Here is the order in which I have been on a Jincy Willett kick:

(photo from Amazon.com)

First: Amy Falls Down. I found this on the library’s New Books shelf and thought it looked like just my sort of thing. When I finished the book (having confirmed my guess about it being just my sort of thing), I noticed there were quotes on the back of it from David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs. I looked up Jincy Willett online, and found that David Sedaris is the guy who brought her to national attention. Which is interesting when combined with the plot of Amy Falls Down, which is about an older female writer who is brought to national attention by lucky fluke.

All through the book I kept saying to Paul things like, “This is DIFFERENT. This is my kind of thing, but in a way I can’t figure out how to say it.” There are a few authors I’ve reacted to this way over the years: I’ll be reading along and I start thinking, “Wait. What is this. What is happening here.” Authors who make me lose appropriate punctuation. I’m not saying YOU will necessarily feel the same way, but David Sedaris and I are in agreement and maybe you would be too.

(photo from Amazon.com)

Next I requested Jenny and the Jaws of Life through the library system, because our library didn’t have a copy. I liked this book less. One reason is that I rarely like short stories. (They are too short, which is similar to the reason Paul’s grandmother didn’t like cats: “Too soft.”) But also, I felt like I was pushing my way through character summaries rather than reading a story. “Can we stop talking about what this person is LIKE and instead move the plot ahead just an INCH?,” I would think, my punctuation having returned to me. And I was left feeling depressed and upset after most of the stories, and I prefer not to feel that way unrelentingly even if the dismal stories are very nicely-written, so that was the final blow. I still liked the book, even though it sounds like I didn’t, but I’m glad I didn’t start with it or I might not have tried others.

(photo from Amazon.com)

Next I read Winner of the National Book Award. It was dark, like the short stories, but longer. Character descriptions felt worthwhile because we were going to be spending so much time with these people, and because the plot did keep inching forward. (Though I would sometimes have to put the book down because I felt worn out waiting for the next inch.)

This is the kind of book where you know upfront that something bad is going to happen: in this case, that the narrator’s twin sister is going to kill her husband (her own husband, not her twin sister’s) (the second twin sister’s, not the first twin sister’s) (okay, so the sisters are Dorcas and Abigail, and Dorcas is the narrator, and we know from the start that Abigail is going to end up killing Abigail’s husband, is THAT clear?). And then you jump back so you can work toward this Bad Thing That’s Going to Happen, feeling jumpy about it and wondering how/why it’s going to happen. And then it turns out there is another layer or two of things to anticipate.

It wasn’t cheery, but I liked it. I kept pausing to re-read particularly good parts, wishing it worked well to quote little pieces to someone who wasn’t reading the book. (It never does, which is why I dislike Meaningful Quotes.) (Unless they are meaningful to ME, in which case they’re marvelous.)

Thinking over it afterward, I find I still don’t feel like I understand the characters (despite all the description), so Amy Falls Down is still my favorite.

(photo from Amazon.com)

Now I am reading The Writing Class. I am only a little ways into it, but I see it comes before Amy Falls Down. You definitely don’t need to read this one first, and in fact so far I’d advise against it. The narrator (not the author, as the author keeps using her narrator to remind us) is trying a blog, and the way I feel about what she says about bloggers and blogging is very similar to the way the narrator (and perhaps also the author) feels about the things everyone says to her about fiction-writers and writing fiction. I’ve nevertheless already found several parts to wish I could read aloud to someone, though, so clearly I am ENJOYING it, it’s just that she happens to be hitting some of my personal irritations. [Edit: The part that was irritating me is over, and now I really love it.]

To sum up: I recommend trying the author. I recommend starting with Amy Falls Down or else with The Writing Class (The Writing Class is meant to be first). [Edited to add: I finished The Writing Class, and now would recommend reading that first, then Amy Falls Down. But Amy Falls Down stands alone, if you only want to read that one, and/or if you don’t like mysteries.] If you notice a self-conscious stiffness to this post, it’s because the narrator-who-is-not-the-author says she uses Google Alert on herself.

