Perfect Happiness: In Pictures

Gettin' Down to Biz-ness

* With the fancy schmancy cocktail party at the Atlanta office tomorrow. Rah.

* With the college homecoming festivities - I can hardly wait for fried chicken on the hill. And I've charged my camera battery so that I can take approximately 800 photos.

* With yet another business trip to J. Island that promises to be...interesting. Leaving Sunday and gone on Monday and Tuesday. And packing my flack jacket for the angry mobs that are likely to be staking out our meeting.

* With yet another big opportunity at work in Atlanta on Wednesday - again, hand-picked by the creative director. And he reviewed my work from last week's meeting today and said he was so proud that he nearly teared up. And then I nearly did in turn.

* With a less fancy schmancy cocktail party next Thursday hosted by a friend of mine at a downtown hotel. And despite its lesser level of schmancy, I'm looking forward to time with friends.

* With pondering items about The Professor...the significance of the fine line between "when" and "if"...i.e. remarks like "When you meet my parents who live in a far distant state on the other side of the country" as oppose to if. Like it's a done deal. Like yesterday, he said "when" in reference to a family reunion. And then there's the EX Factor. As in his ex is coming for a visit - a closure visit, I guess? So. Yeah. She's here all next week, and I'll just be...waiting??

* With subsequently considering when or if to pursue dating someone else (no one in particular - unless Christian Bale is available)...but just...someone to keep if from turning into when so fast. Plus, I'm a hot ticket - wildly successful in my career, fantastic taste in shoes, and I'm smokin'. So maybe I should share the wealth.

* And then with thinking, Who am I kidding? It's 10 o'clock and I just want to go to bed and finish Twilight.

Remember Sam?

You may recall my request for thoughts and prayers for my friend Laura's son Sam, who was in neonatal ICU back in August just after he was born. I was catching up on Laura's news from her blog, and thought you might like to see how well he's doing.

All these happy little baby boys - Sam and now Pen's Nicholas and Andi's Wyatt. The next generation of heartbreakers.

For the Record

I hate the word "pamphlet."

It reminds me of the pamphlets found in the Berry College health center featuring a very swirly Age of Aquarius-esque design that read "Chlamydia is Not a Flower."

Update on Little Sam

Over the last few days, Sam has been getting better and better. The doctors have taken him off the respirator, and he is improving "by leaps and bounds," according to Mommy and Daddy. Further tests need to be run to confirm there are no further complications, but he may get to go home by the middle of next week. Laura and Russ have both been able to hold him and feed him - and Laura's been able to change a diaper (lucky her!). It looks like Sam is only getting stronger. Thanks for pulling for him! I know Laura appreciates it.

Rest for a Weary Soul

Frost Chapel sits up on a hill overlooking Berry's mountain campus. I'm a little rusty on my history, but I think it was built in the early 1900s. For me, it is a sacred place. It is a place where I feel most spiritual, most calm, and always, always at home.

I made one of my regular pilgrimages to Berry last week, and I couldn't resist driving up to the old chapel to wander around for a little inner peace. The stones themselves have a particular smell to me - and it's like inhaling serenity. And for the few moments I stood on the steps looking through the archway and over the mountains, all the outside noise - and the interior noise, too - seemed far below me. And the quiet was just perfect.

Good Thoughts Requested

My very good friend from college - and specifically from the hallowed halls of Oak Hill - Laura had her third baby last Wednesday, August 1. Samuel Owen is her first boy, weighing in at 6 lbs., 11 oz. and measuring 19.75" long. Little Sam is having trouble breathing on his own and is in NICU on a respirator. Please keep him, his mother and father, and his two big sisters in your prayers and good thoughts.

Octagonal Oddities

Tagged by Pen to reveal 8 weird things about myself...as if what I write everyday doesn't qualify.

1. I am obsessed with trees. I have in my closet a branch of a weeping cherry tree that used to reside in our backyard and was cruelly cut down because it grew into the septic tank. At Berry, there was a holly tree that grew outside my window, and in Wilmywood, the giant ancient oak outside the Grace Street house was mine all mine. Trees make me feel peaceful and contemplative. Something to do with my name, perhaps? Or maybe I was an Ent in a former life.

2. I feel bad when I am not part of a cultural phenomenon. I feel guilty about the fact that"Smells Like Teen Spirit" was one of the most formative songs of my generation and I simply wasn't that into it. Clerks and Mallrats? Never seen 'em. The Simpsons? Not that funny to me. It makes me feel like a lesser member of the human race, like I'm not being a team player because I'm not participating. It's one of the main reasons I watch American Idol.

