"Your Intellectual Type is Word Warrior. This means you have exceptional verbal skills. You can easily make sense of complex issues and take an unusually creative approach to solving problems. Your strengths also make you a visionary. Even without trying you're able to come up with lots of new and creative ideas. And that's just a small part of what we know about you from your test results. "

This comes from http://www.tickle.com, where you can get your free IQ test. Let's just say that my IQ isn't what it used to be and that I never believed algebra would help me in my adult life, but now I see that it would help me score higher on internet IQ tests if I'd ever learned it in junior high school. But they put me in that teach-yourself program and I was incapable of learning it on my own so there you go.

I went to RI for the weekend. We had a good time, really enjoyed being together, Mark, Liza and I. Liza told me all about the Rankins--I mean all about the Rankins. They're impossible, and having an impossible time packing up the things from their home of 40 years. Like, they're refusing to deal with it in a rational way. I had to talk to both of them on the phone on Sunday, which is a strain on me because they're not kind to my mother so naturally I don't care much for them. It's hard for me to feel sorry for them for many reasons, but mostly I'm protective of my mother. Anyway, we did other things that were fun, and we spent a lot of time sitting in the living room having nice visits. We ate lobsters, clams and mussels and we went shopping a little. Yesterday morning we went bulb shopping and found tons of wonderful bulbs. I'm thinking of putting up window boxes under my living room windows and putting spring bulbs in them, figuring that they'll come up and bloom long before anything else does, so I bought some crocuses, tete a tete daffodils, something else new, and then some indoor bulbs that are hard to find but smell delicious and Liza and I always used to give each other. I left yesterday at noon so I could be in Keeseville by 7 to pick up Jackson, who had been boarded at the vet's. It was a short trip to RI--I'd only been there since Sat. afternoon, but it was good to go. It's hard to be in that house, Henry is everywhere for both Liza and me, and we talked about that. We agreed that every time we look out our windows we think of him, when we look at the vistas he created with his chain saw. His living legacy.

It was cold when I got home--the house was 50, and it took about 4 hours to get it up to 64, with a fire and the heat on. Tess was thrilled to be home and to be with Jackson again. It turns out she just adores him. She started wagging her tail like mad when she saw him. She wanted to go to bed at about 9 but I didn't get in bed until 1. It was 27 last night with a heavy frost. We're done with whatever semblance of early fall we had. I'm making a commitment to fires now, burning the first load of wood I got in June. I'll have to work with last year's wood--it's like an orchestra, working with the 3 wood piles I have. First we hear from the string section, then percussion, then winds.

And now I'm back at work, getting ready to gear up for the week. The director leaves this morning for the rest of the week for the statewide library conference. There was a board meeting last night, and if she's planning to pursue her charges against me presumably she would meet with the board about it in executive session. I was wondering if she would do that, but there wasn't a quorum last night so she didn't have an opportunity to do that if she had intended to. So another month goes by without my knowing what she plans to do. I'm hoping that her feedback from the board president is that it would be too expensive to go forward, since they've already spent a fortune in legal fees and still have no paper in my file.

I just had to speak with a member of the AuSable Forks library board about automating their library. He was impressed with how much I knew and how well I expressed myself. "How long have you been here?" Twenty years. "That's all? You know so much!" well, geez, I hope I do. to the director: "Where did you find her?" Director: "I didn't have that pleasure." As if she would have hired me. Well, maybe she would have, who knows.