i am of the generation that thought we could have wild unprotected sex just like our predecessors, only to be slapped with the reality of aids in our burgeoning adulthoods.

excuse me whilst i bitch obliquely:

i just hate it. hate it. when i am brought in on a project to do something specific and i then do that thing, and do it well and frequently and then someone, who has not been doing that thing for quite some time and is in fact the reason i was brought on in the first place, says to me, "i really wish you hadn't done that" when i do the thing i am supposed to be doing.

project management by obfuscation is so not a good thing and i refuse to get sucked into the little games going on behind the scenes of this particular project.

that said, i love my company and most of these covert machinations are occurring in the ranks of the other companies working with us.

i love geraniums.

they were marked down to 75 cents at eagle, so i bought ten of them, as well as some marigolds for accent. i still have dirt embedded under my fingernails from all the potting, but my back porch is so colorful it makes your eyes hurt. too bad these pictures don't show it in all its glory.

so my father is coming for a visit on july 6th which means i spent this weekend starting to panic about cleaning the house. i need a maid.

woohoo! i was carded tonight. for cigarettes. when the cashier asked me for my birthday, i thought he must really be asking about sophie, wanting to know how old she was. so i asked, incredulously, "my birthday?" when he nodded yes, i rattled off, "september 28 1962." he shook his head, then turned to sophie and said, "your mommy doesn't look that old."

sadly, i couldn't tell jim the story as i wasn't supposed to be buying cigarettes since we are supposed to be quitting. sucks. i only smoke 1 or 2 a day, right before i go to bed. i love those cigs. jim, on the other hand, smokes a pack or more a day. it's not fair to him if i keep smoking when he is trying to quit so i thought i'd best quit too, remove the temptation of having tobacco in the house. then i thought, nah, just have the smoke when he is asleep, have it outside, no harm no foul.

father's day afternoon, i had to make an emergency grocery run to get garlic bread and ice. rather boring and the errand was completely mindless and mundane until i was most of the way home. just before i drove past the state park, i saw a fluttering in the middle of the road.

it was a bird, madly flapping its wings, but unable to get more than a few inches off the ground. it was turning in crazy frantic circles, like a helicopter in freefall. i don't know if it had been clipped by a passing car and was injured just enough to disable flight but not enough to enable death, or if something else was wrong, but it creeped me out. i felt helpless and wrong watching it as i drove by. i kept thinking to myself, "if i were a more compassionate person, i would stop. i would gently wrap the bird in a towel or a sweater or whatever is hiding in the backseat that would wrap itself around a bird, and i would take it to the vet. or i would be cruelly compassionate and wring its little neck. i should stop. i should help it. i should be a better person."

sometimes i am so indecisive as to be completely scary. and stupid. i am dying of thirst and after opening the cabinet and staring at the glasses for five minutes, unable to decide out of which one i want to drink, i walked out of the kitchen, thirst unquenched.

i think the cat has alzheimer's.

i feed her, put the food right in front of her and she starts to eat. then she hears something, or has an itch, or just plain spaces out in her little furry brain and wanders away from the food dish. doesn't matter how far she wanders, can be as little as a foot or as much as a house length; the point is she is distracted from the still relatively full food bowl. so she whines and she bitches and she meows at the top of her little tiny lungs. "i'm staaaaaaaaaaaaarving! feeeeeeeeeeeeeeed me! i haven't eaten in aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaages!" so i find the beast and pick her up and put her in front of the food again and she looks at it and looks at me and looks at it and looks at me and sniffs at it and looks at me and then starts with the whining again. "this is ooooooold fooooood! it's been here for eeeeeeeeeeeever! i can't eat old foooooooooood!"

it's hard to explain what exactly a program manager does. i write spec, i go to more meetings than i can count, i schmooze clients. but this week, i can sum up the job quite succinctly: keep the geeks happy.

we are in the final stages of a high profile, high prestige job. we have a hard deadline of jun23. we have bugs.

i've been running up and down halls asking for status updates and offering to make coffee runs. i handwalk menus from office to office and then pick up three boxes worth of thai food. i make offers of dancing girls and cake. i tell them they are wonderful fabulous miracle workers.

the doctor who told me, at age sixteen, that having a baby would lessen the painful cramping of my subsequent periods was apparently, just like the exterminator, a big. fat. liar.

the carpenter ants are back.

when we returned from germany last month, there was a giant pile of sawdust on sophie's windowsill. i stood staring at it, like an idiot, trying to figure out what the hell it was when i heard that horrible screetch screetch scratch scratch bugs in the wall noise that completely freaks me out every time i hear it. then i saw the big black ant stick his head out of a hole above the curtain rod, spit out the bit of wood out of his mouth, and then disappear.

luckily it is in the structure, so the condo association has to deal with it and deal they did promptly. the exterminator squirted stuff in the hole then sealed it up and assured us no more buggies.

we watched run lola run yesterday afternoon, just in time to return the video to the library.

i loved it. the test for greatness in a foreign language film, for me, is when you are no longer aware you are reading subtitles and it almost seems as though the characters are speaking english. that happened rather quickly into the film. it's all about running and alternative realities and the butterfly effect and it made me really tired just watching that poor girl run through the streets of berlin. it was cool, though, to be able to point at places and yelp, "i've been there, i've been there."

i dyed my hair on saturday. my mother and i bought a box of color in germany, meaning to wash that grey right out of my hair, but we never got around to it. probably a good thing, as my oma's bathtub is old porous porcelain and i don't think it would have been improved with a black-red rinse.

schwartzkopf rouge-noir.

[-7] or maybe [-8] i need a digital scale so i don't have to peer, blearyeyed, at that little needle and dial in the early morning.

i love how easy it is to lose weight at the beginning of a diet. it's like nature's way of saying go team! go! get you all excited about how the diet is working and keep you on track for the first few weeks. without that rush at the beginning i don't think i could stay dedicated to the plan for more than a few days.

[-5] yes, i weighed this morning, in spite of myself.

i finally watched the thin red line last night. i enjoyed it much more than saving private ryan, which is the film it was most compared to last year. i am tired of steven spielberg slapping me over the head with his version of morality and what i should be feeling about whatever it is he is filming. i much prefer to see a story and make my own conclusions, let my brain meander over different possible reactions, puzzle over the ambiguities that are inherent in life.

Are you righteous? Kind? Does your confidence lie in this? Are you loved by all? Know that I was, too. Do you imagine your suffering will be any less because you loved goodness and truth?

i forgot that i actually like cottage cheese. diet lunch is not nearly as onerous as i feared it might be.

prepare ye for a healthier me.

jim and i started a diet last night, and as a reward for doing so, had copper river salmon for dinner. oh. my. god. the fish is damned expensive but worth every penny. yum. yum. yum.

i, of course, forgot to weigh myself this morning so i have no idea if day one was a success or not. maybe i will just weigh once a week, thereby avoiding that whole obsessive thing that led to bulimia in my misspent youth.

another imminent death dream:

this time on a plane and it was flying lower and lower but we weren't supposed to be landing. i knew we were going to crash, was completely calm about the matter, and was fully prepared to die. jim and sophie were in the seats next to me so at least i was able to hold them, unlike the exploding mt rainier dream. at the last second, the plane levelled out and gained some altitude.

then i woke up.