent a bit of time oohing and aahing as we were led to our table. And then it was time to select our tea and our lunches from the lovely menu that is full of too many delicious sounding choices, and then nothing else to do but sit back and nibble ginger cookies with lemon curd and wait to be served.

I tend not to like strong tea, so the flavor I (and several others at the table) chose was perfect – an Apple and Caramel blend that was very delicate and not at all overpowering like some teas can be. We chatted our way through many pots of tea and plates of tiny little tea sandwiches made of impossibly thin slivers of cucumber or tomato or roast beef or some other delicious concoction. There were scones and tiny little quiches that provided only one creamy bite each, and compact potpies full of cheese and broccoli or turkey and vegetables, and everything was so very good. And then once the plates were cleared away they brought us goblets of water and plates of dessert – tiramisu and little selections of petit fours and perhaps best of all, slices of dense caramel covered apple tart.

We talked incessantly. We laughed and teased each other, especially the youngest in the group, Richard’s niece. We would occasionally, and as discreetly as possible, watch the tea party for two that was unfolding on the other side of our room, where two little girls dressed in their most grown-up dresses and clutching purses importantly to their laps, drank tea from delicate china cups and ate their sandwiches and simply shone with the heady honor of being considered grown up enough to do this all on their own. Oh, there was the occasional lapse in ladylike behavior when one of them would curl her legs underneath her in her chair, or when they would lean across the table to share some girlish confidence and break into giggles. But they were, above everything, mostly little ladies, and if their mother popped her head into the room from time to time just to check on them, they never seemed to notice it. We put their ages at perhaps 8 or 10 – just the right age for little girls to have tea parties that do not involve fake tea and flower sandwiches, but that still just might require one’s fanciest hat anyway, just in case.

Stuffed from the hours-long lunch, my younger sister-in-law and I elected to walk the few miles home while the rest of them drove. It was the perfect sunny day for such a walk and it was easy to pretend that this sort of weather might be waiting for me back home, even though it has been gray and dreary and wet far more often than not of late in the Sacramento valley.

Later in the evening, after a chance to curl up on the sofa and work on my knitting while chatting with Richard’s aunt, we set off for the elementary school where the play was held. We wandered around outside for a bit and watched a horde of blue t-shirted small people darting around setting up tables for intermission refreshments, or clutching handfuls of programs to hand out at the door, and then we found our seats and got to practice our very best posture in order to somehow see around the tall people who inevitably are always seated in front of us, and then we watched the play.

This year they did Scheherazade, which is a rather sanitized version of 1001 Arabian Nights, wherein a young woman ends up marrying a king who is in the middle of a snit where he marries women and then kills them every single night. She escapes only by telling him stories, but leaving each story’s ending til the next night so he is forced to allow her to live. In the original tale, it takes her 3 solid years of telling stories before the king finally decides that he’s no longer going to threaten her with death every night of their married life. In the play it only took three nights, during which the king was somehow magically transformed into a woman and Scheherezade proves once and for all who really has the power in the relationship (it wouldn’t be the king) and during which a lot of small children did a lot of singing and dancing, mostly together and mostly in tune, and when the play was over we cheered and applauded because for little kids, they did a pretty good job. And besides, any ten-year old boy who is brave enough to dress up as a girl and be romanced on stage in front of his peers deserves as much cheering and applause as he can get.

I woke up yesterday morning feeling more alert and awake than I have in a while. Richard, however, was coughing and wheezing and has a sore throat. So I think the overwhelming lack of energy we’ve been suffering the last week or two wasn’t an effect of the weather; I think we’ve both been fighting off another bout of the winter crud. Except this time I seem to have avoided it, but Richard, unfortunately, has not.

