public enemies R us! And damn proud of it.

Bill O'Reilly's Web site now features a hate list. I am pleased as punch to say that I work for one of the media outlets listed on this Nixon-esque enemies list and to me and my colleagues, this distinction is better than winning the Pulitzer, baby! We must be doing something right :)

A Message from Bill: Media Operations that Traffic in Defamation
The following media operations have regularly helped distribute defamation and false information supplied by far left websites:

- New York Daily News
- The St. Petersburg Times
- MSNBC

These are the worst offenders. In the months to come, we expect to add more names to this list. We recommend that you do not patronize these operations and that advertisers do the same. They are dishonest and not worth your time and money.

So, in other words, Bill has proclaimed himself chancellor. Be afraid.

have a holly, jolly, oh, just bite me.

The holidays are already annoying the crap out of me.

The church around the corner from my house erected a manger over the weekend. It really bothers me because:

A--it is inflatable and collapses into a primary-colored puddle every morning when they unplug it and

B--the whole inflatable thing just seems wrong to me for this particular representation of what is supposed to be the most momentous event in the Christian faith. Nothing says savior like vinyl, I guess.

C--the mustard-yellow baby jesus looks like the baby from the Homer Simpson brood,

D--Joseph bears a startling resemblance to Yukon Cornelius from the Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer claymation classic. So for all of you who believed that happy horseshit that Burl Ives fed us as children that Yukon and the Abominable were happily traveling the arctic circus circuit together and returning to the North Pole to plop the star on top of Santa's tree every year can just deal with the sad reality that Yukon is in a vinyl heap under a palm tree at the end of my street in humid Florida. And there is no Abominable in sight. (I will snap a photo this week if I can for further proof of my claim).

Okay--moving on--is it me or is the Lexus, big-frigging-red bow-on-top-of-the-SUV-Christmas commercial not just totally out of line and obnoxious, not to mention disgusting?

I mean, first of all, it's not even December 1st yet and I'm already sick of it. And this is significant because I'm not a TV watcher. But everytime the GITB is watching football or ESPN and I happen to be within earshot, bingo. And what is the message here--this is a normal gift that women should expect from their men??? Or is this just an appropriate gift for the beautiful thin white women from their uptight, rich type-A husbands who buy such items for their wives to assuage their guilt over banging the girl at work with their tiny little toolage? (thanks, e)

Ditto for the bullshit Kay and Gordon's diamond commercials. He must not love you if you don't get a diamond something or other from him for Christmas. So dump him on December 26th and go find some schmo who will buy you all kinds of baubles you won't wear most of the time anyway, because that means he really loves you.

And back to the mangers--Miss Daisy and I went for our nightly one-miler around the 'hood tonight and I noticed that my neighbor has a manger scene up in his front yard now and right next to it, the neighbor has positioned a jolly neon Santa and a neon train full of toys. Kind of a mixed message. But what I especially love about it is that although I know that Santa is waving, I could also be easily convinced that he is shaking his fist menacingly at sweet little baby jesus. He does appear to be advancing in a menacing way toward the manger...it's all perception I guess.

Thanksgiving: underclothes are optional

My favorite moment from yesterday: sitting on the deck after dinner enjoying the balmy breeze and smoking a fabulous sweet Nicaraguan cigar, a yearly tradition. My brother, uncle, and mom and dad and I do this every year in memory of my great uncle Bobby, my grandfather's brother. He was a Golden Gloves champion boxer and a huge cigar fan and a larger-than-life character. We miss him terribly.

Anyway, there we all were, basking in the post-turkey afterglow, sipping coffee jacked with Southern Comfort and blowing smoke rings, when my sweet little three-year old niece came out and climbed up on my lap. She threw her arms around my neck and we exchanged kisses and I told her how much I love her and what a big girl she is now (I suppose I am partial to her, but it has nothing to do with the fact that she is named after me and looks more like me than she does either of her parents).

