Someone just asked me how my weekend was. Not bad, actually. I went to Canton (again) on Friday for a workshop on Excel. The morning was sort of a blur--your basic improving your Excel skills, but the afternoon was great fun, charts and graphs, and we had a great time with that. I got home at 5:30, stacked firewood, had a relaxing evening. Thursday night I had my book group and we stayed at Mary Lou's house until 11:00 so I was tired. We did Mysteries of Pittsburgh this month and our basic comment was that we're all too old to be reading coming of age books. There were only 4 of us there so we had mostly conversations about ourselves, our lives, etc. We thought the book was full of unlikely events and characters until it came to me in a flash that we've all, at some point in our lives, had our lives filled with unlikely characters and been involved in unlikely events. We all agreed that was true and felt much better about the book. Our next book is Jane Smiley's The Greenlanders. 500 pages, better get going.

So Saturday was cloudy and cold. Lin wanted to go to town, since Ralph was gone and that meant she would feel free to have a good time and stay as long as she wanted. We left in the late morning, had lunch at Applebee's (I spend time with people who like rituals, we always eat at the bar, have a beer and order something good from the menu). She was kind enough to buy me lunch, since I'm totally tapped until Friday's paycheck. I spent $70 on prescriptions last week--but of course I got $1200 worth of drugs so I can't complain. Anyway, we went to Sam's Club and bought about 400 pounds worth of stuff At Sam's you never really go by cost, you go by weight. We each got 48 (not 50) pounds of dog food. We had a good time, sauntered through the store. Floor cleaner! Garbage bags! Coffee! Canned milk! And determined that we are most unimaginative when we shop there, always getting the same stuff. But that's what Sam's is good for. Then we went to Walmart and I got 2 new dog bowls for $2 each, and 8 new pairs of socks for $8. This was quite good for me, resisting the temptation of TJ Maxx, where they have the socks I REALLY want that cost more money. Anyway, I got home at a decent hour and did not take a nap, but did not stack firewood either. Instead I watched Love, Actually, which I really enjoyed. Hugh Grant doesn't have a big enough part but he is awfully cute as the prime minister, and they're all awfully British and it's a movie that's mostly happy and cheerful in which the people are appealing. I like the part where the guy who can't get laid in Britain decides to go to America, knowing his British accent will make him irresistible. He announces proudly he's going to a place called Wisconsin, then lands at the Milwaukee airport and asks the taxi driver to take him to a bar, any bar.

Yesterday I was incredibly (by my standards) productive. I sprayed every leaf and stem of my huge philodendron (with a wingspan of 6') with insecticide to combat the scale it has. Today it looks a bit droopy but hopefully it will not only survive but prosper. I put the permanent license plates on my car. I went to Sunday dinner. We had Ken's homemade baked beans, of which he is incredibly proud. He makes them about twice a year. There were 6 of us, a real crowd, and he was really pleased to have so many there to eat his product. We had a good time. I went home and stacked 8 wheelbarrow loads of firewood, then went to camp to get some stuff from the boat house and look it all over. This weekend is my Columbus Day cocktail party on the porch. Jim took the water out last week and turned off the power in the boathouse, not thinking about the food that might be in the refrigerator there. What can you do. It was a beautiful day, sunny and slightly cool. I saw my friends who are here for a week, staying just down the hill from my house. My dogs met their new border collie and Tess and Katie got along really well. Katie wanted to herd Tess and T. wasn't quite sure how to be herded but she was game for anything. Katie is a working herder, since Richard and Becky have a big flock of sheep in Maryland. Chances disappeared for an hour or so without Tess, which convinced me that someone had taken her home with them. I sat on the couch, looking out the window while hugging Tess, telling myself that this is why I have more than one dog. I finally went looking for her and found her waving goodbye to the last car that was at the bog. It was really strange that she was there without Tess, but she's been acting pretty odd this fall. I guess it's the change of seasons. Jackson slept outside 3 nights in a row, which is certainly fine with me. My friend Julie just reported to me that she lost 2 cats last week (she still has 6 left) and we tried to figure out what might have killed them. Fisher, I think, but perhaps a coyote.

What I didn't do over the weekend was paint the bathroom door burgundy, but I can do that this weekend. I'd like to strip the coffee table too but that's a pretty involved process for me. There will also be lots of people visiting this weekend, which may be just too distracting.

This morning while I was in the shower Tess knocked the cast iron skillet off the bureau by the dinner table, breaking a pottery plate in the process. Now what was it about the skillet, which was in a plastic bag that appealed to her? I could hear the crash all the way upstairs in the shower. When I called her she came upstairs, wiggling like a fish in her "I did something wrong" mode, with a piece of the broken plate in her mouth. Last night while I was watching my tv marathon (3 hours of the Gilmore Girls, now that was actually enjoyable for me, followed by Law & Order, then Nip/Tuck (plastic surgeons), then The Shield (cops) then at last I was sleepy enough to go to bed at 1), Tess slept on top of me the entire time. This is not really like her, she usually does that for an hour or so, then gets down and sleeps on the floor. Last night she slept on top of me for hours. Not good for my acid reflux (as Julie said, I can now tell my doctor that it feels as if a 50-lb. dog is lying on top of me) but I have to admit I did enjoy it. It'll be nice this winter if she continues. I got my winter comforter from the boat house and put it on the bed. Now THERE'S a sign of the changing seasons.

I overslept this morning, something I've been doing a lot of lately. I can't sleep at night. I just finished a double-shot mocha latte, my third encounter with caffeine this morning. Time to switch to decaf. I have to do data entry today, which is mindlessly rewarding. Doing retrospective conversion of a member library's collection--converting bibliographic information into machine readable format. That just means I look up their books in our data base and add their holdings symbol, plus some other information about their books. We can make anything sound complicated, can't we. Anyway I enjoy doing it for a while, and I was out on the road 3 days last week so I'm way behind in my work and need to do something mindless to feel productive. I need to weed, too. And my desk is an unbelievable mess.

I think a lot about my brother lately, as we all have been doing. My car has become my crying chamber. This morning's thoughts were Do I really care if I live or die? My brother was dying just a few months ago. What did that feel like? Did he really just finally give up? Did he know he was dying? He didn't want to die. Part of my reason for living was the pleasure of having him for my brother. Now that's gone. All that time he had all those things wrong with him, why couldn't he just have lived on and on with those things wrong with him? (can you tell I have an appointment with my psychiatrist tomorrow morning?) I'm trying to be ok about all of this but sometimes I just feel as if I'm not ok, I can't move forward, I can't accept it that my brother died and I can't stop crying and I can't stop feeling the pain of losing him. Sometimes I think it's because I don't talk to anyone about it, then I think that I don't WANT to talk to anyone about it, it's my pain, my love for him, my family, and there are some things that I want to keep to myself. But is that the best way for me to handle this? Guess I'll get some insight tomorrow. The 5th.