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.

By the time I returned from grocery shopping with Kat and Sean this afternoon, I was somewhere between light-headed and seriously low on blood sugar. A quick rummage in the fridge turned up real honest-to-goodness yogurt—the real kind, with fruit, sugar, and calories.

After I ate it, I settled down at my desk to fire off some emails. Jeff came in with a dinner idea, just as I was finishing giving Gareth the details he needed for a script I've been begging him to write for me. "Why not try the new Vietnamese place?" Jeff suggested. "Okay," I said. "Give me a sec, and let me finish giving Gareth the information he needs to write this script."

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.

"Oh, don't be silly," I said to one of our friends. "Just because we're getting one of these doesn't mean that we're going to watch a lot more television than we do right now."

He laughed. "Yeah, right."

One day after it arrived: "Hey, Jeff! Look at this! If I just punch in 'A,' it'll format a listing of all the movies available over the next two weeks, in alphabetical order. Isn't this cool?"Jeff giggled and nodded as we scrolled through the list. The primary goal of looking through all the movies was to find ones that we wanted to record and watch (The Red Violin and Sneakers being our first choices). In about three minutes, though, this quickly devolved into 'Guess Which Movies are Lifetime Movies.'

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.

So, where were we? Seems like my mention of the words "breach of contract" opened a few eyes over at Corporate yesterday afternoon. While I was busy working on refining a couple of scripts for cat.net, an emergency domesticat.net board meeting was held.