It's axiomatic: no decent auto repair shops are open on Saturdays.

I sent Jeff off to Tuscaloosa early this morning in my car. I got an extra hour or two of sleep, got up, tended to a few things, and talked with Geof. The end result was that he offered to drive out to "the sticks" to bring me takeout Chinese.

Softly, quietly: 'Mrow?' So quiet that I can barely hear it.

I look up. I talk to Edmund a lot, mostly because he acts interested when I do, and often chirrups back at me. Our 'conversations' are short, and usually have to do with whatever action I'm doing at the time.

The night before a visitor arrives is always a night of quiet, panicked, introspection. Especially when it's a visitor I've not seen in a while, and if it's someone whose opinion I trust.

Tomorrow, Colter arrives for a short visit. He's headed out east to attend a concert and putting in a side trip to Alabama as a bonus.

Mc and Mc
at Hillcrest, Little Rock, Arkansas, United States by domesticat.
(A picture of us from our last meeting if you're curious—come to think of it, I'm wearing that sweater right now. Full photoset is here.)

His is a friendship filled with memories of every color and shape. Colter, who let me sleep in his dorm room heaven knows how many times during my freshman year while I was distraught over another, floundering, friendship.

Some days, it's just difficult to make up your mind. Go to the Christmas bazaar with a friend, or attend a screening of Hedwig and the Angry Inch?

Me: Hrm…..I'm feeling damned indecisive today. *laugh* I'm sitting here knowing I should make up my mind…but find myself thinking….'mmm, nap, sunshine.'Kat: *laughing* Okay, then I'll make up your mind for you. Amy, you're going to [the for-charity Christmas bazaar]. You will leave the house at 1pm and head over here and we'll go into town together.

Amy: From my spouse: "I think you have your answer, Amy." OK.

Even I, dear readers, can occasionally take a hint. Therefore I showed up, Amy-style.

The drive to write can be as ephemeral as a smile—fleeting, brilliant, and then—gone. I've put off writing for the past 24 hours in the hope that the need to push words together into a coherent whole would come to me.

Perhaps it's because I've fired off a daunting number of emails in the past few days. Perhaps because I've been a bit tired, spending a bit more time reading, and putting my creative energies into a couple of websites. Or maybe it's just that trying to come up with moves for playing Photoshop Tennis against Noah zap my brain.

I'm now about to do something that I've never done before—radically change an entry after it's been posted.

This entry originally appeared on 11/17/2001; today is 11/21/2001. Originally, I ranted about how the Moving Fairy seemed to have discovered my January 2000 issue of Fine Cooking and taken it for her own. The problem: that magazine contained the Boston cream candy recipe I loved dearly.

I tore my house apart looking for that magazine. I believe I must have loaned it to someone and forgotten to ask for it back.

Phone call: "We'd like to come over and stay. We'll get up at three and go outside to watch the meteors. Since you live so far out of town, yours is really the best place to be to watch these go by."

I wasn't hopeful. In my entire life I'd seen two meteors—at least, I thought they were meteors—but they were brief, inconsequential moments. Nothing to write home about.

But I told everyone to come over anyway. I stayed up late, talking to a friend, and then got up at the 3:30 ring of the alarm to get up, dress once again, and go outside. Heather, Jess, and Gareth joined Jeff and I a moment or two later. Tim and Kat drove over and were here shortly thereafter.My lack of excitement about the meteor shower went away from the moment I opened the back door. I saw my first meteor before I even got the door entirely open. Suddenly I felt excited, exhilarated—I realized this was going to be a bit more memorable than I'd been giving it credit for.

"…Now it all started two Thanksgivings ago, was on—two years ago on Thanksgiving, when my friend and I went up to visit Alice at the restaurant, but Alice doesn't live in the restaurant, she lives in the church nearby the restaurant, in the bell-tower, with her husband Ray and Fasha the dog. And livin' in the bell tower like that, they got a lot of room downstairs where the pews used to be in. Havin' all that room, seein' as how they took out all the pews, they decided that they didn't have to take out their garbage for a long time…"

Over the years, I've asked myself many, many times why I do this. Why I feel this need. Why, at random times, it galvanizes me into packing a bag, calling up a few friends, and bartering cooking experience for crashspace.

Other people call it "wanderlust." That's probably as accurate a term as I'm ever going to find.It's best described as a quiet ache—of looking at the same four walls and knowing that you've looked at them before. Knowing that you've explored them from top to bottom, inside to out, and that there's not much left to discover.

Q: How to know you've probably done too much baking in one day?

A: When you reach out for something with your left hand and are horrified to realize that you're using all four of your fingers together, as one, to oppose your thumb. Just like you would, if your left hand was in an oven mitt.Yes, indeed, the holiday baking is done at last. The final tally of destruction: two batches each of fudge, Boston cream candy, gingerbread, chocolate chip cookies, peanut brittle, and one batch of blondies.