It is beginning to get a bit busy at work. We have had our big Fair, which kicks off the Back to School shopping season the way that the Friday after Thanksgiving kicks off the Christmas shopping season. It isn't as busy yet as we would like it to be.

The new girl and I (and I really cannot call her the new girl any more -- she is older than I am -- but she still doesn't have a nickname) watch anxiously for signs that the busy season is beginning. "It's been pretty brisk this morning," we tell one another. "We'd better get that order cleared up," I say, "before we get busy." "I'll vacuum," she says. "We might not have a chance later." We say these things in solemn voices.

The new girl is a seriously good worker, and doesn't mind doing manual labor, of which our job includes a lot. She carries Clorox wipes around with her (truly -- in her car and her purse) and enjoys vacuuming and doesn't care to be idle. I must see if I can't get her to come and spend a week at my house. She also, since she is a math teacher, is capable of converting measurements for laminating and bulletin board paper, and doesn't get flustered by all the numbers we have to deal with.

She is also really funny. The Empress and I simply hang on her words.

"My water broke when I was eating a bowl of Rice Krispies," she says in her rather high-pitched voice. She bustles around, telling us the story. It is not intended to be funny, and she isn't witty. She reminds me, in terms of humor, of Roseanne Barr. Not in any other way, but there is something about her voice and her delivery... The matter-of-fact plonking down of these statements. I can't describe it. But we are fascinated by her.

When you walk outside, you feel as though you are being gently steamed. Like green beans. It has rained a little bit each day for the past several days, so the humidity is higher even than usual, but the heat has not abated. Or perhaps it has. Perhaps it would have been in three digits rather than just in the 90s if it had not been for the rain. You never can know what dreadful thing you have been rescued from.

This weather is not ideal for people, but it is just the thing for tomatoes. I have already been out to pick some from my garden this morning. We also have lots of peppers and herbs. I have been taking some to That Man and The Empress for the sake of their nervousness. I don't know whether garden vegetables are a recognized specific for nervousness or not, but they can't hurt.

Week seven of the Summer Reading Challenge, and my book #2 for the week is My Antonia, a story about life on the prairies in the 19th century. My Antonia is so beautifully written that you have to go back and re-read sentences just to taste them once more. It is filled with dark secrets, hunger, cold, loneliness, suicide, murder, and stuff like that, not to mention those horrible prairies, with and without snow. Naturally, you can't read something like that straight through.

So I watched the movie Casanova, suggested to me by #1 daughter, who said that you wouldn't think it would be a good movie, but it is. She's right. It's light and fun, visually enchanting, and not suited to much thinking. I mean, if you start thinking about it, it will spoil the whole thing, so just watch and enjoy it.

I got a bit of progress made on the sleeve of my Jasmine sweater while watching and enjoying Casanova.

I also read a lighter book. A while back I said some harsh things about Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine's book What Not to Wear. A stylish reader told me I had read the wrong book, and should read their newer What You Wear Can Change Your Life. So I did.

They do a better job of making themselves look bad in the "don't" pictures in this book. They still describe themselves in startlingly negative terms ("fat white maggot," "sagging udders," and "elephantine legs" are a few of the ones I can repeat). Perhaps this is that British self-deprecating humor of which we hear so much. In a way, though, it is like reading Shakespeare or the King James Bible. At first, you are distracted by the odd language -- in this case, vulgar and hyperbolic -- but then you get into the swing of it and can appreciate it.

This book, unlike their first, doesn't focus entirely on "figure flaws," as though people who like their bodies don't bother to wear clothes. It doesn't overlap with their first book, so it really doesn't discuss how to choose clothes at all, but focuses more on accessories and makeup and so forth. There are sections on pregnancy and travel (including how not to look like a barmaid in your holiday snaps, something I confess I had never worried about). As a book, it is attractive and interesting to read.

Is it useful? Possibly. My favorite part was the section on color. While I would have liked some support for their startling pronouncements (you can't wear black shoes with gray clothes?), I realize that fashion writers don't normally expect to have to prove their assertions. But they advocate and illustrate some really interesting color combinations. If you tend to make the same color combinations all the time in your knitting, or just to follow the pattern suggestions exactly because you don't know what else to do, their ideas might give you a jolt out of that rut. Can you see a sweater in charcoal gray, dark chocolate brown, mushroom, and shocking pink? 

