I am so glad to be home.

Ages ago RDC asked if I wanted to go to a conference with him in Santa Clara. I said no because of Dot Org's Under the Big Top and airfare. Then several weeks ago Dot Org decided it did need me to go to the Big Top (not just stay in the office), this year held in Indianapolis. So. I was warned that the work that weekend would be arduous, the pace hectic, the subservience cranked way up, and I prepared myself for that.

I arrived in Indianapolis through a magnificent thunderstorm. I had never before seen a thunderstorm from eye level. I was in awe. I wanted to describe it for DEW since I'm always on the lookout for things of beauty and things of nature to write to her about, but the poor woman is petrified of lightning. So I'll have to think of something else.

I shared a taxi into town with a coworker, who kept the cab after dropping me off at the lovely Days Inn Downtown, and only in my room realized that although Indiana is in the Eastern time zone, it doesn't observe Daylight Savings Time so it's only an hour behind. I would have to get up at my 5:00, not at 4:00, to get to the convention center by its 7:00. So up I got, showered, dressed, ate of the lovely Days Inn "continental" breakfast, and walked toward central downtown. The hotel clerk asked, "You're going to walk to the convention center?" It was a half mile, maybe more, certainly less than a mile. I wondered if the clerk's name was Henry Woodhouse.

From 7:00 to 5:00 my time was Dot Org's. I was released for lunch, which was fun. Steph and I scampered through skywalks between the convention center and a Hyatt and an enclosed football dome to Circle Center (which is a mall), where she found sandwiches and I found a Caesar Salad rounded off with a weakness at the Sweet Factory (both the weakness and this candy store are new to me): the store sells supposedly real Reese's Pieces (with the logo on the bin) and supposedly real M&Ms (with the logo on the bin and on the candies) and a scoop of one and a scoop of the other, in proper proportion, is exactly right.

We were both being extremely silly (after being extremely subservient all morning with prospects of a similar afternoon). So dancing to "Staying Alive" on the Muzak system while waiting for sandwiches and asking the candy store clerk if she minded if I didn't take any (toxic) blue M&Ms and the clerk responding in kind was just the sort of release we needed. Then back to subservience.

Except there wasn't much to be subservient about because so many people preregistered and remembered their materials that the lines I had dreaded never materialized. Instead we discussed the proper proportion of Reese's Pieces to M&Ms, the evil of blue M&Ms, methods of eating M&Ms, just how hot it was out there, and fascinating stuff like that. I note with pleasure that everyone who matters ("mattering" here defined as "agreeing with me") thinks that blue M&Ms are wrong wrong wrong. I've given my reasons before, but again, blue doesn't fit into the color line-up, which is further messed up by blue killing off tan, as well as the fact that I voted for purple, damn it (which also would have screwed up the color line-up, and which I did ignorant of the fact that tan would be "retired.") The most popular method of eating M&Ms (for those with a preference) was to segregate by color and eat all greens then all yellows etc. Hmm. I still like my rainbow line-up theory best.

On the eastward plane were three other Dot Orgers, one of whom asked the next day if I'd ever heard of a chain restaurant she wanted to try for supper. Then she asked what I was doing for supper, and I said, "Going out with you," which was agreeable to her. Four of us ended up at Palomino's, whose food was merely okay and whose server was unacceptably rude. A host sat three of us with the understanding we would wait for a fourth, but the server clearly wanted us to order before the fourth showed (maybe 15 minutes later). That won him no points. He reached over and through all of us and particularly into the face of the shortest of the party, who is under five feet. Clearing my silverware, he scraped a knifeblade across my arm with enough force that he should have realized that the resistance indicated a direct strike, but he didn't apologize. We had already decided he'd get 10% at the most, and after the knife slice 8%, but when he nearly scraped off the end of someone's nose as he slapped down dessert menus, I said "seven" as if to the air. Then when he came to pick up the bill (which included no appetizer, and no desserts after all), he pointed at it and demanded "What's that?" and Johanna, choosing to believe he indicated not the total but her scrawly signature, said, "That's my name."

I do not believe in abusing restaurant servers, especially not with my sister. I consider 20% or over standard, not the 15% my coworkers first began to reduce from. This guy, however, deserved it. I told one of my favorite CLH stories. Teddy Kennedy often came into her former restaurant in Back Bay (a tony neighborhood in Boston), and apparently he was a quite rude guest. Once he came in with three other people and instead of waiting to be seated by the hostess--who we must presume knows what she's doing--strode through the establishment to seat himself at a table set for eight. Another time he ordered a bottle of wine as soon as he sat down with his two companions and when my sister brought the bottle and three glasses, he began to abuse her that the wine was for them and he had asked for a screwdriver. CLH then asked the bartender for a screwdriver you could see through.

