tbone and Mr tbone got married this weekend in Retarded Cleveland (so monikered by the bride herself) and for some reason, I was invited. I know, it surprised me too! Who would want me at a wedding?

This question raised itself even more once I got there, because I am clearly a social retard. The ceremony was lovely and tbone, as I predicted, laughed through most of it. It was nice to see her so happy and Lock so emotional and I'm glad he didn't cry because that would have set me off and I would have been a mess.

After the ceremony, the guests filed through the church lobby to greet the lineup of bride and groom and families. As I waited, I stored up a list of things to be sure to say to Polly (congratulations, she looked lovely, she looked so happy laughing her head off, etc.). I ought to have done the same for the other people in the line, because I moved along to Lock and all I came up with was, "Thank you for marrying Polly!"

WHAT DID I JUST SAY? The words came out of my mouth and I think I was surprised as Lock, who laughed and said, "You're welcome," but was clearly thinking, "Alrighty then, we won't be associating with this crazy tart after today..."

I managed to bungle the rest of the line as well, introducing myself as "Sarah. I go to school with Polly" in my weak little quiet voice and having tbone's mother respond, "You do what with Lock?" and cheerfully repeating the same introduction to a bored, unimpressed teenaged brother of tbone's who refused to identify himself and was clearly only in the line due to a sense of duty or familial threats.

We threw rose petals at the B & G and moved on to the reception. Much to our surprise, we were seated in the same room as Polly and Lock - we had speculated that we would be placed in the add-on area up the stairs, but apparently that was the Teenager Ghetto for Polly's brother and his friends.

Food and beverages were et and drunk. Despite my promises to drunk-dial Matt from the reception, my white wine and champagne were spread out over the course of about four hours and I was hardly squiffy. I managed, however, to bring myself to dance in public, including some fascinatingly literal performances with "I Think We're Alone Now" and "Dancing Queen," à la the DeMarco Brothers on Saturday Night Live.

Dear Diary,

Sometimes I feel like I just have too much free time on my hands! And too many toes*! So today I set out to remedy that situation.

I gave tbone and Mr B------ a ride to school this morning, dear diary, and managed to get myself trapped in a snowdrift whilst trying to parallel park. They claimed I was "good enough" even though I was angled out into the street, but I tried pulling forward and backward and got nothing but tire-spinning from the process. I finally forced my riders to get out of the car and push, at which point they made up some story about green liquid dripping from the front of my car in order to get out of pushing.

Well, okay, there really was green liquid. So I gave up, declaring it "good enough because if the radiator is leaking, I don't want to drive it anywhere, so as long as I'm getting towed, I might as well get towed out of this stupid snowdrift." We went to a pointless waste of time class, then I got lunch and called AAA around 11:30.

When I finally got through to the AAA "customer advocate" around noon, I explained my situation.

"Green snow is better than yellow snow!" he pointed out, "But you still shouldn't eat it." He told me that the towing company would be there at 1:00, so I killed an hour paying my tuition** and walking back to the car. I arrived a few minutes before 1, just in case he showed up early and I wasn't there.

I got into the car and sat there. I was afraid to start up a car leaking mysterious green stuff, so I just sat. I fiddled with things in my bag. I sat. I entered AAA's 800 number into my cell phone. I sat. I looked at my watch. I sat. I shivered. I sat. I pulled my scarf tighter around me. I sat. I considered taking off my shoes and pulling my feet underneath me to warm them up, but rejected that idea because the tow truck would show up any minute and I would need to have shoes on. I sat. I tried to figure out if I could still feel my toes or not. I sat. I rethought the shoe-removal idea, but decided that since more time had passed since the time I originally thought of it, I was that much closer to tow truck arrival-time.

Around 1:22, I called AAA again.

"The truck is on his way," the operator told me. "He's just dropping off another car."

"Um, do I have to be with my car for him to tow it?" I asked.

"Yes, you do. Are you in the car now?"

"Yes. I was hoping to go somewhere warm."

"Do you have somewhere you could go near your car?"

"No... it's a residential area."

"Well I'll put a rush on this then. They should take this into account, because it's cold out there."

