This Week in Review

I haven’t written a week in review in a looong time, and I’ll be honest. Today I do so because a few bits and pieces on which I feel the need to report continue to pinball across my brain, but I lack the energy to start a full-blown blog post at 3:19 on a Friday afternoon. So as they say, you get what you get.

For those of you who have been wondering about Gladys and the Call of the Wild, the mystery is no closer to being solved. Every day, at one minute and twenty second intervals, from 5:15 a.m. to 8:15 p.m., recorded bird sounds emanate from our mysterious neighbor’s open window. The man who lives there has not turned up at all. It's been going on for close to a month now and we are trying to ignore the repetitive noise, meeting with fair success other than that first predawn blurt through our open windows. Demonstrating keen restraint, I continue to bite down on the, err, vocabulary, that is wont to crop up upon being awakened with such cruel disregard, but tomorrow is Saturday. All bets are off.

When you finally devise a little plan that might make good use of your photography/boat obsession, you can guarantee that something computer-related inside the camera will malfunction. Badly.

Further, if you acquiesce to an offer of a second-hand air conditioner for the bedroom…the first you’ve deigned to own in your entire life, you can be sure that about the time you go to bed, a cool wind will blow in.

If you go to the post office to mail the books to the winners of Wednesday's “not contest” and the clerk asks: “Did you write a book?” and you answer “Not yet” without giving it a thought, the word “yet” is lush and full and drips with promise and optimism.

There is nothing, I repeat nothing, more heartwarming than lolling back to sleep after that first annoying wake up, to be surprised at 6:20 by breakfast in bed, an idea conceived and executed the teenager who usually doesn’t rise until noon, and served to you 10 seconds before you remember it is your birthday.