Category Archives: Uncategorized

Keeping the nerd in me happy

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).

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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.

Anniversary Monday

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.

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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.

Grape Feeding

We’re all melting

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?

Baseball in the heat

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.

Broccoli twists

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.

I am very sore. Also, there were fish.

When I was here last year doing mollusk handler training for Benthic Creatures, we found a marvelous little diner called the Santa Cruz diner. Early this year, when Richard was in Santa Cruz passing out shell polishing kits to the mollusks, he discovered the joys of this diner too. So this morning when we both got up too early for the inn’s continental breakfast, we decided to relive some of the fun of our Benthic Creatures days and went to the diner for breakfast.

It was as cute and quirky as we remembered. The waitresses are all no-nonsense and serve up sarcastic humor along with the coffee. We had pancakes and drank coffee and tried very hard to find some energy for one more day. After yesterday’s marathon of walking we were both exhausted, so we eyed the tourist map dubiously in the hopes of finding some kind of entertainment that would involve a minimum of movement.

First we meandered through the streets back to the coast (but safely away from the traffic that surrounds the boardwalk) and found the Santa Cruz Natural History museum. It’s in a tiny little building overlooking the ocean and was manned by one rather quiet and bookish gentleman who greeted from behind his counter. There isn’t a lot to see in the Natural History museum, but what little there was, was laid out quite well. One room had all sorts of exhibits and pictures and information about the local indigenous people in the area while another held all manner of birds and local furry things (including a huge full-grown red tailed hawk hanging from the ceiling). In a third room we learned all about fossils and shellfish in the area and got to pet starfish in a tide pool.

Then we decided to go to the Long Marine Aquarium. We arrived before they opened (it seems to have been a trend for this weekend) so wandered around on the cliffs overlooking the ocean for a bit before we were able to go inside.

It’s another tiny little place, but like the museum, was definitely worth the trip. Unlike most aquariums, this place was set up to show how science actually happens. Each exhibit started with a question, and then gave simple steps on how the scientists came up with an answer. Obviously it’s mostly geared toward school kids, but even for adults it was pretty neat. There was some hands-on stuff, including a huge puzzle (which Richard and I put together because I really, really like jigsaw puzzles), and a tank full of jellyfish, and a few little tide pool areas where I got to poke at sea cucumbers and watch them contract, and also let an anemone try to run off with my finger by leaving it there long enough for it to wrap half a dozen of its little sucker legs onto my skin. Once we were done poking at sea critters we went on a little tour, which mainly consisted of a short walk outside along the bluff behind the center, and then an even shorter trip into the main complex to see the dolphins and sea lions and seals. It was a highly educational trip, because when one of the docents asked if we had any questions, I jumped at the opportunity to find the answer to a question of utmost importance (by the way, in case you were wondering as well, jellyfish do not, in fact, have butts. You are welcome).

We headed home after lunch. My legs are sore and I am walking funny because there is a huge blister on the bottom of the middle toe on my left foot, and we are both sporting nasty sunburns on our faces and arms, and I am completely and overwhelmingly exhausted. We forgot to bring the camera and we realized sometime today that if we’d had half a brain between the two of us we would have tossed the bikes onto the car and brought them along and maybe we wouldn’t be nearly as worn out. The cats will not leave me alone because they have been left with no one to give them attention for TWO WHOLE DAYS (no matter that my parents came in and fed them both days, and probably did a bit of head scritching and petting), and I need to do laundry and I think I could use another day just to sleep before I go back to work tomorrow and am required to at least pretend to be awake. But all those things aside, it was a lovely weekend, and I am very glad we went.

Far too much walking in one day

This morning we lounged lazily in bed until just after 8 (such luxury!). This was mainly because breakfast wasn’t served until then, so despite me waking up before 6 and then lying there in bed half awake for the next hour or two, it wouldn’t have done any good to actually arise any sooner. Now that it was morning we could actually see what the gardens of the inn looked like during the day. We took a quick amble through them (we’d done a more thorough stroll last night) and I once again had reason to bemoan the boring flatness of our yard. Most of the gardens were up a steep hill literally covered with some kind of bright red flowers.