"Thank you."

So they sped that tow truck up so fast that it got there... half an hour later. But you know what? It was worth the wait, and I blamed no one because he was finally there and everything was going to be all better now.

I told him my problem and he pointed out that it was going to be more expensive if he had to tow me out of the snowdrift, so maybe I should try to get out on my own. I explained that I'd tried to get out, but just spun my wheels for a while. I also explained that I had been afraid to start up the car with greenness dripping out, so I hadn't tried since that morning. He said it shouldn't be a problem unless it looked like the car was overheating.

I gave escape a shot with him watching, but just spun some more. He got in and got a rocking backward-forward motion going and managed to back out of the space. This I'll-help-you-do-it-yourself-to-save-money approach reminded me of the time I went to the doctor and he helped me take my contact fragment out. It's nice when people help you avoid getting hosed for something simple, but it also makes you feel kind of stupid.

The tow truck man looked at the green puddle under the car. He looked under the hood. He looked at the snow in the wheel-well of the car. His diagnosis: Green snow. That I had parked on top of.

Ahem.

So at this point, it was about 2:30 pm (three hours after my phone call began) and I had no feeling in my toes... ALL FOR SOME GREEN SNOW.

SNOW.

GREEN.

No point to calling a tow truck.

Three hours.

I am so close, dear diary! Just a little more work at it and I will eliminate all of those pesky toes and free time with pointless time- and body-heat-wasters!

* I figuratively, rather than literally, have too many toes on my hands. I think one would be too many toes to literally have on my hands.
** The University likes it if I do that from time to time. I almost forgot.

When I was a senior in high school, I directed the church's Christmas pageant. This was not because of any interest in religion or religious displays or any love for the church, since all of this had been waning for years.

I volunteered to direct the Christmas pageant because I was tired of years without Christmas pageants and of years with strange, new updated versions of the Christmas pageant. I remembered Christmas pageants when I was young - the same script, the same songs and the same parts year after year. It was tradition and you always knew what to expect. You knew that you could work your way from Sheep to Angel to Mary or from Sheep to Shepherd to Wise Man (no one wanted to be Joseph, because he had to hang around with a girl). You knew the songs already because you had sung them the year before and because they were traditional Christmas carols. I can still, over twelve years after my last pageant, remember most of the dialogue to the play.

I was sad that kids no longer got to do this, so when I heard that there was no one to direct, I volunteered. I revived the old Christmas pageant with the original dialogue and songs. I enlisted my whole family, my friend Becky and the church organist to help direct, make costumes and practice songs. The kids had to be retrained in the songs and dialogue, since we hadn't used this script or these songs in years. In the end, we pulled off something adorable and nice. Best of all, I got to share my Christmas experience with a new generation of children.

Christmas Eve is my favorite holiday. It's the one day of the year that I will go to church of my own will. Like the Christmas pageant, Christmas Eve has never had anything to do with religion for me, but is about the pageantry and singing and candles and happiness. To me, Christmas Eve is all about tradition.

When I was in fifth grade, our class did a penpal exchange with a school in Texas. They tried to match boys up with boys and girls with girls (because the opposite sex was, at that time, ostensibly still cootie-ridden), but the numbers didn't match up quite exactly. So I got matched up with a boy.

And did I get matched up with a good-looking boy with common interests to make up for it? No. They sent us their class picture with the letters and mine was the nerdy-looking one, front and center, sitting cross-legged in such a way that it looked like he was going to use his knees as wings and fly away. I don't remember now what his interests were, but I know they didn't match up with mine at all. I believe he didn't even like reading. I was annoyed enough to have to correspond with a boy, but why him? Although I've forgotten his real name, I shall never forget that his nickname... was Smiley.

He was dubbed, with typical 5th grade wit, Smiley Butterfly Idiot. I've never participated in penpal exchanges since. Wouldn't it be nice if the story ended there?

Yes. Yes, it would. The summer before my senior year in high school, the phone rang. It was a boy, which was quite unusual. I had no idea who it could be.

"This is Smiley," he said, as though we were best friends and he called every day and I should automatically know who he was.