There is a section on how to care for your clothes, and suggestions about how to organize your wardrobe, your handbag, and your packing that seem very sensible. They have recommendations on buying underwear, and which old clothes to throw away, and how to swap clothes with friends. The section on makeup was too rarified for me, I am afraid -- I don't even know what half the things they discussed are. It may be that this book will be most appealing to those who are interested in clothes and fashion as a topic and simply like to read about that stuff.

However, I would say this book is worth getting from the library in order to check out the section on color. And it has convinced me to harvest my lavender and make some lavender bags for my lingerie drawer, so perhaps it has changed my life in some infinitesimal way.

My husband had to be up at 4:00 this morning, so I also had to get up then. It was nice to lie in bed for a while listening to the rain and reading about life on the prairie.

I made coffee and tea, but did not cook breakfast, because yesterday I made a blueberry and lemon cake. The recipe was in a woman's magazine and looked luscious. I halved the butter and then replaced half of that with canola oil, halved the sugar, replaced the dairy products with nonfat yogurt, and skipped the icing. I would usually also use whole-grain flour, but madly threw caution to the winds and used the bit of white flour I had hanging around. Some people feel that if you do all that adjusting, you might as well just skip the cake, but really it made a nice, light, fruity cake, suitable for breakfast. Especially at 4:00 a.m., when a skillet does not look its best.

Yesterday I had a call about the Chamber Singers. Joining the Chamber Singers was the first thing I did for myself when my kids got old enough that I felt I could take some time for myself. While I enjoy singing in the church choir, there is a satisfaction in singing challenging music with a disciplined ensemble, and particularly in singing with a group that sounds good.

Singers are not supposed to luxuriate too much in the sound, and of course we mustn't really listen to ourselves much. Even so, the pleasure of creating a good sound with good musicians is immense. I really don't like being the best singer in a group.

So being in the Chamber Singers offered a good deal of satisfaction. We dressed up to sing madrigals, a type of fun that adults don't get to indulge in very often, we had the pleasure of singing classical music and challenging new pieces, I got to know some new people, and it was just basically fun.

Then the group ended under dramatic circumstances, as sometimes happens with musical groups. I sang one season with the Master Chorale, but the time and place were deeply inconvenient for me, so I have just been doing without the challenging music.

Now they are trying to revive the Chamber Singers. Overall, the idea appeals. However, since I also have choir practice and my Tuesday class, that means I would have three nights a week committed.

You may be horrified at the thought that I would leave my family on three nights out of the week. But the kids I still have at home are teenage boys. They do not spend all their evenings hanging out with their parents. And my husband works long hours at a hard job, and often spends his evenings watching sports and perhaps snoozing on the couch. I'm not saying that they don't notice whether I am there or not, but I don't think they actively miss me while I'm gone. Even as I write that, I am aware that my husband would always prefer that I be home when he is. This does not keep him from going out with the guys on Friday nights, though.

Instead of being horrified that I would leave my family, you might be laughing at the idea that having to go somewhere three nights a week would be a big deal.

I get off work at six. Those three nights require me to leave the house between 6:30 and 6:45. So dinner has to be organized before I leave in the morning, and rushed through. Housekeeping also has to be done in the mornings -- and the gym cannot just be skipped on all those days. Also, since I am getting old, I find myself tired by Friday morning if I have been out all those evenings.

So I am trying to think seriously about this. The group is meeting to audition some possible directors in a couple of weeks, and I have agreed to join in that. I guess if it is not fun and the director candidates are not good, I could decide against it right there. If it is fun and there are good candidates, I will have to be very organized about food and housekeeping for it to be a possibility.

Hmmm.

Ozarque has been having a discussion which has included, among other things, the question of whether it is really harder for young people to head out on their own nowadays than it used to be, or whether they just perceive it as harder.

You can click here to see a serious article detailing the evidence that young people today are taking longer to achieve the traditional defining landmarks of adulthood: "leaving home, finishing school, becoming financially independent, getting married and having a child." At its simplest, data from the census shows that, in 1960, two-thirds of 30 year olds had completed all of these milestones, while in 2000, only about a third had done so. Since you can check this article for the details, I will not apologize for over-simplifying; the point here is that we are not imagining this change.

