Richard is nearing the end of his summer class in children’s literature. Plus he came home from his one week intensive with more homework and a final project. So this means he’s starting to get really stressed and spending a lot of time when he is home glued to one of his computers, trying to get all his homework out of the way. I am strongly encouraging this, if only for the fact that the sooner the homework gets done, the sooner we get rid of the rather impressive stack of 50-something children’s books that have been camped out on the coffee table or the breakfast nook table for the past several weeks. Not that I have minded having that many books, per se, since I got to read all of them (and occasionally keep finding more that I didn’t get a chance to read), but it’s hard to put your feet up on the coffee table when it is covered in books, and I am too lazy to move them somewhere else.

So Sunday he spent most of his time doing homework except for the brief trip off to the hardware stores to gaze upon the pitiful selections of build-it-yourself shelving and workbenches for the garage, and Monday he stayed home to do homework while I went to dinner with my parents and my older sister and her family (although I did bring him dinner home from the restaurant). Tuesday night we met for Indian food on the way home but then it was back to the homework, and last night he was still plugging away at it too. At least Tuesday night the bulk of the books were returned (yay!) so that I can actually see parts of the coffee table again, and I suspect that the rest of the books will disappear soon enough.

I have been frantically busy at work this week on a variety of projects, but the main one has been this database. I had to figure out how to deal with linked tables once it is distributed and I spent two marvelous days in a crash course teaching myself how to build my very own customized Help and then figuring out just how the heck to attach it. Plus there was an entire day earlier in the week devoted to organizing a paper to look like a research study, and there was also the office picnic on Monday where I volunteered to bring a fruit salad just to have an excuse to use my melon baller. Only some of my coworkers seemed to understand this reasoning. I would say it was the women versus the men but that seems somehow sexist and it really just happened to end up that way so instead I will simply say it was the ‘people who like to cook’ vs. the ‘people who could not find a colander in the kitchen if it was staring them in the face and doing a jig’

By the time I have come home most days this week my brain has been reduced to little more than a big pile of grey mush in my head and all these other things I should be doing – like updating the format for our house and yard journal, or writing my July entry for On Display, or pondering healthy choices for dinner – remain undone and instead I have been camped out on the futon in the living room next to Richard, laptop on my lap, watching movies from Netflix (Galaxy Quest, which we should just break down and buy because of our sheer and unnatural love of the film, and then Jumanji because I had apparently forgotten just how cheesy the special effects are) and playing far too many games of Spider Solitaire. I am addicted to Spider Solitaire. Granted I cannot play anything higher than two suits at a time, but that does not deflect from my unnatural love of this game.

Today I did a million and one little last minute fixes to the database and I had fun with style sheets for that nifty Help system I built with my own little hands and I commandeered various coworkers’ computers to see if I could make the whole thing work, and I went through several versions of sheer panic when it would all suddenly and without warning crash in a spectacularly vile fashion, and then I finally got it all to work and once that was done I decided I had better stop poking at it because if something else broke I really didn’t want to know about it.

I am not sure how productive I will be tomorrow at work as a result. The database is off to be previewed at another office and if it breaks there is not a darn thing I can do about it. I have some nice easy tasks to accomplish that require a minimal amount of thought, but yet should keep me busy until noon, at which point I skip merrily out of the office, hop in my car, and drive up to Reno, where my sisters and I are converging for a wild and crazy girls-only weekend of husband-free, child-free fun. Pink hot pants, thong bikinis, and impractical shoes have been discussed. Donuts and ice cream and copious amounts of chocolate will undoubtedly be consumed. It is possible that one of us may actually toss a nickel in a slot machine somewhere, but seeing as how none of us are big into the gambling the chances of one of us losing the family fortune is slim (although you never know what three adult women under the influence of a box of good Belgium dark truffles and a spa pedicure might do).