She told me that she had gotten dressed all by herself for Thanksgiving dinner, and I told her what a great job she had done, that she looked gorgeous and she should tell her mommy she can get dressed all by herself every day.

She hopped down and posed for all of us and then she bent over to pick her blanky up off the floor. It was then that we all got the big full moon shot--that's right, no panties. After a beat of silence, the grandparents burst into laughter and my brother said "Yep, we did the right thing naming her after you, sissy. "

My name-sake scampered off for pumkin pie and none of us bothered to call to her mom that she was on her way into the kitchen, pantiless. Sometimes you just have to let things go. I mean, hell, it was Thanksgiving.

family fun

The Thanksgiving morning Turkey Trot has been a tradition in my family for 25 years. My dad is a hardcore runner and so when I was a kid we would go and watch as he ran the 10K or the 5K. Then we all started participating in the one-mile "fun run" each year, known as The Gobbler. After Dad wraps up his real run, he loops back and joins the whole damn family and 3,000 other folks and we all do the annual walk.

The Guy in the Boxers realized early-on when we hooked up that this was a mandatory annual requirement. If he wants to continue to sleep with me, he must participate. He hangs his head every Thanksgiving morning and reluctantly gets dressed and comes along. We always have to stop for coffee on the way, and he meanders along in The Gobbler, which he calls "The One-mile Mosey" with coffee in hand, admiring the landscape of people's yards (the course snakes through a residential neighborhood) chatting up fellow meanderers and stopping to pat dogs. Every once in a while he will loudly and sarcastically proclaim: "Wow, I really feel the burn now! Gosh, I hope I beat my time from last year!" But I know he would never miss a Turkey Trot. He secretly loves it.

This year, we brought Miss Daisy along for the walk and she was overwhelmed by the smells and sounds and sights. Oh my, what a hoot the morning was. Along the way we saw a group of kids playing bag pipes and a steel drum band and a pot-bellied pig on a leash in someone's yard and dogs dressed as pilgrims and Indians. I mean Native Americans. Or is it Indigenous Peoples?

Anyway, now we are all sitting around thinking about dinner for 22 at my brother's this afternoon. I made four of my famous Key lime pies with real Key limes from my tree.

The political arguments will break out at precisely 4:00 PM and at least one of my nieces will have a tantrum or wet her pants at the table and my size 4 Aunt Sue will comment on the size of my ass at some point during the day.

Dad will have too much wine and become weepy about all of his friends who died in Vietnam and never made it home for any more Thanksgivings and he will say that they were better men than he and they deserved to live more than he did and why did he make it home and they didn't?

One of my sisters-in-law will toss down a few drinks rapid-fire then announce that her husband is screwing around on her and she knows he is up IMing his girlfriend half the night after she has gone to bed. He will take her out in the backyard to calm her down and Uncle Paul will casually bump up the volume on the stereo which is a great idea, since my brother just went crazy with a home remodel job that included wiring every room including bathrooms and garage but we will still hear her scream "You're such a fucking asshole!"

My brother will go postal toward dinner time because he will discover that his wife has gotten rid of one of his favorite serving platters without asking him, since he is a major packrat and she is a neat freak and regularly gets rid of his shit without asking him. "That was Aunt Mabel's vintage Fiestaware!" He will sputter and bark incredulously.

My cousin Gail and I will exchange bitchy raised-eyebrow looks that communicate our satisfaction at the confirmation of our mutual long-held suspicions about the often-asked but deftly evaded question "Who got Aunt Mabel's Fiestaware?" Sometimes my sister-in-law gets away with ditching some of my brother's treasures and he never misses the stuff, but woe to her when he does. It always makes for fun times.

As we all start to finally drift into the dining room, one of the kids will run in and announce that someone stopped up the potty and there is poop water on the floor.