These numbers reflect other social changes -- more people go to college, school takes longer to finish, people marry later and have children later or not at all. However, the result in terms of independence is clear. In 1960, 70% of 25 year old women were financially independent of their parents; in 2000, the figure was only 25%.

Some would say that it is actually harder for young people to gain financial independence. Commenters over at Ozarque's place have mentioned the high cost of housing and transportation. And, indeed, The Wall Street Journal recently pointed out that many Americans are putting 52% of their income into housing and transportation, leading to financial stress out of proportion to income. The point that the Journal was making, however, was not that these things cost too much but that people are choosing to spend too much for them. The family with three SUVs used to drive to work and the grocery store, the single person with three bedrooms -- these are examples of excessive consumption, not of helplessness in the face of high prices.

We know that the Journal is not a paper with a commitment to frugality and simple living. If they say folks are overspending, then things have really gotten out of hand.

I have one kid who has been married for a couple of years and is living in New England, and one just starting out on her own in the Midwest. Both of them have been able to find housing in the traditional recommended 25-28% range of their incomes. I also spend that proportion of my income on housing, in the South. Don't tell me it can't be done.

But people don't always want to do that. This article suggests that the sense of angst ("Why Wait to Have a Mid-Life Crisis When You Can Have One at 25?") comes from excessive affluence. Kids who have had no struggles are simply not prepared to face the difficulties that have previously been accepted as part of growing up. Those difficulties may include having a less luxurious lifestyle than the one your parents have achieved by working at it for several decades.

This made me think of the TV program Friends, which shows a group of people in their 20s (the program ended this year, I think, because that premise was getting less and less plausible) and their adventures starting out in adult life. They all have wardrobes which would cost more than any of them could expect to make in their fictional jobs in a year. Someone at Ozarque's place pointed out that their apartments would be completely unaffordable in the city in which they are supposed to live. Their haircuts would probably be beyond their means.

If we compare that with similar young adult programs from earlier generations, such as Seinfeld or That Girl, do we see a big difference in their standards of living?

You know it. The people in Seinfeld did a fair amount of scrimping, and wore their clothes more than once, too. That Girl was apparently an important fashion influence in its day, but I don't remember that from watching it as a little girl. I remember that Marlo Thomas had a little bitty apartment and was a really careful shopper. In both of these programs, having to struggle financially was a normal part of early adulthood -- as it is in real life.

Now, kids expect to have the same standard of living as their parents, or perhaps better, right away. Many of them achieve this with credit cards, continued family assistance (I know three 20-somethings whose parents subsidized their housing costs), or simply living with their parents well into adulthood. In fact, some of the young people commenting at Ozarque's are not defining being a "real grownup" with reference to things like finishing school, supporting themselves, or getting married at all, but instead are referencing ownership of objects.

The "failure to launch" phenomenon of extended adolescence may be another symptom of "affluenza."

Xanga is not allowing me to show you what I'm reading today, so I will tell you. My Antonia is my current novel -- book 2 for week-I-think-it-is-seven of the Summer Reading Challenge. I also have Three Black Skirts, a book of advice for young women which I am going to give to #2 daughter. I have only skimmed it so far -- it just arrived from a frugalreader pal -- but I was amused to find that it refers to the program Friends in its section on budgeting. You want to have those apartments and those clothes like the people on Friends! it says. You're young and beautiful and would look way better in designer clothes than your boss! Then it says: suck it up, make a budget, put away that credit card, and put some money in your savings account. You can have a designer lipstick now and work your way up.

Look who is hanging out at the edge of my patio.

You are thinking how cute this little bunny is.

He is not cute. Nor are all his brothers and sisters back home in the field behind my house.

The reason they are not cute is that they are here to despoil my garden.

I would be willing to share the produce with God's wild creatures, I assure you, but the fact is that they do not share.

Rabbits, deer, birds, bugs, turtles, cattle -- the thing they all have in common is that they will eat every single bit of the plants in the garden, never once thinking that they ought to share with me and my family.