Thursday night I drove home from work and stayed just long enough to check my email and pill the cat, and then I continued on down to Fairfield, where I met a few of my old Benthic Creatures coworkers for dinner. We went to Mimi’s Café because I am nothing if not a pushover for the buttermilk spice muffins they make. They’ve been passing out shell-polishing kits to all the lovely mollusks in Napa county and had been there all week, but had nicely avoided going to Mimi’s for dinner because they knew I’d want to go there for the muffins when we got together. Are they the coolest possible ex-coworkers or what?

I managed to get there early enough to hit the bookstore beforehand and purchase a book by Anne McCaffery that it turns out I had already read. But since this book was at least a return to her days of writing decent fiction (as opposed to the pure slop that describes some of the later Pern novels she produced) I didn’t mind too terribly much and sat inside the restaurant and read all about tsunamis and dragons until they arrived. And then we crammed ourselves into a booth and I had my muffin and salad and soup and they had other things that mainly involved pasta, and there was much talking and loud, raucous laughter, and it was almost like old times except that I did mention once or twice how glad I was I wasn’t actually *in* that job anymore. And they all very politely refrained from either smacking me or flinging their pasta on me, plus we all went to the bookstore after dinner (where I somehow managed to avoid buying any more books, even though there is a new Terry Pratchett Discworld novel out that I really wanted) and there was more talking and raucous laughter and hugging and congratulations on recent promotions and it was a lovely evening.

Friday night I picked up Richard at the airport where he presented me with a small stuffed hippo and we stopped at an Italian restaurant in Woodland on the way home (whose name has changed recently except that we cannot ever remember the new name so we always refer to it as ‘the restaurant that used to be Pietro’s’) because I was craving their garlic and broccoli pasta. I talked all about this database I am building and he talked all about his week at class learning all about how to store and index information (there was something in there about how they built a database around how to tell if food in the refrigerator is kosher or not but that part is a little fuzzy).

This morning we met my mom and dad and my older sister’s family and all headed off to Lambtown before it got too hot (because it has been consistently over 100 every stinking day lately and just in case it wasn’t obvious, we are all getting really tired of this heat). Lambtown seems to consist pretty much of what any other small town festival consists of – lots of craft booths displaying products that range in quality from really nifty to downright dubious, the requisite face painting booth and the temporary tattoo booth for the kids, and a small collection of booths selling the usual Fair fare – high in grease and calories and low in anything of remotely nutritional value. Because this is Lambtown, there were also sheep shearing demonstrations and sheep dog trials and clusters of people sitting around old-fashioned spinning wheels carding wool and then spinning it into thread. Also there was a little train which my nephews got to ride on, and a runaway sheep. I think the runaway sheep was the most amusing thing of the whole trip, since the entire time the sheep was running, a woman did a play-by-play, interspersed with warnings, over the loudspeaker. “Please do not approach the lost sheep. The lost sheep is now behind the cooking tents. Please do not pet the lost sheep. The lost sheep is now in the parking lot.”

After lunch Richard and I headed home for the exciting chore of sorting the recycling so we could take it to the recycling center. It’s a chore we both hate and we put it off as long as we possibly can but when the recycling bins are overflowing and spilling random sheets of cardboard and plastic bottles and bags and tin cans all over the floor of the garage, eventually something inside me snaps and I insist that we do it Right Now. And then we rewarded ourselves by going through every movie we have out from Netflix until we were in such a media-induced stupor that rational thought was really no longer even possible, and naturally this meant that despite having to wrestle with the recycling, it was a marvelous day.

I got my car washed yesterday. It was a spur of the moment decision, made possible only by the sheer fact that my gas light was blinking urgently at me and the station where I stopped happened to have an automatic car wash, and when I had filled the tank I was faced with the choice of saying yes or no and it occurred to me that perhaps the last time I had actually washed the car was far too long for me to even want to admit. So I paid for the highest upgrade they had and drove my car around the back and pulled into the machine and sat there and watched the it spray water and soap and wax all around me and then I pulled out of the carwash and drove home and did not think anything of it until I had to find my car later in a parking lot and actually did not recognize it.

