Today there was music. Lots and lots of music. This is because it was Joyful Noise Sunday at church, which meant that for people like me, who are involved in practically every musical group available, the day started far too early for a weekend. I got to church at 8:30 to run through the piece we’d be playing with the recorder ensemble (which, by the way, is sounding less like an out-of-tune calliope and more like actual music with every practice!), then promptly zipped off to choir practice and from that to the rehearsal for the instrumental ensemble (going from recorder to oboe is not nice to the lips, I might add), and then from that to the rehearsal for the women’s group. And after all that I finally got to flop down in a quiet room and hastily do every single bit of reading and homework for the bible study class because I have yet to get myself into the habit of doing the work nightly like we are supposed to. Here is where my ability to read at lightening speed comes in so handy, or else I’d be perpetually behind. Besides, this week we’re reading all about sin. Our whole group was excited about that. Finally, we get to learn about sin!

Anyway, I digress. Music. Lots of music. In fact, afterwards some of us from the recorder group got to talking and I am hoping to coordinate some sort of practice schedule for the next few months, if only to get us all playing together as a cohesive group, learning how to listen to each other. Plus I have grand plans to arrange Carol of the Bells in four-part harmony for the group since I think it would sound incredible on recorders.

And then after all the music and the rushing around to get to practice and remember which group performed when, there was even more rushing around with non-music things. First there was lunch with my parents and then we headed home where I whipped together a peach pie and washed my laundry while Richard got to go play computer nerd with my dad and my older brother-in-law (my mom’s computer hard drive went south last week and had to be replaced, requiring reinstallation of *everything*), and then we headed off to my parents’ house for dinner and the entertainment of my two little nephews, and much laughing and chatting afterwards.

Friday afternoon Richard got an email from his parents about the Scottish Games. We knew about it, of course, and had discussed possibly going, but now suddenly plans were hastily made for meeting times and hence, we went.

We slept in Saturday morning as long as we could (which wasn’t very long), and started the morning with a trip to the local bakery for a dozen assorted donuts. This was our reward for four weeks of sticking religiously to the Weight Watchers program. Yes, I know, perhaps a donut binge isn’t exactly the best way to reward oneself when one is on a diet, but that’s what Flex Points are for, and while I may not exactly like their new program, those stupid Flex Points have to be good for *something*.

Richard’s parents showed up around noon and we headed off to the games. The weather decided to cooperate (mostly) with some slight breezes, and while it was warm in the direct sun, when there was shade it was downright nice outside. I’m sure this was extremely appreciated by those who attended the Games in full Scottish garb, complete with those heavy woolen kilts, long-sleeved shirts and coats, woolen stockings, and so on.

The one in town is a nice size gathering. There are plenty of booths from all the clans, and plenty of bagpipers and dancers, and lots of music. Richard was pretty excited to discover that one of his favorite bands, Tempest, was playing several times through the course of the day, and as we meandered around we heard a few other groups perform as well. We ate traditional Scottish veggie burgers for lunch (yeah, yeah, they’re only 4 points including the bun) and I took pictures of men in full costume wearing extremely colorful socks, and someone who looked far too much like all the classic pictures of Santa. But the best possible thing of all was a huge dragon built from all types of metal parts that actually could move its head and breathe fire. I want a dragon like this. No, I *need* a dragon like this. Think how incredibly cool it would be to just park a big metal dragon about the size of a Winnebago on the front lawn. I’m sure the neighbors wouldn’t mind at all. Especially the part where it shoots flames out of its nose.

It was a nice lazy day, strolling around the Games, occasionally parking somewhere to listen to music, checking out the sights and sounds. And once we were done we had plenty of time for dinner at a little Mediterranean restaurant in Davis, and a side trip to both a coffee shop and a bookstore (to pick up the latest Lemony Snicket) before meeting my parents for the Davis Musical Theater Company’s first offering of the season. Unfortunately it wasn’t one of their better ones. It didn’t have the horrific fascination of that infamous production of Oliver Twist we winced through a few years back. It wasn’t that the singing was bad, or the cast inept. It just lacked…oomph. It seemed too often to get lost. And while I usually like Music Man quite a bit, I was right there with the rest of our little crowd when we all decided to skip out after the first act and go get pie instead. Because after all, what good are those darn Flex Points if you cannot blow them all in one day on donuts and caramel apple pie ala mode?