Here's the first ripe tomato, too. I fully intend to pick it and eat it with my family, and not to let the mockingbirds have any. Nor that rabbit, who has already been eating the leaves.

#2 daughter has introduced the concept of alphabetical filing at her new workplace.

I mentioned this in the choir room at church yesterday. I had missed the rehearsal on Wednesday, so I went early to make sure I was ready for the anthem. I had run into another chorister at work Saturday and she had told me that she had missed practice because of a hangover, so I at least did not have the worst excuse, but apparently there were only five at practice. So it was that the director had decided not to choose the anthem until he saw who actually showed up for the service. So we were sitting there, chatting and waiting to see whether we would have representatives of all the parts or not, and I told them about this filing thing.

It turned out that the music in the choir room isn't filed alphabetically either. "It's mainly alphabetical," the director insisted, but it turns out that at some point in the past someone decided to file it by season and type of piece, and that rather subjective system is at war with the former alphabetic system, so that now it can only be found by people who know it by heart, and surprises are always turning up. And it is not on the computer, either.

So the unbelievable idea that a person would have to introduce alphabetic filing and use of the computer is I suppose not that unbelievable.

There are a lot of big changes going on in my family. #2 daughter's shift from student to independent working woman is the most dramatic. But #1 daughter, having gotten accustomed to being apart from her husband while he has been incommunicado on a sub, must now get used to having him back. #1 son is going into his senior year in high school, with college applications and major life decisions looming. #2 son is beginning high school, leaving the smallness and support of junior high. My husband and I are hurtling toward the Empty Nest.

An exciting time for all of us, and you all know the Chinese curse.

Here's a SWAP report. I completed both skirts. On the left is the print skirt.

It works with both the matching print top and the blue one.

The tops and the skirt are Butterick 4467. The skirt is cut on the bias. The print is Moda's "Windsor" and the blue is a microfiber from Hancock's.

The gray below is Simplicity 5914, also in a microfiber from our Memorial Day sale trip to Hancock's. It will eventually have a matching jacket and trousers.

It works with both the solid and the print top, as required by the rules of the SWAP.

Now, I started that gray skirt during the Memorial Day weekend sewing marathon, so it is possible to conclude that it took me a really long time to get it finished. However, it is also possible to say that in the six weeks since the marathon, #2 daughter and I each completed four pieces of our SWAPs, and I think that sounds better, so that is how I'll put it.

We have done the easiest third of the project.

I'm going to stop the SWAP for the moment and do a SewRetro project next. I spent most of my needlework time this weekend hemming, so the Jasmine sweater is still just at the start of the first sleeve. I'll post a picture when it gets interesting.

The book I am reading right now, Killer Hair, is a snappy mystery novel with a plucky girl detective. I always like those, don't you? I brought Trixie Belden books into the store, and women often stop when they see them and exclaim over them happily. One woman said, "I got chills when I saw that!" and many are equally excited about them.

In any case, the heroine is a fashion columnist, and the book has a lot of descriptions of people's personal styles. Not "preppy" or "elegant." No, this book describes people's styles as "Valkyrie's Wagnerian Wunderbra." "40's bravado." "Pledge night at the coven."

Reading this -- in combination with having watched The Devil Wears Prada last weekend, having mused on the sartorial cues of meth cooks (although the Water Jar may be right in suggesting that the smell is the real tip-off), and working prettily steadily on my and #2 daughter's SWAPs -- has caused me to think about the idea of clothes as communication.

The Wall Street Journal had a review yesterday of a book called The Suit which suggested that the first President Bush's preppy look made people think he didn't understand or care about them, while the second President Bush was able to avoid that by looking like a businessman (except when he dresses up as a cowboy or a military man or something, but we all know he likes to play dress-up, so apparently it doesn't affect our opinion of him). President Roosevelt was able to dress "like a Hudson River Grandee" without political fallout, because -- according to the book -- he was a Democrat and well-born, a combination that rendered him immune. I think there were differences in the policies and behavior of these presidents that may have had more influence on how compassionate they appeared than their suits did, but it is an interesting thought.

There is a scene in The Devil wears Prada in which the young worker betrays her feeling that fashion is unimportant. Her boss/nemesis points out that her clothing, intended to show how far above fashion she is, was actually "chosen for you by the people in this room."

