(Ellen took up with him again on a Thursday.  It was sudden.) 

Well, dolls.  There were cavities, six of them total, at the dentist’s today with the kids.  That means I’m awful.  My own mother turned out a perfectly toothed child, no cavities ever, never ever, her whole life.  Wait — that means A.’s awful.  I passed down the no-cavity gene, he fouled it.

The year 2000 was a leap year starting on Saturday.  It was also the Year of the Dragon and of Leo, too.  Scruffy’s underwear habit is insatiable.  Again, today, nothing of note. 

I’m working on timeline.  I’d left it loose, it’s time to nail it.  I hadn’t picked a year or a month in which to start, it changes page to page.  I’ve got Christmas right behind July 4th and ahead of Easter, I’ve got nighttime things happening in the day.  There’s 2001 always to deal with, too — an elephant if your story’s within 5 years on either side.  I’m leaning toward 2000, re: Where to start.

By the way, and this has nothing to do with that, but I’ve decided, finally, how to make peace with A.’s subway tattoo. I’m going to get one myself.  Either this.  Or this.  Lower back. 

(And psst — I’ll be here all week.)

My ankle still hurts, have I mentioned it yet?  It’s gone from throbbing to searing.  A. wants me to use crutches, I think I’m too clumsy. 

I’m working until Aunt Betty comes, then I will limp-walk her around the house (she’s never been here), fix her a sandwich and send her off.  Isn’t that thrilling?  I’ve obviously nothing to say.  I’m doing grunt work on my book, the dull scenes, the ones that need repair, it bores me.  Why can’t someone else come and spice them up, why always me? 

And I’ve got 30,000 words still to cut.  There are plenty I don’t like, there’s no reason it should be hard.  Here are some.  They can stay or go, I’m indifferent.  They’re not even in sequence, I’ve just grabbed them half-heartedly and plunked them down.  Read them or don’t read them.  Cut them up and use them for toothpicks.  Suits me just fine.

The kitchen, what a hideous monster it had become!  Fruit was piled high in bowls on the window sill, the bottom layers rotted.  Stacks of bills lay on the counter alongside clusters of Michael’s scribblings from school and Sarah’s blue-green drawings of pine trees and skies.  A pile of coupons — milk, bread, Campbell’s soup, Ritz Bits crackers; all expired – had amassed by the stove.  (Ellen would never successfully navigate the arcane world of coupons; nor would she stop trying.) 

There were cupboards open, she’d stopped bothering to close them.  The dishwasher was constantly full — clean, dirty, dirty clean, always full.  Food bits and slime from the morning’s breakfast and last night’s dinner clogged the sink. 

The hours from noon to five nearly killed her.  Over and over again.  Every day.  Howard kept busy at work, so distracted.  Ellen picked at her cuticles and grew anxious. 

There.  Now get on with whatever it was you were doing and if you have time to spare, bring me a Diet Coke, there’s one in the little house out back.  Yes the time, I know – it’s early to be hitting the hard stuff.  But these scenes, remember?  Excruciating. 

[Photo:  Anthony DiFalco]

This week all headings will come straight from The Good Wife.  Whoopee!

I saw Bill, he remembered Austin, he’s still the one.  (By the way, it was 2005 not 6, and Liz Smith mentioned it in her column because I told her about it the next morning in the Senate Chambers of the Austin Capitol Building … while we were waiting for, yep, Bill.)

Speaking of Austin, Lisa Austin came to my house. 

You’d think I have more; I don’t.  Except that it’s cold here and they’re cutting concrete a few feet away.  See you in the funnies, as they say.

My friend Anna is the best garlic farmer I know.  Seriously!  She grows wide, squat Bogatyr garlic from Russia for crying out loud.  Buy their garlic, or a CSA share or I won’t take you to see my friend Bill. 