While in graduate school, years and years ago, I worked as Managing Editor for a nutrition research journal. It was an interesting job, if only because it was really just the two of us running that journal. I had my own room and my own computer in the back of the house and I got to set up the organization of everything however I wanted it to be – tracking subscriptions and sponsors, sending out books to be reviewed and gently prodding authors to return their articles and reviews in a timely manner. I worked only part time, and usually a fairly flexible schedule, wrapped around my classes and my research and everything else I was involved in during school. The editor-in-chief pretty much let me do things however I wanted. I suppose he figured it was easier that way, especially since the work always got done.

On a whim, I decided to Google the name of the journal, even though it’s been inactive for more years now than it ever was active, and with the way things had happened when it folded, I never expected it to resurface. But suddenly there was a list of links, and as I hit the first one my eyes were drawn to the top of the page. It displayed a list of editorials from this journal, with words I was not expecting. In Memory Of.

He’s dead. The editor-in-chief is dead. In a way this is not so much a surprise as it should be, but in some sense there is still shock. Worse yet, a chance glimpse of another online article tossed the phrase “before he killed himself” into the mix. Dead, and by his own hand.

That, I think, is perhaps the strangest part. Dead of accidental overdose I might have expected, since he’d been experimenting with alternate substances since long before I ever knew him. But dead because he brought it about himself? That was unexpected. Shocking. Sad.

He had such a clear certainty about the world of nutrition and the world of supplements. He introduced me to a viewpoint I’d never encountered in any of my classes. He was prominent enough to rub shoulders with the big names. His connections gave me the opportunity to work as a freelance writer and gave me the taste for a career wrapped around writing. Because of him I once got to speak with Linus Pauling on the telephone. Yeah, that Linus Pauling. And if you don’t know the name, you should. Go look it up.

He had a lot of other views that weren’t necessarily so well received, and I think in some way some of them were more linked to his use of mind-altering substances than based on anything more than tenuous fact and hearsay. But despite all of that he tried his best to take on the FDA. One person fighting this type of battle is more like a flea trying to bring down a bear by gnawing on its leg, but at least he gave it a try.

I don’t know how long he has been dead. I tried finding him a year or three ago, just out of curiosity, and found no indication of this so I can only assume a time frame. I wonder what happened to him. By the time the journal folded he had begun to show visible signs of wear – in part because of the death of his father and also I think because his own personal demons were starting to close in.

I looked for him earlier hoping to find him; to at least let him know where I was; to thank him for his role in setting me on this career path, even though what I have become is far different than what he ever envisioned for me. I wanted to talk to him; see how he was doing; hear about the progress he might or might not be making in his fight against the demons he alone could see.

I wish I’d tried harder the last time. Maybe by then it had already happened and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, but I can at least pretend that it would have been different. But I suppose it’s too late for that now.

This entry is a collaboration for On Display. This month’s topic is “endings.”

These past few weeks I have felt a bit scattered. Not necessarily a bad thing, this feeling, although I’ll admit it’s been bad for this journal. There are so many little things I think I should write about, like how I got at least four inches hacked off of my hair and not one single person has noticed, or how the new improved Nice ‘n Easy Color I did is not fading as quickly as the older stuff used to and my hair is staying darker than I am used to for longer than it usually does and maybe I might have to switch to a different shade next time, like the one with ‘caramel’ in the name because I am such a sucker for caramel.

And there are other things I have thought about writing – like stories I get second hand from my mom about my nephews, especially the oldest one who is playing soccer in a team where they do not keep score in their games, and where sometimes the game is paused on account of worm rescue, and where sometimes the teams have to be reminded which side of the field is their goal because all the players are five. Or how Christmas is going to be in Seattle this year and I am poking at airline reservation sites and trying to get someone, anyone, to commit to times and dates for everything that has to be decided before we can actually make those stupid reservations because ‘do whatever you want’ really is the most unhelpful response ever. Or how there are times when I can post a question to the tech support newsgroups and get the most useful replies, and there are other times when the only reply I get is from some idiot who is so incredibly impressed by himself that he cannot even be bothered to read my question and discover that the ‘answer’ he has deigned to post has absolutely nothing to do with what I asked.