What do you say when you wear something like this garment from the current Knitty? Or, indeed, any of the garments from the current Knitty?

To me, they seem to say, "I've learned how to cable, but I can't actually make a pair of real gloves or mittens" or "I follow the herd, even if it is a small herd." But that can't be the intention.

So often we knitters make things because we want to try out a stitch pattern, or we love to do texture stitches, or we are enamored of a particular yarn. If it is a really expensive yarn, we may make tiny silly things from one skein, just for the pleasure of making something -- the silk sandals in the current Knitty would be an example of that, surely. If we bother to wear our creations (and some knitting bloggers brag that they never do), we're just showing off our knitting.

(If you were as disappointed as I with the new Knitty, check out Jessica Tromp's site instead.)

#2 son reminded me that George, in Seinfeld, once said "I love velvet. If it were socially acceptable, I would drape myself in velvet." This is about loving a textile as an object, and that is surely more what most of us knitters are doing than any idea of communicating something about ourselves with our garments, or of fashion.

Learning to look at fabric like a dressmaker, not a quilter, has been an education for me. I am glad to say that, as I sit here hemming my plain gray microfiber skirt, I am really enjoying the texture of the fabric. I was able to get quite enthusiastic about some swatches of solid gabardine that I received in the mail recently (yes, I have found myself on the seamstress's mailing lists now).

Oh, and I was right about paisley. Here's the rest of my fall fashion forecast: the romantic looks will continue, with a piratical influence that will keep shaped and military-style jackets and boyish looks in style, and last year's blue and brown combos will move to plum or gray with taupe and camel.

Of course, I will still be wearing jeans and sweaters. Perhaps my style is intended to say, "Hello, I am someone's mom. Do not be scared."

Oh -- it is my xangaversary. I have been blogging for two years today.

I had something else I was going to write about, but then I went over to the Water Jar's place and read his post and got to thinking about the point he is discussing over there.

It is generally held that traditional societies did not make a distinction between art and craft as we do. Anything you wanted, you had to make, so everyone made stuff. My mother-in-law wove silk into cloth, dyeing it as she wove to make amazing patterns. But hey, so did everyone else. They grew their food, they made their clothes -- the fact that we would be inclined to put one of those products in a museum and not the other is the way we look at things, not the way that they did.

Then we got to the point at which some people made things for the other people. And then we began to distinguish. Those who made utilitarian things were craftspeople, and those who made things just to enjoy were artists -- or were they? Cellini's salt cellars were and are art, aren't they?

For some people, the most beautiful things are art and the rest are craft. For others, it is a question of originality or intention. Many of us would not call a quilt "art" unless it were entirely unsuited to being a bedcovering. Others would call it art only if it were hanging in a gallery being called art by experts.

The question of which things were art and which were crafts continued to exercise people's minds until the present day, when you can go get yourself some artisanal bread, or you can hang a mass-produced copy of a street sign on your wall to enjoy.

But the Water Jar brought in a third set of skills: the technical skills. Much that is utilitarian nowadays, and much that we enjoy, either exists in the virtual world or is made for the physical world by machines. If one person designs a quilt or a salt cellar, and another person figures out how to get a machine to make it, and another builds the machine, and another operates it, then which of these people is the artist, which the craftsman, which the technician?

And what if it is a really ugly or even a useless item? The Mary Maxim catalog shows us that great technical skill can be put into items which are both ugly and useless. Great technical skill is probably required to produce even one episode of a reality TV show, too. Hackers do destructive things to show off their technical skills. So skillfulness, within the category of technique, is entirely divorced from either utility or beauty.

The Water Jar gets into the question of which is better, but I will leave that to him. There is more, though. He quotes Albert Borgman on the modern family, saying,

"The husband exercises power on the basis of extrinsic attributes, the paycheck and physical force. The family, severed from the work world, is no longer a place where he can prove and enact genuine competence and resourcefulness. The family more and more becomes a setting for consumption, [which] makes no demands of skill and discipline."

