I dreamed last night that a VERY CUTE boy was interested in me. Unfortunately, when my dream mind discovered that the boy was 18, it did not do what _I_ would have done in ITS shoes, which would have been to assume _I_ was also 18. No. Instead my dream mind said to me: “Hey. Hey, wait. *counting on fingers* Aren’t you nearly TWENTY YEARS older than that? I don’t think this is AT ALL appropriate. Not at ALL. Seriously. Ick. And…wait. Aren’t you also MARRIED? We need to stop this right here.” Then my dream mind went and fetched Paul and had him take away my glass of champagne and make a pointed remark about my “boyfriend“—with heavy quotes, just like that, and not a very pleasant tone of voice, either.

Thanks a lot, dream mind. This reminds me of once when I was on a diet and I dreamed that I was very tempted by a bunch of candy but didn’t eat it. Come on, now, that is TOO STRICT.

********

I recently gave up on a book after 220 pages, which I think may be unprecedented for me. Despite being very familiar with the concept of sunk costs (that is, that the amount of time I’ve spent reading the book is irrelevant to the decision about whether to KEEP reading it, since I can’t get that time back either way), I have trouble putting it into practice. And besides, with a book, it MIGHT pay off to continue reading it. Though, admittedly, probably this is more true at 50 pages than at 220.

It was bugging me because there was a ton of foreshadowing to keep the suspense going, but then the foreshadowed events were never as big a deal as they’d seemed like they’d be. Plus, most of it was made up. Which is to be expected of fiction, of course, but in this case the narrator was also making up a story: imagining what things were like for his parents before he was born, when he hadn’t been told those stories. So then I felt like I was reading fiction about fiction: the story wasn’t even true within the covers of the book.

********

But then I read a book I liked very much: You Know When the Men are Gone, by Siobhan Fallon (photo from Amazon.com).

It is a TEENSY bit “you civilian wives have no idea how good you’ve got it,” and I’m not sure anyone can make that kind of statement about anything (parenting, working, location, relationships, lifestyle choices/non-choices of any sort) without it being kind of annoying. And since NO ONE experiences ALL life circumstances, it’s also kind of a duh thing to bring up: we ALL live a way that only other people who live the same way would understand, and ALL those ways include some things that would be considered disadvantages—and other things that would be considered advantages. If the book had instead JUST told the stories, without adding the little preachies about how much better things are for civilians, I would have received the message ANYWAY, but without feeling prickly about it.

Another problem is that it’s short stories, which I hadn’t realized when I checked it out of the library. And while I partly love short stories, I also partly hate them: they leave me stranded just when I’ve gotten fully invested in the situation. But these particular stories overlap each other a little, which I LOVE, so. Still, there are a couple where I thought, “No. You can’t just leave it without any sort of ending and and call it done.”

Boy, it sounds like I DIDN’T like this book, doesn’t it? But I DID. I liked it in an “I NEED TO SEE WHAT ELSE THIS AUTHOR HAS WRITTEN” way. (Nothing, sadly.) It is just, when I like a book, I don’t want to talk it up too much because then you’re BOUND to be disappointed, and also I want to make sure I mention the things I DIDN’T like so that when you read it you don’t say “She liked THIS?”

This morning I went to wake Elizabeth up and she wasn’t in her bed. She was fine: she’d just gotten up quietly and gone to the living room—which is atypical for her, obvs, or I would have cottoned to what was going on a little sooner. But those seconds of first thinking “That’s funny: she’s so buried under her covers I don’t even see her,” and then “Actually…she’s so burrowed in, it doesn’t even look like there’s room for her under there, nervous ha ha,” and then “Okay, okay, she’s NOT under there, she might have just gone in to our bed after I got up,” and then “SHE PROBABLY JUST GOT UP QUIETLY, THAT’S ALL, THERE IS NO NEED TO PANIC ABOUT THIS”—well, it was a little draining, and I found my hands were a little shaky by the time I saw the back of her head in the living room.

NOTHING CAN HAPPEN TO THEM, is the problem with having children.

********

Rob, eating a taco: “Mmmmmmm, BEEF!” Paul: “…It’s turkey.” Another meat education fail. (It would be a more understandable fail if we didn’t, every taco night, send either Rob or William to the downstairs freezer with instructions to bring up a package of ground turkey.)

