I thought I would just put down here, readers-mine, since I do use this space as a kind of memory-capsule, and who knows—I may wish to remember this time when I am extremely old and ready to laugh about it—that

1) Bad Stuff is happening with work. The Global Economic Meltdown (or GEM, as Ross likes to call it) we have all been hearing so much about is currently busily melting away a rather large corner of my pants, and I do not like it, not one bit.
2) I am slightly preoccupied with the Bad Stuff.
3) I hope to stop being preoccupied with the Bad Stuff very soon, and start channeling it all into Productivity! Creativity! and Various Other Important -ivities!
4) Please note: The Bad Stuff is not going to kill me. If you’re thinking about getting your broadsword out and charging over to defend me, put away the thought. I do not need anything, except for a series of strong drinks and a new pair of pants.

Of course, you should feel free to shoot me a line at any time if you have paying writing work to offer me. My experience includes, but is not limited to, witty and mildly literary emails, break-up letters, post-break-up letters, welcome signs, amusing grocery lists, to-do-lists for depressive people, captions for stick-figure doodles, questions for the ages, and self-deprecating Facebook status updates. Contact me to discuss specific project proposals.

Today I lay on my back in the sun and read.

I swung on a a swing with such delight that a 13-year-old girl swinging languidly next to me was moved to utter to her friends, with an air of great disdain, “That girl really likes swinging, yo. She’s enjoyin’ herself!”

I went to yoga and rocked the bow pose.

I had lunch with Ross on the grassy lawn of the main quadrangle of the university, the sun so bright and hot on our backs we began to be covered in a thin film of sweat. The year’s first sweat—it should be divine, so sweet we could bathe in it—but instead it feels almost like a punishment. Then you froze, now you shall burn. Bodies are so temperamental.

I put my ailing rosemary in a proper pot (why is rosemary always ailing? It’s as if it doesn’t think Chicago’s weather is as healthy as the weather in the Mediterranean, or something) and cleaned out last season’s roots and dead branches from two other pots; I saved as much soil as I could from those, to make a ready place for the nasturtiums I’m going to plant tomorrow and the tomatoes Megan is slowly coaxing from seed.

While repotting the rosemary, a piece of grit flew into my left eye, sharp as a needle, and I could not get it out for half an hour, flush as I might. Finally, I thought it might be better to let a professional maul my eye for me (and make sure I didn’t have a corneal abrasion), and as I sat in the office of the nearest optometrist, waiting to pay a hundred dollars for him to get the piece of dirt out for me, I blinked hard and out it came. I should have asked Ross to lick it out for me; that would have been a sign of true love.

While flushing and blinking and swearing at the tiny piece of dirt in my eye, my friendly UPS guy arrived bearing my new wedding ring, and undoubtedly thought I was in the midst of some horrible emotional crisis, red-eyed and teary and sniffly-nosed. But the ring is marvelous: wide and matte and slightly concave. It feels good to have it around my finger.

To celebrate the fact that gardening did not make me go blind, Ross and I picked up some of this at the store and mixed the first summer drinks of the year to imbibe on the back porch. I made them strong. Really strong. So strong I was willing to write to you here, though I swore not to.

Sun is life. Heat is life. I am here and alive and, if not well, then at least beautifully, deliciously warm.

I’ve been a frequently absent host here at my own party for a while now, and dropping in to say hello to you all over these past few months I have felt a little more shy every time, trying out my voice just a little to see if it still works and then vanishing before anyone can tug on my shirtsleeve and bid me stay longer.

I’m pretty sure I lost my wedding ring last night. We went out for sushi, and I’m almost certain I was wearing it when we left the house, but when we unloaded the groceries we picked up on the way home it was no longer on my finger. It’s possible that I never had it on in the first place—I’m always taking it off to wash my hands or the dishes, or just to get more comfortable while I type—but I’ve looked in all the usual places now, and it hasn’t turned up. Since I can’t imagine not noticing it falling off while I was washing my hands in the restaurant bathroom, my best guess as to what happened is that the ring came off when I took off my gloves on the train to the restaurant, sat in my lap during the ride, and slipped onto the floor as I stood up to exit, stubbornly silent as it went astray.

This is not a terribly big deal (although I was very sad about it last night and Ross had to spend some time reassuring me that he did not feel I had let him down and that we were, in fact, most probably still married in the eyes of the law). When we got married we bought a very inexpensive pair of 14K white gold rings online, so there is no real romance associated in my mind with the purchase of the rings—I just checked, and the ones we picked out are still available on the website if I decide to replace it with the same design (I haven’t decided yet what I’m going to do). In all honesty, I was expecting my ring to go missing far sooner than this. I am an inveterate misplacer of objects, and as I said, I am constantly removing it and putting it in random places.