"Smiley? Smiley?" I was confused, but it was beginning to dawn on me. You really don't meet a lot of Smileys.

"Yeah, we were penpals in 5th grade. So what are you up to?"

"Up to?"

"Yeah. You still like to read?"

He talked to me for about half an hour. I was petrified and rather disgusted the whole time and just wanted it to be over. What kind of person calls up an old fifth-grade penpal that they never corresponded with beyond the mandatory in-class letters? And asks them what's new in their life? Out of the blue? Why did he still remember me? Why did he still have my phone number?

Somehow he came up in conversation the other day and it occurs to me that I'm still living here, where he knows the number. Is he just going to call every eight years for an update? Hopefully by 2006 I'll be long gone.

15:30. I'm sitting at my computer, reloading and reloading Internet Explorer, annoyed that the Albion email server still isn't up. I'm feeling there's something missing in my life. When I was in France, there was a sense of newness and adventure. Everything was a new experience. Right now, there is too little adventure in my life. I consider blogging about it, but decide that blogging about the lack of adventure would be really boring. I despair and return to work.

16:15. The lights flicker, then I lose power to my computer, losing whatever file I was working on. This is the second time this week that it's happened. I curse the construction workers for blowing another fuse, then realize that it's not only my end of the room, but the lights and all of the computers. I look through the door of the sorting room and discover that the lights are out there as well. Damned construction. I realize that I haven't heard any construction noise in a while, and someone points out that they're not working anymore. Someone calls the appropriate campus authorities and finds out that the whole campus is down. Gradually, as we call out to other places, we learn that all of Ann Arbor has lost power. People start speculating about anti-Affirmative-Action terrorists.

Brian gets off the phone with his wife, who says that she thinks that New York City has lost power as well. People start speculating about real terrorists. I am reminded of something I read somewhere about a device that somehow destroys all electrical signals, but I'm not sure if this actually exists.

16:30. After running around for a while like chickens with our heads cut off and calling everyone we know, we've run out of things to do. We can't work without lights or computers, so we're released for the day.

My dad works next door and we can't get ahold of him on the phone, so I run down the hill to see how his workplace is dealing with the blackout. I creep across the lawn and peek through his window, only to see him sitting in his well-lit office, tapping away at his computer. The damned building has a back-up generator, so they're just fine except that the phones and air-conditioning don't work.

17:45. The three McNitts, having stalled on leaving for a while, start the journey home. We came in to work separately this morning, but abandon one car in the parking lot. It's going to be a zoo anyway, so we might as well decrease the roads' vehicle population by one. The drive is surprisingly easy, all things considered. There are big backups and people cheating at intersections, but there are also strange gaps between intersections where one can drive quite freely.

I wonder where my website is hosted and regret having never gotten around to backing up my blog.

The radio says it may be 3 to 4 hours before the power is back.

18:30. We arrive at home. We walk around the house to unplug everything, automatically flicking on light switches as we enter a room and flicking them off as we leave. The worst part is that I'm surprised when the light doesn't come on. I am surprised every single time.

I suspect that my brain may be powered by the now-nonexistent eckeltricity, especially when I am reading a comic where the characters are making microwave popcorn and my first reaction is What are they doing? You can't make microwave popcorn! There's no POWER.

19:00. Robin's mom is in Chile and she's home alone and scared. I invite her over for dinner and we play cribbage. Although all of my normal mental capacities seem to have been lost with the electricity, I have developed SUPER CRIBBAGE POWERS, sort of in the way that Daredevil lost his sight and developed his other senses. I attract amazing hands and peg well, but lose my powers once I become aware of them, and only win by about two points.

Dinner is spaghetti and tomato sauce and corn from the garden, all made possible by our grill's burner. Hardship? Bah. This is an adventure.

It starts to get dark out and we search out the flashlights. I find a snake-light and wrap it around my neck. When I look up, the light moves up. When I look down, it moves down. Left, right, all around, and so on. I declare myself Light Girl and am excited when people actually use my new moniker, such as, "Hey Light Girl, get over here and help me find another flashlight."

The radio says that it may be 24 hours before the power is back up.

