This was the most unproductive weekend ever. I didn't finish any of my projects. I have no idea what I did but it took all weekend. Okay -- I did clean up the massive pile on the floor and turn it into 5 small piles. This morning I found a Delta page response email from a random stranger and this was quite a surprise since when the pampage went down a few months ago and I did the remodel and thought I removed a lot of that stuff. Turns out I took it off the links but both Delta Sucks and Southwest Sucks are still floating out there and you can bring them up in the search engines.

I forgot to mention that I finished White Teeth by Zadie Smith this morning. I don't know. I gobbled up the first 350 pages on the trip to LA and thought it was a pretty cool book but for the last 100 pages I've been thinking, "when is this book going to get over?" I'm not sure I even understand what happened at the end and I'm not about to go back and read it again. Also we got *another* copy of The Week today -- I am now 3 issues behind. This is why you should never subscribe to a weekly.

The plan for this afternoon is to do a bit of tweaks and start building the new pages for High Sierra and the trip to L.A. We'll see how far I get. I just did today's "15 minute gardener" routine. I finished chopping down the other dead rhodie and managed to dig up the stump or root ball or whatever you'd call it and I cleared a bunch more ivy and started chipping away at the tall rhodie on the side of the house. It's about 10 feet tall now and I think I want to make it more my height. Someday this area will be ivy free and I'm going to plant hostas and maybe some calla lillies if they're easy to grow. I also harvested more beets. Beets are my best crop after tomatoes. And what a bummer because Bob won't eat them. Billy won't eat the beets anymore either.

Last night we went to the Lillian Pitt Gallery on NE Alberta to see the premiere of a documentary about the Plateau People - art, culture and history of some local Indians. The documentary is very well done and the gallery is fabulous. I pointed out many ideas for potential gifts to my husband. Next weekend is the Wy-Kan-Ush-Pum at Waterfront park which is the Indian Art Northwest artist's market and also fun outdoor music. I think we're going to check it out.

I got back from LA Monday afternoon and I have a ton of stories -- I think this weekend will be tune-up website and post High Sierra and 20 Yr. Reunion stories -- I say that now, we'll see how I feel then. The condensed version is: I had a super fabulous time and would do it again in a hot second. But now I'm slogging through post-vacation bitchy-ass mode and trying to get my act together while not being in the mood to do anything except time wasting activities. Bob subscribed us to emusic.com so I see a major time suck getting to know that site.

Meanwhile, here are two helpful law enforcement oriented URLs. You can educate yourself on speedtraps in your area and you can use this handy calculator to compute your blood alcohol content. Like you're going to be anywhere near a computer when you need this information.

I think I'm pulling it together. It's 7:30pm now and I've already done my last store run and got my cash and although I haven't actually packed, I've been packing in my head for several days so it's just a matter of pulling the stuff together. I leave for LA at the crack of dawn and pick up the car (a groovy Pontiac Grand Am -- stylin') around 9am and then zoom off to Santa Barbara -- I don't think I've done that drive since the last SB Gal reunion in SB which was ... I can't remember. Probably before I got married so at least 6 years ago. I'm going to go to campus for the nostalgia stroll and visit Maria at the library. The whole weekend is going to be the nostalgia stroll because I'm going to visit Agoura High and drive past my old houses.

There are still a few loose ends I hope to tie up tonight but whatever, I can amuse myself in LA any number of ways.

I'll be offline until Monday. Until then, enjoy the Microsith (Star Wars ref) site until my return.

I am unglued. How do people go on trips all the time and here I am coming apart at the seams? I think it's the preparations and taking off and then returning and cleaning up over and over for the past several weeks. We just got back from High Sierra last Sunday and Weds I am leaving for LA. I went to the mall over the weekend to try to pick up a last few things and struck out so tonight I went to downtown Portland to do the same. I had a bit of luck but just got home at 9:15pm and I haven't eaten and the yard should be watered and all I want to do is guzzle some refreshing adult beverages and then lay down (which is what I will end up doing.) I still have people to call and lose ends that need to be tied up. I still haven't gotten my reimbursement from the EEOC/Quinault travel way back in May (9 weeks later -- how come the US Treasury can seemingly cash my tax check mere moments after I've mailed it -- yet it takes this long to get my travel reimubursement?) and we just got our first Verizon bill and it looks totally screwed up unless I totally misunderstood what we signed up for. argh. I just made my Avis car rental reservation -- it was going to cost $70 more to do it over the phone than it cost online. I don't understand how things work.