********

Rachel AKA Doing My Best AKA Crappy Day Present Sender has started a blog, and one of her entries is the Crappy Day Present backstory, plus instructions!

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Elsewhere:

On the baby name blog, one of the hardest naming issues I’ve ever attempted to answer: what to do when you’re marrying someone who has a hyphenated surname.

On Milk and Cookies: our favorite cheap but good brand-name stuff. Like, not generic, but not La Mer either. I’m taking notes from the comments section.

On the review blog: review of a custom-decorated (with stickers) toothbrush and toothpaste for kids, with a $100 Visa gift card giveaway. Through June 9th.

I have recently been plagued–PLAGUED–by spamments. There IS a spam filter on Blogger, and I KNOW spam filters are not an exact science and require delicate tweaking and will nevertheless make the occasional mistake—but I don’t see how ANY spam filter would let people BLATANTLY named “generic [drug for men’s Personal Regions created by scientists who could be using that time to create non-stupid birth control]” comment freely. The upside is that when I have to click over to delete the comment, I revisit old posts I forgot I even wrote. I’m thinking of it as a little Swistle Archives Tour.

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Henry, amazed: “I was born ON my BIRTHDAY??”

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I finished the fifth and final book of the Y: The Last Man series, and I was a little disappointed. I really really really liked the series, and I’m still glad I read it, but it feels like it was supposed to be a couple of books longer but then the budget ran out and they were instructed to wrap it up fast.

********

I have been frustrated ever since we bought our minivan six years ago, because if there is enough weight on the front passenger seat, a “passenger seatbelt” warning light will flash throughout the entire trip. Sometimes even my purse will set it off. It only JUST occurred to me that I could just…buckle the seat belt. It sits flat against the seat, so it doesn’t keep me from putting stuff there.

My lip has an ouchie split place, and I think the blame can be placed entirely on opening my mouth wide enough for huge floofy bites of the kielbasa-and-greens salad, which I’ve been eating day after day as if the fields will run out of greens.

********

I’m reading a book in which a new character was described right away as African-American. We’d met many characters already, and none of them had been described in corresponding terms. That is, we had not met “Liz, a short Caucasian girl of mixed European descent” and “Anne, a plump Japanese-American girl.” Just this one character, who was “Marissa, a tall and beautiful African-American girl.”

I am not usually particularly sensitive to these things, I don’t think: when someone else points them out I am immediately on-board, but often they go right past me without catching my attention. Well, unless they are blatant like in the 1960s Shocking Interracial Romance book my mother-in-law once lent me because it was her FAVORITE BOOK OF ALL TIME (ick alert: she gave her children the same names as the two hot-romance main characters), where the author couldn’t mention the guy without using adjectives to describe his skin color.

But here’s a riddle I couldn’t solve, as an example of my usual lack of noticing: What is wrong with the sentence “He was in love with his neighbor’s wife”? Take yer time. (The answer is that unless his neighbor’s wife lives elsewhere, SHE IS ALSO HIS NEIGHBOR. He is in love WITH HIS NEIGHBOR. The sentence as written implies that the man of the couple is the only real neighbor.) [Edited to add: After all the comments about commandments/adultery connotations, I should add that the original puzzle was “He murdered his neighbor’s wife.” I changed it to be less gruesome, but perhaps I should have changed it to “He respected his neighbor’s wife” or something.]

But anyway, this one caught my attention and bothered me, but maybe it is because I felt like I needed to pee at the time. And also, I started this section with “I’m reading a book…” but actually I’m not reading it anymore, because it was making me feel hopeless and weary with all its cutting social critique that didn’t suggest any alternatives/solutions to what it was cuttingly criticizing.

********

I dreamed last night that my mother-in-law was alive (although I would say it like this: “ALIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVVVVVVVVE!!!”) and visiting us and making arch remarks about things she thought I should take action on. I woke up feeling tired and headachy and full of suppressed impotent rage—but then relieved and grateful all over again. I really am very, very, very lucky to have been spared the path where she lived into her late 90s like her mother did, and I think of it often. And I’m using it as a reminder to try VERY HARD not to be a person whose death makes other people feel relieved and grateful and lucky, but if I keep being so irritable WE’LL SEE.

