This morning I interrupted Ross in the middle of a shave because I had to pee before I left to meet Anya in Teele Square. As he walked out of the bathroom he showed me, proudly, the shape he’d fashioned his hair into for fun and I admired it (please understand, the boy needs to be encouraged to develop hobbies, so I take what I can get). Closing the bathroom door came the sunny remark, “You can take a picture of me, if you want!”

I did indeed want. Two pictures, in fact. Then I left the house to see Anya’s beautifully soothing and bright office space, shared a delicious lunch and equally delicious conversation with her, and finally wandered over to Magpie where we browsed the shelves and I valiantly continued to resist the temptation to break my “no unnecessary purchases” rule.

When I returned to the house later in the afternoon after a few errands, I made this with Ross sitting next to me on the bed offering helpful comments. He was slightly perturbed by the use of the word “assault,” but in the end he had to submit to my strong sense of artistic ownership.

When I was done with my creation I sampled the Kimchi Soup with Tuna Ross had made while I was gone, and it was significantly less unappealing than I had imagined. Score!

Since then we’ve been doing a bout of purging: making bags of clothes to donate, recycling reams of old papers, sorting CDs into “keep” and “throw” and “sell” piles, and putting all of the stuffed toys we own (not a pathological number, but more than you would perhaps expect two mature adults to have accumulated—I blame it on the fact that when I was 21 I lived with Sean) in a very sad little box that says “Stuffed Toys: 25 cents each” on it. It doesn’t seem as if we’ve made that much of a dent, but I know every bit of progress is helpful. Having made ourselves quite ill from inhaling dust for two hours, we are both resolutely committed to a life of refreshing simplicity from now on; it’ll be interesting to see how long that lasts. I think it might actually take though—I’m slowly getting used to just looking appreciatively at objects I covet and walking away instead of feeling like I have to own them.

In other news, I’m about to send off my 27th Bookmooch package, which makes me really pleased. I love it when things just work.

I hope you’re having a fabulous weekend, lovelies. See you soon.

Every year around this time I go through a period of slowdown, where both my body and mind adjust to the change in weather and it takes me twice as long to walk across the kitchen to open the fridge, or put away a book on the shelf. That, along with the million gazillion articles I’ve had to write lately, is my excuse for not being more verbose here lately—and yes, I think I’m sticking to it. I had this thing I wanted to tell you tonight about the complex consequences of every economic decision we make and how supporting American biofuels over gasoline can, in combination with protectionist U.S. tariffs, contribute to rainforest deforestation in Brazil. But then I decided it would depress me too much to write about that, so I’ll save it for later and just tell you that tomorrow is my Last. Day. In. The. Office.

I don’t quite know how to express how I feel about this, but I suspect most of you can guess anyway.

Insert long, whistling sigh of indeterminate sentiment.

Could be worse.

Working again. Also wilting. Also craving pizza, which is crazy because we had a perfectly delicious dinner of teriyaki salmon, thin asparagus, and brown rice, and because it is too hot for pizza. Unless it is cold pizza. Can you order cold pizza?

Dear girl standing in the road with the extremely cute black puppy who yelled at her dog for walking too close to an approaching car,
I am not a traffic expert, but maybe you could solve that problem by not standing in the road?
Love,
Helpful Pedestrian

Dear adorably curly-haired and bespectacled CVS employee ringing me up this evening,
When your nearby colleague said, “Thank you for putting our laziest register clerk to work!” and I said, “My pleasure,” what was the accent with which you said, grinning, “I am not a register clerk—I am a technician!” before pointing to your badge? It was very musical. I would like to develop such an accent myself.
Love,
Inquiring Mind

Dear water sprinklers going off in the little playground next to the baseball field near my house,
thank you for cooling my face. I was walking very fast to get home in time for a very important conference chat (is there such a thing as a trivial conference chat? I do not think so.) and I was hot and tired. You were lovely; I may have a small crush on you. It is too bad you disappeared into the drain moments after kissing me.
Love,
Not Quite Exactly Ready for the Summer

Dear grass under my feet in the baseball field,
you were both green and springy. I liked that. Maybe after I get over my recent thing with the water sprinklers, I could call you?
Love,
Summer-Ready Feet

Dear Polaroids I am taking and which cost almost a dollar each,
please stop sucking so entirely. You make me sad.
No love,
Inept Toy Camera Owner

Dear Jenn,
I am so glad you are back.
Love,
Me

It’s about to storm! The air smells so. Unbelievably. Good.

Ross is out running right now.

Our landlord has been showing new people around all week. It feels good to be able to look everyone in the eye and tell them, smiling, that we love living here. It’s amazing how much this house has come to signify home to me, not in a romantic sense so much but almost in a semantic one, as if the meaning of the word is simply derived from the combination of these letters and no others. When I imagine myself at other points in my life, four months from now or forty years, in my mind I am still pulling the laundry out of the small closet opposite the bathroom door, still turning on the lamp next to the bed (the one that Alec made), still hearing the same china mugs clink together on the same shelf as I put them away.

I love being able to make my way around in the dark in the middle of the night knowing exactly where everything is. I love how rooms become part of the body, the fact that motions to rise from a particular chair or cross a particular carpet are memorized by muscle.

We’ll be here two more months, and then we’ll be gone. I hope it remembers us, too.

1) I usually shy away from posting large images here because they didn’t fit on the screen of my old computer (even before I shrank it). This is an experiment: can you tell me if you have to scroll to see this photograph? And if so, what monitor size/screen resolution are you using? Many thanks. I know it is a terribly boring question.

2) At some point during the last two hours, I managed to skin a tiny portion of the knuckle on my right index finger. I just noticed; I have no idea how that happened.

3) My best guess is that it took place while I was prying the lid off the tamarind concentrate we used to make the South Indian curry that lives on page 124 of this cookbook (thank you, Estee dear!). It smelled absolutely terrific while we were cooking, and although its color did not exactly match the photograph in the book, it tasted—if I do say so myself—dashed delicious.

4) I am not sure why I decided to type “dashed” just there; I haven’t been reading any Wodehouse or anything. But I jolly well should, don’t you think?

5) I read a horribly depressing editorial in the New York Times today about the rapid and all but ignored decline in the numbers of various common bird species over the past few decades, including several different kinds of sparrow. After that every sparrow I saw on the way home was like a needle in my conscience. I wanted to apologize to them all for being so irretrievably, inexcusably human.

6) I finished the novel I was reading when I offended crazy balloon lady. I read its last few pages on the T, even though (to tell you the truth) every time I have fished it out since then I have looked around surreptitiously in case she was in the car. I wasn’t sure about the book at first—the narrator has a tendency to get just the tiniest bit too clever with language—but by the time I got to the end I kind of loved it in lots of bizarre ways. It also made me want to visit Bombay, so let’s get on that India trip, okay, family?

7) We have fresh organic strawberries in the fridge that simply have to be eaten. I must answer the call of duty. Later.