He stayed home yesterday and today while I went to work and played with databases. I was very happy yesterday to have managed to get a particularly difficult piece of coding to work, but then realized that there is really no one else in the office that would have a clue what I was talking about if I bragged about it. So instead I just poked at the code some more and eyed my schedule and tried to figure out when it would be convenient enough for me to try the bus/bike thing to and from work again because, due to the sheer laziness of this past weekend (dancing and haggis do not, unfortunately, count toward bike miles), I am still sitting at 26 miles total for the year, and with the month almost over, I’m starting to feel a little nervous about how far I have already fallen behind.

This evening my friend came over to work on the tree. I sat and chatted with her after feeling a little guilty about how many leaves I have *not* managed to get painted on the darn thing, but she didn’t seem to care that I’ve been such a big slacker, and so she created leaves on the wall while I corralled the cats and kept them from stepping in paint. And then we took a break and ate ice cream because, it being Girl Scout cookie season, Dryers has their themed flavors out and as a former Girl Scout it is my solemn duty to support them in whatever way I can.

And speaking of trees and leaves and Girl Scouts and other things that are green, I finally have pictures of the back yard. Or rather, Richard took these pictures back in December but we have been big slackers and didn’t actually get around to doing anything with them until now. So here you go. From left to right, the new and improved back yard. It doesn’t look very exciting yet (well, except for the fact that there is bark where there once were oh-so-lovely weeds), and the trees all look so forlorn and vulnerable, all bare and grey since it is still winter. But we have been assured that come spring things will start to explode. There will be flowers and color, and even, quite possibly, leaves (real ones, not painted ones, no less). Needless to say, I’m looking forward to this very much.

We got up this morning and I hastily scribbled out my notes for the Harry Potter class (sin and temptation were the topics today), and then we headed off to church, still sleepy and yawning from getting back so late last night from our evening of dancing and haggis. It made for some interesting choir practice, trying not to yawn in all the important bits of the song, but enough strong coffee will get me through almost anything so somehow I managed to hold it all together.

It is Girl Scout cookie season, so after the service I was very happy to see one of the church youth dressed in her green vest, clutching a cookie order sheet in her hand and eying the people in the social hall nervously. Luckily for her all she had to do was just *be* there because most of us are so desperate to find a source for cookies that our eyes are trained to immediately pounce the instant we catch sight of anything resembling a cookie order sheet. There are a few new flavors but Richard and I have to stick with our favorites – Thin Mints and the chocolate covered cookies with the peanut butter filling. There are now four boxes of each coming to us, and we will put them in the freezer and then dole them out in ones and twos and play the yearly game of ‘how long can we make them last?’

The rest of the day has been nice and quiet. I crashed for a few hours after lunch in a futile attempt to recover from the lack of sleep last night (dancing and haggis, remember?), and then we went online and finally hashed out all the details for our trip to Ashland that we are going to take in May. I made hotel reservations after dithering over whether we should do the Bed & Breakfast thing, or pay less than half as much for a cookie cutter hotel room a little further away since we probably won’t be spending enough time in the room to care one way or another. And then we scribbled out the schedule of plays and figured out which ones we want to see and what times work best, and bookmarked links for other things to do in the area. I am trying very hard to not end up planning this thing out to the last minute because I know we would both prefer to have time to just relax and wander and not have to stress, but I also knew we would have to reserve our seats for the four plays we want to see sooner rather than later. So now we are set. There will be plays and there will be a trip to see stalactites and stalagmites and there will possibly be a trip to the Harry and David farm and I am really looking forward to this because it has been an awfully long time since I have gone on a vacation that wasn’t a rushed weekend-only affair.

After putting large sums of money on credit cards in preparation for a trip that won’t even happen for another four months (sigh), we decided it was about time we tried out the newest restaurant in town. We’ve tried before, but for whatever reason we’ve always managed to go when they are closed. I was half expecting it to be closed tonight as well, but to my surprise, the Open light was still on. So we went in and had tempura and teriyaki and sushi and are now fervently hoping that this new place sticks around, because it would be awfully nice to not have to drive to the next town over to get decent sushi for a change.