Last night I had such bad dreams—and they’d started out so well, too, with the classic romance-novel plot of “I thought he didn’t like me but actually he was in love with me,” plus I also had David Boreanaz interested. But then the first guy wasn’t where he said he’d meet me, and instead there was some blood, and I realized something bad had happened to him and was about to happen to me, and I was thinking, “Ah, so this is what Gavin de Becker meant about how when it’s Real Fear it will help you—but then, shouldn’t I be able to run faster than this?,” and I ended up at a dead end and couldn’t tell if THAT was the trap or if backing up and going the other way was the trap, and anyway maybe I shouldn’t be watching Bones so close to bedtime.

I got up and did the Nightmare Cure from my childhood (go pee, eat a Tums, brush teeth, get a drink of water), but as I was getting the drink of water, a spider threaded down from the ceiling a foot in front of my face. And when my eyes had followed its return climb, I saw two more spiders up there. So it is not particularly surprising that when I went back to bed, it turned out the Nightmare Cure had not worked and I dreamed that I was at the animal shelter and it was flooding and I couldn’t figure out how to get the animals out without releasing them into the wild, and also it was clear someone was flooding the place on purpose and therefore was out there waiting for all of us.

I have no reason for being so sleepy and laggy and unmotivated and sad the last few days. Except that we’re all going to get old and die and so will everyone we love.

Rob has been at the moodier/angrier end of the teenager spectrum recently, surprising me with his sudden outbursts over what seems from my point of view to be NOTHING. It’s hard to respond peacefully/defusingly [ha—I originally had this as “diffusingly,” like I was making tea] when I’m not even sure what’s going on. Sample conversation:

Other child, looking at Paul’s desk: “OOOOooooo, a new keyboard! Let me try it!”

Rob, turning around and getting involved with sudden and unexpected scorn: “It’s not even PLUGGED IN yet.” *scoff sound*

Me, in a friendly voice: “It’s a cordless one.”

Rob, with even more intense feeling: “It still has to be PLUGGED IN. The thing that MAKES it cordless still has to be plugged in SOMEWHERE.”

Me, puzzled by this outburst and unsure how to respond/proceed (i.e., is it that he’s embarrassed to have been wrong so he’s trying to prove he really was right, or does he know the thing that needs to be plugged in hasn’t been plugged in yet so he’s trying to rudely-but-nevertheless-accurately correct what I said?): “Mm hm, yes, that’s right.”

Rob: “WHAT?? It DOES. There’s a THING that gets plugged into the computer!!! YOU SAID it didn’t need to be plugged in!!”

Me, cautiously, in a mild, explaining tone: “Yes, I know, I just thought you might think it had a cord, since the last keyboard did. You can check if you like to see if that other thing is plugged in yet. Maybe it isn’t yet, but I thought Daddy already set it up.”

Rob: *exasperated sound; hands briefly beseech the heavens; he spins around in his chair and is back to his computer typing crankily*

Me: *bewildered and annoyed*

It’s difficult to imagine this going on for the next decade or so, but perhaps it gets easier with practice. I’m trying to remember if it got easier to deal with toddler irrationality/outbursts or not, and I THINK it partly DID—if only because by the time the fifth child was being a toddler I was aware that the stage would pass without me having to actually make a toddler understand that he/she was nuts.

I have started the menopause book recommended by the nurse-practitioner at my OB/GYN, and I am having mixed feelings. The author is Not My Type, and nor is her ex-husband, and in fact I would be mincing rapidly away from either of them if I encountered them in a social or work setting. And so when she is describing how their marriage fell apart due in part to menopause, I have to do extra work to separate out the actual point of the story from the parts catching my attention, which are things such as him saying he hates when she acts disempowered, and her saying he should be more supportive of her truth, and me thinking “I would divorce BOTH of you without even FLINCHING.”

So what happens is I skip ahead a few chapters, because I think, “This part about marriage readjustments is making me dislike her, and I don’t want to dislike her because I want to glean usefulness from this book, so I will skip this part.” But then as I’m skipping ahead, something useful catches my eye and I think “Well, it DOES make sense that the marriage would need to adjust to the new stage of life…,” and then I have to go back to see what she’s talking about, and before I know it I’m back to where I started skipping. And then a minute later I’m wondering if she and I are too different for me to apply her advice to my life anyway.

