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Dad & I ran into Steve and Amy (Fletcher) Brown at El Tapatio. (We also saw Diana’s friend John, but that is less surprising, cause he works there.) Amy is preggers and she and Steve just closed on a house. “Yeah, it’s right down the street from the house we were renting,” Amy joked. Down the street? Dude, we moved next door.

“So, is Pickle still living in the apartment?” Steve asked.

“Nah, she moved back in with her parents. But she’s gonna be living in one side of the back duplex.”

“Wasn’t there someone else living with you?” Amy inquired.

“Oh, Liz! Nope, she just hung out with us a lot.”

“She’ll be living on the other side of Jaimie,” Dad added.

I totally forget that our situation sounds like a sitcom set-up until conversations like these take place.

* * * * *

All right. So, Kris and I are leaving Sunday to drive to Pensacola. We’ll be back on Wednesday; I’ll be back Thursday updating you on the ever-exciting endeavors of me and mine. Now, I know it will be tough withstanding my absence, but you’re just gonna have to deal. Look, I went ahead and updated the desktop and illustration of the month for you. Oh, just calm down, you won’t even miss me. Oh no, don’t cry. I’ll be back before you know it. Chin up, there. That’s better. Good. See you Thursday.

During the winter, my feet are always covered. My toes are always little ice digits, and so as not to freeze, I keep socks on most of the time. But I guess my feet get tired of being cooped up, cause as soon as spring arrives, I go into full-time sandal and/or flip-flop wearing.

About half the time, the first thing I do after turning on my computer at work is kick my shoes off under the desk. If I have to walk out into the newsroom for something, chances are, I’ll put my shoes on first. But if I’m just going to the printer 15 feet away, not so much. Upon one of the barefoot trips to the printer, the Sports Editor saw that I was shoeless. Now, when he passes me, he always checks to see if I have on shoes, and if I don’t, he teases me that it’s because I’m just a country girl.

(That’s really not as offensive as it could sound. I’m about the age of his granddaughter, so I’m guessing it’s the kind of thing he’d say to her. He rarely needs graphics from me. Most often his requests are for me to print pictures the aforementioned granddaughter has e-mailed him from her post in Iraq.)

Now, this has got to be the only person ever to have called me a “country girl.” I’ve lived in Alabama all my life, but I’m way more accustomed to comments like “why don’t you have an accent?” and “where are you from?”

But then I got to thinking. I grew up on a dirt road. You passed cows to get to my house. I have waited in traffic behind tractors. I drink sweet tea. I use phrases like “cooped up,” which if you think about it must be a reference to chickens in farmhouses.

Can it be true? Am I a country girl?!?

Jaimie hasn’t been able to update her site since April 15th cause of server issues, so she sent me a blog entry via e-mail. Now, that’s service.

Of course, her “web host” is her boyfriend. Aside from whining (”Jimmy, the forum is broken. Jimmy, Jaimie can’t update the blog. Jimmy, my computer is slow and stupid, can you fix it?”), I cannot complain. Cause (a) he hosts the site for free & pays for the domain and (b) hosts about a bazillion other sites for free, including the church’s and mine from college and who knows how many more. Did I mention the him not getting paid for it? So dude, I understand. I’m even being patient.

We yard-worked at Dreamplex 1.0 yesterday, and it looks so much better. Underbrush=creepy vibe. Not anymore. Most all the windows have been scraped so that Kris can re-glaze them and then Jaimie & her da can pressure wash the place. Kris called around lunchtime.

“So, do you want me to work on our bathroom, trying to get the shower fixed so that we don’t have to have duct tape in there? Or start glazing the windows on the back duplex?”

I chose window glazing, hands-down. Cause I’m totally used to the duct tape.

I enjoy making new friends. You find out shared interests. (I have two co-workers who recently discovered they’re both big A-Ha fans. Bully for them.) You can bond over shared experiences. (I was floored to find out Heather A. had the exact same childhood experience as me, waiting around at Alabama Art Supply while our parents stocked up on supplies for the school year. I love how that store smells.)

But new friends can’t substitute for people you share a history with. Jaimie says that Lori T. will e-mail her every once in awhile about some odd memory from elementary school, just to ask “did that really happen?” And sitting around with friends a couple weeks ago, somebody mentioned bison and I said how that word always conjures up a scene from something they showed us in grade school. I can’t remember anything about what the movie/propaganda/etc. was except that these kids were out shooting bison and one of the kids ended up shot. It’s this weird image, burned in my brain for always. But Les was there and she totally remembered that film and said it stayed with her, too.

Years and years ago, my group of then-friends (at least 4 of them the same as my now-friends) got together every week to cook dinner, make dessert and coffee and then play UNO. It’s every cardplayer for himself until somebody says “uno” and then we play as a team against the poor soul with one card. “Can anybody reverse it? I’ve got a draw-4 card if someone can just reverse it!”

We’ve played so much over the years that we have alternate ways to play. There’s Australian Rules, where a blue card and a yellow card can equal a green card or a 4 and a 3 can make a 7 and you can build Draw-2s on each other, etc. The rule is, as long as you can talk the rest of the cardplayers into it, it’s okay. And there’s Zen UNO, a.k.a. ZUNO, where you never pick up the cards dealt to you and have to try to play each hand without looking at them.

At the retreat over the weekend, when all the meetings were over and the dinner was eaten and nobody wanted to go square-dancing, I said “Well, I’ve got my deck of Hello Kitty UNO in the car…” And we laughed and raged and talked in Puerto Rican accents (”De collor iz J-Lo.”) and introduced a new friend to our zany UNO ways.

But only in a group of old friends will someone lay down a draw-4 and say the color is “Blu-ew-ew…” only to have other card players react by singing “eye-shadowed girls in the bath-roo-oo-oom, we’re gonna meet out on the dirt at a quarter till two-oo-oo…”

Man, do I still love that album.

About a month ago, Chris Wood borrowed my digital camera cause he wanted to take a picture at school of the steamer there since the brand is Cleveland. He brought the camera back to me last week while I was at work, so I took these shots of my office*:


Mi oficina es su oficina.

From these pics, I see there are:
7 photos of me and Kris
6 home-burned music cds
5 kid’s meal toys
4 Hello Kitty items
3 books on Celtic designs
2 Jolly Rancher lip glosses
1 green highlighter

* Office in the general sense, since I share a room with the network servers and about 2 dozen bound files of old newspapers.

* * * * *

The Created had a retreat in Mentone over the weekend. I think they got all accomplished that they meant to, and they planned for another meeting on May 1. But I missed Bethany’s opening. Kris was having a fabulous time at the retreat and didn’t want to leave, and I didn’t really want to leave without him, so I stayed. I hate decisions where you know no matter what you decide that you can’t be positive that it was the right choice, or decisions where you know you’ll be miserable with either outcome, just for different reasons.

Welcome to adulthood, right?