I am a little DISCOURAGED today. I have another UTI (and if you want to ask me why I always, ALWAYS feel the need to share this particular diagnosis with you, I have NO ANSWER to that question), and having a UTI is like being nauseated or like having a backache: it is really hard to focus on ANYTHING ELSE. And furthermore, when I feel like I badly need to pee, I also feel IRRITABLE, and I have been feeling that way since yesterday afternoon, so I have a lot of irritable stocked up.

I’m also discouraged because I thought THIS TIME the doctor would do something about this, because LAST TIME she said that NEXT TIME we’d do something about this, and I was hoping “do something” would mean “give you a fill-as-needed prescription”—but instead she did NOT do something about this and said NEXT TIME we would.

Furthermore, our insurance doesn’t want to pay for the entire cost of the lab work, and I don’t even blame them: according to the doctor, the lab work is to find out if the strain is resistant to the antibiotic they prescribed. I can see how that would be important in some situations, but in MY case, I think it’s one of the many markers of What Is Wrong With Health Care. It’s $450 for that lab work. I pay $150; my insurance pays $300—money it collected from us and from everyone else paying in. TO FIND OUT IF IT’S THE RIGHT ANTIBIOTIC. Which we could also find out for free, by waiting.

And it’s just ROUTINE, it’s just AUTOMATIC that this amount of money is spent, EVERY TIME I go in for one of these. I’m picturing that money as little dots on a map, little $300 symbols pinging pointlessly out of insurance accounts across the nation as each person with a UTI pees in a cup. And on a personal level, I am seeing those little $150 symbols pinging out of my bank account every time it’s my personal cup.

And perhaps you are wondering why I don’t just decline to have this test done, to which I reply with a blank look, because I am wondering what it might be like to live that way. I even totally worked up my courage once and resisted the lab work for several back-and-forth dialog exchanges with the doctor, explaining (1) that I thought the test was unnecessary and (2) that I was willing to take the risk of not having that test done and (3) that it was not an amount of money I considered unimportant, and the end result was that she continued to argue back at me and so the lab work was done, so I don’t really want to talk anymore about it and you are just going to have to chalk this up to a temperament component that looks unlikely to change. Maybe the day will come when I can handle more than three volleys of the ball while arguing with a medical professional about her medical opinions vs. my “this is what SEEMS like it would be the case” opinions, but that day was not today. Oh, I can do it in my head, sure! But whenever I imagine applying that script to an actual conversation with an actual doctor who will then respond to what I said rather than blushing and stammering and agreeing with my finely-put point, it does not work out.

After reading Frustration (about something my eldest son Rob did to make me cry with the frustration of not being able to hit him with a stick), Mar commented:

Seems like my N has a very similar personality when he’s at his most…challenging. I’m always sad when people ONLY see this..challenging side.
Quick ! write something to redeem Rob in the eyes of your readers!

GOOD THOUGHT. I know that EVEN THOUGH I understand that someone might only blog about a spouse when the spouse is being awful, or about life when they need to vent, I NEVERTHELESS sometimes get the impression that someone is married to a total pinehole or having a rotten life. And Rob, while he has his pinehole/rotten moments like any other human being, is not ALL BAD.

Rob was 5 when I found out I was having twins, and his response was a sarcastic “Great. TWO of them.” He was not particularly fond of his 2-years-younger brother William, so the prospect of EVEN MORE younger siblings failed to please. But then as soon as the twins were born he was affectionate and sweet with them, and started saying things like, “When do you think we can have ANOTHER baby?” He was very happy when I was expecting Henry, and wanted to talk a lot about what did we think the new baby would be LIKE, and he’s been affectionate and sweet with Henry too, as with the twins. He’ll say, “Hey, Henry, do you want to go PLAY OUTSIDE with me?” and then they’ll go racing out together, a 12-year-old and a 3-year-old. Periodically he’ll mention that he thinks we should have another baby in our family.

Oh, I just remembered a Rob-related story. After the twins were born, Paul and I weren’t planning to have any more children. So when Rob asked when we could have another baby, I said no, there wouldn’t be any more babies. I’d have to look up exactly what he said, but he was dumbstruck and indignant, saying something like what about the fifth one, the boy? He said it EXACTLY as if it had been a long-standing, much-discussed plan—as if for years we’d been saying that our family would be boy, boy, girl, boy, boy, and now we were suddenly saying we wouldn’t have that last baby after all. So then it was neat when we DID have an unexpected fifth child, a boy.