3. I like to have the same conversations over and over again, particularly with my mom. If we've talked out a situation once, we've talked it out 100 times. Sometimes we even use the same phrases. There is no answer, no resolution to these conversations. They are just familiar terrain that we like to explore over and over again. Like we need to say, "Remember that rock from yesterday?" Yep, I remember.

4. Embarrassingly weird, but Sister Act Two: Back in the Habit always makes me cry at the end. I'm serious. Those kids singing "Joyful, Joyful" and beating out the giant choir from St. Wherever, and I am in a puddle. Oh, Whoopi.

5. I don't like to listen to music unless I know the words. When I get a new CD, I listen to it at least twice with the liner notes in front of me. I've got to get a hang of the chorus, a thread of each verse in order to build on it until I know all the words. Perhaps this is why I cannot get into jazz. And as a second to this, when I find an artist that I like, I feel compelled to get all of their music even if I only like one song. I want to own them - all of them - and know all the words. This is how I like music.

6. I only like art that looks like something. I know this is incredibly low-brow and unhip of me. But if I'm going to hang it up, I need to see something in it - a cloud, a dog, a barn. It can be abstracted, but there's got to be something there. I'm sure there is great meaning in Pollock. But I don't want it on my wall.

7. I am obsessed with my left-handedness. I like to note what activities I actually perform left-handed...writing, eating, drinking, painting my fingernails, repelling.... I make note of anyone around me who is left-handed - store clerks, waiters, delivery men. I acknowledge it, like we are somehow comrades in arms because of our left-handedness. If I'm watching a movie, I will notice if an actor is left-handed. And I have to say it out loud. "Diane Keaton's left-handed!" (This during watching Baby Boom with my dad last weekend.) It is like being part of a secret society to me - and yeah, Hendrix is in it with me.

8. I see shortening people's names as a sign of affection. And some people hate this and find it a real insult that you would shorten their name. My friend Niki and I have been friends since first grade...back then, we were Nicole and Ashley. But as years went by, it shortened and shortened until we were Nik and Ash. And we used to joke that some day we'd just be letters. I also call STGD by the first letter of his first name which is "T". There are exceptions to the rule - names that simply don't lend themselves to being shortened or people who simply don't fit the acceptable shortening. But really - if I cut off most of your name, it's because I love you.

Tagging the hometown gals - Nik, Andi and Megan.

Taking the Long Way (or The UnPlan Plan)

Two questions most asked since my departure from Wilmywood:

1) Are you enjoying having some time off from work?
2) Have you found a job yet?

Please don't think these questions are mutually exclusive. I'm often asked them back to back.

Here's the thing: I have followed the plan to the nth letter since I was 12 years old. I choose 12, because that's when I decided to go to Berry. And major in Communication. When I was 14, I started high school on the college prep track. I joined clubs. I did extracurricular activities. When I was 15, I took the PSAT. When I was 16, I took the SAT. Took it again when I was 17 and took the ACT, too - just for good measure. At 17, I was accepted to Berry and awarded a scholarship. At 18, I went to college.

In those four years of college, I stayed in the major I declared as a 12-year-old, and added three minors to it. I got a second scholarship in theatre. I worked at Oak Hill and was made supervisor. I applied to grad school. I did an internship. I graduated and went to Wilmywood. I got a job. At 24, I earned my MFA. And I stayed in my job, working full-time.

I have followed The Plan so very carefully. And now, for a few weeks of my life since I was 12, I don't have a plan. And it's a national emergency. I know it's what people think to ask, but I wish they wouldn't ask it like they're panicked for me. Like the time is ticking and the bank account is growing smaller.

There's a plan for everything. Your cell phone. Your retirement. The possibility that your workplace comes under a terrorist attack. Perhaps it's time to be liberated from The Plan.

On the way home today, I wasn't paying attention and missed the interstate I was supposed to take and ended up taking another way home. A longer way that I probably haven't driven since college. I missed a bypass later and ended up driving through a quaint little downtown. A drive that should've taken me an hour and a half tops, crested to just over two hours. But you know what? It was okay.

Sometimes, you have to throw the map out the window. Sometimes you have to get lost. Sometimes you just have to keep driving even though you don't know where you're going. Sometimes, the future - that far off destination- is too far away. Sometimes, right now, with the windows down and Keane turned up, is enough. It's enough.

Here's to the UnPlan Plan.