Yesterday I went to Lloyd Cinema to see Episode II again (#4 if you're counting). Turns out I-5 was closed between the 405 split and ... I don't know, somewhere after that. So I had to get off and Portland Ave. and take MLK to get there -- there may have been a faster way but I did not know it then. So I was totally late and now that the movie is only playing on about 4 screens in town, I guess there is no need for the 20 minutes of trailers so we ended up missing the first 10 minutes of the movie.

Then again today I went to Lloyd Center only today I was meeting Bob during a break from this conference he's attending. We had a yummy lunch at Yuki and finally bought a new strainer thing at Kitchen Kaboodle. We use our strainer at least once a day and I broke the handle off the old one not to mention it is sort of falling apart so we were in dire need. The cashiers at KK were out to lunch. Then we went to the bakery on Broadway and I thought I should apologize to the woman who waited on us for disturbing her -- I don't know what else she needed to do, but helping us with our damn loaf of bread seemed to cause her a great deal of inconvenience. The guy at the bookstore who took our money was quite friendly and chatty.

In the past week I came across 3 different people on phone customer service who were completely chatty and had a sense of humor and helped me with my reservation or whatever my problem was. Also I've noticed people at the bank(s) (work=BofA, personal=WAMU) that I go to are almost always friendly and ask me about my day and what I'm up to. You never know what you're going to get and I’d like to point out that it doesn’t take any longer to be nice than it does to be an auto-matron, or a surly bastard.

I’m going to take Zadie Smith, White Teeth, to LA with me this weekend. I’ve wanted to read it for a long time. I’ve got to drag my sorry ass to bed now, I’m tired. I was the human weed-eater this morning and cleaned out a huge patch of weeds plus the whole area along the fence and I tidied up the garden and harvested some peas, beans, raspberries plus I cleaned vegetables for salad AND I have identified the mystery item in the garden: tomatillos. I guess I must have composted some of the ones Mom gave me last summer.

I still haven't gotten my act together. You should see my room -- there are papers and doodads and reading material and recipes, notes, whatever spread from one side of the room to the other. And I still haven't gotten the whole LA trip sorted out yet -- I need to get on the phone. But first, my semi annual trip to the mall where I buy enough clothes to limp through another 6 months. Why do I hate shopping? My horoscope said it's a good day to buy clothes so hopefully I will like the first two things I try on and be done with it.

For those of you seeking to improve your literary background try Classic Novels.

Well, I've just now stirred my "spicy thai big soup noodle bowl" after eating over half the noodles and turns out all the spice has been stuck in the bottom in a spice cube. cough cough.

I've been putting off checking in b/c I was waiting for my big High Sierra Music Festival post except I realized I will be doing a whole separate page w/ pics for that so I'd better get my ass in gear and put something up so my regular readers (all 3 of you) don't drop off the radar.

For now I have a couple of URLs for you. First, you can learn all about safe sex by playing SuperShagLand. I just played and when I finally got to the end my prince told me I was too drunk or too tired to shag properly and to come back later. Like some guy would ever tell you that ... . The other one is Bible Lego stories. My friend Robert sent it to me with this quote, "I heard about it on NPR, searched 'lego' and 'gomorrah' and it came right up."

I'll have more very soon.

ug. I have *no* energy. I wanted to take a nap all day. Am I still recovering from World Cup fever? Or is it the flux of the weather - miserable rain to warm and sunny? I don't know but I've got some music to attend to this weekend so I'd better pull it together.

Tonight I went to the bookstore to find some stuff for the long weekend. I didn't have a lot of luck but I did get Phantom Menace in paperback because I am hung up on Star Wars at the moment. While I was at the bookstore I looked through the sale books -- doesn't it hack you off when you see all these books piled in the sales area for about $6 that you paid full price for?