Still, over the past nearly-four-years I had eventually developed a kind of unswerving faith that the smooth, cool hoop was always going to be somewhere when I looked for it. I liked turning it around in my fingers and looking at the inscription on the inside, and I liked how its outer surface was slightly scratched while its inner surface stayed polished and wonderfully glassy. Every time Ross and I left the house for a vacation, or left a hotel room at the end of a vacation, we clinked our rings together to make sure we both had them.

My left hand feels denuded without the ring. I have my engagement ring, which is a trifle of a thing that I think is very pretty, with tiny what-look-like-sapphires-but-are-probably-just-glass stones in it—we got it at an antique store in Cambridge and its origin is unknown. But that is too large for my finger and I never got around to getting it resized.

Well, you know what this means: When I visit Sarah in Nebraska this week, I’m totally going to get hit on by cowboy-booted buckaroos in every country bar we go to now.

Yesterday afternoon, sitting in the waning light of our living room while wet chunks of snow, rain, and hail fell from the sky, a sudden desire to hear a particular Simon and Garfunkel song came upon Ross, as it does; a half hour later he had the album in question in his possession, as you do. Listening to it now, I recall many waning evenings spent kneeling of the floor of my parents’ bedroom in my late childhood, playing “Silent Night/7-O’clock News” over and over—trying to catch the low murmur of tragedy in the background of the hymn.

Ross’s song was “Patterns.”

The night sets softly with the hush of falling leaves,
Casting shivering shadows on the houses through the trees,
And the light from a street lamp paints a pattern on my wall,
Like the pieces of a puzzle, or a child’s uneven scrawl.

And the pattern still remains on the wall where darkness fell,
And it’s fitting that it should, for in darkness I must dwell.
Like the color of my skin, or the day that I grow old,
My life is made of patterns that can scarcely be controlled.

Cheery pair, Paul and Art.

On Thursday at the museum I worked on preparing a Yellow-Shafted Northern Flicker, which is a species of woodpecker that has the most amazing sunflower-golden coloration on the inside of its wings and tail feathers (there is a Red-Shafted variation that lives in the western United States, and has scarlet coloration instead). The Flicker also had a red bar across the back of its neck and a constellation of wonderfully elegant black spots on its lower belly, which made me think of a pattern on a fine silk summer dress. It was an utterly gorgeous bird. I am always slightly surprised when Dave hands me a pretty bird to skin, as I generally feel that when I am done with them they cannot help but have lost at least some of their beauty.

I wish I could say that I did the Flicker justice, but I’ve had a two-week hiatus from the museum, and it showed. For one thing, I ripped the skin in several places as I was working it away from the body. Most of the time, this isn’t terribly devastating to the final result, since once you finish up and fluff the feathers on a bird into place (I lose far fewer feathers as I’m working now, which is a huge relief) small tears are not at all noticeable and don’t have to be repaired. But this time I managed to create a significant gash right near the bird’s right ulna, so that when I slid the wingbone back into place it popped out of the skin. I had to sew that tear up. I also had trouble securing the two ulnas together, which you do by simply knotting them together with a piece of thread that runs across the bird’s chest cavity. This keeps its wings close to its body as the bird dries, protecting them from damage and allowing the bird to be stored in a smaller space when it is unpinned. You have to work the skin right down to where the ulna meets the carpus (see the fourth picture on this page) and make the knot there; otherwise, the string doesn’t stay tight enough and the wings will fall open once the bird has been sewn up. This happened to my Flicker. I could see one of the other volunteers look over at it as she was leaving, and I cringed.

There’s no denying that I’m improving, though incrementally—there’s just such a mountain to climb. A good skin is perfect. No feather is out of place, the shape of the body is just right; you feel the bird could open its eyes and take wing.

My second bird that day was a Common House Sparrow, a dowdy brown thing, but I adore sparrows. I gave it all the delicacy I could muster, and it turned out reasonably well. Fluffy poof of a bird.

P.S. When I had worked the Flicker’s skull out of its skin, I noticed two extra bands of cartilage spanning each side of the head that you don’t see on other birds: extra shock-absorption for all the drilling it does. Walking back from the gym this morning, Ross and I heard—and then saw—two downy woodpeckers hammering away sonorously in the upper branches of a tree behind our apartment building. I thought of those bands of cartilage, cushioning their brains, and grinned.