Another big issue is that the author and I are not of like minds on the subject of what causes what, medically speaking. Certainly I allow room for the idea that one day in the future it will be proven scientifically that uterine fibroids occur when a woman has been prevented from giving birth to something creative and powerful, or that acne occurs as a literal manifestation of something metaphorical “getting under our skin.” In the meantime, I am not following along—and such things form a strong foundation for the book. If you stop taking care of your husband the way you did when you were in your mother role, he may get heart disease or high blood pressure in unintentional revenge—that sort of thing. It makes me wonder if I should even bother to look up her take on the physical changes I’m curious about. If I try to look up this hair-thinning-at-one-temple situation to see if it’s from hormonal changes or if it’s because I grew my hair longer/heavier and I’m wearing it up, am I going to find information about how this is really my body’s way of communicating to me that I am metaphorically “pulling out my hair,” and that it’s because I’m struggling to style my old dead strands of creative energy when I should be “cutting away” the old stage of life and welcoming the new growth?

But then I got to the part about how many women have trouble switching from “the mothering stage” to “whatever is next,” and so they try to prolong the mother stage and delay decisions/adjustments about the next stage by having more children, or by adopting more children, or by getting very involved in their children’s activities, or by taking care of their grandchildren, or by over-mothering their grown children, and I thought, “That does make a certain level of sense, and also I recognize that category of impulse.” So in short, I’m still reading, but Paul is getting tired of hearing me read sections aloud in that tone of voice.

Well! I managed to sign up for some volunteering at one of the schools! If you remember, I tried to do so earlier, but never heard back from the volunteer coordinator. This time, I was dropping off Elizabeth’s Epipen at the school nurse’s office (such things have to be hand-delivered by a parent), and an acquaintance was there and mentioned there was a volunteer training session going on right that minute for a particular volunteer position she’d done before and thought was a good one, and she said I should go right now and join in. And so I did.

The reason I’m not specifying the type of volunteering is that I’m about to make some complaints about a fellow parent and suddenly I’m nervous about being Found Out. So what I will do is use a stand-in for the type of volunteering AND for the types of things I want to complain about. Let’s say that the type of volunteering is helping set up the lunchroom, and let’s say it takes an hour and a half each time, and you can sign up for however many/few days you want out of an available eight days per month, and that there will be two or three volunteers each time. There: now you can imagine me going to this training session, and they are showing us how to set up the tables and put out the silverware bins and where/how to set up the milk station and so forth.

Okay, now I will describe the other parent. So, we are there to learn how to do this. And she started RIGHT IN criticizing the old way, before we’d even been fully trained, let alone tried out the job for real. She was disgusted by how unclean the back of the silverware caddy cart was (“Ug, don’t you ever CLEAN this?,” she said, constructively, to the person training us), an area that no one touches and that touches nothing, and also I didn’t agree it was dirty (it looked like it had been cleaned many times but was old and had been periodically re-painted without sanding first) and so I certainly don’t want to clean it with her when that is not what I’m volunteering for, and also at that moment we were SUPPOSED to be learning how to fill the silverware caddies. And also: RUDE.

Then, during a 30-minute training session, she managed to perform THREE highly-controversial and irrelevant mini-rants, one of which criticized public schools in general (keeping in mind that we were at that moment standing in the public school our children attend); one of which was on a topic such as vaccines, or why we should consider a relationship with Jesus Christ; and one of which directly criticized one of the policies of the school we were in. The root of her complaint on that third subject seemed to be that she should be exempt from that policy, and that she had every reason to be indignant/offended that it was enforced even for her. She told us how she had given the principal what-for (evidently she was wildly victorious in the way most of us are only while lying awake imagining it differently than it happened—and yet no policies changed as a result of this confrontation, not even for her) and then delivered a rather scornfully-put closing remark (“I mean, SERIOUSLY! What are they THINKING??”), and then waited. A couple of us tried to brush it off politely with “Mm” sounds. But she would not have it. “You know what I mean?,” she said, turning directly to me. “Mm,” I said. “I mean, RIGHT?,” she said. So that I finally said, mildly, “Well, I see what you mean, but I still see why they do it that way.” So then she kept going about how actually it was stupid, and then I tried another “Mm,” and it didn’t stop her, so then I did what I should have done first, which was to say, “Oh, I see they’re showing us how to…” and trailed off as I walked away toward something I acted like I needed to have explained to me about keeping the forks and spoons separate.