Anyway, back to the Rob Praise. He’s a good talker. He asks questions of the sort a person WANTS to answer, and then he listens, and then he asks more questions of the “Is it like….?” variety that keep the conversation going and show he’s been listening. And I don’t have to worry as much that he’ll be upset about something and won’t tell me about it—like William, who will suppress it and cry privately over something COMPLETELY FIXABLE, with me not even knowing he was unhappy about a decision I’d made casually.

He says hello when he comes into a room, and says things like “Goodbye, I’m going to the bus now, have a good day, see you later, bye!” when he leaves in the morning. And when he comes home he’ll say “How was your day?” or “Did you have a good day?”

He’s naturally helpful, in that he will start pitching in without being asked. If it’s a task he doesn’t know how to just pitch in with, he’ll ask if he can help. If I come home from errands and start bringing in bags, he’ll put his shoes on and come out to help without anyone saying anything. And this isn’t because we’ve trained him to do it, which is why I used the word “naturally”: it’s the sort of thing that, after he started doing it on his own, I thought, “Hey, we SHOULD HAVE been training him to do this. And we should train WILLIAM to do this TOO.”

He also says “thank you” a lot. We did train that one, but we also trained the other kids and it’s Rob who does it without being prompted or reminded. I’ll come home with something even kind of boring, like a new plain shirt I got him on clearance, and he’ll say, “Hey, thanks!” with enthusiasm. Or if he’s out of some food item he likes, and I go to the grocery store and come home with it, he’ll say, “Yay, string cheese! Thanks!”

He opens doors for me, and for strangers.

We passed one of his teachers at the grocery store and didn’t recognize her at first because she was out of context, and as soon as he realized who it was, he asked if he could go say hi—and then he bounded over to her, greeted her nicely, pointed me out so the teacher and I could exchange a wave, and then said bye and bounded back. Polite and friendly, but without inundating her with child-interaction during her school-free hours.

He likes to go shopping with me, and is a pleasant companion: chatty and helpful.

He doesn’t notice much or care much if other people don’t like him. This is a trait I unsuccessfully work on acquiring, and so I’m glad he has it.

Also, he’s tall and he has lots of eyelashes.

So. Even though I feel like he will drive me LITERALLY MAD with the arguing and the firstborn justice issues and the ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS HAS TO BE RIGHT, he does have his good points too.

So now Blogger is back up, but Twitter is down. This has been a disorienting couple of days. At least it was not both at the same time! APOCALYPSE.

I posted a new review yesterday:
ARM & HAMMER® Spinbrush® MY WAY! ™ Toothbrush
and Orajel ® MY WAY!™ Kids’ Toothpaste—and a $100 Visa Gift Card Giveaway—and if you are wondering if I was required to write those things in all-caps with exclamation points, that would be a big AFFIRMATIVE! (Also, the names must not be broken between two lines; thus the awkward formatting.) Anyway, I tell you this not only because part of my contract involves telling you about it, but also because when Blogger went down it lost all the comments—so if you commented on the post after it went up mid-day Thursday but before Blogger went down later in the day, you’ll need to re-comment to be entered.

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Rob made me so angry the other day, I could barely talk about it. Paul had checked Rob’s homework as usual, and had made Rob re-do a math worksheet on which Rob (1) hadn’t done the problems the way he was supposed to, (2) hadn’t shown his work the way he was supposed to, and (3) had gotten the wrong answers. And Rob had better grow up to be a stunning trial attorney who works either for justice or for our exceedingly comfortable retirement years, whichever, because ROB CANNOT BE WRONG. Does he seem to be wrong? NO, YOU ARE WRONG. Can you prove him to be wrong? NO, THERE IS ANOTHER EXPLANATION. Can you calmly and quietly explain to him that everyone is wrong sometimes, and that in this case it is his turn? NO, HIS EARS ARE NOT HEARING YOUR IMPOSSIBLE CONCLUSION IN RE HIS WRONGNESS.

So. Rob maintained despite all evidence to the contrary (written instructions at the top of the sheet; the provably wrong answers) that he was doing it the way he’d been taught AND that he DID have the right answers. It was obvious his ears were no longer connected to his brain: during the time he should have been listening to Paul’s admirably patient explanations, it was clear that all he was doing was compiling his next argument to explain why he COULD NOT be wrong, whatever the evidence seemed to be. After MANY (again, admirably patient) attempts, Paul finally sighed and said all right, Rob could continue to believe he was right if he wanted to, but Paul was nevertheless telling him that he must redo it the way the instructions said, and with the work shown, and with the correct answer at the end. Rob FUMED the entire time.