In continuation of the serious lack of energy from the rest of the week, this morning I went back to bed after feeding the starving hordes/cats and didn’t drag myself out of bed again until after 10. After that there was really no point in trying to get much of anything productive done. So instead we went out for breakfast (which was actually lunch by that point) and then we came home and sorted out all the cardboard for recycling. The intent had been to sort out all of the recycling, but we were running low on time and the cardboard had piled up so high after Christmas packages and such that it was threatening to take over the garage. So we stuffed Richard’s trunk full of flattened boxes and dropped them off at the recycling center in town and then went back home and poked sleepily at our computers until it was time to leave.

We left a bit early so we would have time to swing by Trader Joe’s in Concord on the way down, in order to stock up on some of our favorites. The day they build a Trader Joe’s closer to us is the day I do a small but cheerful dance of celebration. And then we continued on our journey to Richard’s parents’ house, where we sat around and chatted and then piled back into the car and drove to Mountain View for the South Bay Scottish Society’s Burns Supper.

I have heard about these things, but never actually attended one. After all, haggis is always involved and while I’ve eaten haggis before it’s not one of those foods I feel the need to consume on a more regular basis. But Richard’s father has really gotten into his Scottish roots (so naturally he attended in formal kilt), and it sounded like it would be fun, so what the heck.

It *was* fun. It was also very, very long, but that is because there was so much going on. The evening started, of course, with the traditional reading of Robert Burns’ Address to a Haggis. Considering that most of the room was also in formal kilts and other such attire, it was no wonder that they were all nodding along and chuckling in all the right places. Richard and I, however, being completely clueless when it comes to these sorts of things, were only picking out one word in every twenty or so and it was only after the recitation was done that I found out the reason I’d had such a hard time understanding it was because it was read in the original old English.

After the ode to the haggis was read (complete with processional and bagpipe) we ate dinner, which comprised of various mashed root vegetables, birdie (which is ground beef and onions and stuff inside a pastry shell), and of course haggis. Yes, by the way, I *did* eat haggis. It tastes mainly like an oddly spiced sausage, and it helps if you just don’t think about either what’s in it, or what it looks like when it’s still in its rather embryonic looking outer coating. And then once we had all stuffed ourselves on meat and starch and were eying the beautifully decorated shortbread cookies blearily, it was time for dancing.

Scottish country dancing – or at least the stuff we did this evening – looks deceptively simple. They would come out and demonstrate the steps and we would sit there, watching, thinking “hey, that doesn’t look too hard at all”, and then we would all crowd out onto the dance floor and the music would start and suddenly there was an entire room of people frantically looking at their feet or each other, hoping to find *someone* who knew what they were doing and which direction we were all supposed to be going at any one time. It was grand fun, all whirling around and trying to remember if we were supposed to do two steps or three steps left or where we supposed to be going backwards right about then, and Richard and I usually only got the hang of the whole thing about the time the music was ending, and since we weren’t the only ones who were clueless there was much slamming into people and accidentally stepping on toes and laughing and “excuse me” and “Oh, very sorry” and since we were all doing it with equal abandon to each other no one was really offended and it was so very much fun! It was also an aerobic workout because there is all the whirling and the stepping and the waltzing and by the end of the evening there were tables all around the room of people looking a bit dazed and flushed and out of breath, and then out they would come again with another round and what could we do but gulp some water and drag ourselves out of our chairs and give it one more try?

My boss has been doing the bus/bike thing to work every now and then for the past few months. I’ve pondered it, but never worked up the enthusiasm required to get myself out the door half an hour earlier than I usually leave.

This morning, however, I finally did it. Or rather, I should say that I managed to do it, but just barely. I am all about being sustainable and environmentally friendly, but taking the bus is more expensive than driving my car. Plus it requires exact change. For someone who rarely, if ever, carries any cash at all, this was a bit of a challenge. Regardless of all my misgivings, however, I did manage to leave the house and give myself just enough time to zip up to the store, get cash for the bus fare, and then make it to the bus stop with only seconds to spare before the bus arrived.