Yes, Bill, my bf Bill.  Remember how I charmed him in Austin?  Well, I didn’t really tell you but it’s true, I was very charming.  Now he’s coming to Mac tomorrow and I can’t tell you how or I’d have to kick you, but I have face time.  Sent our SSNs off to secret service yesterday.  My kids will shake his hand and then when one of them winds up president they’ll put the picture of shaking his hand in their office. 

M. told me to remind him that I now live on “Bills” street.  (The last time we got together I lived on Barnsdale).  Nice one, M.  I’ll steal the sign tonight so he can take it home. 

Okay, Friday takeaways:  Buy Garlic.  Vote for His Wife. 

Today, I’m convinced, is the coldest one of the year.  I’m freezing, the house won’t get warm and now I’m wearing absurd green puffy socks with a frog’s face stitched on because they’re warm and I’m not and I’m desperate to be I’ll do anything. 

Here’s something that bothers me, and it has nothing to do with the cold.  Joyce (Carol) Oates made a big thing of Beethoven’s Appasionata in The Gravedigger’s Daughter.  The mother played it in Germany and it was a symbolic thread throughout the story. 

The Appasionata.  She couldn’t come up with something else?  Something from Chopin or Kabalevsky, perhaps?  While not specifically referenced in The Good Wife (new title TK), it is on the soundtrack (yes, I have a soundtrack!)  Dammit, Joyce.  I suppose I’ll be called out in literary scandal — publicly shamed and embarrassed in front of my family. 

I’m not taking it off, I don’t care, I had it there two years ago way before I read her dumb book.  (I didn’t mean that, Joyce, you know I love you!)

It’s a piece about unsurmountable obstacles and the will to overcome, it’s about marriage for crying out loud! 

Hmph.

A. has a new web site at work, I’ll give it to you when it’s up.  We’ll have a launch party, we’ll all wear toner. 

“Listening is an effort that ages the face, makes the neck muscles ache, and stiffens the eyelids looking fixedly at the speaker.  It is a kind of studied debauch … the elevating to its secret meaning a litany of dull words …”

Collette said that.  Curiously, A. keeps looking younger and his eyelids are remarkably lithe.  It’s paid off, his vow of abstinence from the litany of my dull words. 

Today I’m working in Garamond and eating cantaloupe and writing of monkeys.  Ellen’s lover, Reed, lives at the Sunnyside Terrace home in a “persistent vegetative state” and rooms with a monkey, a Capuchin.  Capuchins are small and affectionate and good at getting lids off of jars.  Ellen has issues with intimacy. 

Scruffy is making a sloppy, lip-sucking sound that makes it extremely difficult to work.  I bet monkeys don’t do that.  Maybe I’ll trade him for one. 

I linked to Collette, by the way, so you could read about her lovers.  Including but not limited to her stepson. 

I’m up to get coffee and move Scruffy; if you need to interrupt me, now’s the time.  (If you’d like to leave hot soup at my door, to surprise me for lunch, you may do that now, too.)

One more thing and then I promise I’ll get to work.  This story has been in the paper here, and also on Yahoo’s Most Viewed News.  It’s about two dogs who went to a kennel and then back to the wrong homes.  It matters because it happened at Scruffy’s kennel!  (A. — gasp! – do you think Scruffy is possibly not Scruffy?)

In any case, you ought to read it, it’s funny.  Callie went to Dixie who went to Griggs who went to Best then someone went to Dundee and someone did not.  And then the remark — (ouch) — from the kennel owner at the end. 

I’ve had to delete “Anne Snow turns 40″ and then change time stamps on some things, and still I’ve lost the heading for poor little Stevie (unless I link to it, like I’ve just done here) and the font of some posts is really really small. 

Anne Snow again, so you know, was 40 on Monday, the 14th.  Now could someone please fix the font, it’s the code in my template, I didn’t write it and now I can’t read it.  I’ll call my IT department.  They’ll be here stat.  Maybe they’ll be the ones with my coffee.