The next day, Rob presented us triumphantly with a signed note from his teacher (he emphasized this to us: “SIGNED”) saying that he was supposed to show his work and do the problems the way he’d been taught. He had evidently explained to her that his parents were doing exactly what the teachers had said they might, which was to try to make him do math The Old Way. When, as you know if you’ve been following along, Paul was NOT trying to do: he was telling Rob he had to do the problems not “the way Paul learned in school” but “the way shown at the top of the paper.” AND, Paul had been TELLING HIM TO SHOW HIS WORK.

Not only is this blisteringly embarrassing to me to think of Rob telling the teacher that we were forcing him to do what we were NOT forcing him to do (and then having her SIGN A NOTE to that effect) (and I can’t think of any way to explain to her what actually happened, without looking crazy/defensive/over-reactive AND making HER feel embarrassed), but our theory that Rob’s ears are entirely disengaged at such times was demonstrated with excruciating clarity. I don’t know how Paul kept his temper, because I started CRYING with the effort not to BEAT ROB WITH A STICK and then perhaps send him to his room until the next school day, when I would shove him ahead of me into the classroom and force him to tell his teacher what had ACTUALLY happened, and give her a SIGNED note saying that SHE may now beat him with a stick.

But all Paul did was sigh and explain AGAIN. To which Rob said, “OHHHHHHHHHH… _I_ thought you meant…” (that was when I started crying with frustration).

And you know how everyone expresses exasperation at the “Just wait!” people, and yet the “Just wait!” people continue to say “Just wait!”? I can feel them out there, so tempted to tell me what small potatoes this incident is in comparison to what is to come as my 12-year-old gets into his teens, closely followed by his four siblings.

I always wonder what it is such people hope to accomplish with that kind of talk. Do they want us to give up on this whole child-rearing endeavor, and leave home and/or kick the children out so we won’t have to deal with the horrors that await us? Do they want us to go back in time and not have children? Are they hoping to plunge us into ineffectual and pointless despair as we contemplate upcoming years of Ever Worse? Are they imagining that we are somehow so blind and delusional, we believe that our current complaint represents the worst we will or could encounter? Do they want us to imagine them rubbing their hands together with poorly-hidden happiness at the thought of our upcoming surprise and distress?

We had two household crises: (1) The upstairs toilet clogged, and even after vigorous plunging was only flushing half-heartedly (i.e., the water went down, but not the toilet paper), and (2) The dishwasher stopped cleaning the dishes, even though it sounded like it was running normally.

In time-honored tradition, I first made two unfounded accusations:

Then, this past weekend, Paul purchased some sort of toilet device and used it to discover a BRANCH flushed down the toilet. So it WAS the children’s fault, but not in the way I thought: Henry had flushed his “sword,” by, he assures me, “accident.”

Less success with the second crisis: we switched back to regular dishwasher detergent, but there is still food all over the dishes (and splashes of food/milk untouched on the inside of the dishwasher door), so we are hand-washing. Another branch, this time crammed in the dishwasher water-sprayer? STAY TUNED.

I just read and loved a book I NEVER would have chosen except that BOTH my parents read it and liked it:

Death Match, by Lincoln Child
(photo from Amazon.com)

The cover does not appeal to me, nor does the title, and also I think more than 95% of the books I read are by women because I generally don’t identify with either the writing style or the subject matter of male authors. I would not have even picked this book up to skim the inner flap, is what I am telling you.

Furthermore, the book has flaws. There is a time or two when the protagonist does something and I think, “It is 100% clear he should be doing something different, so this is obviously just a way for the author to give us information he wants us to have and/or force the plot into a particular shape.” And there are some other places where, afterward or at the time, I thought, “But why would they….?” and “But wouldn’t they…?” and “Wait, but if it was the night before, the child would have been…” and “Surely any sensible person would have realized that the information could have been…?” and “But couldn’t he have just NOT set it up that way?” and “Well, and it would have to cost WAY MORE than that.”

But WHATEVER, because the PREMISE is one of the most lock-on fascinating ones I’ve heard of in a long time. And you might THINK I am spoiling it when I tell you the plot, but I am not: I will tell you what my mother told me when I thought SHE was spoiling it, but then when I read the book I thought no, she wasn’t.