I looked at the sign-up sheet and guess who I am working with on five of the six days I signed up for? Yes. Paul thinks she will simmer down a bit, but he was working on the theory that she was nervous and keyed up in a new situation, whereas my impression (and I’ll remind you that I was there and Paul was not) was that she was just starting to get comfortable. She didn’t seem nervous, she seemed oblivious and over-confident and a little dim, and like she hadn’t yet reached the stage of life (“adulthood”) where she knew there were different ways to think about things and that not everything was set up around her own way. I suppose nervousness could exhibit in that way; I’m not ruling it out, but I’m not counting on it either. Instead I am reassuring myself that I have only signed up for six sessions, so if it’s awful and she’s awful, I will get through it and then not sign up for any more of that, and try something else instead.

In the meantime, I am looking for advice. The volunteer job-type I used as a stand-in for the real job sounds like people would be spread out working separately; but the actual job is working closely together and not being able to get away from each other, and not much need to discuss the work itself (and thus, plenty of time to chat). What are some good things to say to someone who is basically DEMANDING either agreement or disagreement? Like, what I’d like to say is “Dear god, why are you bringing up this controversial topic HERE and NOW, and WHY OH WHY aren’t you taking a hint from our unenthusiastic/noncommittal responses and away-turning body language??” What I DON’T want to do is discuss my opinions one way or another with someone so aggressive: I don’t want to argue with her, and I don’t want to pretend to agree with her, and I don’t want to clean that silverware cart with her.

So that is why I am asking: What are some of your ways of dealing with people who won’t take “Mm” for an answer? And I’m thinking of actual, sayable things, not the things we say in our imaginations while lying awake showing reality how it OUGHT to be done.

To some of you this is going to be like me saying, “You guys, I made toast!! Toaaaaaaaaaaaaaaast!!”—but I made potato pancakes for the first time ever. Making mashed potatoes regularly is a bit of a new thing at our house, and it took several occurrences of the “making mashed potatoes” —> “putting the leftovers in the fridge” —> “throwing out the leftovers because I never wanted to heat up leftover mashed potatoes” cycle before I noticed the Potential Deliciousness Alarm going off in my head.

I looked up the recipe in the red-and-white-checked cookbook (Better Homes & Gardens, though I almost always accidentally call it Betty Crocker), and it said to take the leftover mashed potatoes, mix in a raw egg (it also had a part about sautéing a mild-onion-type thing, but I sprinkled mine with garlic salt instead), and fry up pancake shapes in butter. Okay then, I like the sound of that! So I tried it and it was soooooooo good. I had one for breakfast and then another for lunch and then another at snack time. And now I make extra mashed potatoes on purpose, and I stir a raw egg or two into the leftovers before I put them in the fridge so they’re ready to go. (I mark the container with masking tape, because imagine thinking it was regular mashed potatoes and then SURPRISE RAW EGG.)

The main glitch is that they rarely hold their pancake shape nicely and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. Too much milk at the mashed-potato stage, maybe? Or not ENOUGH milk? They’re still delicious as Scrambled Potatoes, but if anyone knows how to make them hold together that would be even better.

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I found the Dunkin’ Donuts Strawberry Shortcake coffee at Target for 50% off, so I thought it would be fun to try. Instead I ended up following Holly‘s advice for cleaning the coffee pot with multiple cycles of vinegar and hot water, and the lid STILL has a whiff of nightmare about it. (I think I’ll soak that on its own in vinegar for awhile.) As Elizabeth said, “Seemed like such a harmless bit of whimsy when I tossed it in the cart…”

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I’ve finished Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake trilogy. It’s apocalyptic fiction of the sort that Raises a Lot of Issues, and I found those issues interesting, depressing, and paranoia-inducing. As presumably intended.

