1. Don’t you love the library? Yesterday when I went to my branch, these were on hold for me:
Such a good use of tax dollars.
2. Blog-challened: After two (three?) years, I finally managed to install a Bloglines button (to the right). If you've been dying, frothing at the mouth and tearing your hair out over the lack of subscription access to Nake-id Knits, now it's easy.
3. Random acts of stupidity: Did y’all know about the Rwanda Knits Auction last week? Cool celebrity samples on sale for a great cause? (Rwanda Knits provides U.S.-made knitting machines and training to Rwandan and refugee women so they can increase their standard of living. It’s been enormously successful. Check it out.) Welllllll, I had no real intention of buying, but bid on an item or two just to bump up the numbers. So now I’m the proud owner of this…
It’s not that I don’t like the afghan, it’s totally cool. Just wasn’t looking to spend that much money. Some things are meant to be. And it’s hard to imagine a better cause.
4. Speaking of meant to be: Seventeen years ago this evening, I put on a pair of black pencil pants, my Buddy Holly glasses and drove my ‘76 baby-shit yellow Toyota to watering hole called Fish Dance. A bunch of us were meeting there for happy hour before gallery hopping. It was a dreary evening, spitting rain, but it was spring and a Friday night and I felt frisky and it was time to shake off the winter.
The ususual suspects were there, my old roommate and her weird boyfriend, this guy Tom, who was just as cute-as-a-button but never seemed to date so was he straight or gay or scared or stunted? Another mutual friend, who had such high sharp cheek bones she could gut trout with them; she was on hand, looking fabulous and smoking.
This guy approached the table and he seemed to know everybody, but I had never met him. He was tall and lanky and had this amazing mane of dark, curly hair—yes, styled ala mullet, this was back in the day. He looked very hip and I pegged him as a filmmaker and figured he wouldn’t give me the time of day. He seemed too cool and fidgity. But the stool next to me was free and he sat down and we talked. He seemed kinda funny. And he wasn’t a filmmaker, he programmed computers. So then I decided, he must be boring. But he had this great profile.
He drove me to the gallery—in his grey Camry, which I loved. I didn’t trust guys in sports cars or trucks with silouettes of naked women adorning the mud flaps. The Camry was a good sign. At the gallery, we talked more. And I remember thinking, “This guy has a soul.”
Well, five houses, four cats and many miles later, the mullet is gone and so is much of the hair and I’m a “silver fox,” but there’s still the topography of that profile. And that soul.