I wanted to write about how absurdly excited I was to finally get one of those silly viruses in the mail that everyone else in the world always gets and I never seem to. Not, mind you, that I was dumb enough to run the attachment, but still, there it was in my inbox and it was with great and malicious glee I deleted it so that it could do no harm. I wanted to write about how I had this sudden need to see Noises Off again but of course Blockbuster doesn’t carry anything more than 2 months old, and we only found it in the strange little video store downtown that arranges everything by some numerical code that is undecipherable to anyone else but the person who runs the store.

But all of these things are such little, inane things, and none of them ever seems worth writing a whole entry about and my mind refuses to focus on anything more substantial than tidbits. I cannot seem to concentrate long enough to get more than bits and pieces. This is probably why I have not yet painted the claustrophobic bathroom, even though we bought the paint and even marked off one wall to get me started. I have become the queen of procrastination, it seems. If I was truly productive I would be working on my knitting so I could at least finish that sweater for my youngest nephew by Christmas (remember how I was going to knit sweaters for all *three* of my neice/nephews for Christmas this year? Ha!), and I would be motivated to paint the walls and I would be motivated to finish sewing those damn curtains (remember the curtains?) or at least hang the store-bought lace panels in the living room that we bought back in (good grief) February.

I think for now I will blame this all on the weather, since it cannot seem to make up its mind whether to still cling, kicking and screaming, to summer, or slide more gracefully into autumn. And I will blame it on the fact that suddenly every bookstore we enter had another stack of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels that I haven’t read and must immediately buy and devour in order to rectify the problem (have I mentioned how completely and utterly I adore his characterization of Death?). And maybe just by writing this I will kickstart something in this cluttered brain of mine and get back on track.

Considering my feelings on religion and on god and everything to do with either, I would never have expected to be so excited about getting involved in a Bible study. After all, despite my best efforts I have never been able to understand the whole concept of faith, nor have I ever been able to muster up any sort of ability to believe in divine beings. And yet here I am, flush from the lingering enthusiasm of the first group meeting of this study and still just as excited about doing it.

The difference, I suppose, is that this particular study focuses on the bible, and not so much on the need to have some kind of necessary faith. And while I may have my own personal issues with divinity and miracles and inanimate objects suddenly bursting forth in lists of rules to live by, I cannot escape the fact that this book; this motley collection of stories and prose and random facts has had such an impact on so many countries and cultures, for so many hundreds of years. When they announced they were going to be undertaking this Disciple Bible Study training in the church, I realized that here, at least, was my chance to try to get a better handle on the book, and through that, perhaps I’d get a better understanding of faith as a whole.

I tried reading the bible years ago, probably when I was in high school, and mainly because I had this feeling that I really ought to have read it at least once in my life. I think I made it as far as Leviticus, when everything gets bogged down in nitpicky details on how to handle all the various burnt offerings and I finally gave up. The only time I’ve ever touched a bible since has been when necessary for some type of church function. Other people have favorite versions of the bible. I have never even bothered to figure out what the differences between all the versions are because it has never been all that important to me. And frankly, right now it still isn’t all that important. What is important is getting a sense of what the book is about; what kind of information it contains; what type of influence it holds over those who do believe.

Tonight was our first meeting. In preparation we all had a list of various bible verses to read prior to the meeting. Our particular group is for the ‘young’ adults (or as I put it, for the adults who still have yet to accept their grey hair) – mainly those of us under 40. By golly we’ll cling to that ‘young’ definition until you have to pry it out of our wrinkled, gnarly hands!

But I digress. I knew that with this group the focus would be more on the historical and cultural aspects of the bible, since we are all coming from about the same level of background and understanding. Other groups have different participant types – those who might have already undergone intensive bible study, or those who have a difference in religious faith due to generational familiarity. Plus with what I knew of the participants for our group I knew there’d be lively discussion and insight from everyone, as well as unique perspectives.

But I hadn’t realized quite how much those unique perspectives would contribute to the discussion as a whole. Each weekly session is two hours long, but those two hours sped by. We mainly focused on the makeup of the bible – how it contains so many different types of writing: law, prophecy, letters, history, and prose. And it was amazing to me how each type of writing seemed to resonate so differently with each member of our group. For example as we were discussing the sensory images a particular psalm evoked for us, each person in the group had something completely different. I think in a way it surprised everyone how differently each of us interpreted the words we read; what each of us perceived as the meaning or message behind them.

