My, um, exciting week

MONDAY: We repaired the screen door (which a raccoon had torn right through to raid the bird seed) and cleaned the porch. At last, it's porch weather again! In SC, spring and fall are the seasons for it. In between, the heat is usually too much. Now we're getting slightly cooler days.

Time to eject a cat from a lounge chair and get comfortable to...

ALL WEEK: ...proofread and edit a manuscript for Larry. I'm not the greatest copy editor. I can't maintain my ability to focus very well, so I miss typos, have to do a lot of backtracking. But I do make some good suggestions and weed out a fair number of typos, and I work cheap! The plan is to finish this project before we head for the mountains for a week, so I can take my own work, and some fun reading with me. Most of Larry's writing is fun to read but nothing is fun to edit - I was not built for detail work.

FRIDAY: My mom turned 80, and that gives us four parents in their 80's.

SATURDAY: As we're loading our car in the grocery store parking lot, a guy comes running out, with 3 store employees after him. He crosses the 4-lane highway, disappears through the trees into the neighborhood beyond and they lose him. We've got the car running by now, so we leave the store, cross the highway, cut through a parking lot, and there he is, strolling across in front of us and letting himself into a house. Back at the store--where they had not only devoted the 3 employees to the chase, but had called the sheriff --we gave them his address.

Later on Saturday, a friend of my brother's came to visit my parents. He had kind of a troubled family and spent a lot of time with us as a teenager, grew quite close to our parents. Hadn't seen him since my brother's 1994 wedding, so it was a cool visit.

SUNDAY: Today was Larry's birthday. The gods smiled - we had no accidents, auto or otherwise!

This date has been inordinately accident-prone. In 2000, our neighbor locked herself out, came to our place to use the phone and tripped on the sidewalk, breaking a wrist and a cheekbone. That was a rental complex, so we had plenty of sympathy and no liability. She and her husband took us to dinner afterwards. Then in 2004, and again in 2005, SUV's backed into us. On his birthday. Who the bleep uses a drive-through ATM, and then backs up?! That was the 2005 incident. Only someone sent by Satan to crunch our front bumper, though one reason we let it go is that the decorative front plate took the damage. The guy offered me $20. I said, "It's a custom plate." "Will you take $40?" I agreed.

By last year we were scared to leave the house.

But 2 years in a row have been incident-free. We finished the day at what used to be our favorite restaurant. We still like it but they had dropped prime rib from their regular menu about a year ago, breaking Larry's heart. They do have it as a special on occasion, and derned if tonight wasn't one of those occasions. Which means this blog has entered the darkling plain of my telling you what we had for dinner!