The color of my car is officially called sea mist green, which really is just a kind of dull middling sort of green that is neither dark enough to be striking nor light enough to be pretty. It is just green, which is usually one of my favorite colors, but this green doesn’t have enough oomph for me to really care one way or the other. The only reason I got this color was because it was the only color that was not one of the million shades of white (champagne, silver, gray, whatever) that seem to be the predominant theme in cars these days, and I pretty much refuse to ever buy a car in one of those shades unless I can immediately take it somewhere and paint it a personality.

The problem is that since we live in the Sacramento valley and since I am surrounded by farms everywhere I drive and since those farms (plus all the wind we get around here) produce a lot of dust, and since I already mentioned above the whole issue of how long it has been since the car was last washed, I was used to my car being a lot lighter in color. More of a grayish green color, actually, instead of a true green. And now it is not. It is definitely green (sea mist green, yes, but that’s still a true green).

This ‘new’ darker color still startles me every time I see my car. Perhaps I should get my car washed more often. Heck, one of these days I might even break down and get the inside cleaned as well. Although at least there I can be reasonably assured that the upholstery will not magically change colors on me when that happens. Dusty it may be, but not dusty enough to turn brown upholstery any other color than what it already is.

I have felt vaguely unsettled these past few days. I suppose I could blame it on the weather, but mainly it has to do with the fact that I have this feeling I should be writing. In fact I feel as if I *need* to be writing. The problem is, I don’t know what it is I’m supposed to be writing about.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. I know what I should be writing about. Unfortunately, however, I can’t seem to manage to actually write. Months ago Richard and I hashed out the plot of what promised to be a pretty interesting book (that – surprisingly enough for both of us, what with our normal choice of writing topics – has nothing whatsoever to do with science fiction or fantasy, and everything to do with just normal life). But after getting the first chapter out of the way, I cannot seem to churn out another word on it. The story is there in my head, all jumbled up in circles and knots, and if I let myself think about it I can actually see the characters; hear them talking and watch the expressions on their faces. I know exactly how the main character twists her hands together when she’s distressed and how she sets the line of her mouth when she is determined. I know the way her friend – the strong one – sounds when she laughs and how her hair sweeps forward across her face when she leans forward to say something important. I know how the sitting room looks of the oldest friend – the prim and perfectionist one, how it closes in on the rest of them when they sit there, and the color of the décor and the flowers in the vase on the little table under the lace curtained window. But when I sit down with paper or a blank screen on the computer, or whatever other medium I might find, I cannot get a single bit of it out of my head.

I used to write a lot when I was younger. I always carried a spiral-bound notebook with me, and sometimes more than one. I liked the ones with three sections best because it was an easy way to divide work on three different stories. Granted I rarely finished those stories I would work on so diligently – I seem to be cursed with the inability to write middles, and can only reliably churn out beginnings and endings – but I was writing.
There were times when it was all I could do to pay attention in class when all I wanted – needed – to do was to pull out my notebook and write. Characters and conversations and plots would all bombard me and I had to let them out, get them down on paper as fast as I could before I lost them forever.

I don’t know if part of the reason why I cannot seem to write these days is because I have moved away from spiral-bound notebooks and tend to do my composing via keyboard more often than pen. I cannot write by hand as fast as I can type, and my handwriting is frustratingly horrible enough that even if I were to write fast enough, I would never be able to decipher the words once I was done. For that reason alone I have a hard enough time some months making myself write in my paper journal. I’m not sure the spiral-bound notebook is the answer.

I know that eventually something will click and it will come out – this story about these women I can see in my head, or some other story. I know if I am patient enough it will eventually make its way out of my brain and trickle down toward my fingers and allow itself to be captured. I just wish it would happen soon, because I am getting tired of this frustrating need to write things that stubbornly refuse to leave my head.

Before you do anything else, go here and read Richard’s story (Ten Foot Tall He Was…). It was accepted months and months ago and now it’s finally published (he got paid for it and everything). He’s finally a published author. Woo!