On the way home the GITB will comment about how fucked up my family is at least once. I will remind him that he has not spoken to his father since the huge falling-out after his grandmother's funeral nine years ago and to shut up about my family already. God, I love the holidays.

him again

Last night I dreamed I was with my old boyfriend and he was as he was then, young and still very boyish, before the curse that is age made him mature and cynically acerbic. He was shaggy-haired and goofy and completely unaware of his sexiness, just like I remember.

You know how you can talk to yourself while you are dreaming--like this other level of consciousness? Like the director's comments feature on a DVD? I love that. In my dream, I was the age I am right now, and I looked at him with wonder, thinking, "god, were we ever that young?" I could not take my eyes off of him. Anyway, he was wearing jeans and a loose old hippie shirt that laced up the front. We were in a van and he said he had to make a stop at work.

I was surprised to see that he worked in a big office and as I followed him inside I noticed that everyone was so happy to see him. He was casual and greeted everyone warmly and as he chatted with a woman at a reception desk, I wandered off and looked at framed art work hung on the walls that all looked like it had been drawn by children. Then as I turned back I realized that it was his office, I mean, his enterprise, he was the boss. But when I looked at him again, he was suddenly my age, middle aged, but it didn’t seem to surprise or alarm me.

He grabbed my hand and we walked from the building into another that was a like a huge glassed-in display floor like at a car dealership, only it was packed with motorcycles. He told the woman there that he was picking up a motorcycle, but that we didn’t want helmets.

I stood there listening and when he said “no helmets,” I noticed I was clutching a small suitcase to my chest and I said to myself: “Is he frigging crazy? I’m not getting on a motorcycle with him without a helmet.” He turned around and grinned impishly at me and he was a young man again and at that moment (and not because he was a kid again) I said “Okay, maybe it will be fun. Yeah, I guess I will after all. But what am I gonna do with my suitcase?”

Then I woke up.

meowch!

HEY DIDDLE, DIDDLE
the cat took a piddle,
All over the bedside clock.
The little dog laughed to see such fun.
Then died of electric shock.

heat up them freedom fries!

So my girlfriend, the one whose job in the Big Apple I covet, is transferring to Paris for a two-year assignment in the spring.

I told the Guy in the Boxers that I must get the passport renewed ASAP, as she needs me desperately to help her with the move. This is one of those times when I break my rule that I am too old and at that point in life where I should not have to help my friends move, because, hey you need to not be rigid and make exceptions now and then and this is one of those times.

I am so going to France with Grace. Hey, you try to fly with two neurotic cats by yourself. She needs me. And I need some french soap. And perfume and sassy new jeans. From France. Oh, and shoes, yes, shoes...

GITB laughed his ass off and said something to the effect that this is per usual for me, wait until there is civil unrest and discord and looting and decide, "yeah, I need to go there! Now!"

speaking of *bux

Is it not completly f**king insane to pay $4.00 for a cup of coffee? Or is it just me?

wrong again + pms = not a good day.

I had a most disappointing experience this morning. And I am still not sure what to think of it. But I guess the upshot is that my delusion that men and women (heterosexual men and women, members of the opposite sex, no, should I just say people who could ever possibly be sexually attracted to one another?) can be "just" friends has been shot all to hell again.

My friend Ray and I have known one another for over 15 years. I love Ray in the way I love my dear, close friends. It is affection born of a lot of shared history and experiences. I do not find Ray attractive because it just has never occurred to me. I have never thought of him as anything other than my friend.

Ray and I have been meeting for coffee once a month for 7 years. We work on projects together (he is a theatrical director, I have done some design work for him) and we chat about all things theatre, plans for his next show, who he is casting, etc. We also talk about movies and books and travel and cooking and history and gossip about all of our friends in common. He is witty and snarky and dear and I have so enjoyed this friendship.

Today at *bux, over a cup of hot pumpkin coffee, Ray asked me if I would consider sleeping with him.