Except for the few lead characters, I found it difficult to remember which character was which; I don’t know whose fault this was, but since I have trouble if two characters have names starting with the same letter, I’m guessing it was mine. I also had a lot of trouble remembering the minor characters and even the medium characters—I had no mental pictures of them. The first book was hard for me to get into at first: I don’t like it when a book starts out with NOTHING MAKING SENSE and then gradually explains it, so I was happier once things got going. I found the whole “misspelled/mashed-up brand names to make them seem annoying and modern” annoying in a “kids these days with their misspellings!” way instead—-like the author was over-making her point. It reminded me of Stephen King and his overkill on the cell phone topic, YES WE GET IT YOU DON’T LIKE THEM. I don’t blame either author: it’s hard to quit harping on something when it drives you crazy. But it can still be annoying for the reader. The third book seemed to me to have about 100 pages of material it needed to get through to finish up the trilogy, filled out with a bunch of interesting but mostly unnecessary backstory on a couple of characters from the other books. I was basically pleased and satisfied with the ending. There was one mystery that never got cleared up, and I wished it had.

Overall I liked the whole trilogy, and I put it in the Worth Reading / Will Likely Want to Re-Read category.

Two teenager things.

One. We were going mad–MAD–about William’s little rubber bands for his braces. His orthodontist had strongly emphasized to him and to us that he MUST wear them, he MUST. But every single time we said, “William, do you have your rubber bands in?,” the answer was NO (and/or “I was just GOING TO,” and/or “I just took them out to EAT”—when eating had last occurred hours before), followed by a scramble to find some. And we kept having Firm Talks with him, and going over the importance of blah blah, and how much he’d appreciate his effort NOW when he was an adult, and how the orthodontist SAID, and look she sent us a BUSINESS LETTER about it, and so forth.

And yet the situation persisted. Sometimes I would realize it had been a few days since I’d remembered to ask him, and therefore it was likely he had gone several days without wearing them, and I would feel both panic and despair. This is not MY job! This is HIS job! But he is not accepting it as his job, and the natural consequences (his braces completely fail to work, the orthodontist continues to Speak Firmly to both him and us, we stretch out this situation for years) are not ones I’m willing to accept.  WHAT TO DO.

Here is what I did: I said it was not my job to remember his rubber bands, and that if he was going to MAKE it my job by not doing it himself, he would have to pay me for that work: 25 cents per reminder. I made sure his siblings overheard me, knowing they’d LOVE to get in on a costly tattling opportunity like this. RUBBER BANDS ON EVER SINCE, BABY.

Second thing. I would like to give you an example of the kind of argument Rob likes to have. The pediatrician had recommended melatonin for William’s periodic stretches of getting-to-sleep troubles. I’d warned William that one side effect can be vivid dreams. In the morning, William reported that he had slept well and hadn’t had any vivid dreams, and I said good. Rob then wanted to argue that we didn’t Really Know if William hadn’t had any vivid dreams, since maybe William just didn’t remember them.

Now, that is a fine point to make, very nicely noticed. Perhaps another time we can have the late-night-college-student discussions about whether maybe this could ALL be a dream, or about what if anesthetic was completely ineffective except in that it made us completely forget the pain so we THOUGHT it had completely worked, what THEN. But right NOW, in THIS discussion about melatonin, when we are BUSY DOING OTHER THINGS, let’s NOT get into it, and especially not in that tone of voice. That is, if we CAN’T KNOW, then we CAN’T KNOW, so we have to go with what we CAN know. If we must define “not having vivid dreams” as “not REMEMBERING vivid dreams,” then FINE. We are not going to attach William to wires to make sure that he is not having vivid dreams, before allowing him to report a happy lack of side effect. BEEzus.

