dear reader(s)

Please stay with me! I have seen the error of my ways (communicating sporadically at best, being a sometime blogger, emailer, and caller) and have found my way back to the light. Here are some things that have happened since my last missymussion:

I. School let out for Spring Break. I now have one week (of two) left, and while I have to accomplish a great many things (planting a garden, reading five books, grading, spring cleaning, getting a haircut, doing my taxes, and starting an exercise regimen), I feel more relaxed than I have all year because there's only one quarter left, the State Assessment is over, and the end is in sight.

II. Carolyn and Scott, guests extraordinaire, honored us by spending their honeymoon with us. I've always hearted Carolyn, but now I heart Scott as well! He made a great playmate for Ben, too. Their stay was ideal for several reasons:
a) neither Ben nor I had to work;
b) Scott can't stand to have dirty dishes in the sink, and takes care of business; and
c) they share my attitude toward vacations, and life in general:
1. if ice cream presents itself, eat it.
2. Wal-Mart and Costco are perfectly respectable and worthwhile tourist destinations.
3. There's no wrong time to drink alcohol when you're on a sanctioned vacation.
d) they left me a little gift of Scott's rosemary-thyme body wash which I had been
coveting, though I tried to hide the fact that coveted it.

III. We had a par-tee at our house that, may I say, was our best yet. We invited the brothers, and they serenaded us with bluegrass music, silly ditties, and an old-fashioned sing-song broke out on the back lanai. The neighbors probably hate us now, but it was worth it. There is a hilarious anecdote about Ribsy that I am trying to figure out how to tell while preserving its hilarity.

IV. I got a ridiculous-looking sunburn that sealed my fate as a leathery-chested lady in the now-nearer future.

V. Ben scored tickets to a Chocolate Festival, where we were served about 40 different chocolate treats, coffee, wine, and champagne. I made the mistake of eating a 3-pound Portuguese sausage-omelette-fried rice at Teshima's just beforehand, and thus had my smallest appetite for chocolate ever, but it was fun all the same. I drank enough champagne to de-sensitize my fullness mechanism and managed to choke down some truffles.

VI. The Chocolate Festival, which was a fundraiser for the local Waldorf School, provided me with a new poorly-reasoned soapbox from which to pontificate. I need to work on the specifics, but I am pretty sure I feel strongly about it, and will start a viewpoint article for the newspaper that will never see the world outside my computer screen. More on this later.

Dang it, I can't get the spacing right on my outline. Please know that I do know how to write in outline form.