21:15. Robin claims to be afraid of looters. My mom points out that looters are more likely to go someplace like Best Buy than our houses. Robin and I look at each other in interest. Looting Best Buy sounds like a good idea. Then we remember that we are the biggest goody-goodies ever and sigh in disappointment.

Robin can't leave her dog alone to come and stay with us, so I go to spend the night at her house. Upon arrival we decide to play Scrabble but first search out all of the candles in the house. We discover that the light produced by one candle can be significantly increased by placing reflective objects behind the candle, so we almost forget to play Scrabble in our nerdly search for the ultimate reflection. Soon we are surrounded by candles, silver teapots, trays, pans, and cookie sheets.

We turn on the radio. Electricity has returned in Michigan's thumb. That's nice - the Michigan Militia will have power and no one else will. It's important to get them back online.

The radio seems to have no speculations about when the power will return.

21:30. Have begun to pretend am Amish. Have also begun to talk like B. Jones. Begin speculating that outages were caused by Amish who have decided to start proselytizing.

22:00. Still listening to the radio and playing Scrabble. The game will never end. Foster Braun keeps talking about how the outages may have been caused by a turban exploding or a turban bursting into flames, and how once you take one of those turbans out, it could shut down all of the turbans in the system. It's a turBINE, dude. An exploding turban never caused more than a headache.

Businesses are being advised not to open tomorrow. We are excited at the prospect of a day off.

22:20. We knew that we had to cut down on water use, using it only for drinking and medical purposes. Now the radio tells us that drinking water must be boiled before use. Of course, they tell us this right after Robin drinks a big glass, so we start wondering if she's going to grow another head. We search the house for drinkable substances and find one bottle of iced tea, so we have to drive over to my house and wake my parents up.

Someone on the radio points out that U-M has their own electrical system (which they can, but don't usually, use during the summer). So much for my day off.

23:00. Robin's boyfriend, Bob, calls from Virginia. I ask him if my website is online, and he says yes. Good, I can stop worrying about not having backed up.

Robin trounces me in Scrabble, which is not hard to do when she got 43 points in the first round and I got, I believe, 8. We go to bed around midnight.

The next day. 7:00. The alarm goes off. I don't want to get up and go to work. Luckily, the radio announces that U-M is shut down and employees should not report to work. I roll over on the cat and go back to sleep.

8:15. "We have power!" Robin exclaims. I am happy. I roll back over on the cat.

Eventually, I realize that I'm not going to get back to sleep, so I get up and help plug things back in.

According to the radio, it turns out Ann Arbor water is just fine. So much for additional heads.

Since we can't sleep, we decide to go for a drive. We go to my house, taking a roundabout route so that we can see the lines at the gas station. How many of these people actually need gas? How many actually have somewhere to go?

Once at my house, where the power has also been restored, we turn on the TV. Detroit's mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, is on TV, saying that Detroit is the greatest and that we are now prepared for all kinds of eventualities, such as tornadoes or hurricanes. I don't know how long Kwame has lived in Michigan, but I don't remember ever having a hurricane here. Where would it come from? Up the St Lawrence Seaway? And what is he doing wearing a pink shirt?

So anyway, that's pretty much the end. Later in the day we went to Kroger's, where they were giving away bags of ice, and Meijer's, where they were running on auxiliary power, so we bought emergency essentials like tequila, Cointreau and limes. In an emergency situation, you have to make some sacrifices, so we had to get key limes instead of big ones.

So danger was averted, nothing serious happened, we didn't lose power long enough to suffer any real hardship, and I had my adventure. Hooray.

Yesterday, going to Dominicks, we went to park in a parking structure. A maniac in a red car came careening around the corner in the structure, heading right at us, and I yelped and pointed, OH MY GOD WE'RE GOING TO DIE IS THAT A PIZZA ON HIS ROOF?

Robin braked out of fear, the driver reacted and pulled to the right, and disaster was avoided. The crazy driver saw me pointing and stopped his car next to ours.

We pointed at the top of his car. "There's a pizza on your roof," we informed him.

He rolled down his window. "What?"

"There's a pizza on your roof," Robin repeated.