Ash's Obsessions du Jour

Tagged by Pen - here we go.

1. Noticing. Everything. Contemplating the light through the windows in the apartment in the late afternoon. Considering Kudzu's regular patterns of movement from room to room and neat jumps onto the windowsills. Ways of getting from one place to the other in town, recognizing the acute knowledge of each curve and straight and landmark - I know this road. Wondering (but trying not to overly much) if this will be the last time I do this or that in Wilmywood before I move. Noticing. Everything.

2. Quiet solitude. Not that quiet is the way anyone would describe me - prone to nervous chatter as I am and filling silences with it. And generally talking too much and too loudly. But today is quiet, and I relish the quiet and hold the quiet.

3. Oakdale Cemetery. Having never been there until yesterday, I was unaware that it holds the esteem of being quite possibly the only place in Wilmywood that I might describe as "hilly." Any other season, it might be drab - naked wintry branches or fully-leaved summer trees. But in spring, it is blossoming and fragrant and serene.

4. Songs that I hear that have a confusing context. How sometimes The Killers' "Smile Like You Mean It" sounds like a song Kim and I would've listened to in the car on the way to the beach, even though it came out after we graduated. Or how The Fray's "How to Save a Life" feels impossibly like a song from college that I would've listened to on repeat going up Stretch Road and hummed to myself as I rattled around Frost Chapel.

5. Kudzu's relentlessness in waking me these days when he wants to be fed. His pawing the covers off me and wet nose on the eyelids. He drives me mad until I stumble into the kitchen and crack open a can. But then, after he's eaten and I've gone back to bed, he'll curl up against my spine in a tight circle and I feel loved.

6. My secret day off. I hedged about going home for Easter because I selfishly wanted a three-day weekend to myself. Other than my sister, sworn to secrecy, my family thinks today was just another day at the office.

In Praise of Spring

The shift in seasons reminded me of a poem I wrote in college during my e.e. cummings period. I was quite fond of wandering around campus in the wee hours.

2 a.m. in spring

blooming into april neverdarkness
alive with lush green whispers
brazenly unfurling petals for a pale moon
who smiles at fevered spring eyes.
wild feet kiss fresh grass lips
lately wetted by dew's first --
poetry in the trees, these leaves
that rush against one another
like the lines of a sonnet, rhythmic
rustling words of lovers, spoken
during these hours of sleeping
when the light across town burns,
a little daylight saved for me.

Pretty Good Yell

When I was in college and minoring in theatre - yes, I was going to be the next Streep - I had a professor who constantly berated us for having Ted Nugent Neck. Ted Nugent Neck occurred when you failed to project properly from the diaphragm and ended up straining your neck trying to sound loud enough. I was particularly bad about this. And on Friday, on the way home, I was listening to Tori Amos' "Pretty Good Year" and giving my all to the "HEY" part when I full on experienced Ted Nugent Neck and then - ouch. I'm not sure what happened, but I definitely felt a pop and imagined that I could hear it, too. Now I'm taking Aleve every couple of of hours to alleviate my enthusiasm.

The Sound of Music: A Personal History

Let's start at the very beginning. It's a very good place to start.

*1965 - My parents go to see the movie in the theater on one of their early dates. The thought of my father sitting through this in the theater is...laughable. But it must've been a good date. They married two years later. And then 10 years later, there was me.

*1984 - I figure I was about 5 when I started listening to the record we had of the soundtrack. I clearly remember sitting in Anna's room with its yellow and white shag carpet and striped daisy wallpaper and trying to learn the words to "Sixteen Going on Seventeen." And thus began my obsession with song lyrics.

*1980s - For a long time, one of the channels would run the movie every year at Christmas or just after. It was always a big family event to watch together - we were easily entertained.

*1993/4 - Somewhere along in here I got the movie on VHS. And I also developed a terrible crush on Christopher Plummer. Captain Von Trapp is HOT.

*1997 - Our high school put on the musical as the spring production. Jenn was totally robbed of playing Leisl by this horrible girl who thought she was headed for Broadway. Instead, Jenn and Allison were cast as backup nuns. Oh, the agony. It led to many, many inappropriate nun jokes for which we will certainly burn in hell.

*1998-2001 - I learned in college that I could use this movie to study. No, really. I would let the movie play while I was studying for tests and then I would listen to the soundtrack on the way to class. Excellent memory trick. It's the only way I made it through Dr. McKee's Public Relations Theory course - I had confidence in me.