Each bus can handle up to two bikes, which fit into racks that have been bolted into the luggage areas underneath the bus. It seems a colossal waste of space, since without the rack you could probably fit a few more bikes in there, and the racks are not necessarily the most self explanatory, nor do the drivers seem to know the secret tricks to getting a bike to actually *fit*.

Once we arrived in Old Sacramento, we pried the bikes out of the luggage areas with can openers and rode about three miles through the park to the office. All told, I managed to score just a little under 13 miles today, which was a nice boost toward our goal. I also determined that next time I do this, even though it’s such a short distance, I am definitely wearing my padded bike shorts. The padding was sorely missed when riding over the cobblestone streets in Old Sacramento, you see. Ouch. Serious ouch.

It was a nice experiment, and at least now I know where to catch the bus for both ways, and how to work my way to the office, and more importantly, how to wedge my bike into the bus so that the top of the luggage area does not remove the handlebars. I doubt it will become something more than an occasional thing, for a number of reasons (not the least of which had to do with the cobblestones). The timing is certainly an issue, since many nights we have somewhere we have to be in the evenings and there’s little enough time as it is to scrounge dinner out of our kitchen without adding on the additional time of bussing and biking. But when I’m faced with the need to rack up a dozen or so extra miles to meet the monthly quota, at least it’s nice to know an option exists.

Remember how I said I was determined to finish that 10-pound bag of satsumas? Well that was before Richard found out that that 10-pound bag of oranges he bought from a coworker’s kid (school fund raiser of some kind) was actually 25 pounds of oranges. 25 pounds! 10 pounds was bad enough, but we figured Richard would probably just eat them all and I’d focus on the satsumas and we’d be fine. But 25 pounds? We are talking one whole heck of a lot of oranges for two people to get through, especially when one of those two people (that would be me) is not really a fan of oranges much at all. Add in the remaining satsumas and we are facing over 30 pounds of citrus fruit, sitting in huge orange mesh bags on the dining room table because there was no where else to put it all.

My little sister, when I poured out our orange plight to her in an email, immediately went online and searched out a whole plethora of recipes that make use of oranges. I have already put out a plea to my parents (both of whom are in Germany now!) for temporary use of their orange juicer (although if we’re going to do that I have to borrow their teeny tiny strainer because pulp in juice is nasty and wrong and just the thought of that juice that so proudly announces that it has Extra Pulp makes my stomach churn). If I was determined before with the measly ten pounds of satsumas, I am even more determined now.

Someone please remind me of this in about two weeks when I never want to see another orange fruit ever again. Okay? Please?

On the way home from work last night I stopped at the produce stand and, among other things, bought another ten-pound bag of satsumas. When I lugged it into the house Richard gave me a look that clearly indicated he thought I’d lost my mind. After all, sitting in a colander on the counter were the sad and lonely remnants of the previous ten-pound bag, and it was only this past weekend when I firmly declared that I was sick of the darn things and couldn’t stand to eat any more.

But I am determined. I will eat these, even if it is only a few at a time. Not only are they good for me, but they serve the rather attractive purpose of letting me quickly reach my daily quota of five servings of fruits and/or veggies a day – one of our big goals this year. Besides, by the time we finish this bag, their rather short season will be ended for the year, and so even if I reach my tolerance of satsumas by that point, it will no longer be a problem. I’ll have 9 or 10 months in which to get over it before they start showing up in the produce bins again. Who knows – by then I might have managed to work my way up to something else in the citrus family besides satsumas and grapefruit.

********

We got up this morning and did our 6.5-mile bike ride. I’ll admit there was a brief moment after the alarm went off during which I lay in bed and seriously pondered just going back to sleep. But the only way we’re going to hit that 1000 mile goal is if we get up and do these short little rides on a regular basis. Considering the late start, my current goal is simply to reach 50 miles by the end of the month, and I know if we don’t ride twice a week until then it just isn’t going to happen. This morning’s ride was done mostly in the dark again because replacing the batteries in the bike lights didn’t fix them. On the way home from work I stopped by the bike store to get new lights. I did not end up getting lights at all, since apparently we’ll need some sort of special attachment to get them to fit around the bars, but I did manage to procure a new helmet, new biking gloves, a rear view mirror to attach to my handlebars, and new toe clips. The best way to discover just how much toe clips improve your riding is to suddenly have to ride without them.