"What?"

"There's a pizza. On your roof."

He looked confused. We pointed some more. "Pizza. Roof."

He reached up and found his pizza, then continued on. We parked, walked through the Business School, and headed towards Dominick's. Looking both ways before we crossed the street, we saw red and blue lights flashing. We looked to see what was going on and saw that two police cars had pulled over a familiar-looking red car, for what we could only assume was drunk or reckless driving.

We wondered if we would have been pulled over if we hadn't stopped him. At least we saved him from the charge of Recklessly Endangering Food.

Robin and I played Scrabble last night (I will refrain from metioning Rummikub because I was thoroughly trounced) and I won, with the two of us working together to find words like toile, zone and quo in each other's letters, and with a whopping winning score of 246.

After the game, Robin took a look at the box, which reported that a good Scrabble player should score at least 300 points.  Damned box.  What the hell do you know, anyway?  I'd like to see you do a crossword puzzle, Mr Smarty Smarty Board Game Box.

Now I remember why I play Scrabble on average once per year.

Good Idea: Scheduling the time you have to take off for Wednesday morning so you can sleep in.

Bad Idea: Scheduling the time you have to take off for the Wednesday morning when the roof is being replaced.

It sounds like Godzilla is playing with my house, and like eventually he's going to break through the roof and get me. It sounds like the roofers are just jumping up and down and occasionally falling through the roof, rather than doing any replacing. It sounds like they are scraping every shingle up by hand, whereas the loud drone of machinery would perhaps be more soothing just because it would be more regular.

Point is, it sounds like I'm not getting back to sleep.

Last night, I got a frantic call from Robin. She was at the car wash, and I had to come join her. What did I see when I got there?

The Oscar Mayer Weinermobile. At the car wash. This is one of the times when I realize I need a digital camera.

Katie has requested that I recount for her The Story of the Balloon. It is a frightening story, so I suggest that you hold onto your socks and tighten your diapers. Not really. It's mostly just a really stupid story about Why I Hate Balloons.

When I went to France in 1996 with my high school group, my mom bought me a balloon when I came back. It's a strange tradition in our family to buy balloons for people returning from Abroad.

The balloon was shaped like a moon and had a face on it. It lived in my room and I ignored it until it started getting creepy. I would go to bed at night, and in the morning, I would discover the creepy creepy balloon hovering over my head. This happened twice - the balloon would be sent to some corner of the room, only to loom over my head in the morning. It was losing helium, too, so it was hovering closer and closer to my head. It may have had plans to eat me, if I hadn't woken up first.

Finally, I decided the balloon was too creepy and put it in my bathroom for the night. The next morning when I woke up... it had ESCAPED from my bathroom and was once again hovering low over my head.

I have been traumatized for life. My mom doesn't buy me balloons when I come home anymore.

Today on the way home from Antrosio's barbecue, I ended up stopping at a light behind a car with an "Albion College Alumni" windshield decal. As I examined the car further, I discovered that it had a Linuxgrüven bumper sticker and one of those oval stickers, showing that the driver had been to Germany.

Hmmm, I thought to myself, Albion College, computers, foreign travel... that's me driving that car! So I changed lanes in order to get a look at my doppelganger. And who was it? The Simpsons' Comic Book Guy in human form. Flattering.

Seven years ago, when I went to France for the first time, I remember being concerned about the French people's smoking habits. Since my grandpa quit, I didn't know anyone who smoked and I found it a disgusting, repulsive thing to do. I was filled with disdain for smokers and swore I would never be friends with anyone who did such a thing. I remember being scared that I would be peer-pressured to try it (having never been peer pressured into anything by my very geeky and well-behaved American friends) or that people would (gasp!) smoke around me.

And smoke they did. Americans smoke, but nothing like the French. I remember huddling under a bus shelter in the rain with about 20 other high-school-aged kids while everyone lit up. I was offered a cigarette, but no one pressured me when I refused. And I didn't cough too much, and I wasn't rude to them, and I survived.