(She had to explain that to me, who does not drink and is evidently also socially ignorant: a screwdriver is orange juice and vodka and you're not supposed to be able to see through it unless its drinker really only wants to get sloshed).

Another time he came in with some female or other and the couple's tab was $180. When CLH came to collect the tab, she saw two hundred-dollar bills on the tray. She looked at the money, looked him in the eye, looked at the money again, and turned away. When she came back there was another fifty waiting. Mention of Teddy Kennedy leads to one of her jokes: "What's the penalty for drunk driving in the state of Massachusetts?---Election to the Senate."

After dinner, my coworkers were going to go to a street festival including Rick Springfield and the Beach Boys. I declined to hear anyone who got his start on General Hospital or who should be dead, or both, and returned to my oh-so-lovely hotel to swim, only to discover it has no pool.

I sulked. I ate the rest of the candy. I read A Century of Women. I watched "Devil's Advocate" and "Sex in the City" on HBO. I talked to RDC and got an explicit description of where the car was. I slept.

Sunday I brought my bathing suit with me to sneak into either the Westin's or Hyatt's pool, which endeavor was unsuccessful. In favor of the pool attempt, I had declined the Dot Org social event at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which is about the last place on earth I wanted to be when the heat index was over 100 and I'd have to continue being subservient to strangers who might now be tipsy. I picked up a margherita pizza, staggered up to my room, pouted, read more A Century of Women, watched "In and Out" (which should indicate the low point I had reached) and a new episode of "Sex in the City."

On both nights I talked to RDC. He was glad he rented a car not just because it enabled him to go to Monterey but because Santa Clara is like the Denver Tech Center, with office buildings but no substructure of Stuff or Activity. So he went to Monterey on Saturday and San Francisco on Sunday.

I do, honestly, like almost every aspect of Dot Org and working for Dot Org except the actual nature of my job, which means that I get to act subservient and stay in a poolless Days Inn; RDC does, honestly, deserve with his formidable brain all the perks of his current job. I need to find work that exploits my talents: petty ridicule and typos.

In the morning, at the airport, I succumbed to a Waterstone's because I hoped I could find the new book of A.S. Byatt short stories, which I had not had the time on Friday to snag from the Tattered Cover. On the shelf directly after Byatt, all of whose featured titles I'd read, I found some Italo Calvino, which really surprised me for an airport bookstore. I bought Cosmicomics, my favorite of his that I've read (If on a Winter's Night a Traveler might be his Best or Most Widely Read or whatever, but it befuddled me to such a degree I could not call it a favorite) and The Non-existent Knight and the Cloven Viscount.

Home again, in the pleasant high 80s heat, the most frustrating part of the day was waiting for a shuttle to long-term park. Finally it came, and of course I was glad I hadn't tried to walk it because while it's only three miles out, it would have been three miles of airport walking like Steve Martin's trek back to the rental car office in "Planes Trains and Automobiles." Then the driver stopped at the bus stops at A and G but not O despite our ringing, so a few disgruntled folk and I got off at S and I, now under my own steam, ran across the columns of cars toward where row O intercepted the north fence of the lot.

There waited the Impreza, whose name is almostly certainly not Ripple. "I might have left the lights on," RDC told me Sunday night. "The phone number's in the glove compartment." "But there won't be a phone in the lot," I didn't point out to him. Luckily I didn't remember this (one-sided) exchange when I threw my messenger bag into the hatch then threw myself into the front seat, knapsack on the floor and hateful purse ripped open on the seat beside me to spill out the seven Junkies discs I had brought with me (so I could torture myself some more for not knowing about the concert). I didn't recall that he'd left the lights on until I went to turn the switch myself, saw that the switch was still switched, and was grateful for either the car's sensible automatic-off or its fresh battery or both. Because I did worry, when we first bought it, that it didn't have the warning buzzer for doofuses like me who prudently do drive with headlights on all the time but doofusly do forget to turn them off all the time.

Out and away and south toward Blake, except that I saw, just in time, a traffic jam just south of our usual homeward exit. So I got off there, went to CostCo (nary a drop of oj in the house), continued on to the vet, picked up my buddy, and came home. Blake was angry at first, either at being abandoned there or at being taken away from his new friends, I wish I knew which. He wanted to go home with a pharmacy courier who reeked of tobacco smoke. He forgot all that as soon as we got in the car and he chattered all the way home. At home, we shared lunch, we listened to "Lovely Rita," we had some headpetting, and then I abandoned him again.

I needed the pool.