*2002 - Hoang-Anh discovered my love of The Sound of Music. There was a communal viewing. And possibly a sing-along. But I'm not confirming anything.

*2006 - At Christmas, Mom and I happened to catch the movie on TV. We had forgotten how cheesy it is. Particularly "Something Good" sung by Maria and the Captain after they declare their love for one another. It was so silly in fact, that Robert Wise chose to shoot it in silhouette because Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer couldn't keep a straight face.

*2007 - Excellent distraction to pass the time while counting the hours until meeting my nephew.

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, good night. I'm off to see the baby. Copious amounts of pictures from every imaginable angle upon my return.

Scooby Doo, Where are You?

It saddens me to report that the creator of Scooby Doo died today at the age of 81. He also did animation work on Disney classics like Cinderella and Peter Pan, but his crowning achievement was the sleuthing Great Dane and "gang." Scooby Doo was undoubtedly my favorite cartoon as a kid, and I admit to watching it a great deal in college - it used to come on the Cartoon Network at 2 a.m. before they only played weird cartoons. I was a little bit in love with Shaggy for a time. Maybe I still am. Rest in peace, friend.

Extended Family

In college, I worked as a tour guide at the founder's house, a great white columned house that wasn't quite Tara but close enough. I initially sought the position because of the promise of wearing an antebellum dress - and I now know how to drive in hoop skirts. Little did I know that one of the unadvertised job perks was working for Vesta. A tiny little woman with the most lovable Southern accent ever with more energy and vive the you could imagine, considering she celebrated her 70th birthday my freshman year of college. She finally retired last year.

We kept the "office" in the kitchen at the back of the house, and I spent inumerable hours at the white metal table eating vegetable soup or homemade biscuits and hot tea. Over the years, Vesta transformed from supervisor to friend to family.

As already mentioned this week, my mother's mother died before I was born, and the woman my grandfather remarried wasn't exactly a cookie-baking cheek-pinching grandma. And my father's mother died when I was 11. After a childhood almost completely devoid of grandparents, I had suddenly gone out into the world and adopted one.

Just after I graduated college, I was going to a friend's wedding in Memphis - a fellow tour guide. Vesta wasn't going to the wedding, but several of us were meeting at the college to travel together. I asked her if I could come the night before and spend the night. She welcomed me. And she cooked dinner and we sat and talked until we grew sleepy and she tucked me into the little twin bed in the guest room. The next morning, she made coffee and waffles and peeled an orange for me because I had a particular fondness for them in college. When I left, I teared up a little - because it was the first time I ever got to go to Grandma's house.

I went to see her today in the little cottage (in the picture) where she lives - as I do when I'm in town for college homecoming or Thanksgiving or a week in spring. And she listened to me and loved me and laughed with me and advised me about life. She has an enormous family - born one of seven and with three children of her own, eight grandchildren and a handful of great grandchildren. But with Vesta, there's always room for one more, blood or no blood, and so she welcomes me home every time I come.

Weird Six

I've been tapped by Kim to reveal some of my innate weirdness to the world. Narrowing down to six was the tough part:

1. I have an overwhelming fear that the world will run out of electricity. Sometimes when I drive at night and see all the lights on in an office building or think about all the electric signs, I feel panicked. When I had a washer/dryer and dishwasher in my first apartment, I couldn't run them at the same time without needing to leave the apartment. I can't sleep if I can hear the air or heat clicking on and off, so I'll turn the air up and the heat down to the point that it only comes on periodically.

2. I've noticed lately a few habits about numbers. I have to pump gas on the fives. It has to be $16.65 instead of $16.62. And the volume on the TV or radio has to be an even number.

3. When my sister got married five years ago, I had my first and only manicure. Before that, I wore my fingernails very, very long. The manicurist cut them pretty short, and since then, I've been unable to stand long fingernails. I had to cut my nails before I left for Salt Lake City, because I knew if they got too long on the trip, I would chew them off just to keep them short.

4. I have an undergraduate and graduate degree. Neither the college nor the university I went to had a football team. Conversely, I grew up a stone's throw from Athens, Georgia, a town obsessed with its UGA dawgs. But I have never been to a UGA football game.

5. I am obsessed with my handwriting. Perhaps it's something to do with being lefthanded, which typically makes for terrible penmanship. But I practiced and practiced and practiced until I had neat handwriting. If I start to write a note to myself on a post-it, and it looks messy, I'll throw it away and start over again.