We joined a handful of other equally sleepy people in the main lounge for breakfast. I discovered that I could only pretend that the pancakes didn’t really have bananas in them for one pancake’s worth of eating; after that the banana contamination was too strong to overcome and I made do with a deliciously flaky croissant. Then we headed back downtown to see how everything looked in the daytime.

As I suspected, during the day the concentration of gothed up college students standing around in clusters managing to smoke and exude extreme boredom had decreased. In fact, the downtown strip was nearly deserted, which, as we soon discovered, was due to the fact that a majority of the businesses did not even open until 10. So much for getting an early start. But we did walk all the way up to a clock tower and then took a detour over to the mission (which also did not open until 10 so we had to content ourselves with peering up the hill through the gate at nothing). Then we stared at our little tourist map of Santa Cruz and figured that since the boardwalk wasn’t all that far away, we might as well walk down there too.

The beach was still mostly empty when we made it down to the boardwalk, and most of the rides were in process of opening and doing their beginning-of-day tests. We wandered the length of the boardwalk and looked at the beach and the volleyball courts and all the sand, and then Richard saw a sign for a train trip up to an old lumber site which looked kind of fun, so we marked the time and then walked out onto the pier to find somewhere for lunch. Amusingly enough, we ended up at the same place each of us had gone for dinner when we were here (not together, but each on our own during separate trips) for Benthic Creatures. We sat by the window and tried to figure out what type of ducks were bobbing around on the water, and I got to be amazed by how big pelicans really are when you see them close up, and we ate salmon wrapped in spinach and puff pastry and then had just enough time to walk back down the pier and back to the boardwalk and pay for our tickets and board the train.

The train ride was lovely. It took us through some of the prettier parts of Santa Cruz with all the little colorful Victorian houses, and also through some of the not-so-pretty areas (industrial yards, mostly). Once we left Santa Cruz it was mostly redwood trees and occasional glimpses of rivers and hikers and mountain bikers.

Then, however, it reached Roaring Camp, which, being further away from the coast, was significantly hotter. And the first glance from the train window made us wonder just what it was that was so exciting that people (who were over the age of 10) would really want to go there. There really wasn’t much at all there except some pony rides and a few boxes of water on sticks where you could ‘pan for gold’, and a shack selling the typical tourist trap food (ice cream, burgers, hot dogs), and of course a little souvenir shop. There were signs for trails leading into the redwoods we’d just seen but we had less than an hour to kill and it simply wasn’t enough time to do much exploring. So we got flavored ices and sat on a picnic bench in the shade to eat them, and then poked around the gift shop and got back on the train.

This time we decided to ride in the open car, which turned out to be a huge mistake. The ride through the redwoods was just as lovely as before but in the open car we had no protection from the sun, and the breeze from the movement of the train just wasn’t enough to make up for the heat.

We were both pretty tired after the heat and the sun, but we decided to walk all the way back downtown again to find the Santa Cruz library so Richard could get a library card (because for whatever reason he decided that he should try to get a library card from every county in California). And then we finally walked back to the inn where I really wanted to collapse but after that extremely hot and sweaty train ride we both felt disgusting so we ended up taking showers instead.

We decided to find dinner somewhere, since the cheese appetizers in the lobby weren’t going to cut it two days in a row, so we rummaged through the inn’s big book of menus, found a promising spot, called and made reservations, and then hopped in the car. We drove off to Aptos, where we discovered that just because the woman at the inn *said* it was in Aptos didn’t mean she knew what she was talking about, called the restaurant, got correct directions, and finally found it at the top of a hill overlooking an extremely snooty golf course surrounded by even snootier mansions. We ate dinner and whispered across the table to each other about the other people in the restaurant, who all seemed to be the sort that lives in snooty golf course mansions and name their children Muffy or Hamilton the Third and worry about how their little angels’ preschool will impact their ability to get into Harvard later in life. Then we split a dessert which had an appropriately snooty name but was really just a big slab of soft fudge in a shallow bowl surrounded by espresso cream and crushed Heath bars, and then finally decided we’d had enough snootiness for one weekend so quickly paid our bill and escaped.

Getting away

We decided that, with the hectic schedule of the rest of the summer, we needed a chance to get away, just the two of us. This was especially nice considering that Richard is off to a class for an entire week at the end of this month, and leaves on our anniversary – a class which requires him to be gone on our anniversary. Not, mind you, that either of us is hopelessly anal about making sure we celebrate things on their exact days, but it was as good an excuse as any for a weekend escape.