Today started off too early, for which I have only myself to blame because I was a big slacker and did not do my final prep for week two of the Harry Potter class I’m leading at church. In my defense, when the leader’s guide arrived on Friday, I *did* immediately read through the whole thing, so it wasn’t like I hadn’t done anything. But I ended up getting up early anyway to at least have a chance to sit down and scribble out notes for the class itself.

I had to be at church earlier than Richard anyway, since it was the third Sunday of the month, which means the instrumental ensemble was playing all the music, and since my dad’s still in Germany, I’m still the acting director. In reality I don’t do much directing so much as I pass out the music, set the tempo, and then occasionally at the end of a song I have to do interesting contortions with my body in order to hold the oboe between my knees while still blowing the last note and at the same time waving one hand wildly over my head in order to cut the rest of the group off. It all usually works out, but I am still looking very much forward to when Dad gets back and takes it over again.

Getting up early this morning wasn’t made any easier by the fact that we were out so late last night. At least it was for a good reason – last night we went to see the latest offering by the Davis Musical Theater Company, which was Jesus Christ Superstar. Despite initial misgivings due to the lackluster showing of the rest of this season, we were pleasantly surprised. There were a few minor issues, like the fact that the electric keyboard and guitar were sometimes so loud they drowned out the singers, but overall the performance was wonderful. The cast was energetic; especially the woman who played Simon, and the man who played Judas was outstanding. There was a sense of coherence about the entire group – cast and musicians – that has been noticeably lacking in the past few productions by DMTC, and it was a relief to see that it had not been lost, only misplaced.

And then of course after the play there was the traditional post-play pie and play recap with my mom (much to my dad’s dismay, since he missed the pie and discussion due to being in Germany), all of which meant we didn’t get home until late, and didn’t get to bed until even later, and all day I have been yawning and trying to make up for it.

So speaking of sleep (or lack thereof), this afternoon we went out and bought a new futon mattress for the living room couch because the old one was thin and uncomfortable and now seemed like as good a time as any. We found a tiny furniture store in Vacaville that was so full of stuff we could barely walk, but they were selling the mattresses for prices so low we let the guy talk us into a new futon cover (with matching pillows) as well. Then as soon as we got it home and tossed the old mattress into the trash and put the new one down, we both collapsed on it and took a nap, just to try it out. Or rather, we tried to take a nap, but the cats were determined to out-cute each other and so finally we just gave up and instead lay there and cuddled,

It was nice just lying on the futon together. We’ve got a king sized bed that we sleep in, and I love that bed because there is enough room for both of us to sprawl and not smack each other, plus there is almost enough room for the cats to swarm me without shoving me off the bed (I said ‘almost’ because there is not a bed made that is big enough to deter a cat if it is determined enough). But the downside to having the big huge king-sized bed is that we usually end up each on our own side of the bed with a big gap between us. Considering the propensity for sprawling and snoring on both our parts this is usually a good thing. But lying there, cuddled next to each other, it was nice to be on such a small area. Sometimes, like when we were snuggled on the new futon mattress this afternoon, I miss the smaller bed. Of course then I climb into the big bed and there is actually room for me between the seven lazy cats and I know that going back to the smaller bed would drive me crazy. But sometimes, just for a moment, it’s nice to pretend.

Another Friday Five.

1. What does it say in the signature line of your emails?

   During one of my stints as a traveling database code monkey one of my code monkey friends gave me the niftiest little program that would attach a random sig line to each email that I composed. I adored that program and spent far more time than I really want to admit to, searching out witty sayings to add to the queue from which it could choose.