Yesterday I went responsibly to my Annual Exam, thinking the whole way there, “At least it’s not the dentist”—which reminded me I have a dentist appointment in a couple of weeks, so I effectively doubled my feelings of dread. Nice going.

It had actually been more like a year and a half since my last annual, because when I called last March, feeling extremely righteous to be calling the VERY DAY the reminder card arrived in the mail rather than after six months a month several weeks several days of phone-related procrastination, they said they had no appointments at all with ANY of the six doctors, and that I should call back in MAY (TWO MONTHS LATER) and they’d “see.” They’d SEE.

I felt so miffed by this (THEY sent ME the reminder card!! THEY are the ones who harp on how important this is!! HOW CAN THEY POSSIBLY HAVE ZERO APPOINTMENTS WHEN THEY HAVE SIX DOCTORS???), I didn’t call back until August, when they again told me they had nothing at all. Just as I was about to hang up in a huff (THEY’LL BE SORRY when I get CANCER and I write them a polite business letter to complain about it!!), they allowed as how they might have an appointment with the nurse-practitioner the next month. So anyway I took it, and then stewed about it for a month wondering if I should have gone to my primary instead (even though last time she did something wrong and I had to GO BACK AND HAVE IT DONE A SECOND TIME), and I’m still stewing now. Goodness, I am SO SORRY for DISTURBING them with my APPOINTMENT REQUEST for an APPOINTMENT THAT IS EXACTLY THE KIND OF APPOINTMENT THEY DO THERE and TIMED TO FIT THEIR OWN GUIDELINES OF WHAT IS APPROPRIATE. I can see how it would be EXACTLY as hard to get an appointment for a PAP as it would be to get a LUNCH DATE WITH ANGELINA JOLIE.

Anyway. It turned out I liked the nurse-practitioner about ten times as much as any of the doctors, so that leaves me in the difficult situation of still feeling like stewing, but about something that turned out better this way. My experience with nurse-practitioners has not been universally successful (the one at our pediatrician’s office is so awful I will not even get into it, because I can feel my brain kicking up the Let’s Stew Fruitlessly Over Long-Past Resentments All Day and Perhaps All Night! gears, and I am already very busy stewing over the six months’ worth of “can’t get an appointment” resentment), but sometimes they are MUCH BETTER THAN DOCTORS. This one was so kind and understanding she made me all teary and happy, and also she gave me a prescription to help prevent UTIs (the “one antibiotic pill Each Time” prescription) that my primary doctor has been extremely reluctant to give me (I’m sure it is unconnected to the $700 it costs each time I have a UTI), treating it as if I’m asking for a monthly supply of narcotics.

Also, did you read Caitlin Moran’s book How to Be a Woman? And if so, were you mesmerized and intrigued by her mentions of using potassium citrate to treat cystitis—cystitis being another word for UTI or urinary tract infection? I immediately looked for potassium citrate at the store, wondering if THIS WAS THE ANSWER, but the store didn’t have it so I ordered some online. And the next time I felt the beginnings of a UTI, I took some, and IT WENT AWAY. Except it didn’t: when the potassium citrate dose wore off, it was back. Also, I noticed that UK sites tended to recommend potassium citrate for UTIs, and US sites said specifically NOT to take it if you had a UTI. It was a bit of a mystery.

After some further research and some consultation with the nurse-practitioner, I think I have the answer: potassium citrate treats the symptoms but not the condition. So if you have UTI, and your UTIs tend to clear up on their own rather than turning into massive raging bladder or kidney infections that leave you wishing you had died instead, then at least for me, potassium citrate worked better than Azo for pain relief (additional bonus: no orangey-yellow stains). But unlike with Azo, if you’re taking an antibiotic (or at least a certain antibiotic, the one I was researching), you can’t take potassium citrate—something about the potential for forming stones. I don’t feel like I have the full story yet, but at least I know it’s not some UK secret for over-the-counter UTI treatment I could have been taking all along. The nurse practitioner said it sounded to her like a product called Prelief, which is for people who get pee-related discomfort from the acids in food.