It was still hot last night but there was enough of a breeze so that I could open the windows and let in the night air. Still, I slept fitfully, and woke suddenly this morning, yanked out of a dream where all I recall is that I had just discovered a letter, quite distinctly in my mother’s handwriting, written to me because she thought I was dead. What woke me was the absolute certainty that I had heard a voice – a one-side conversation as if someone was talking quietly into a phone. I looked outside, expecting to see someone there (the elderly neighbors to our right have required late-night visits by paramedics before so it wouldn’t have been all that unusual), but there was no one in view. And then all seven cats stopped whatever they were doing in the bedroom and as one turned their heads toward the door and stared at it very intently.

Naturally, as only someone who is home alone in her house – and who has watched and read far too many horror stories than is probably good for her – can do, I panicked. I tiptoed toward the door and peered cautiously around the edge to look down the stairs but of course it was too dark to see anything, and I didn’t hear anything at all except a distant train, followed by the sound of the Littermaid running through its cycle.

I tried to tell myself it was nothing and I went back and sat in bed but I couldn’t sleep. So I finally made myself go downstairs, where I turned on all the lights like the big chicken I apparently am. After that there was no way I was going back to sleep so I sat in the computer room and deleted a whole lot of uninteresting email and then I heard the long, low crying of a cat and when I went downstairs to investigate Rosemary was hissing at the back door, and the big fluffy black cat who lives in the area was outside, singing to her. When he saw me he nonchalantly wandered toward the middle of the back porch and proceeded to clean his back paws, but Rosie wasn’t going to be deterred until he had disappeared, so I finally opened the door and that scared him off.

Only after all of that did I finally manage to get back to sleep (with all the lights on downstairs still) for the remaining twenty minutes until my alarm clock went off and I had to wake back up.

Looking back on it now it seems foolish to have been so scared. After all, this is not the first time the cats have played “Made You Look” (although to give them credit, they’ve never been quite this successful before – possibly because the seven of them have never done it to me as one group!), and even more importantly Zuchinni – the cat who is terrified of everything (including me) – was clearly visible in the bedroom the entire time and if there had been a stranger in the house he would have bolted under the bed and quite possibly to another dimension entirely to avoid actually being *seen*. But perhaps tonight I will sleep with my dagger under my pillow, just to make myself feel better. I’m not sure what I would do with it if something actually happened, except that maybe the burglar would be so taken aback by the sight of a slightly crazed woman with bed hair and bleary eyes leaping about at him in a Garfield (the cat) nightshirt, brandishing a dagger that is long enough and sharp enough to do some serious damage, that he might decide to rethink his actions and go away. Or at the very least he’ll be laughing so hard I’ll be able to get in a few good shots first.

I feel in some ways as if my life with this new job resembles that recent Celine Dion song – the one where she sings about how “it’s all coming back to her now” (but without the sappy overtones). Because that’s what happens on a regular basis with all the coding I am doing – with each new little twist they throw at me for the main database I am building I have to scramble around in the Help files, and poke through the knowledge base, and even occasionally post frantic messages on the Microsoft newsgroups and then suddenly, I’ll find it – that one piece of information I forgot I knew, and all the rest comes flooding back into my head and what was driving me crazy is now easy as pie. There was a time, years ago, when I knew Microsoft Access backwards and forwards. I’m not sure I’ve remembered everything I’ve forgotten yet, but I think I’m almost there.

I may have my issues with the limitations of Microsoft Access, namely over the fact that what I can do in SQL is so much less than what I *need* to be able to do. But what it lacks in SQL it more than makes up for in VBA. And the more I go tweaking and twisting here and there, building in all the functionality they ask for, the more I remember just how very much I love VBA. You can do almost anything in VBA, if you put your mind to it (You can do almost anything in SQL too, if you have access to Advanced Transact SQL, which Access does not have, so forget I said anything about SQL at all).

********

It’s still over 100 degrees outside and I am beginning to think that my tenative idea to have us go look at flagstone, and maybe even put in the path around the raised flower bed, might not be such a great idea for this weekend. Perhaps it would be better if we just stayed inside and did useful things there like hang curtains or non-useful but much more fun things like watch movies or drag out the bread machine and roast some garlic and spend the day eating homemade rolls until we are not fit to be around other people.