6. I am an inherently messy person. At my house, I throw clothes and shoes around without care, leave dishes in the sink, and let the bathroom go straight past EPA standards. In a hotel, I am meticulously neat. Fastidious even. I will fold my clothes, put items back in the suitcase after use and hang up the towels in the bathroom. Perhaps I need to pretend I live in a hotel.

I'm double-tapping, but I'd love to see weirdness from Pen & M, Tom, Andi, Niki, and The Growler.

I Am 32 Flavors and Then Some

Driving down Market Street tonight, I happened to be listening to one of those mixed CDs I made a few weeks back. Alana Davis' cover of Ani DiFranco's "32 Flavors" came on just as I pulled up to an intersection under the glow of the red light. It's funny how a song just takes you back to a moment - a moment you'd forgotten existed. But suddenly, it was my freshman year of college about this time of year on a Friday night. My roommate had gone out with friends, and I lay on my bed alone in the room with the Christmas lights strung around the room plugged in and no other light on. And I laid there and cried, thinking about being jilted by this guy who just stopped calling one day. It was one of those moments that I think you are required to have your freshman year of college - feeling the absolute depths of brokenhearted loneliness. I remember eventually getting my keys and driving around campus and I listened to this song - "32 Flavors" - and felt some revenge because this guy who jilted me loved Ani DiFranco, but I thought that the more cutting words of the song were from me to him.

Incidentally, I saw that guy in Athens one time when I was at home just after I started grad school. He was wearing an apron and smoking outside a Papa John's.

Spooky Little Girl

It's that time of year - I knew it when I heard the ghost tour outside my house through the open window on Saturday night. I've never been on the tour, but I could tell the guests were getting the extended All-Hallows version of whatever haunted tale accompanies my house.

And turning on the TV, there's the deluge of scary movie marathons and ghost documentaries and VH1's new show that sends five B-listers on a similar journey as the old MTV show Fear. For a girl like me, this time of year is scary. Because at every turn there's something to scare me out of my wits.

I scare easily. I admit it. I find being scared both delicious and agonizing, and my imagination knows no bounds when it comes to whipping me into a frenzied terror. I slept with my brother for almost a year when I was nine after watching an Unsolved Mysteries episode on aliens. In fourth grade, Flowers in the Attic scared me so badly, I threw up six or seven times from sheer anxiety. My brother was forbidden to let me watch a full movie trailer for Nightmare on Elm Street because my terror of Freddy Krueger had me unnerved day and night.

As I got older, I learned to tolerate the scary movies - even like them. At a high school sleepover, we watched The Changling, which is to this day, the scariest movie I've ever seen. But it was a delicious, hilarious kind of scared with half a dozen girls laughing and screaming. And then when I went to college, I had my own set of paranormal expereinces between the old dorm where I lived and the old house where I worked.

I guess every college comes with its set of stories. Ours involved a girl who hung herself in an upper floor study room - students swore they could hear her feet scuffling about in the closet. Or the hall in one of the dorms that supposedly had a pentagram on the wall that appeared through innumerable coats of paint. A tall shadowy figure was said to lurk in same-said dorm's parking lot. A pair of lovers biking up the mountain road were supposedly struck and killed one foggy night. Legend says if you pull up on the bridge where they were killed, turn off the engine and the lights and honk three times, you can see a ghastly face in your rearview mirror. The town itself boasted a road where you could supposedly take seven people, leave them each at a bridge, and on the way back, you would only encounter six friends, one lost in some alternate time warp until you retraced your initial route.

I always believed in ghosts until then in the sense that I feared them. But it wasn't until college that I had real experiences - not a one involving the standard fare. My freshman year, I had my first strange experience in an all women's dorm. I woke up several nights in a row hearing heavy footsteps above me - even though the attic above me was only accessible by a key held by one student in the building. Until one night, I sat in my room, up late studying, my roommate out and about. And I heard the footsteps and then the indescribable feeling - and you doubters will call it an improbable feeling - that I was not alone. "Please go away," I whispered. And then it did - whether I was sending away my own feeling or a ghost.

The second dorm I lived in came with a forceful banging under the floor. Furnace? Radiator? Hot water heater? Likely. But one night, I stood brushing my teeth, trying to ignore the persistent banging. Until I not only heard it, I felt it. Directly under me. The floor feeling like something was going to come up through - so insistently that I jumped back out of the bathroom.

At the founder's house, I gave tours, starting with the second semester of my freshman year. The origin of the house is unknown, only traced back into the early 1800s when the founder's family acquired it. Over the years, I experienced all sorts of strange feelings, unexplained noises, closing doors and eerie presences. I admit I never saw anything manifest. But at times, it was so palpable - that feeling of not being alone. A shift in the energy or temperature or pressure or smells.

