There is a scene near the end of Living Out Loud where it becomes clear that Judith (played wonderfully by Holly Hunter) has finally, at last, forgiven herself. It's a late-night, dreamlike dénouement for a woman whose life hasn't even remotely turned out the way she might have wanted…but who has finally decided that she's going to take that life and make it her own.

A friend of mine confessed to me recently that she didn't know what to say to me, because she's never lost a close friend or relative to death. I didn't tell her the real answer, because if you've never experienced it firsthand, you'll undoubtedly think the person telling you the answer is trying to deliberately mislead you for some strange reasons of their own.

I've been promising these photos for quite some time, but a post such as this had to wait until I'd gotten both rolls of film developed. After Dad was diagnosed with cancer, I spent a week in Arkansas, staying with Mom and Dad. I made a point to catch up with some old friends while I was there—all of them old friends who see me rarely, now that I live four hundred miles away.

(A number which Eleanor always says with a glare.)

Sean's birthday; cat photos

Shortly before I left, we celebrated Sean's birthday at a local restaurant. All of the locals, minus Geof cleared their schedules to show up:

Sean's birthday party, 2002
by domesticat.

Back in 2000, when the domesticat.net corporation was created, I signed a contract with the corporation to start producing almost-daily content for this site. I was assured in writing that I would have creative control over every aspect of this site.

"Amy," they said, "look. We have to have access to your site, in case anything goes wrong and you're not available. But if you'll check section 15(c) of the contract, you'll see that we plan on remaining behind-the-scenes at all times."

Well, well, isn't that tidy? Like all artists of the highest caliber, my artistic output can be purchased. It is with greatest pleasure I announce that, due to higher-than-expected returns, the 2002 Pledge Week is now officially over, and all—both on the artistic side and on Corporate—will be going home happy.

Unless you're a pantyhose-toting piranha, that is.

Afterwards, I said to Jeff: "I should call Andrew, you know. He and Joy both will be tickled to hear this."

A few minutes later: phone, earpiece, and frightening number of night and weekend minutes firmly in hand, I used my cell phone to call Andrew and Joy's house. I reached Andrew, and could immediately hear noise in the background. "Hey, Amy! We're playing Siedler, so I can't talk for very long…""Well, I won't keep you. But I have some news for you that I think you'll like."

"Oh dear. What's that?"

"I started watching season 1 of Buffy tonight."

—at which point he yells "Woo-hoo!"—and puts the phone down. Slightly muffled, I hear him say, "Guess what? Amy's started watching Buffy!" Not so muffled was the cheer that erupted at the end of the sentence.

Someone got brave today and asked the question that I think has been on the minds of most of my friends lately: "How are you, Amy? Not how you say you are, but how you really are."

Asking such a question to someone who has recently lost a family member is an inherently risky action. There's no way of determining in advance which person you're talking to: the friend who is bravely wandering through her days, or the friend who has decided that this whole bravery and wandering thing is for the birds (and who is looking for an excuse to cry).If you reach the former, you'll get a cautiously-optimistic answer: "I'm fine."
If you reach the latter, you'll get a cautious answer: "I'm fine."

The difference is in the tone of voice.

Did you ever have a family member whose antics were guaranteed to liven up any holiday gathering? Someone whose particularly-skewed ideas of fun and amusement were the subject of dinner-table conversations for years to come?

I wouldn't be posting if I didn't have one. Truthfully, I had several, but the one that comes to mind is Clint.

In my family, "mudding" is a verb. As in, "Clint's gone mudding. Who's gonna pull him out this time?"

He wasn't the first member of my family to get addicted to this particularly-rural pastime. My uncle, Keith, was the one whose antics that most of us remember most vividly. My sister, when asked to describe, said it this way: "On every holiday, Keith would take the biggest vehicle he could find and go out to the bluff and sink that sucker up to the axles in mud, and then we'd all have to go pull him out."

Clint was the same way.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen! You might be surprised to learn that, while you're standing there, yapping loudly into your cell phone while filling up your gas tank, the person sitting in the next car can hear what you're saying…

Before we go any further, let me tell you something, you wanna-be darlings of the fashion world: unless your name is Audrey Hepburn, you do not look good in capri pants. I do not care what you look like, who did your plastic surgery, or what company your grandfather founded. Unless you are Audrey Hepburn, yes, you look terrible in capri pants. On principle.

In fact, let me amend that statement. Even if you are Audrey Hepburn, you do not look good in capri pants, because you are dead and have been so for quite some time now, and this whole hopping-out-of-the-grave-and-dancing-around bit really needs to be kept to the better Buffy episodes, mmmmkay?

He is legendary in this house; his steps are stealthy and quick. You'd think that you'd hear him when he pulls up in the driveway, but his vehicle has a degree of silence and stealth that many secret agents would envy.

The brown suit is just a disguise, and we know it; what better way to disguise a ninja than as a UPS deliveryman? After all, they are friendly and harmless! How much can one fear a man whose job requires him to drive an enormous truck with no doors, while wearing the drabbest shorts known to man?Not to mention the socks pulled up, unfashionably, to his knees!

In your world, UPS men are pasty-skinned men in bad socks and orthopedic shoes, men who look down from their wind-tunnel truck cabs and wave at children in nearby cars. They are the harmless purveyors of heavy packaging. (Hey, Clark Kent was a reporter, and that seems an obvious little gambit to us now.)

In my world, it's a little bit different.

Lot A was for the newer cars. Lot B was for trucks, vans, ATVs, SUVs, and anything that didn't quite qualify as a "car." Lot C was for older cars.

We were the sixtieth car in Lot C at tonight's auction down in Cullman. While waiting for the first fifty-nine cars to be processed, Jeff and I had plenty of time to talk over how much we wanted our reserve price to be. We knew we wouldn't get a lot of money for the car—it was, after all, an eight-year-old Sundance—but we wanted to see if we could do better than the trade-in offer we'd received.

On the drive down to the auction, I found myself laughing as I thought about all of the places this little car has taken me since 1994. Nine states: Arkansas, Missouri, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois.

This is the code that powers the syndication of wondergeeks.net, the portal site for my group of friends. For some time, we were using a standard RSS-and-Perl solution, but we had a good deal of problems with it.Problem 1: Non-ASCII characters