We picked Santa Cruz, only because it is within driving distance, and really, neither of us have ever really had the time or chance to explore the town. We’d both been there for work with Benthic Creatures, but the schedule for that job was always long and left little time for exploration.

Richard tracked down the Babbling Brook Inn, a little sprawling hobbit sized bed and breakfast nestled in the middle of lush gardens and surrounding – appropriately enough – a little brook complete with water wheel.

We didn’t get there until shortly after 8, since we had to wait until after we got home from work, and then still had to pack. Initially the intention was to find dinner in Santa Cruz somewhere, but the hostess offered us cookies and sparkling cider and little plates of cheese and crackers and homemade pizza as we checked in, and suddenly we weren’t so hungry any more.

We checked into our room and sat on the tiny little deck, surrounded by ferns taller than my head when I was sitting, and ate our cheese and crackers and drank our cider. And then we wandered off towards downtown, to see what we could find in the dark.

The downtown stretch is typical college/tourist town – pizza and coffee shops every time you turn around, and more ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ product stores than you might find in others. We did stumble across a large used bookstore and spent some time in there happily browsing. I found two books by Terry Pratchett and one by someone else. I am in the middle of reading it now, curled up in bed and listening to the water right outside our door. It is not the best possible book because there have already been parts where things happen that seem to have been added without much thought to how to incorporate them into the story, but it is about cats and magic and mysteries and the importance of friends, and I am pleasantly tired from all the walking, so it will do for now.

Rumor has it there’s a beach there too

I got up far too early this morning and drove to the airport while it was still dark, to catch a plane to Los Angeles and from there, a taxi to Santa Monica.

It was muggy in Santa Monica today; in fact it was extremely muggy. But I didn’tt mind it so much if only because at least it is cooler than Sacramento is right now so at least I have that for relief. The taxi driver who took me from airport to office did not ask me any questions other than to confirm the address, for which I was grateful since by this point I was starting to suffer from the combination of waking up far too early, and a lack of caffeine. Outside the office building the weekly farmer’s market was just starting to set up as the taxi pulled up beside the curb. A few minutes later, after I’d been upstairs and given the quick tour and pointed in the right direction, I headed back outside in search of coffee. The office is right next to some kind of shopping promenade, with stores lining the street on either side (pedestrians only) and a movie theater on the corner. I found coffee in the form of a latte, and could not resist the oddly shaped, intriguingly named espresso chocolate chunk scone.

Walking back to the office – this time with a borrowed pass so I wouldn’t have to rely on the kindness of strange men washing down the sidewalk to let me in – I eyed the produce and plants set out in crates and boxes alongside vans as the market sellers set up their tables. Huge tomatoes, boxes of apricots mounded high, buckets crammed with all manner of plants that might tempt me into making a purchase save for the fact that there really is no way I could bring it home with me on the plane tonight.

There is a dentist’s office in this same building, and as I walked by I did a double-take. The lobby is like something out of Arabian nights – overstuffed plush and heavy tapestries tucked into every corner amid tall potted trees. There was a little hallway inside with video games (to entertain the older kids, I imagine), and a brightly pink room to one corner with giant crayons on the wall for the younger ones. Somehow I managed to stop my jaw from dropping onto the floor. This is nothing like any dentist office I’ve ever seen. I am used to stark, boring lobbies done in every shade of beige, with the requisite pile of magazines on a table in the corner where the most recent edition was published back when I was in college or earlier. I wonder if all those trips to the dentist and the orthodontist for the braces and the headgear and the extractions (I have thin enamel, a jaw too small for all my teeth, etc., etc.) would have been more anticipated if there had a sultan’s tent, or giant crayons, or a Ms Pacman game to keep me occupied until it was my turn.

The Santa Monica office was originally designed for a now failed dot com. This is the explanation I was given for why, scattered here and there like misplaced drains in an otherwise normally carpeted floor, there are golf ‘holes’. Apparently the now-failed dot com employees were welcome to relieve a bit of stress by grabbing a club and doing their best to hit a few holes-in-one in lieu of a coffee break. The love of office-floor golf does not, however, explain why it is that the failed dot com felt the need to decorate the entire office in some kind of bizarre hybridization between the 70’s and the type of ‘modern’ décor that usually equates to minimalism, lots of metal, and far too much emphasis on frosted glass panels. There is a little glass-walled conference room in the back of the office, in a relatively unpopulated corner, and it is there that I spent most of my day, with the architect and the intern, pouring over an ever-growing pile of information as we try to track down often-elusive equations for buildings.