At one point we were all asked what we expected from the bible, and then, what the bible expects from us. One woman’s answer seemed so simple but so true. The bible expects us to give it a chance. And that’s really all I am doing. I do not expect to be miraculously changed from agnostic to someone who hears the word of god speaking through me. I do not expect to suddenly find that faith that everyone around me seems to have. I just want to get a little more understanding. That’s really all I’ve ever wanted out of this whole concept of faith, after all.

Rebecca is getting old; has been losing weight for quite some time now. Last year I wrote about trying to trick her into eating more, in an attempt to get her to regain some weight after the yearly vet exam showed how much more she lost But last year I didn’t spend too much time worrying about it, because there were blood tests and there were physical exams, and except for the heart murmur and the acknowledgment of old age, it seemed that everything else was normal.

This year wasn’t the same story. This time when the vet came she had lost two more pounds. Considering she started at 9 pounds and the vet weighed her in at 6, this is a very bad sign. And this time when we did the round of blood tests, things weren’t so fine.

It could have been worse. It could have been kidney disease or diabetes or any number of other conditions that would have required difficult medication and treatment options and forced us to make some decisions I’m not yet prepared to make. But luckily it’s just hyperthyroid. Just hyperthyroidism. I never thought I’d be so happy about such a diagnosis, but after some of the other options that had come up after initial tests were inconclusive, this was the best of the lot. After all, it’s so common in older cats that it’s easy to treat. Drop a pill in her mouth twice a day for the rest of her life or inject her full of radioactive isotopes and turn her into a glow-in-the-dark cat to destroy her thyroid and everything will be happy.

She took the pill with absolutely no difficulty, so it wasn’t that she was hard to medicate. Unfortunately she is one of the small numbers of cats who cannot tolerate the medication in pill form. Basically she ended up puking her guts out on a daily basis, and sometimes more often than that, and by the time of her first checkup she’d lost another half pound. She’s skin and bones. When she sits on my lap and I pet her fur and slick it close to her body I can feel every one of her vertebrae and the sharpness of the bones underneath her skin, with no padding to dull their edges from my probing fingers.

There is another alternative for the medication, although you have to have it specially ordered from very specific veterinary pharmacies. They’ve managed to put the stuff in a highly absorbable cream, which gets rubbed into the cat’s ear.

They sent me the first box a little over a week ago, and when I opened it I found six skinny syringes of medicated cream and a sheet of explicit instructions. Apply 0.1 cc of the cream to the inner ear of the cat twice a day, said the instructions. But do not apply with bare skin. Only do this when wearing gloves.

Because most people do not make a habit of keeping gloves in their houses, the pharmacy had very nicely included six little finger gloves in the box – one for each syringe. These were rolled up into little latex discs, carefully nestled beside the syringes on a bed of cotton. And surely I do not need to go into much more detail here before you all figure out just what these little things look like.

Or maybe I do, because after all at age 34 I have long since grown past the age of immaturity and at this wise and mature age I would certainly always refer to them as finger gloves and not as finger condoms, and I would never giggle madly and refer to the little air bubble at the tip of the finger after slipping on the glove (condom) as the ‘reservoir tip’, and I would never gleefully announce to my husband, twice a day, regular as clockwork, in my best redneck drawl, that it’s time to slip on a finger condom and go grease up the cat.

Or maybe I would, if only because right now humor is the only way I can deal with this situation; with the knowledge that my little girl is sick and isn’t getting any better. Maybe the humor is what I use to try to pretend that the vet doesn’t keep suggesting we do an ultrasound because he thinks maybe something else is going on too; there’s a thickness in her intestines that might or might not be a problem and there are other symptoms that shouldn’t be happening with this medication that suggest that there might be something else as well. Maybe the humor is sometimes the only way I can forget that there ever was mentioned the possibility of intestinal cancer, or that the only other treatment option available for this is so prohibitively expensive that suddenly I am forced to try to put a price on a life, to try to somehow put all the what-ifs together into some more cohesive puzzle; to try to demand from whatever deity may or may not exist that I be given some kind of guarantee that if we go through this, she will live a long and healthy life because I don’t know how to be ready to let her go.

Today Richard and I went to the zoo. The main reason was to see lemurs, but also it’s been a very long time since either of us has been to a zoo, and I’ve never been to the one in San Francisco.

We headed out bright and early in order to get a decent parking place. Since we arrived an hour before the zoo opened, we managed to get a spot right in front (go figure). This also left us plenty of time to wander across the street to the beach and watch the surfers in the ocean.