I was stunned. I laughed it off and told him that if I ever slept with someone outside of my current and longtime situation, I never would sleep with a friend. He asked me some questions about the womanly perspective on monogamy and fidelity and I answered him, but inside I was totally checked out. I took my leave shortly after.

When I got home the phone was ringing and my girlfriend Deborah, who is a hetero-single-attorney-feminist-man-eating man-hater was on the phone. I told her what happened with Ray and she let out a long low whistle and then said "Ew." Which was a surprise coming from her but I guess she figured I was already upset and she did not necessarily need to unleash with one of her "All Men Are Wired to Be Promiscuous Pigs and Whores" speeches. She said quietly "Wow, I'm really sorry that happened."

Me too. I am now wondering what signals I must have sent Ray for him to think I would ever in a million years want to sleep with him. I have been his friend through two marriages and divorces, job changes, cheered him on in dating new ladies, been his buddy and helped him with projects that would not have gotten off the ground otherwise and he has done the same for me. We have been friends. Whatever that means. Now I feel like an idiot. And I'm uncomfortable because if I do meet him for coffee next month (will I? I don't know) it will never be the same and I don't want to have coffee with him again, really. And that sucks. Funny how quickly some things can change.

And I have no intention of telling the Guy in the Boxers about today's coffee klatch. He has always said: "Honey, Ray just wants to get in your pants, you know that, right?" I hate it when he's right about stuff like this.

retirees

retirees should be required to have locks on the outside of their dwellings that prevent them from leaving their homes (except in the event of fire, of course) during rush hour. Once the clock hits 9:00 a.m., their condos would spring open just like at the penitentiary. But they must go back inside between the hours of 4:00 and 6:00 p.m. Bingo and water aerobics should only begin after 9:00 a.m. and early bird specials should start at 6:00 p.m., the main culprit in the end-of-the-workday traffic jams, I am certain of it. Gotta get the two-for-one brisket before 4:30 p.m.

Here is my idea: when you retire, you should sign a paper that legally binds you to stay off major roadways during the height of rush hour. Oh, and out of the grocery stores too. But that is another rant. In return, you get your Social Security check and Medicare. Not before. I mean, what is the deal? If I were retired, or, rather, when I retire, you will NOT find my happy ass on the busiest throughway at the height of rush hour. Going 25 mph in the fast lane. Oblivious.

And don't get me started on the tourists. One of my neighbors recently erected a sign in his yard that reads: "Welcome to the beach. Now go home." A bit harsh, yes, but I do not get why folks think nothing of using our driveways or blocking access to our homes or peeing in our yards so that they can go to the beach. When they are old tourists, it's worse. The farther north the license plate, the worse the driving skills, I am sorry to say, and yes that means the Canadians.

But anyway, old people, please, I am begging you. Do you really need to be on the interstate at 7:45 a.m.? Make your tee-time after 9:00. Could you? Please? Yes, Papaw, you too.

settling ourselves for a long winter's...read

"The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it."
----Elizabeth Drew

This is the season for reading, at least for me. Though I live in a tropical clime, I still feel the need to slow down, get out my favorite quilt and do a little cocooning at this time of year. Maybe it is my psyche's way of helping to prepare for the mental torture that can sometimes occur with the holdiays and the too much time spent with people I am related to.

Anyway, here is a list of the "100 best novels of all-time," as prepared by someone who thinks they know a thing or two about novels (that would not be me). Please note, no Harry Potter here. No whining. I did not come up with the list. But I do intend to pick one title I know nothing about and make it my new best friend this holiday season.

How about you? Anything on the list you heartily reccomend or are dying to read?
(And thanks to Mel for getting me thinking about this one).