   Alas, during one of the laptop conversions or upgrades the program was lost, and I have never found something to replace it. This means that my sig line is now stuck to only one thing at a time, and only changes when I find something amusing enough that it overrides my natural laziness and forces me to go into the account settings and make all the manual changes. This is why all email originating from my home computer contains the following quote from J.R.R. Tolkien – “It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.” – and has contained that quote for probably far too long.

   Of course, I couldn’t remember what the actual quote was when setting up the nifty web-based email Richard configured for me to use when I’m at work, so instead of a quote from a well-known fantasy author, emails originating from this system contain quotes from my immediate friends and family, which may or may not make much sense to anyone who wasn’t involved in the conversation from whence they came. For example, right now, depending on the email account I’m using, the sig line is either “What good is decaf to a worm?” (originating from, I kid you not, a conversation I had with my in-laws about compost heaps), or “I wish I were an imaginary lemur, so that I could have time to expand my horizons in all the directions they could go”, which I am not even going to try to explain because it would take far too long and by the end you’d all be backing away from both Richard and I, sidling quickly to the door in the hopes that the men with their little white coats would be coming soon to take us away, ha ha.

2. Did you have a senior quote in your high school yearbook? What was it?

   High school has been long enough away that I actually could not remember if I had a quote. Thankfully it only took a few moments to remember just where the heck we’ve stashed the yearbooks, so I tracked down my picture and what do you know, I did, indeed, have one: “Morning is not a time, it is a state of mind.”

   I am sure that there was nothing deep or meaningful about that quote, even when I filled out the little form for the yearbook at the time. I have a feeling that it was meant to be a commentary on the fact that, as a band geek, I had to be at school an hour early every morning for practice. Every morning! For four years straight! The reasons changed with the seasons, since in the fall there was field show practice and in the winter and spring there was jazz band, and if having to get to school an *hour early* every day wasn’t geeky and insane enough, I also ended up staying after school for band things (wind ensemble practice) as well. And yet somehow I successfully avoided any sort of serious addiction to caffeine until graduate school, when working the graveyard shift as a waitress forced the issue.

3. If you had vanity plates on your car, what would they read? If you already have them, what do they say?

   I wanted JENIPUR, but of course it was already taken, which was so surprising because Jennifer is such an uncommon name, especially for women in my age group, and Jennifers who like cats are even more rare. Sarcasm? Never. Anyway, I got a variation on that, which, combined with the license plate frame that says “Owned by Cats” and the ‘Cat’ fish (much like the Darwin fish but with cat ears and tail and it says Cat in the middle instead of Darwin), my car sort of screams “Cat Lover”. At one point in my life I might have entertained the notion of attaching whiskers to the front grille. Luckily I have since grown past that idea. Really I have. No, really.

4. Have you received any gifts with messages engraved upon them? What did the inscription say?

   I cannot think of anything I’ve ever received that is engraved. I guess my friends and family are not much into engraving (that was not a request for engraved things, family members who are reading, so don’t get any ideas about pizza cutters or cheese slicers into your heads!). Although now that I think of it, an engraved pizza cutter *is* a good idea for my dad…

5. What would you like your epitaph to be?
   If we’re going to be highly technical here, I would actually prefer to not have a tombstone at all because I’d much rather be cremated and then sprinkled somewhere pretty, with lots of purple and blue flowers. And besides, if we’re going to be honest here, I’m a little miffed that cemeteries do not allow the really cool kinds of tombstones any more and make you stick with some stupid flat plate in the ground so they can mow around/over it more easily. Because lets face it, what’s the point of having a tombstone if you can’t have a TOMBSTONE, with gargoyles and curlicues and maybe some really sappy stone cherub weeping gracefully on the top. However, just for the sake of argument, if I really must have a tombstone, I think I would prefer something vaguely cryptic, much like the worm comment in my sig. In fact, I like that. Engrave it on my tombstone. “What good is decaf to a worm?” We could just forgo the weeping cherub and carve it in big letters in some vaguely old world font. Right underneath the gargoyles.