I came in to work this morning and was greeted with the sound of raucous laughter and loud radio blaring from the office next door. Whoever it is who is going to be renting that space has been sending in crews of people to work on the space, knocking down walls, rewiring, painting, and ripping up the carpet. Over all, it’s noisy work, and the walls between our office and theirs are hollow and block almost none of the noise. As before I popped my head in to let the workers know that we can hear everything so to just keep that in mind (I do this because of previous conversations overhead by the pair of electricians who came in a week or two ago). The rest of the day was interspersed with loud bangs and thumps, with the occasional slamming door.

I know that when our neighbors do finally move in they are not likely to be demolishing their office on a daily basis. Still, I am not necessarily looking forward to their occupancy, if only because the noise is starting to get to me. I’m having a hard enough time concentrating on the project I’m neck deep in right now without the added distraction of demolition crashes and bangs.

It’s still hot out – 105 today and not a bit of wind. I had the air conditioning on last night but even though it feels cold in the house, I still have a hard time sleeping. I’m so used to being able to open the windows and let the night air in that the house starts to feel and smell stuffy and stale after 24 hours with no outside ventilation.

When I got home I was restless – probably from the heat – so I forced myself to do a quick tour of the house, picking things up, going through the mail, and clearing away all the clutter that somehow collects in untidy piles on the kitchen counters and the breakfast nook table. I sorted and paid all the bills and I also gathered up all the dragons and assorted stuffed things and took them back downstairs. This means that the threshold of feline noise has increased slightly, as Rosemary has already begun the careful task of bringing every one of the dozen or so dragons and owls and assorted critters back up the stairs, one at a time, singing quietly to herself the whole way.

On the way home I stopped by the grocery store to stock up on white peaches and broccoli (which will not come anywhere near any asparagus this week if I can help it) and two different kinds of melon. Richard is down in Fullerton doing his best to stick to the healthy eating plan, and despite the temptation to eat pop tarts and ice cream for dinner every night this week and not touch a single vegetable, I am determined to be good as well.

Richard is 600 miles away, learning all sorts of fascinating things about information retrieval, and staying in a hotel that he says is extremely pink. I suppose I could be a little bit jealous of the fact that his hotel room comes with a huge jacuzzi tub, but I think I will just eat the rest of the peach yogurt pie that is in the freezer instead. I can feel justified in this since I just finished a disgustingly healthy (and low-point) dinner of stir-fried shrimp and vegetables that was so peppery I was gulping water the entire meal.

********

Two years ago today I got to marry my very best friend and the love of my life – the only man in the world who understands the mysteries behind jellyfish butts, invisible pets who have invisible pets of their own, and the power of the word ‘bean’ to be used in any situation at all.

I feel lately as if I live in a perpetual state of unsettled stickiness. Inside, with the air conditioning, I can almost get comfortable, but even a brief jaunt outside, to take out the trash or fetch the mail, and I start to melt. I am doing my best to stay inside and avoid going out altogether, but that’s not always possible. This morning, for example, I had to leave the house to go to church, since my dad called Friday night to see if I would accompany a quartet on the piano. Then after church we climbed back into our little ovens on wheels – otherwise known as cars, and drove home. There is no shade anywhere near the church for parking, and I suppose if we were going to be perfectly environmentally friendly we would ride our bikes there because it’s barely over a mile away, but it is just too hot.

Yesterday wasn’t much better, since I spent most of it in away from home attending a conference on missions. The topics were interesting but most of the rooms we were in had no air conditioning. They set up fans to try to alleviate the heat, but all the fans did was make so much noise it became hard to hear people across the room during discussions. By the end of the day I was limp with exhaustion and all I’d done was sit.

This heat wave is lasting far too long for anyone’s liking, and it doesn’t seem to show any signs of easing up on us any time soon. There has been only the lightest of breezes to give any relief, and that comes only at night – just barely enough to rustle the leaves on the trees but not enough to blow the hot air away.