Don Quixote -- Miguel De Cervantes
Pilgrim's Progress -- John Bunyan
Robinson Crusoe -- Daniel Defoe
Gulliver's Travels -- Jonathan Swift
Tom Jones -- Henry Fielding
Clarissa -- Samuel Richardson
Tristram Shandy -- Laurence Sterne
Dangerous Liaisons -- Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
Emma -- Jane Austen
Frankenstein -- Mary Shelley
Nightmare Abbey -- Thomas Love Peacock
The Black Sheep -- Honore De Balzac
The Charterhouse of Parma -- Stendhal
The Count of Monte Cristo -- Alexandre Dumas
Sybil -- Benjamin Disraeli
David Copperfield -- Charles Dickens
Wuthering Heights -- Emily Bronte
Jane Eyre -- Charlotte Bronte
Vanity Fair -- William Makepeace Thackeray
The Scarlet Letter -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
Moby Dick -- Herman Melville
Madame Bovary -- Gustave Flaubert
The Woman in White -- Wilkie Collins
Alice's Adventures In Wonderland -- Lewis Carroll
Little Women -- Louisa M. Alcott
The Way We Live Now -- Anthony Trollope
Anna Karenina -- Leo Tolstoy
Daniel Deronda -- George Eliot
The Brothers Karamazov -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Portrait of a Lady -- Henry James
Huckleberry Finn -- Mark Twain
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde -- Robert Louis Stevenson
Three Men in a Boat -- Jerome K. Jerome
The Picture of Dorian Gray -- Oscar Wilde
The Diary of a Nobody -- George Grossmith
Jude the Obscure -- Thomas Hardy
The Riddle of the Sands -- Erskine Childers
The Call of the Wild -- Jack London
Nostromo -- Joseph Conrad
The Wind in the Willows -- Kenneth Grahame
In Search of Lost Time -- Marcel Proust
The Rainbow -- D. H. Lawrence
The Good Soldier Ford -- Madox Ford
The Thirty-Nine Steps -- John Buchan
Ulysses -- James Joyce
Mrs Dalloway -- Virginia Woolf
A Passage to India -- E. M. Forster
The Great Gatsby -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Trial -- Franz Kafka
Men Without Women -- Ernest Hemingway
Journey to the End of the Night -- Louis-Ferdinand Celine
As I Lay Dying -- William Faulkner
Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley
Scoop -- Evelyn Waugh
USA -- John Dos Passos
The Big Sleep -- Raymond Chandler
The Pursuit Of Love -- Nancy Mitford
The Plague -- Albert Camus
Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell
Malone Dies -- Samuel Beckett
Catcher in the Rye -- J.D. Salinger
Wise Blood -- Flannery O'Connor
Charlotte's Web -- E. B. White
The Lord Of The Rings -- J. R. R. Tolkien
Lucky Jim -- Kingsley Amis
Lord of the Flies -- William Golding
The Quiet -- American Graham Greene
On the Road -- Jack Kerouac
Lolita -- Vladimir Nabokov
The Tin Drum -- Gunter Grass
Things Fall Apart -- Chinua Achebe
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie -- Muriel Spark
To Kill A Mockingbird -- Harper Lee
Catch-22 -- Joseph Heller
Herzog -- Saul Bellow
One Hundred Years of Solitude -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont -- Elizabeth Taylor
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy -- John Le Carre
Song of Solomon -- Toni Morrison
The Bottle Factory Outing -- Beryl Bainbridge
The Executioner's Song -- Norman Mailer
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller -- Italo Calvino
A Bend in the River -- V. S. Naipaul
Waiting for the Barbarians -- J.M. Coetzee
Housekeeping -- Marilynne Robinson
Lanark -- Alasdair Gray
The New York Trilogy -- Paul Auster
The BFG -- Roald Dahl
The Periodic Table -- Primo Levi
Money -- Martin Amis
An Artist of the Floating World -- Kazuo Ishiguro
Oscar And Lucinda -- Peter Carey
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting -- Milan Kundera
Haroun and the Sea af Stories -- Salman Rushdie
La Confidential -- James Ellroy
Wise Children -- Angela Carter
Atonement -- Ian McEwan
Northern Lights -- Philip Pullman
American Pastoral -- Philip Roth
Austerlitz -- W. G. Sebald

"What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains..." Tennessee Williams

Last night I went out on a date with my very best moody homo boyfriend, David. His husband, also named David, hates theatre (go figure) and the Guy in the Boxers subscribes to the "why should I pay to go to the theatre when I can nap at home for free?" club, so David and I are regular mutual beards.