I haven't had a peaceful afternoon by the pool in ages. Denver hasn't had the blazing blue skies this summer of the three past summers I remember, and we've gone to the mountains more, and I think there are more, and more obnoxious, kids and smokers in this complex than in years past. A perfect summer day, as far as I'm concerned, has some good exercise in the morning, some hours poolside with a book, and then more hours under dappled tree shade with Buddy, and a long bike ride in the evening. Exercise I've had, but to read in the pool, leaning on a folded-up towel over the side, hasn't happened because of mountains and weather and brats, and on this other side of the complex we don't have trees immediately outside our window, besides which our section of lawn in always moldily sopping. I carry Buddy a little way toward other trees, but then he and our neighbor's cockatiels notice each other. Loudly, so I have to bring him in again.

I want to propose a playgroup to Cathy, the neighbor with the two 'tiels. Maybe she won't want to, because maybe two 'tiels don't need a playgroup. But does my one need one, or is he simply mad that other male cockatiels live nearby? Would they play, or would he fight them?

So at 6:00 I went to my other pool, the one in the park, for a good long swim. I did nearly a mile, and I'm trying to console myself that maybe I lost a lap in there and I really did 32, a full mile, not just 31. My time is getting worse, not better: I have done a full 2k only once very early this summer.

Back home, I found HAO waiting for me (although I'm sure I said 7:15, not 7:00) and she waited some more while I showered and then we did my rousingly fun errands and rewarded ourselves with ice cream. Back to CostCo, because when I got home I saw the list RDC left for me, which included dishwasher soap, and I would definitely make another trip through the fundy gauntlet to CostCo in preference to washing anything by hand. Then the Mayan for Blair Witch tickets, except the throng had not yet been admitted for the 8:00, whereupon I suggested Walgreen's because I was desperately proving to HAO that I can be the most vulgar-mouthed, tedious chick who ever ran out of deodorant and razors in the whole universe. At 8:05, on to the Mayan, where I further demonstrated my stupidity by forgetting that the Mayan takes only cash. I don't remember what the third movie was when we saw "Run, Lola, Run," but that third has got the axe and now two of the Mayan's auditoriums have "Blair Witch."

And finally, the reward (to HAO, for coming with me) of the evening, Bonnie Brae ice cream. We each got hazelnut chocolate chip (my regular is triple death chocolate) and I asked for jimmies as well. I shouldn't have. The scooper gave me a styro bowl of jimmies and a plastic spoon, which is how they do it now because of some psychological terror that children suffer if their ice cream cone is rolled in the jimmies in the proper, time-honored method. I didn't follow the logic of it, but whatever, these littluns pro'ly call jimmies "sprinkles" anyway and therefore cannot be trusted. I tried to roll my cone in the bowl, but the scoop of ice cream fell out, whereupon I realized I really need an exclamation with a "G" rating. I think "poop" is permissible for all audiences, but when I'm actually mad, labial consonants (like "p") don't satisfy the way a labiodental fricative (like "f") and a velar stop (like "k") do. Jimmies, however much I love demonstrating my New England roots by calling them jimmies instead of "sprinkles" or (worse) "shots," are artificially chocolate flavored hydrogenated oil and should not be allowed, even to prove my regionalism, to adulterate otherwise fine ice cream.

Walking about, we passed a few sprinklers and I confounded HAO's superb command of the Simpsons when she could not remember in which episode Milhouse asked Bart what kind of sprinkler he would be and then demonstrated the different varieties. HAO realized this might be the origin of Dexy the Smoking Man's Sprinkler Dance, which I, alas, have never seen.

I hadn't got over last week's Austen fit so I rented "Sense and Sensibility." HAO declined: "I've already seen it once, and...." Once?

So. Today I again got Power Pesto from Organic Orbit for lunch. This is my new rut. I should bring parsley to chew afterward, though: a pasta salad with spinach and broccoli and heavy on the garlic. My Laughing coworker suggests chocolate to cover garlic breath. Bittersweet. She swears by it. Honest. When I explained this scientifically-based preference to RDC, he reminded me of parsley. Damn. Perhaps chocolate-covered parsley?

Speaking of which, HAO pointed out another sign of the decline of western civilization last night (in Walgreen's, which speaks for itself): Reese's peanut butter cups with grape jelly. That and those new waffle sticks from Burger King.

I finished my lunch with my usual non-organic snack, a Raspberry Rapture cookie from Mountain Moon. Raspberry and chocolate, yes; purple grape and chocolate, no. And after work I'll pop down to the Mayan avec cash, and then I'll clean my house (particularly my bathroom, which I've ignored longer than I shall admit) and get it ready for RDC's triumphant return.

Then I'll rollerblade, and afterward spend some time with my banana-headed boy.