I’ve never seen people surfing before. Sure, I’ve seen it in movies, but never in real life. As we were driving by, all the dark shapes looked at first like a random gathering of seals in the water. But as we got closer I could see that each dark shape was a person, bobbing about in the water clutching a surfboard, waiting for just the right wave. There weren’t all that many waves that were acceptable, judging by the length of time most of the people spent bobbing about in the water waiting, but every once in a while one would come in strong enough and a handful would get up on their boards and do a credible job of remaining upright for short periods of time.

We headed back across the street and waited outside with a handful of others until the gates opened and we went in and spent the next six hours wandering all over the park looking at all the animals, and especially the lemurs.

We watched them feed the elephants and the penguins and the lions and tigers. We saw an entire flock of flamingos, including a few babies – white balls of fluff that had the most ridiculously long legs for a baby bird. We got sidetracked by the juvenile lion cubs, who kept a small group of us entertained with their antics. They were playing like kittens, with their stuffed fish toys and sisal rope-wrapped boards, and dangling ropes, but these particular kittens had feet the size of dinner plates, and when they were wrestling with each other they growled far deeper and louder than the kittens I’m used to.

There was a bit of playing in other areas as well, although for the most part most of the animals were napping or yawning. One of the polar bears had a tire he was wrestling with, and when you are a huge bear, you wrestle in slow motion. He would lift it up in one giant paw and slowly bring it to his mouth to chew, and then roll over on his back and bat at the tire.

We wandered off toward the conservation section to try to see the other large cats, but they were all hiding, probably asleep, and the only furry face we saw there belonged to a fisher cat baby, who peered at us sleepily from the very top box of a huge cat tree.

It’s a wonderful zoo. Most of the animals seemed to have lots of space and the ones that normally live in green areas had lots of trees and bushes and places to climb or lurk or swing or burrow. We saw an anteater and a shy zebra and turtles and tortoises and a turkey vulture and the world’s ugliest stork, but no ostrich. We saw a pair of river otters with whiskery faces and bright eyes, and an orangutan asleep, a furry ball ‘under’ a shallow plastic water dish. There was a kangaroo who couldn’t be bothered and a very anxious coyote and an albino wallaby that looked as if he had just woken up and didn’t quite remember who he was, and a really bored hippo and a very industrious rhino. The prairie dogs were mostly sleeping or wandering around nibbling on grass, but the meerkats were busily active, digging in tunnels or darting here and there, or stopping what they were doing to peer quizzically back at the humans that were peering at them.

And of course we also saw lemurs – lots and lots of lemurs. There were ruffed ones that were black and white like skunks, or rust-colored with black bellies, or solid black, all lolling around on trees or the ground or on specially heated platforms where they could sprawl and expose their tummies to heat lamps or the sun. There were also smaller ring-tailed lemurs, including two babies who zipped wildly all over their enclosure, swinging up and down and occasionally taking a flying leap and landing squarely on the back of the one we assumed was their mother. They all have extremely long and extremely fluffy tails, which they seemed to take great pride in, draping their tails over their shoulders.

We took lots of pictures and you can see them all here, because I am not going to try to fit them all into this entry somehow.

After all of that our feet were sore and we were a little bit sun burnt because naturally we forgot to put on any sunscreen in preparation for this trip. But we figured as long as we were in the area we might as well get dinner and since Richard hadn’t been there yet we called up The Stinking Rose (where they season their garlic with food!) and after a few cell phone signal issues, finally managed to get directions and somehow navigated all those one-way streets in San Francisco without getting lost. We smeared rolls liberally with roasted garlic cloves and then split a bowl of roasted garlic potato onion soup, and barely had room left for the main course, which was garlic-roasted lamb for Richard and roasted chicken with a huge pile of roasted garlic cloves for me. It was heaven to be able to just sit and let our feet try to recover from all the walking around the zoo and watch the people as they walked past us outside, and then when we were stuffed with food and had eaten enough garlic to make ourselves completely unsuitable for polite company, we finally came back home, tired, sore from walking, comfortably sleepy, just a little bit sun burnt, and in complete agreement that it had been a marvelously wonderful day.

Another Friday Five.

1. What housekeeping chore(s) do you hate doing the most?

   At first thought it’s easy to say that I despise all chores equally. But I think the reality is that I despise the thought of chores, and once I actually get myself motivated enough to do what needs to be done, it usually takes less time and is much less horrendous than anticipated. Does this get me to clean more often? Heck no.