Also, I told the nurse-practitioner the gist of scattered, irritable, and sentimental, and she asked a few questions about cycle and so forth, and then the word “peri-menopausal” came up. So. Let’s just let that hang in the air for a moment.

She recommends vitamin B-6 supplements, 100 mg a day. She says they can help somewhat with mood fluctuations. She mentioned that she had the unfortunately-not-at-all-rare privilege of going through menopause at the same time her daughter was going through adolescence (nice planning, SPECIES), and one day she was like, “That’s it: we are BOTH going on B-6!” She said they still had their moods, but there were fewer “Crud, did I say that out loud?” moments for both of them. She also recommends the early books (“the earlier the better, before they got so…celestial”) of Christiane Northrup, for information and comfort.

William accidentally broke my favorite of my two West Elm owl plates, which is the sort of thing that makes me wonder why we even HAVE children. Furthermore, though it WAS accidental and he DID feel bad about it, at the time he broke it he was unloading the dishwasher huffily.

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Speaking of breaking, I have a category of Things That Break that makes me feel crazy. Here are three examples from the category I have in mind:

• The “check engine” light comes on in the car, and it turns out the engine is perfectly fine and the check engine light itself is the problem, and it will cost $220 to fix it.

• The button that changes the temperature on the oven won’t press.

• The dishwasher’s handle latch stops latching, so the dishwasher can’t be closed.

It’s not like the dishwasher stopped working: the dishwasher is fine, but because the door won’t latch, the dishwasher won’t run. The oven would still heat perfectly well if I could tell it what temperature I wanted. The check engine light should be notifying me of a PROBLEM WITH THE ENGINE.

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The comments on posts aren’t getting forwarded to me from my Gmail account. Nor are Twitter DMs. It is frustrating. At first I chalked it up to a temporary glitch, but it’s been days now. PR requests for free publicity are still getting through just fine.

I just heard a little girl in our neighborhood shrieking in a voice that sounded like it was paused at just the right intervals to be punctuated by sharp, devastating kicks to the neck of a vile archvillain: “I !!! [*imagined kick*] Am a beautiful!!! [*imagined kick*] UNICORN!!!! [*kick kick kick*]” I’m thinking that would be good written on a t-shirt (without the kicks).

I just realized that the word “villian” is probably why it took me so long to learn that the word “village” doesn’t have an I before the A. But since it’s actually spelled villain, not villian, perhaps we need to dig a bit deeper for the larger solution to this puzzle.

[Edited to add: My brother just emailed to say he has this SAME ISSUE.]

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Rob, kindly, looking over my shoulder as I played a Webkinz game he’s much better at than I am: “How about this: I’ll just make a whistling noise every time I see you about to make a wrong move. *steady, extended whistling sound*”

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Me: “WHAT WAS THAT. Paul! I heard a noise, right outside the window!! Now I hear thumps, like someone is dropping rocks!! OMG NOW I HEAR SOMEONE ON THE ROOF!!!”

Paul: “It’s the walnuts dropping off the tree.”

Repeat once for each of the thirteen Septembers we’ve lived here.

[Edited to add: It was only when proof-reading this post that I realized we have a child with tree-nut allergies and a yard full of nut trees. Hm.]

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An update on the school volunteering situation (the comments on that post were SO EXTREMELY HELPFUL) is that I asked a couple of questions and then decided I would try it, and then I had VERY MIXED FEELINGS the minute I sent the email and hoped I hadn’t made a DREADFUL MISTAKE. But then I never heard anything back, even though they’d said they urgently needed help right away.

This is fairly typical. There are also urgent letters every year about desperately needing baked goods for the annual holiday fair, and every year I answer right away saying I can help, and every year I hear nothing back. And last year I got guilted into signing up to chaperon a field trip during my two hours of child-free time per day, and never heard anything (to my great relief). It would be tempting to take it a little personally, if I could think of a way to do so. As things are, I live in an area where people say, “Are you CRAZY?” when someone is expecting a third child, so it’s just as likely they’re looking at the list of volunteers and thinking, “Oh, god, five kids??? Let’s let her off the hook.”