And now, after repeated visits and stays in France, it just seems so normal to me that I didn't even understand why people objected to my pictures of dinner with the S2OLs. "They're smoking at the table? Didn't that bother you?" It didn't, surprisingly enough. I suppose that I should be proud of my adaptability.

I went back to my high school today to visit my former French teacher. As I walked in the building, the first thing that hit me was the smell. Not that it was a bad smell, but smell has a way of triggering memories more than the other senses, I think. All of a sudden, I felt like I was back in that period of 1994-98 where I actually belonged there.

But I didn't, and because I am a Suspicious Outsider, I had to go to the main office and sign in as a visitor. We didn't have any of that crap when I was in high school. Back in my day, we... anyway. I knew I could pass for a student, but that students weren't supposed to be in the hallways between classes. Rather than risk getting detention, I went to the main office and started filling out the sign-in sheet.

"Who are you? Who do you want to see? What are you here for?" the office-woman asked me, accusingly.
"I'm here to see Isabelle C--," I replied, "I'm a former student."
"Is she expecting you?"
"Well, not today specifically, but I knew that this was her free hour, so--"
"Well I'll have to see if I can get ahold of her so that she can tell me if you can go."
"Well, I--"
"I can't just let you go up there. What does she teach?"
"French. But I--"
"I'll call her."
"She doesn't know I'm coming today, specifically, but she does expect me."
Quizzical look.
"I've been emailing with her."
"Well then, okay."

She gave me an enormous neon-green Visitor sticker to fill out with my name and the date and to stick on myself. I crammed it into my pocket and went upstairs.

What I loved about our church Christmas pageants when I was little was that it was the same every year. You might start out as a sheep, but by the time you were a bit older, you could have the script and the songs nearly memorized and would be all set for one of the juicy roles like Mary or a Wise Man (no one wants to be Joseph - he's boring and has to hang around with a girl). I was offered the part of Mary once, but I didn't want to be Mary to Scott Weber's Joseph. I don't know why exactly, because I don't remember really disliking him.

There is a student at Albion who I haven't seen in the four years that he's been there. This may be because I've forgotten what he looks like now. I can't think of him without remembering him at about nine years old, dressed as the third Wise Guy, following the flat, monotone delivery of "Where is he who is born King of the Jews?" and "For we have seen his star in the East..." with a very lively, animated, game-show-announcer-esque "...and are COME to WORship him!"

I was sad when our choir director left and we went through a series of new scripts and even years where there was no pageant at all. My senior year, more in the interest of tradition than in religious affairs or the church, I volunteered to direct the pageant and resurrected the script. I had the disadvantage that none of the current crop of actors knew the songs or script as well as we had, but with the church organist as Musical Director, we managed to get them singing and practicing lines and pulled off something nice.

I don't really know why I felt I had to blog about this, except that at 22 years old, I still remember big chunks of dialogue from the play. As I sat eating dinner tonight, I suddenly remembered how it made me giggle when the narrator said that the shepherds "found Mary and Joseph and the baby lying in a manger."

Earlier this week, I was walking out of Borders and going to my car. As I walked through the parking lot, a car came driving striaght at me. I thought it was angling to get into a parking space, but it kept coming towards me. I very awkwardly jumped out of the way... just as it pulled into a handicapped parking space. Uh, I hate to tell you this, lady, but eligibility for a handicapped space is not based on how many people you have handicapped.

I was cursed yesterday with waitpersons who, for some reason I never identified, hated me. Or they hated everyone at our table. But mostly me.

At lunch, we went to the restaurant whose name I can never remember. Either Round Robin or Red Robin. Anyway. We sat at the same table we sat at all three times I've been there. I'm going to start calling it my "usual table". Last time, it was I who hated the waitress, because she kept calling me "hon". Different waitress this time, but equally evil. We all placed our orders and the waitress left.

A different waitress brought us our food. Becky got her burger, Mommy got her guacamole burger (but with no guacamole, so they had to get some from the kitchen and give it to her on the side!), Daddy got his turkey burger, Aunt Pat got her turkey burger. The waitress looked at me. "Did you get something?" "I thought I did," I replied. "I ordered a BLTA croissant and french onion soup..."