So last night we ventured out for a night of Tennessee Williams. I am chronically tardy and David is always annoyingly early. So as usual, I was in the bathroom wrestling with my contact lenses when the Guy in the Boxers bellowed: "Your date's here!" and when I finally appeared in the living room, he asked if I had stock-piled enough prescription drugs and alcohol to effect a good post-show overdose since that is how he feels every time he sees anything by Tennessee Williams. I could tell that both of my boys were relieved by my emergence from the powder room since they always run out of things to talk about when it's just the two of them.

The Guy in the Boxers warned David not to keep me out all night, per usual. David laughed nervously then chirped "Don't worry, I brought condoms!" over his shoulder as he and I departed. The Guy in the Boxers laughed so hard I could hear him all the way down the driveway.

The play was okay, but the woman playing the lead has recently lost a shitload of weight and so unfortunately she now has substantial wings under her ams. David was fascinated by the wings to the point that he could not concentrate on anything else, despite my elbowing him. I know this because he kept whispering: "I am so awful for saying this, but, oh my lord, my god, her arms look like pitiful deflated hot air balloons." And unfortunately, she did a lot of dramatic arm gesturing throughout. David moaned every time she gestured.

After the show we stopped at the neighborhood pub for "a nightcap" as David likes to call them and three Diet-Coke & Southern Comforts later, I was wobbling back in the front door jonesing for rice pudding or a pop-tart, as e and maxine can attest.

But the best part of the whole evening was story-time. David spent the last hour of "nightcaps" regaling me with stories of his career as a cheerleader at a huge southern college during the 1950s. Football players were naughty in the '50s too and they did not always like just the girls. Oh my, the stories that boy tells!

I love rice pudding. And strawberry pop-tarts.
And in case you wonder if I ever think of you, yes.
I do.

flu-you

The past five winters I have allowed myself to be chided and prodded into submitting to a flu shot. In the end I shrug and offer up my arm because I figure I must be an idiot to refuse--I mean, it's a good idea, right? And every year I have come down with an ass-kicking case of the flat-on-my-back-flu from hell.

So this year I am going shot-free.

Damn thee, oh fickle flu shot, I say. I laugh in the face of germs and various bio hazards, ha!

Screw it. I am going commando this year. I will drink more water and wash my hands a lot and steer the shopping cart with my feet and kick doors open and refuse to shake hands with anyone. I'll let you know how I did come Easter-or so.

butt, butt, butt...

The Guy in the Boxers came home unexpectedly for lunch today and caught me smoking a cigarette in the backyard. Oy and argh.

"Butt, I only smoke half of one once a month or so..." I whined. He must have found my stash in the garage, a few pathetic fags in a ziploc baggie hidden behind the bag of charcoal and the foam pool noodles. He did not seem at all surprised. I am so lame.

He is a mental health professional, so he refrains fom the guilt infliction. But he looks at me sideways and sadly wags his head back and forth. What to do with the badly behaved girl?

The butt, butt, butt excuse is the same thing I tell my groin-a-chiatrist every year when I go in for my annual pelvic exam (such fun) and actually answer the questions on the questionaire honestly. To which she always replies: "Well, why bother? What's the point? Just stop it already."

I'm stressed, it helps me think. I know it's bad for me, so wrong and icky. That's me today. Wrong. And icky.

I know about pop-you-lar

First thing tomorrow morning, this is where my toes will be.

