I should move this damned diary. I don't like diaryland. Blogger has all the bells and whistles (for free) and it's easier to use and yet...none of my blogs ever lasts.

I'm such a nostalgic person. I'd miss this purple background. Glad Andrew fixed that.

Our babysitter was stranded this weekend in Florida. Thanks skybus. I can't believe that's legal.

In high school I had a friend, Cristina. She was from Peru and her father was an intellectual and he whole family was so very different than anything I had ever seen. Cultured lefties. I swooned. I haven't seen Cristina since 1993, I believe. I was supposed to meet her for coffee today, but totally flaked. I feel like a jerk, but also, like I didn't want to meet her for coffee. This is what misanthropy looks like, friends. Sigh.

What else happened today: a dog who looks exactly like our dead dog Frankie (remember her? I loved that dog) showed up in our driveway! This is very very weird, since we live approximately in the middle of nowhere. We have no neighbors, we are a full mile from any real road. How did this little scrap of a dog (he weighs no more than 7 pounds, I bet) find his way here? He is darling. Funny and friendly and just great. Jeff and I both fell in love immediately. We are looking to see if he belongs with anyone, but if we don't find anyone, we're a-keeping him.

We're down in the pet count, though. In addition to the great great loss of Miss Blue and Harold (still gone, for good, I have no doubt), one of our pigs, Harriet, died. Natural causes, I guess. Ossie and Jeff buried her with potatoes and flowers. Sweet. Our friend, Penny, came over today with her husband and baby girl (biggest eyes on a baby I have ever seen, my gosh that kid is cute). Penny runs the pig rescue place and is cool as hell. First question she asked about Harriet (who died a couple of weeks ago--day we returned from Florida), was whether we still had the body so she could do a necropsy on it. She takes care of about a million animals and is so unsentimental about them. I love it. They bought some land around the corner from us and plan to build a house, and they may have Jeff be their general contractor. Great news for us here in the middle of the woods. They are real good guys, as William Carlos Williams once said of Emily Dickinson.

Jeff's folks arrive for a week starting tomorrow. I think it'll be ok. I am trying to fake some good attitudes around here. I feel a little bit better when I do.

Three weeks left in the semester, thank the gods. Tomorrow I'm starting a unit on The Wire in two of my classes and I'm excited by that. We're doing character analysis and I'm going to show three episodes, I think, from season 4. I have to work out the episodes, though. That's what I'm a-going to do tonight.