My mom called. She and my step-Doug are moving to Laramie, WY. In eleven days. How cool is that? I could drive there for Thanksgiving!

I’ve done nothing useful this weekend.

Friday I went to lunch at the ashram with the girls (C & NLW) and they were wonderful as ever and I’m absurdly grateful to have girlfriends to go to lunch with. After, NLW gave me a cape she was getting rid of and I’m excited to wear it next Fall. I hit the grocery store on the way out of town and made it home around four.

Saturday, yesterday, I slept in. When I got up, I worked on a website a bit. When I went downstairs, Bread was asleep on the couch, sleeping the way he always sleeps: with total abandon. He sleeps like a little kid, sprawled, with a fine sheen of sweat on his face. Very little wakes him up. I don’t know how he can sleep with the TV on, but he does it every day of his life. He’s cuter asleep than he ever is awake because he’s such a man when he’s awake, so macho and crass. *giggle*

We went to town around three-thirty for malts from the Dairy Bar, and cigarettes, and so he could clean his truck. There are scratches beneath both windows from dogs’ nails as they used the windows for entry – he said it happened a couple of weeks ago at 1-Stop. It’s a bummer; the paint was so nice before. There are a few other scratches on it too, because it’s a work truck, but the dog scratches look like shit when the truck’s washed and clean. He’s really pissed off about it. I mean, you’d have to see it: the door panels both have about a hundred deep vertical scratches from dogs’ back legs as they scrabbled up into the cab.

After cleaning his truck, we drove home. Bread made noises about pulling the dump truck up to the house and cleaning out the junk in the future kitchen/Truck’s old room, but then said, “or I might just do absolutely nothing.”

He pulled a muscle in his lower abdomen earlier this week. It’s hurting him, so he should probably take it easy anyway. He was a little worried about it because it’s a sharp pain he says, but I looked up Gray’s Anatomy over at Yahoo! and where he’s got pain there’s basically nothing but muscle and some small intestine. I think he’s got a mild groin injury from the work he does – there really isn’t much else there to hurt but the muscles that hold the pelvis together. So I think he should lie around in front of the glass teat and rest.

The weather is fucking gorgeous. My dad took the cold to Tahoe with him, thank God. I’m always amazed at how tropical Iowa can feel – humid, lush, loud with birds and insects, and how disturbingly fecund it is. One week the trees are bare; you go to work a few times and one evening coming up the driveway you realize all the trees are fully in leaf again and you can’t see the rooster shed from the driveway any more. Nature in this part of the country is on steroids. I love it for its vitality and inevitability, but it’s a little spooky. And it’s a pain in the ass to try to keep anything weeded, since weeds grow so fast here you can actually see it.

When I woke up this morning, it was to a thousand birds chatting in the woods outside. And a stupid Junebug, walking down my arm. I grabbed it and threw it across the room. It bounced. Over the years, Bread’s yanked the screens out of most of the windows in the house for some reason or another and he sucks at putting things back. I ask him to put the screens back in, he says he will. He doesn’t. It’s just how he is. I do take unladylike joy in saying, when he complains that there are bugs buzzing around the living room, that it’s his own damn fault for never putting any of the screens back. He ignores me, because that’s how he is, and swears up a blue streak about the fucking bugs.

Since this is window-open weather, they are, and if there’s a light on the dumb Junebugs come in and bash themselves against things. Last night one spent a few minutes walking around on my keyboard and was inevitably on the letter I wanted at any given moment. I finally flicked it off my desk, but of course it buzzed back to crash itself into my monitor over and over. I used to be really freaked out by them, Junebugs that is, but I’ve lived in Iowa long enough to know that their hard shells and sticky feet are just annoying, not truly gross.

Ticks are gross. I hate ticks. I’d never seen a tick in my LIFE until I moved out here. The Northwest is virtually bug-free, compared to the insanity that is the Midwest. But I guess ticks are nearly balanced out by fireflies, another bug I’d never seen ’til I moved here. I mean, fireflies are gorgeous.

Generally, I like bugs. I rarely kill them. I don’t kill spiders because they eat other bugs (and it’s supposed to be bad luck to kill spiders in your home). Junebugs are too stupid and earnest to be angry with. Box elder bugs have such a short season and are so ubiquitious that it’s a waste of time to be pissed off at them either, because there’s literally nothing you can do about them – they will be everywhere and that’s all there is to it. Ants are too small to care about. And I’ve always rather liked roaches, because once I caught one in my dorm room and told it that it and its family had to move out or I’d wage chemical war upon them (and I visualized the location of a kitchen and a nearby dumpster they could relocate to), and I never had a roach problem again. I think they might be smarter than most people think.

I kill ticks, fleas, and houseflies. I HATE HOUSEFLIES. Lord of the Flies? Oh yes, the fly IS the symbol of evil. They are stupid, horrible, annoying little fucks. God, how I hate houseflies. Bzzz.

I listened to the answering machine this morning. I do it about once a month, if at all. We don’t use the land line for anything but dial-up and faxes, and we keep an answering machine on the line so it only rings four times instead of ten when telemarketers call. My mom left a message that she’s moving to Wyoming. As soon as my cell finishes recharging I’m gonna call her up. Plus it’s Mother’s Day and I haven’t spoken to her in over a year. We’re not phone people.

Now I’m going to finish an MT installation for a client, and then maybe take a blanket and go lie in the yard while it’s still nice out… in no time it will be too hot and too sticky to be outside for fun.

Now you’re sorry you didn’t rent my dad! Last night Brett wasn’t around when I got home, and my pop wanted to “go do something” since it was his last night here. He and I stopped at the Dew Drop for a couple of cocktails, then he took me out for Indian food. (Although, lemmie tell ya: cocktails and Indian food do not a happy G.I. tract make the next morning!)

After leaving India Cafe, I picked up some drive-thru for Mr. Brett and we returned to the farm a little after nine. I had a great time.

I’d promised dear ol’ dad a pair of felted wool slippers, back when he was going to be here longer, and they weren’t done. So I sat myself in the recliner and knit like a mad woman until ten of eleven. Ta-dah! They’re done! I put the slippers and felting instructions into a plastic grocery bag, debated taking them up to dad’s RV right then, but went to bed instead.

Mr. Brett had had a few beers at Libertyville after work and then gone to a friend’s house that evening, so he was pretty much passed out drunk on the couch by the time I went up to bed.

Dad took off this morning for Tahoe, but I didn’t give him his slippers. I’ll have to mail them when I forward the rest of his mail next week. But when he gets them, they’ll be so superior! (I love felted wool slippers; I wear mine all the time. But I think I like the heathered charcoal I used for his better. I might need a new pair.)