We held auditions at the theatre the past two nights for a musical that opens in early 2006. My friend's husband is directing and she is stage managing and I am producing. Which means I devise a rehearsal schedule that works around 45 people's personal schedule conflicts, hire the musicians, beg people to work on crew, order t-shirts, break up fights backstage and make sure the teenagers wear underwear when they go out on stage for the big tap numbers. A few of them decided during the last production that as a dare, it would be fun to be onstage sans panties. But our core audience is mostly elderly and had one of the dancers taken an accidental header onstage, we would have had cardiac arrest-city in the audience. Oy. So now I will be on panty-patrol as well. Great.

So anyway, the folks who show up to audition for your average community theatre production run the gamut from truly talented to really painfully, sometimes tragically, not (see Waiting for Guffman) and that is just the worst for everyone concerned. We sit there with smiles plastered on our faces trying to be kind, humane and supportive without giving reason for false hope without seeming to be big fat liars. And the kicker with this particular show is that the direcor is a former professional actor who worked on Broadway for nearly 20 years. So every person with acting aspirations from 20 miles around shows up to audition for my friend's husband whenever he directs, which is once a year. Which is about all I can handle anymore.

Let's just say it's been two of the longest nights of my life and if I never hear another song from Wicked sung badly by a writhing 14-year-old going on 45 in too-tight jeans with a belly-button ring hanging out of her too short top it will be too soon.

happy, birthday, eric

One of my favorite peeps turns 40 today. Yep, welcome to the middle-ages, buddy. But worry not, you're still a cool-rockin' daddy.

where in the world is Matt Lauer?

who gives a shit?

I mean, really, WHO CARES? Morning network "news" shows suck.

Give me Captain Kangaroo, Mr. Greenjeans and Dancing Bear any day of the week.

PS: Dear Katie, you are so NOT a "journalist." Not, not, not.

not a-Mused

Most days sweet Daisy is my muse. She sleeps under my desk and whenever I peek down and we have eye contact, her tails starts slapping the floor. We play the peeking game a lot and she always catches me. She is happy just to be gazed upon by someone who loves her.

Lately, though she is sweet in nature, she is decidedly NOT in odor. Daisy has a delicate problem that, shall we say, makes her tough to share close quarters with. She's a gassy girl. It must have something to do with the sulfa-based medication she is on, because the odor of rotten eggs permeates the house once or twice a day and even she seems irritated and mortified by it.

The only fun part about it is when Schmoopie comes skipping in from swinging in the back yard, stops dead in her tracks, wrinkles her nose and shrieks" "Ewwwwwwwww, Daddy!"

The Guy in the Boxers of course denies responsibility for the malodorous state of our home, but she looks at him in disgust anyway. And I see no point in defending him. His track record speaks for itself.

Chin up, only two more days until the meds are done, sweet Daisy girl.

Karen's memorial service is on Saturday.

She had been ill for four years and as I told a friend on the phone yesterday, you know it's coming, you know it's going to happen, but still you're just not ready for it.

Okay, me. I am never ready for it. I thought I was.

And I know how cheesy this is, but you know when Debra Winger's character passes away in the movie Terms of Endearment and her mom, (Shirley McClaine), sobs to her son-in-law something like:

"It's so stupid. You think when she finally goes it will be a relief. But it isn't. It's just so hard."

And that's it for me where Karen is concerned. We knew it had spread to her bones and her lungs and not long ago her doctor told her that she could do one more round of chemo to try and buy six more months but she said no thanks. She spent the summer with a full head of hair, lounging by the pool with us girls, drinking beer, and yes, smoking cigarettes ("what the hell, why not now?") and listening to music from the '70s.

They were sad, fun afternoons. She was relaxed and soaked up the sun and it was what she wanted. But there is no sense of relief like I had expected, hoped for. It's really, really hard.

in memoriam

in memory of my friend Karen, who succumbed last night after a four-year battle with breast cancer.

There are no words.