Today has been a mix of emotional issues. I ended up pinch-hitting for the tenor line during one verse of the song the quartet was singing since the bass didn’t show and my dad could sing bass if I sang tenor. This was the first time I’ve been accompanist at the church that I felt as if I played the song well and wasn’t cringing through the entire thing hoping that no one was noticing all of my mistakes. It helped that I kept practicing the song as fast as I could at home because I had no idea how fast they would be singing and I wanted to be prepared, and they didn’t sing it as fast as I’d practiced. Our friend brought us a bag of peaches from her tree and we had a little black spider to amuse us during the service.

And this morning we found out that some friends of ours are going through an awfully emotional and difficult time right now, and my parents are wrestling with problems of their own, and for both extremes I feel oddly helpless and unable to do anything else except listen to what little I am told and do my best to not take sides. And tomorrow is our second anniversary but Richard left today for a weeklong intensive class down in Fullerton, and did I mention that it is disgustingly, mind-suckingly hot?

A few weeks ago we started tossing around ideas for office summer activities. My idea was to get tickets to a game at the minor league field in Sacramento, since even though not a one of us in the office cares even remotely about baseball, it would still be fun. So earlier in the month I drove over to the box office to get tickets for the office (I could have purchased them online but my brain ran screaming in shock when I discovered that this would require me to pay a $4 surcharge per ticket!!), and the tickets have been sitting safely in the petty cash box in the office ever since.

Thursday night was the game. We all changed after work and then piled into cars and headed for Old Sacramento since the ballpark is within walking distance and we wanted to get dinner first. It had all seemed like so much fun when we were planning it. Dinner first, followed by a short and leisurely stroll around Old Town, and then we’d head over to the park for the game.

Except that Thursday it was 106 outside, and there was absolutely no wind, and since the ballpark is located rather inconveniently outside and not somewhere air conditioned, it wasn’t nearly as much fun as we’d hoped.

Our seats were, at least, not in the direct sunlight. But that didn’t make it any better. We found our seats and then sat in them along with everyone else around us, sweating away any remaining driblets of energy we possessed, as it just seemed to get hotter and stuffier as the minutes passed. The ballpark sells garlic fries and everywhere in the stands was an overwhelming smell of garlic and sweat and heat and exhaustion. The poor mascot (who must have been literally melting in that costume) tried to get the crowd excited but we were all too hot.

The first three in our group made their escape after the third inning. I held out until the fifth inning before I finally had had enough of sitting in the middle of hundreds of hot and sweaty people feeling more and more gross from sweating with each passing second. And from what they tell me today, everyone else in our office left by the end of the seventh inning, and by then so had a lot of the other spectators as well.

Tuesday night for dinner we had Cajun spiced salmon, and as a side dish we steamed huge mounds of asparagus and broccoli. We made sure to make a whole lot of extra steamed vegetables so we’d have enough to take with us the next for lunch. After dinner, since I didn’t wanting to bother with the hassle of separating broccoli parts from asparagus spears, I dumped the leftovers of both veggies into a plastic container to live in the refrigerator overnight.

Here is a helpful and important hint, which I have learned from this experience. Broccoli and asparagus should never, never, be allowed to cohabitate in the same container in the refrigerator after being cooked. I say this because I speak from direct and unfortunately personal experience with the result.

Apparently, close association with asparagus turns broccoli into something unspeakably vile. It is beyond wrong. It looks like broccoli and even smells like broccoli but it certainly doesn’t taste like broccoli. It is as if VeggieTales suddenly started taking plot hints from the Necronomicon. It is the vegetable version of the toxic avenger, but without the comedy.

Lest you think that this is just me being ultra sensitive, I should note that Richard bravely took the remainder of the broccoli and asparagus to lunch with him today. A few moments ago he sent me an email that included one short sentence:

“You were right about the broccoli. Ew.”

Don’t say you weren’t warned.