The premise is that there is a dating service that has a 100% success rate: it costs $25,000 PER PERSON to join, but there’s a full money-back guarantee and no one has ever used it—or even needed to be matched a second time because the first one didn’t work out. (The cynical reader might notice that every single person who uses this agency is not only attractive and intelligent and emotionally/mentally-well-balanced, but also marvelously multi-talented, and with many interesting interests. We will not spend too much time, however, wondering about couples who are kind of dim and dull; we will just assume they didn’t make for as good reading.) Matched couples are remarkably, blissfully happy. As one or two of the employees at the agency says, people left on their own choose each other for the wrong reasons and eliminate potential partners for the wrong reasons; the agency matches people who at first think the match was a total mistake, and then within minutes see the perfection of it.

Then the couples start committing joint suicide, and a psychologist/detective is called in to find out what is going on. The book is not only his attempt to figure things out, but also lots of interesting discussion about how the agency works, and the tests they use to establish compatibility.

***SLIGHT SPOILERS FOR THOSE WHO LIKE TO BE PREPARED FOR UPSETTING SCENES INVOLVING CHILDREN***
The opening scene is a little traumatic, because a small child (old enough to sit in a high chair, not old enough to speak) has SEEN her parents kill themselves. But we don’t join the scene until it’s over (we just figure out that she would have had to have seen it), and the child is safe and unharmed and of course too young to really know what’s happened. In another scene, it is mentioned that one of the women who committed suicide was pregnant.
***END SLIGHT SPOILERS***

A potential downside of this book is you may find yourself looking sideways at your significant other, wondering if you chose him/her for the wrong reasons and if you are not in fact particularly compatible. One character in the book says that even though he’s had a long and happy marriage with his wife, he would have cut off his own arm to have a relationship like the one he’s seen of a couple matched by the dating service. Food for thought, and not necessarily a meal that sits well. But it has been a long time since I had to take a book to another room because I HAD to keep reading it and couldn’t tolerate any distractions at all.

Yesterday I was having a crappy day for no reason. I woke up, and the day was already crappy despite the tulips blooming and nobody barfing and the car out of the shop and basically everything going just fine. But there was no more Easter candy, and when I woke up I thought I was waking up at about 2:00 in the morning but in fact it was 5 minutes before I had to get up and yet I still fell back to sleep so I woke up feeling all weird and sleep-interrupted, and furthermore I’ve been reading more volumes of the Y: The Last Man series so I’d been having bad dreams about being trapped in a bathroom with killers outside, and as soon as I woke up I remembered I’d forgotten to thaw muffins and ANYway it wasn’t all that bad a day and yet it WAS.

I poked around for awhile trying to fix it. Good breakfast. Favorite lavender-vanilla conditioner and body wash. Extra coffee. Sitting and reading more Y: The Last Man instead of getting going on the laundry. Still I remained cranky and wan.

Then I remembered what I hardly ever seem to remember on the days that are crappy because I am feeling too crappy to think of things that would make me feel better: I have Crappy Day Presents. And at first I tried to talk myself out of opening one, because I didn’t have a good reason for having a crappy day, and also because a characteristic of this kind of crappy day is a certain sullenness and resistance toward improving it—as if being able to improve it with a present would mean it hadn’t REALLY been a crappy day. I shook that right off.

And I also remembered that when I wrote about Crappy Day Presents before, some of you asked for follow-ups to give you more ideas for sending your own CDP boxes, so…look what Mean Living (more of a Twitter girl these days AHEM languishing blog) sent me:

THINGS ARE LOOKING UP ALREADY

I should have waited for good lighting to take the pictures, but I knew those mini Cadbury Eggs were not going to make it to the good lighting (they are half-gone as I write this post) so you get one with too much flash, and one dark and not completely in focus.

Can you believe that cross-stitch? Mean Living is all “Please excuse all the flaws” and I was all “OMG you MADE this? out of, like, THREAD??” Look at the BIRDY. Look at the SWEET LITTLE FLOWERS, which gradually change from darker to lighter as the row goes along. And do you see what it says? “TODAY’S GOAL: Do not go slap out of my mind.” And the thread it’s written in MATCHES MY BLOG. I think I should put it by the coffee pot. Or next to my alarm clock.