   Luckily it doesn’t really matter so much anymore since we’ve been handing over large chunks of cash to have someone come in and clean the house every other week. It is the most marvelous feeling to walk in after they have been here and know that the dust bunnies are no longer lurking in corners to taunt me in my reluctance to vacuum them away.

2. Are there any that you like or don’t mind doing?

   Washing dishes by hand is probably one of the chores I despise the least. There’s something rather relaxing about standing at a sink scrubbing things. It’s requires practically no thought whatsoever so I can just let my mind wander away.

   Now that I’ve got a dishwasher I rarely wash dishes by hand anymore. I suppose I could pretend that I miss it, but we’d all know I was lying.

3. Do you have a routine throughout the week or just clean as it’s needed?

   In our house, the routine, such as it is, is relegated to only a few tasks – mainly cleaning the litter boxes and making sure the water and food bowls are filled. The rest tends to be done on an as-needed basis. Laundry gets done once a week, usually, and since we both do our own laundry, it’s never that much of a hassle. Shared laundry (towels, sheets, the bedspread during a major hairball hacking fest) gets done as needed. Kitchen counters get cleaned and wiped as needed, usually as I am in process of cooking or preparing a meal. Dishes get washed when there are enough in the sink to fill the dishwasher. I suppose I could put them in the dishwasher as we use them but I am extremely anal about how the dishwasher gets filled and I just know that this would end up with me having to unload and reload the darn thing every time a new set of dishes was dirtied.

   Back before we had someone in to clean every other week, the rest of the chores tended to get done when I finally got sick enough of tripping over dust bunnies to grumble-nag Richard into vacuuming – which would also guilt me into cleaning the bathrooms because if vacuuming was his chore, scouring the toilet bowls was mine. And dusting – well, let’s just not talk about dusting, shall we?

4. Do you have any odd cleaning/housekeeping quirks or rules?

   I already mentioned my issues with loading the dishwasher. It is so bad that if Richard loads the dishwasher I literally cannot look at what he is doing or I will start rearranging it and driving us both crazy. Once the dishes are clean I really don’t care how they were loaded, but pre-washing it’s an issue. Yes I know I need help.

   Other than that I can’t think of any other bizarre little quirks regarding cleaning, unless you count the fact that even at the ripe old age of 34 I still have this wishful fantasy that somewhere out there, cleaning elves really do exist.

5. What was the last thing you cleaned?

   The last thing I cleaned (I’m going to say that the daily litterbox scooping fest doesn’t really count) was the kitchen counter. The next thing I should be cleaning are the dishes, since it appears it’s time for another trip to obsessive-land with the dishwasher.

Bad news, I’m afraid. The invisible pocketknife – the knife that has successfully passed under the not-so-watchful eyes of the airport security in at least a dozen flights around this country – this knife is no more. Apparently the security personnel at the courthouse in Fairfield are far more observant, or else their x-ray machinery is superior to that used in airport terminals. They caught my knife in the first go. In deference to their superior technology I gave them the knife to toss. It’s old, the blade is so dull it couldn’t possibly cut anything anymore, and I never really use for anything more than a nail file these days. Plus I think there was something growing in the cracks and besides I really want to get myself a new one – perhaps one of those incredibly spiffy knives similar to the computer nerd pocketknife I gave Richard last Christmas.

I suppose, in a way, this is for the best, because one of these days those airport security folks would have eventually caught it. Really they would. No, I’m sure of it. Just pretend I said those last bits without the slightest hint of sarcasm, okay?

The reason my knife had to be caught in the first place was that I was called for jury duty on Wednesday. Tuesday night I called the handy number, and after wading through some version of voicemail hell, I eventually discovered that I’d been given a one-day reprieve. Unfortunately, last night I discovered that the reprieve was over and I had to show up in Fairfield to join a small throng of other similarly disinterested people, to mull around in a large green room wearing oh-so-lovely Juror badges, waiting for hours on end to either be called into the court or released back to freedom. Yes, I know the jury system is important, and it’s critical to have intelligent people on the jury in all cases of trial, but oh this is so horridly inconvenient, and I have to admit that I have spent a good deal of time since receiving that summons trying to come up with ways in which I might possibly be able to get out of it.

