After returning home in the early afternoon from a quick shopping trip with Kat, I came home to find a business card shoved in our door. It was a card from the Athens Police Department, with a handwritten note on the back that said, "Please call," and gave his direct line.

Now, granted, I'm a good little law-abiding citizen, but the first thing that popped into my head was, "Wait. Even if I had been bad, I haven't been through Athens in months!"So, I returned the call and got the bane of current-day corporate-America: voice mail.

Approximately an hour later, he returned the call. (So as not to be a total jerk, I'll not print the name of the person he was asking about.)

"Do you know a person named C.A.J.?" he said?

I'm going back into my book world. Let me tell you, a woman with James Joyce on the brain and Marvin Gaye singing antiwar songs in her ears is a woman buried to her eyebrows in lyricism.

I can't remember, exactly, when I started on Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but I know that I got halfway through it and put it down in favor of reading The Lord of the Rings.

Portrait has held the topmost spot on the bookshelf closest to the window, spine facing out, toward the living room. When I water my plants, my trek to refill my water jug takes me through the reading room to the back door of the kitchen. Every day I would pass the bookshelf, and with some degree of guilt I would see the slim paperback, waiting for me to come back to it.

Okay, for those of you using Netscape 4.7x to read this site, the Easter Bunny has a present for you: you can now read all pages on domesticat.net again. After weeks of pondering what I could do to make the site both HTML 4.0 compliant and have workarounds that would make the page readable in Netscape 4.7x….

I had a momentary flash of brilliance.

Amy: Brad's getting me another video of theirs. At this rate I'll have sold my soul to him by August.
Andy: *laughs*
Amy: He's pleased, surprisingly enough.
Andy: He can't have your soul, I still have lease options.
Amy: bwaaaaah?
Andy: I was going to lease it to a dotcom as a promotional aid.

Everyone keeps asking, what’s it all about?
I used to be so certain and I can’t figure out
What is this attraction?
[duncan sheik]

Welcome back. Life returns, the friends go home, the cats relax, and my fingers start tapping almost of their own accord. They make it clear that whether I want to or not, it's time to start writing again—not because I should but because I must.

"And I could stand here waiting
A fool for another day
But I don’t suppose it’s worth the price, worth the price
The price that I would pay"
[d.s.]

Put the music on. Don't turn on the light. Listen to the cats in the next room, industriously tussling each other in brotherly fashion. Despite the fact that no one is here but me, I attempt to physically hide the fact that I am writing—because, of course, if no one knows I'm writing, no one will know to ask me whether or not I was able to finish what I started.

On what I have left to do for geekfest 2.0, which begins tomorrow:

Recipient (Divide By Zero):
>Probably. After dinner tonight I'll scrub down the kitchen, and then mop the
>floor. Then I've gotta clean the bathroom. Tomorrow morning I'll put fresh
>sheets on the guest bed (for Brad) and on the sofa bed (for Brian and Suzan)
>and then I'll be good to go.

*** Message (#7) from Divide By Zero at 18:40 ***
>you're a beastie. You know that, right?

Recipient (Divide By Zero):
>?

*** Message (#9) from Divide By Zero at 18:41 ***
>a holy terror of domesticity. a primal force of hostessing. a grizzled
>combat veteran of the war of playing house.

So much to do.
But Dan's right. I do love this. Given the choice between this life and what I had before—living in a town where I knew no one and had no friends—I will take this. No questions asked.