So hi!

For the past week my connection at home has been AWOL (how lucky is the person whose internet I'm pirating that s/he gets these lengthy vacations in the course of a year?), and so I haven't been able to stay in touch as much as I'd like; although the upside of that is that I have so much more time on my hands. During the course of the week, besides catching up on the usual ho-hum household stuff, I managed to:

• Give out six bags of Halloween candy (which the volume of trick-or-treaters in my neighborhood delights me, being neither too sparse nor too circus-like) while sitting on my porch reading Susannah Clarke's new book (which in terms of writers-I'd-like-to-be-able-to-duplicate also delights me).



• Disentangle my three-foot fake spider-web (festooned with giant rubber spiders) from many more feet of real spider-web to take it from my front window; my house, sitting as it does on the edge of a big wooded area, is heavily spidered, and we have all learned to coexist peacefully, except that I still have fear and loathing in my heart for the big hairy ones and also that one that looks more like a sea urchin than a spider. And the peaceful coexistence sometimes gets to be too much for the cats.



• Have lunch in, and subsequently tour, a big half-finished contruction site on a local college campus which we are building. Which you may not be impressed by this, but I assure you that it was the coolest thing ever, and it has reawakened a long-dormant and perfectly ridiculous desire to train as a professional carpenter. Building things! Is so marvelous and rewarding! And cold! But I regret not my cold fingers; I regret only that I had not a hard-hat to wear.



• Make four dog pillows, which I have been meaning to do for months.



• Do all my laundry. Yes, all of it. (Hence the reason why it's been elevated from the status of the usual ho-hum household stuff.) Even the hand-wash stuff which will sit in my hamper for months at a time. Even my bed-linens. At the moment, the only clothes in my house which aren't freshly laundered and put away are the ones on my back, one pair of pajamas, and last night's underwear. I am so proud of myself, you can hardly imagine.

It's been a good week, except that I wish I could say that I'll be in the Bay Area in a couple of weeks, or possibly that the Bay Area were coming to me. And also, I'll like my life much better once I have a wireless signal smiling up at me from my system tray.

How are you?