in which the server is down, printer jammed, and i cannot work.

hey there, how are you? i've been scarce, i know. sorry. i'll try and be better about it.

bookclub is meeting next month - the new, revised copy of A Moveable Feast is our fare. should be an interesting conversation. meeting at the new house (!) at a date still tbd, but i'm thinking third week in august tentatively... any requests?

speaking of, the new house is wonderful. leaving everyday to come to work for eight hours is seeming like a strange punishment right now. i have boxes to unpack! books to alphabetize! how dare you make me leave!? please, please come and visit. i have been bad with the invitations and my phone keeps dying because i can't find my charger (packed in some obscure box). give me a call or text me, and know that you're very welcome as long as one of us is home.

my sister's wedding is this weekend - get ready for copious amounts of photos.

in three weekends (mid-august) we're going down to st. louis for a table and piano... want to house-sit/watch kittens?

what is new with you? let's sit in my back porch and discuss over cold drinks.

final saturday

it just now dawned in me that this is the last lazy saturday afternoon i will spend in front of the boxfan reading in my fourth floor apartment. the last i'll spend in any apartment. it is the last time i have to think about what my landlord will think of this or that paint color. the last time i'll utter the words security deposit or lug my laundry down six flights of stairs. the last time that i need to worry about the music i'm playing late on a tuesday night and whether the neighbor can hear it through my walls. the last time the super will come and replace a light bulb for me.

while i'm fully ready for this next move, i'll miss it. just a little.

(okay, now that i've written that, i'm giggling about it. miss my tiny, cramped kitchen? probably not.)

less than a week. come help us unpack and have a cocktail in the backyard soon.

catch-all

+joe's friend paul came in on tuesday and i've quite enjoyed getting to know him.

+ dinner at heidi's induced the most delicious food coma i've had in ages - the anise lambshank is to drool for.

+ thursday's bookclub for Ada or Ardor : A Family Chronicle was the finest yet, amazing conversation, food and company. we'll be reading A Moveable Feast [Hemingway] next - new edition out on the 20th.

+ square lake and my mother provide entertaining conversation.

+ got cryphy and may have also gotten my old job back at solera?

today, we're headed to sea salt eatery for some tacos and later in the day, we've actually been invited to barbecue three blocks from our apartment - other people live around here? we close on the house in less than two weeks and i'm starting to think of little else; i cannot wait for this small house to enter my life.

edward is ready to move, please.

starry, starry night

who told kimberly baker how much i liked constellations?

ADA or Ardor: A Family Chronicle [excerpt]

Children of her type contrive the purest philosophies. Ada had worked out her own little system. Hardly a week had elapsed since Van's arrival when he was found worthy of being initiated in her web of wisdom. An individual's life consisted of certain classified things: "real things" which were unfrequent and priceless, simply "things" which formed the routine stuff of life; and "ghost things," also called "fogs," such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three of more things occurring at the same time formed a "tower" or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a "bridge." "Real towers" and "real bridges" were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though. In some circumstances, in a certain light, a neutral "thing" might look or even actually become "real" or else, conversely, it might coagulate into a fetid "fog." When the joy and the joyless happened to be intermixed, simultaneously or along the ramp of duration, one was confronted with "ruined towers" and "broken bridges."

The pictorial and architectural details of her metaphysics made her nights easier than Van's, and that morning - as on most mornings - he had the sensation of returning from a much more remote and grim country than she and her sunlight had come from.

Her plump, stickily glistening lips smiled.

our house...

after much looking (looking at small houses, looking at crazy, giant houses, looking at almost justright houses), we've found the house. our house. and now, i'm in such a place as i can't sleep - moving this or that in my head, repainting that room, planning our first meal there.

you guys, it's perfect. it has a big, beautiful kitchen with a giant gas stove and this counterspace that makes my heart pitter-patter. the kitchen leads directly out onto a big porch for dining and a sunny backyard for a garden. also? a rec room! it's downstairs, with a bar. we're going to get a ping pong table! and, and, and... movies projected on the garage in the back and a craft room upstairs and laundry in the basement instead of that sketchy laundromat over by butter.

we're moving mid-july. then, getting a puppy. you're already invited. it's up on garfield near 29th and johnson in NE.