6 july 2000		i need a hug i know i have a good life. i still need hugs.
One year ago: I became an aunt! She's one year old. I can't believe it. Two years ago: How come no one asks me for naked pix? Three years ago: As usual, I am annoyed by stupid people. Today's news question: Which Williams sister is going to the Women's Final at Wimbledon? (Don't send me your answers. This is just a little way to expand your horizons. Honest.)		It's now Thursday, and I acknowledge that I will never get around to writing Monday's entry, which is probably a good thing because it was an entry about the craziness we returned to when we got back from Cincinnati. And the way I'm feeling now I should not dwell on craziness. I'll try to dash through this: We came home Sunday night to a house where things were seriously strange. Cutting to the car chase: a neighbor's tree had fallen into our yard. It bent over the metal pole that surrounded the power coming into our house. The wires in one of the lines sparked, ate through the insulation, burned through the metal pole, and damn near burnt our house down. We got an electrician out, who charged us an ungodly sum to fix the problem, including ripping stucco out of our house to replace the metal pole. We have to get a tree guy to remove the tree and a stucco guy to fix the side of our house. And we can't get a hold of the guy who owns the house where the tree was. Of course. Last week somebody took our garbage can. This is the city-approved brown can in which you place garbage for collection. I think the house across the street -- which now boasts two brown cans -- took it, but I can't be sure. So I had to go through a seriously upgefucked voicemail system to get to someone who took my order for a new can and told me to just put my garbage out on the street for pickup this week. The new can would be delivered today. It was not delivered. I do not want to continue putting bags of garbage on the street. That way a big old mess lies. I am very annoyed that I have to call the city again to find out where my new can is. Some retrofitting contractor called me on the phone last week and said he was coming out to look at our foundation for cracks. I'd totally forgotten about it when he showed up on Monday (the same day the electrician was ripping out chunks of our house). Of course, he found cracks and repairs would cost between $1500 and $4000. My insurance agent thinks it's a scam and perhaps I should get a second opinion. I have a wart on my knee that I need to get removed. I used some over the counter stuff on it, and all I did was burn off some of the outside layers. I've been picking at it ever since. Now it's started bleeding. You'd think this would be incentive to call a dermatologist right away, but I keep putting it off. Oh yes, I also have a mole on my nose that showed up while I was pregnant. Haven't gotten rid of it either. There's a light on the dash of my card that flashes "Low Range" every time I start the car. It annoys the hell out of me. Mentioning it here has induced me to put it on my To Do sticky. We have boxes of books stacked in our guest room that I have to go through in order to determine what I want to throw away, what I want to keep, and what I'm not sure about (that is, what Darin should look at). I keep going in and going through a box or two, and there are always twenty more to go through. I feel like it's the Augean Stables. I haven't updated Sophia's website in days. I got mail this morning asking me when I was putting new pictures up. I haven't responded to most of my e-mail in weeks. I cry when I look at my In Box. That's an exaggeration, but not by much. I haven't updated Going and Going in weeks. I have about 20 people in the queue. I don't know what I'm waiting for: 50, so it'll be really hard to update? I haven't written my essay for the Diary History project. And I've only had several weeks to do it. It's remained on my desktop half-written for over a month now. I'm not getting much of anything else done either. Every day I make a list of the things I have to get done, and it's just not happening. On the upside, everybody in writing class last night said they liked my first page. I hope this doesn't sound too immodest, but I know people will like things I write. On the downside, it's hard as hell to get me to finish them. Page 1 is easy. It's finishing the damn book that separates the winners from the losers. When I called home at 10:09pm, Sophia was not yet asleep. She wouldn't take milk from the bottle and she was crying non-stop. By the time I got home, at 10:40, Sophia was asleep due to the magic of the auto-swing. It was the only way Darin could get her to calm down. Clearly, we need to start doing something about getting her to go to sleep, particularly if Mommy isn't going to be there. Helpfully, many people volunteer that I should let her cry it out. I am not a fan of this method. I don't like hearing my baby cry. And we need to do something about getting her to take milk from a bottle! I'd heard about this refusal of some babies to drink from a bottle if they haven't been taught to do so from about 5 or 6 weeks. Darin and I haven't used a bottle since about week 3. I sure hope she can learn, because I don't want her to have to live in that swing when Mommy isn't around. For your reading pleasure: a good essay on why you should write every day, by Walter Mosely. And there is a complete list of the other entries in the Writers on Writing series. I'm currently reading -- well, I'm currently in possession of several mysteries from the library (one of which turns out to basically be an idea I had for a screenplay...oh well, so much for that), but I'm not getting any of them read. I've started reading How To Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ, which analyzes the history of putting down writing by women as inferior, as being by someone else, as being done by the woman's masculine half. In the Forum: Anybody else have a strange question they want to know the answer to?
		Copyright 2000 Diane Patterson Send comments and questions to diane@nobody-knows-anything.com