We went to Wolfgang Puck’s for lunch. I had a roasted vegetable pizza (although I had to pick off the eggplant because it is just too slimy to eat). We found great amusement in the drink dispenser, where the regular lemonade contained a label indicated 0% juice. The diet version, however, proudly declared that it was made with real lemons. As the same vendor and brand made both of these, it did make us wonder just what the 0% juice regular version uses instead of lemons (and why the vendor felt the need to use a lemon substitute).

By about 2pm the architect and I were both fading fast. My excuse was the plane flight down; hers was that her youngest – from all accounts a typically exuberant toddler – came bounding into her room at about the same time I was smacking my alarm clock and getting out of bed much further north, and once that started there was no going back to sleep for her either. A previously planned conference call kept us somehow hanging on to some semblance of normal brain function for another hour or two, but by shortly before 4pm the architect had had it, the intern was starting to get nervous about the fact that she is supposed to fly to another continent tomorrow and had not yet begun to pack, and as for me, the sheer fact that I could no longer pronounce simple words like “irrigation” and “calculate” indicated that my brain was slowly going numb from overload. So we all emerged from our little glass-walled chamber of work and headed our separate ways.

The taxi driver who took me from office to airport wanted to chat but by then I was too worn out to manage more than a few simple sentences in reply. He was the type of driver that makes me incredibly nervous – speeding up to tail other cars on the freeway, slamming on his brakes at stoplights. If I paid attention to the traffic around me – and to what he was doing – it only made me tense in anticipation with every sudden swerve and screeching halt. So instead I focused my attention on the scenery, finding great amusement in the trees that lined the side of the road. In some areas they had grown so huge that the sidewalk had become a gentle roller coaster of ups and downs, shoved out of place at regular intervals by the slow and steady force of the spreading roots.

Where’s the magic wand when you need one?

We really need to organize the garage. Things are starting to accumulate around the edges and the clutter is creeping slowly inward until soon we will be trying to figure out just why it is that we can no longer fit even one car in what is supposed to be slightly larger than a two-car garage. Okay, maybe that won’t happen quite so soon, but if we don’t do something about it, parking two cars in there is going to start becoming a challenge.

It is a daunting task, requiring first taking stock of everything *in* the garage, then figuring out the best method of storing it all, via some clever combination of shelves, hooks on the walls, cutely labeled Tupperware containers, pegboard for the tools, etc., as well as figuring out what doesn’t really need to remain in the garage but instead go live in the attic. Assuming of course that we can get it into the attic because maneuvering a ladder into the litter box closet and trying to squeeze between the door jamb and the ceiling in order to make it through the tiny little opening is even more daunting than organizing the garage. Of course, once we actually figure out exactly what size and how many of the aforementioned shelves and containers and pegboards, then we would have to go *buy* them all, and then install them, and then put all the things in their respective places, and suddenly this chore seems as if it will encompass days of hot and sweaty work in a place where various and sundry critters – including the occasional mummified frog and black widow spider – have made their homes. Not, mind you, that the mummified frogs hold the same squeal factor as black widow spiders, since frogs – mummified or otherwise, usually are not in any danger of biting anyone. But it is not exactly fun to move things in the garage and find yet another shriveled frog carcass lurking in a dark corner somewhere, just waiting for the day I will accidentally step on it in my bare feet.

I think that what we really need to do is organize some sort of major chore swapping party. Surely there are people out there – strange but lovely people – who delight in creating those nifty organizing systems of cupboards and shelves and hooks and thing, who would be perfectly happy to take on our garage as a little weekend project. And in return I would be perfectly happy to paint a room for them, and maybe Richard could install a new operating system or set up a home network in exchange too. I am sure this could work. Really it could. Just as long as you don’t decide that payment should be the building of any large stone walls, or the lugging of any large quantities of dirt because I’ve done more than enough of that in the past few weeks to last the rest of my life thank you very much.