She went to get our waitress, who returned to our table. "I'm sorry," she said, "I forgot to turn your order in..."

Thus the slowest eater at the table was the last served. You would think they could bring my soup out first, but they waited until it was all ready to bring it out. Thankssomuch.

I ate my soup and by that time everyone was finished, so I took my sandwich home in a box and put it in the refrigerator. We got busy with other stuff and I never got around to eating it.

So then we went to Becky's graduation. About halfway through the Ls, we started to notice we were hungry. This was pretty understandable, especially for poor srah who had a cup of soup for lunch. We were a bit disappointed to find, when the graduation ended around 7:30 or 7:45, that our dinner reservations were for 9:15. But we headed over there and ended up getting seated early.

Maybe that's why he hated us. Because we, a party of 13, showed up early. Hard to tell. We had to wait a while for the last two members of our party. Maybe refilling our drinks was what drove him nuts.

He went around the table, collecting drink orders. When he got to Alex, Alex asked if he could have a hot chocolate. The waiter said he couldn't, which Alex took to mean that they were all out. So he asked for a lemonade, and the waiter said he couldn't have that either. After Alex settled for a Coke and the waiter left, we began speculating that it wasn't that they didn't have hot chocolate or lemonade, it was just that the waiter didn't want to give him any.

When he came back, he took our orders. He asked what kind of salad dressing I wanted and I asked if I could have French onion soup instead (I know, my name is srah and I'm addicted to French onion soup. Sorry). He said I couldn't. This rather surprised me, since it said on the menu that French onion soup could be substituted for soup or salad. But I didn't argue. Maybe he just didn't approve of my choice.

Once he had taken everyone's meal orders, my mom tried to order a hot chocolate for my sister. The waiter said they didn't have hot chocolate, and my mom pointed out that it was on the menu. He said that it wasn't, so we had to point it out to him. As long as we were pointing things out, I mentioned that the menu allowed the substitution of French onion soup for salad, so we changed our orders for that, too.

Perhaps he was upset about the soup and being proved wrong. Maybe he knew that I was with the hot-chocolate-lemonade boy (who did get his hot chocolate, after all). Maybe he forgot to put in my order. Or maybe duck just takes longer to cook than anything else. But once again, I was the last one served, by a long shot.

After I sat there, foodless, for a while, people started sending green beans down the table to sustain me. Finally, my food arrived. I gobbled up my yummy duck and then we had tea and coffee and dessert. I ordered a cup of tea and when he brought it, I asked if I could have some cream. I had to repeat myself several times for him to understand, and then the waiter announced, "Yes, you may." Well thank you, mommy, I thought. Thank you for allowing me to have some cream in my tea.

I'm sure the second time was my punishment for trying to convince my mom not to leave a tip for the first waitress, but I'm not sure what I did to deserve her. Whatever it was, I'm sorry. I apologize. Just don't give me any more service like this!

I never ever get hit on, but I think the gas station attendant was trying to pick me up last night. I had really stupid pigtails sticking out of the sides of my head and I was clearly an idiot because I don't know how to flip up the little thingy before I start pumping gas, but apparently that wasn't important to him. Or maybe he liked me because I was stupid. Or maybe he was just really bored and lonely.

I'm not going to bore you with the details of our fascinating conversation, but I will tell you that I keep telling everyone about this, just because I never ever get hit on by strangers. I think I'm most flattered that he thought I was 18 rather than 12.

I hit a raccoon tonight as I was driving Alex home from the movie theatre. I think it was unavoidable, but I'm having trouble distinguishing reality from the lies I've been telling myself to make me feel better. I think there was a car coming from the other direction and another one right behind me. I think he came out of nowhere. I know I tried to avoid actually running him over, hoping that the car would just pass over him, but I felt a thump.

When I drove back home, I scanned the road for him, hoping that I would see him. If he was there, that meant that I killed him. If he wasn't, that could mean that I injured him and he managed to crawl off the road and suffer a lot before he died. Or it could mean that I only stunned him and he rolled off the road and went about his raccoony business.

I didn't see him on the way home. I don't know what that means. I hope he wasn't a mommy raccoon. I hope he didn't suffer. I don't know what to do with myself right now, other than cry and cry and cry.