Luckily I never had the opportunity to try any of the (probably incredibly lame) schemes I had come up with for getting out of serving, because after we’d all been sitting there for a few hours the judge himself came in and told us that in the last fifteen minutes they had suddenly dismissed the charges and hence, there was no longer a trial to select a jury for, and suddenly we were free. I joined the milling throngs to pick up my verification of service, just in case I get called again before twelve months are up (this county only requires service once a year), hiked back to my car, got in, pulled out of the parking lot, and hadn’t driven more than a block when the odd thunking noises coming from the right front side of the car had me pulling into the nearest place I could find to stop.

There is a lot of construction going on across the street from the courthouse, and I have a feeling that I probably managed to pick up some sort of stray metal bit from there. Whatever it was had done a good job because the right front tire was completely flat. Ugh.

A very nice man stopped while I was crouched on the ground jacking up the car and came over to help, so between the two of us we got the dead tire off and the spare on. Then he pointed me to the nearest tire store and my car and I limped off to find it. Should I mention at this point that the spare was flat too? Yes indeedy it was all kinds of fun!

I knew this was all because my car was jealous of Richard’s, since it was just last week it and I were at another tire store getting a new wheel. Ha ha, my car said proudly since it has now one-upped Richard’s car, earning a pair of new tires instead of the single one Richard’s car got. Ha ha, said my brain as I winced at the cost of those brand new tires, tired from sitting and twiddling my thumbs in a very green jury room and weak from hunger because by then it was way past time for lunch.

After all of the fun and excitement of the morning I decided that the rest of the day was a complete and total loss and just went home. This decision was spurred on by the fact that even if I had made it into the office after all the aforementioned fun and excitement, I’d have only been there a few hours, and somehow it didn’t seem worth the commute. So instead of doing more research on the embodied energy of ceiling tiles, I lay in bed and poked at the cats and read books until Richard came home. While he made dinner (the most marvelous cheeseburgers, swimming in onions and garlic, followed by pumpkin spice cake and cinnamon gingerbread ice cream which I am only mentioning here because it is so good!) I decided that I might as well do *something* productive (besides spend money on car wheels) so I went outside and managed to clear the weeds out of a huge chunk of the backyard path (persistent little suckers, weeds are).

Today my boss and I ended up doing a little research project, trying to find information about, among other things, the ecological footprint of buildings. It was one of those incredible fun yet frustrating research projects because I end up finding all manner of sites chock full of information that have very little to do with the project at hand, but still are interesting enough I get distracted reading them.

Naturally, when searching for things on environment and ecological footprints, we both ended up finding variations on a theme – quizzes we could take to find out what our own ecological footprints were. And naturally, since these type of sites do tend to be a little weighted, we were told we’re just big wasteful Americans and if everyone lived like we did we’d need nearly four planets to support our wasteful little habits.

It’s not that I don’t realize that I’m not living as environmentally conservative and considerate as I probably could, but it does frustrate me that things like this tend to skew results without taking into account a lot of important topics. But even knowing this, doing this kind of research, especially after taking the environmental footprint quiz, really gets to me after a while. It fills me with guilt for all the things I could be doing but am not. It makes me want to rebuild our house to make use of the natural breezes for ventilation, and solar panels for energy. It makes me want to turn our entire backyard into a garden where we can grow our own vegetables, which I will then can in little glass jars tied with sisal string, and line them up on little shelves in my laundry room so in the middle of winter there they are, just waiting to be eaten. And it makes me feel horribly guilty for not trying to get to work some other way than by car, even though it would take me twice as long and cost twice as much.

But then I come to my senses and remember that I really hate gardening and I really don’t think I could stand to live in this part of California without air conditioning, and despite my best intentions there is no practical way for me to get to work except by car. So instead of going overboard and become an ecomaniac, I instead resolve to adjust the air conditioner controls to higher temperatures, and try to remember to always recycle every scrap of paper and cardboard and every plastic or glass or tin container we use, and maybe eat meat a few less times a week. And I remind myself that as soon as we pay off our current car loan I’m trading in my car for a hybrid. And maybe someday my office will move to a place that is closer to a bus line, and maybe once I start on my very tiny little garden I will discover a heretofore unrealized love of bugs and dirt and weeding, and maybe the guy who installs solar panels will finally call us to schedule an evaluation of our roof like he said he would when we signed up for it weeks ago, and maybe that’s all I can reliably count on for now.