We played hide-and-seek from time to time in the winter months. I once hid in a closet - the closet that housed the founder's old trunk with its travel decal from a ship that sailed shortly after Titanic. The musty smell of the closet somehow became heavier with each passing moment. I was so overcome with fear that I started to cry.

Once while vacuuming the mother's room - the room in which she died - I could tell I wasn't alone. Not only that, but I could tell whatever was with me was disturbed, angered by my presence. I dropped the vacuum and ran. Another student I knew who worked in the summer once lay on the bed in that room for a nap due to a headache. She came down later to thank a fellow worker for checking on her - which her coworker had never done.

I heard the sound of the upstairs doors closing like dominos, only to find them wide open upon inspection. One weekend when working by myself, I heard the front door open, stepped into the hall to see who had arrived, to see the door closing again as though someone had left from inside the house. Jenny Ray and I once sat on the second floor landing, the only people in the house, and listened to the unmistakable sound of tinkling crystal and clinking silverware as though the maid was setting the dining room table.

I arrived at work one day to relieve my friend Laura who had been working alone. She launched into how she was washing dishes, felt she was being watched and turned to see...and I interjected, "The little boy in red." She had never heard the story and was astonished that I could guess such a thing. A woman with a "sensitive" little girl told us one day that her daughter talked to the little boy upstairs.

Other students heard 1930s radio...heard footsteps...saw the doors open and shut. I was always uneasy when I was alone in the house. And never, ever went certain places by myself like the servants staircase that began just outside the kitchen and wound in tight, narrow flights up to the attic. Another off limits space - the attic was eerie and musty and fairly begged to be considered for a horror movie set.

In the house on Grace, I've felt scared a few times. Thunderstorms in this apartment can make the back of my neck prickle with fear. But I don't have a distinct sense of anything like I did at the house in college. Nonetheless, this time of year, I try to be careful about how much TV I watch - limit my intake of horror flicks and scary movie moment countdowns and Most Haunted and Ghostly Travels. Otherwise, I'd just be so paralyzed with fear I couldn't hardly breathe. And I've already got a black cat crossing my path at every turn, so I best not chance getting spooked.

Sheer Perfection

Mountain Day was absolute perfection from beginning to end. It started with coffee in the morning with Mom & Dad and made-to-order weather. It was crisp and cool with enough of a chill in the air to bite at you a little. We drove the Rav up to pick up my brother & sister-in-law. She's quite pregnant, now that we're less than 100 days from the due date.

The afternoon at B.C. was an exemplary Mountain Day. Old friends, lots of hugs, catching up. A bucket of chicken, grape salad and cookies. It was so relaxing, reclining on the blanket under a big tree. We talked about the sun coming through the leaves and took pictures of everyone comparing his or her belly to Eva's. Dad may have won that one.
Afterwards, we drove up into the mountains to look at a piece of land Dad wanted to see. It was incredibly peaceful with the trees creating a full canopy over the road. And it was a thrilling little drive for me navigating the curves and hairpin turns after the flatness of Wilmywood.

We closed out the afternoon by visiting with my old work supervisor, who is 78 going on 79 and just as spry as she ever was. She's the person I think about from time to time when I need perspective on life. She always had the simplest, best advice. In fact, one day at lunch, after a professor had trashed one of my poems, she said, "Well, we'll just have to pray for him."

On the way back to Justin & Eva's house, I got to feel Sprout move! I've never had the opportunity to feel a baby move, but it felt like a little balloon was in there bumping against the ceiling. It was amazing! And the doctor's told them he's going to be a big boy!

I couldn't have ask for anything more. But like all good fairy tales, the day came to an end. And nothing made that clearer than the lonely, miserable drive home in the rain I had yesterday. Even Kudzu and I were at odds after I scolded him for attacking the headrest with his claws. All in all, though, it was about 16 or 17 hours in car, but worth every minute. Mark your calendars for next year.

Out of Context

I'm headed out of town tomorrow to go to Mountain Day, so I thought I'd leave you all with a little writing exercise before I go. Oh, and the last John Mayer post for at least a week. Cross my heart.

I read a recent interview with him - maybe from Entertainment Weekly - that included the following exchange.

Interviewer: I'd like to quote you out of context. You may begin.
John Mayer: All three at the same time. All equally as snug.

So, I'd like to quote you, kind readers, out of context. You may begin.