My family and I went to the graduation party of a family friend today. Our families are friends because our mothers were in the same Mothers' Group before Nathan and I were born, then both Nathan and I and Becky and Galen (the graduate) went to nursery school together. We saw each other at Halloween every year for quite a while, but drifted apart as we got older. We still exchange Christmas cards and get updates on what they're doing, and invite each other to graduation parties.

I'm not sure if he had any say in the decision, but about 18 or 19 years ago, Nathan and I were going to get married. The fact that he's my ex-fiancé only makes our conversation more interesting.

He came over to our table to say hi, my mom asked him what he was doing, and he talked about his life in NYC for a while. Then he turned to me.

"So what are you doing now, Jill?"

"I'm-" Suddenly I realized the name tacked onto the end of the previous question. Should I correct him? Did he think I was someone else or had he just forgotten my name? Had I misheard?

Instead of being cool (I had been feeling cool, anyway) and giving him the well-thought-out repetitive answer I've been giving to everyone, Nathan got a specialized, individual answer:

"What? Sarah. What? I graduated. I just graduated. I'm Fr-I'm going to teach French. Next year. I'm going to teach English in France. Assistant teach. What?"

I don't think he caught on that he'd called me by the wrong name. I spent the rest of the evening trying to avoid having to talk to him. Excellent.

I don't know why I was embarassed, since he was the one who forgot my name. Maybe it's the embarassment of being forgettable...

Yesterday when we arrived at work, there was a bunny sitting on the lawn.
"Bunny!" I exclaimed.
The bunny hopped.
"Bunny!" I pointed out to my father.
The bunny hopped.
"Bunny! Come here so I can hug you and love you forever!" I cried.
The bunny took off like a shot across the lawn. Smart bunny.

Someone pooped in Rob's shoes.

This was months ago, but I've been thinking about it all day. It probably happened at about 3am, in the hallway outside their door, which was where Rob used to keep his shoes. What I'm wondering is: Did someone poop directly into Rob's shoes? If so, weren't they afraid of being seen? And if not, how did they transport the poop to Rob's shoes?

Maybe it never happened. All we know is that his shoes were gone in the morning and the maintenance guy told Rob that he had thrown them away because someone had pooped in them. I think we should check out what size shoes the maintenance guy wears.

People say that the French are rude, but in the French post office, they were nothing but helpful and nice. In the United States, on the other hand...

I went to the post office to mail Denis and Sophie's presents to France. In order to save time, I used one of the Bentley's Priority Mail boxes, which Bill very nicely let me have for free. I was going to send it Priority Mail anyway, so that was handy. Then when Amy, my mom and I went out to lunch, I popped over to the post office while they were waiting for the table to be ready.

The post office was surprisingly empty. I figure now that everyone must have known about Ugly Suspenders Man and gone to another branch, but I didn't. I got in line, then I was called and I walked up to the counter.

I put my box down on the counter and said "I'd like to send this to France." The clerk, who will now be known as Ugly Suspenders Man (because he was ugly and had suspenders, not because his suspenders were ugly) looked at the box and looked at me. He said nothing, but stared at me as if to say "Why do you exist?" After a while I got sick of being stared at and said, "Can I send this like this?"

"No," he replied quite simply.

"Is it the box?" I asked.

"It says here [once, very small where the postage is supposed to go - I hadn't seen it but that's no excuse for him to be rude] that this is for the United States and U.S. possessions. Last time I checked, France didn't fit that."

Isn't that a rude and nasty way of putting it? Maybe it's just me. He suggested that I come back and try again later, as in "Leave my post office and come back when I'm not working." I asked if it would be possible to send it if I changed the box, and did they have any boxes I could use? Could he possibly suggest one, or be in some way helpful?" USM replied that there was "one of those left over there, but you'll have to pay for it and you'll have to repack it and go to the end of the line." I loved how he added the end of the line bit, as though I were going to push up to the front of the line just to see him again sooner.

The worst part of it is that I felt like he was abusing me just because I look young... and that made me want to go crying to my mommy.