Reading: Frank McCourt, 'Tis

Listening: Snoring

Viewing: Party detritus.

Moving: Very carefully.

Learning: How grateful I am not to drink.

1 January 2000: 000101

Man, that's a freaky looking file name. Disarming. That's my intelligent comment of the day after reading Beth's description of what time looks like to her. It means I need a new directory structure, which isn't going to happen since my entire journal is maintained manually. Except the code. I don't write code. Where we're going, we don't need codes. I figured a "Back to the Future" reference would complement the high-octane intellectual level I established with my opening line.

By the Climbing Tree, am I ever rambling, but after ten days in this house I'm just proud I'm not babbling. I mean, not rambling or babbling so very much worse than usual. I should be deedling my lips in whatever elementary school gesture accompanied by a loud and wet exhalation that connoted insanity or stupidity or whatever that was, I forget. It is Saturday night (obviously) and here I am, sitting up in bed with the laptop on my lap (a good place for it), The French Lieutenant's Woman at my feet, the bird in his cage to my right, RDC to my left reading Delirium, and at the moment, no yelling, bird or human, anywhere.

Yes, I've read Beth's description of what time looks like to her but she's the only thing I've read online since 22 December, and ask me if I feel cut off. With seven people and one phoneline and one of those people being a 13-year-old girl who has to keep up with the friends she's made in Texas plus call all the friends she had to leave behind in Florida, I don't get online much, and Beth is to me what Viv is to her, and that's my priority.

Speaking of Beth, I detected a wee bit of teasing in the past couple of days when she implied my pets' pages are up despite my declaration that my site is kablooey. Remember what I said about not getting to go online? I have no idea what's up and what's down. RDC said Speaking Confidentially's index page doesn't work but perhaps his, my, and Blake's index pages work from the root level of penguindust. Maybe she got to my pets' page from Blake's page. Maybe she just remembered that one reason my dog died at but 13 from an enlarged heart resulting from obesity was that popcorn (thoroughly buttered and salted) was such an easy and fun thing to feed her. Maybe I shouldn't call it my pets' page, since my pets didn't make it themselves and someone might think I'm making a plural with an apostrophe. Maybe I shouldn't refer anyone to the page about my pets anyway since another one has died.

My latest email from LEB, in response to my telling the world penguindust was kablooey and asking people to write to yahoo in the meantime, was that she and PEB had come home from visiting their middle child in Westchester all happy about a third grandchild from that daughter (bringing their grand total to six) to find one of their boarders in tears on the phone with the vet because their dog was dead.

Shandy was seven, going on eight. He came home with them the day of the riots in L.A. He was half shepherd and half Labrador, half trained, and wholly loved. He had a heart attack or seizure and collapsed and he was one of the very best dogs and now who's going to greet LEB at the door with a sock in his mouth and talk to her? Mollie can greet her at the door and PEB can talk to her but who's going to bring her a moldy sock or punctured tennis ball or whatever he thought was a suitable offering that day? Whose ears are going to bounce, up like a shepherd's but tips down like a lab's, on their walks? And then there were the four grandchildren who knew him through summers spent with them to tell. And me to tell. Poor Shandy.

But ZBD says she misses me and that warms the very cockles of my heart. I called Charenton last night and talked to DEDBG again, and HEBD, and DEDBG's nephew Robbie (4.5), and ZBD, whose birthday is in two weeks. ZBD seemed to remember me, which was charming. I couldn't talk long because it came time to cut cake, but I heard enough. I love my friends.

Okay, so that's an introduction. I'm in Florida, two weeks in a subtropical climate for the holidays and how lucky is that, but living with any family too far from the beach to walk isn't a vacation.

So.

This night I wrote up the days since the 22nd. This day I mostly read and napped, and so did everyone else.