There is an element of truth here, isn't there? (I'm disregarding the matter of physical force, because I'm not clear on the reference -- Daddy's ability to open jars, maybe?) Many of us only consume things. If someone produces a really beautiful zucchini, and someone else makes a truly lovely loaf of zucchini bread from it, they may not be artists, but they are still way ahead of the person who merely buys and eats it.

Or are they? If no one looks at Cellini's salt cellars, are they still art?

I am an admirer of the Craftsman philosophy: "Respect the earth, live in harmony with nature, spend time with your family, be good to your neighbor, and value the dedication, skill and care of the craftsman." I think of myself as a craftswoman, not an artist, and not really that good a technician. I make things to use, and for the pleasure -- artistic pleasure, to be sure -- of making them. I have a quilt on my wall, and I think it is a beautiful one, too, but it was still made to serve a purpose.

My husband is certainly a technician.

I made a sample magnet motor the other day at work, but it was wonky and didn't go as well as I wanted it to. That Man fooled around with it, but it still wasn't up to snuff. I got my husband in to fix it, and he made it go perfectly, and much faster than it had before. It was also significantly more beautiful: the shining symmetrical coil, the straight gleaming copper wire axle thingies.

He told me not to let people grab it, but of course they did. It was sitting on the counter, not being a piece of art. People grabbed it all day long. It is not perfect any more. That's how it is with technology -- it just doesn't get the respect that art does even if it makes more money.

When I think of what I admire in my husband -- and Borgman was talking about respect and prestige in the family -- I certainly admire the way he makes perfect stuff (produces) more than the way he sits on the couch watching sports (consumes).

In many modern families, the children are expected to produce things -- music, pictures, writing, crafts -- while the adults produce nothing except a paycheck. Putting Hamburger Helper and a bagged salad on the table doesn't count as art, craft, or technique. Sorry.

Even at work, many of us do not produce anything. I don't. I assist people in consuming. My husband produces wrenches. Craftsman wrenches, as it happens. They are all perfect. That is a requirement of his job. My job is way more fun than his, and I think it is just as important, but I have to admit that I don't actually produce anything (assuming that we do not count my alluring vistas of magnet kits). I produce things at home. I don't know what level of prestige that gives me or my husband in the family, because I have never thought of it before. But it may be that many women continue to have their homes as workplaces, while men's work is done invisibly elsewhere robbing them of their opportunity to show their competence in the family setting -- a factor, perhaps, in the often-lamented tendency toward inept fathers in popular culture.

And, as women move more completely into the workforce and give up their domestic skills, they may face the same fate.

I think that probably most of the people who read this are producers, not just consumers. Are you an artist? a craftsperson? a technician? Does it affect your prestige in your family? Does it affect your opinion of yourself?

How can you tell?

Yesterday a woman came into the store to buy equipment for her meth lab.

Meth labs are, I believe, the main source of crime in the area where I live. I tried to check this belief by googling, but was offered "Find [my state] Meth!" as though I were shopping. When I found local crime statistics, I was happy to see that we had had no murders in the past six years (actually, there has been one this year, so the statistics were old), but sorry to see hundreds of meth lab seizures. Stories in the local papers about knife fights, lost children, and robberies also tend to mention meth.

I don't know how to make the stuff myself, but I know that it involves decongestants (because we now have to prove our innocence in order to buy them) and lab equipment. The local college's chemistry department has a lot of theft problems (the faculty have been told not to try to stop scary-looking people who come to take away their beakers), but we are the only place in town that still sells lab equipment. The other likely places have quit selling it because, as one of the workers explained to me some years ago, people buy it for their meth labs.

This hadn't occurred to me before, but once he pointed it out, I began noticing the number of surprising people who came in to get lab equipment, often with way too much explanation. Now, we are the laminator of choice for the local tattoo parlors, so we are not alarmed by heavily-tattooed men with chains and piercings. They are there merely to use the laminator. Men in suits have come in to buy presents for their nephews, or to get their shopping wives to hurry up. Silly overdressed girls are getting paper for their sorority house decorations (I don't know why they are all so silly; maybe it is a rule, but I figure they will grow out of it, and try to enjoy them). Women in long dresses and prayer caps are getting their homeschool supplies, and will probably want some exotic item like triangular pencils. People clinging to hippy dress are buying toys and books as a result of our ads in the Free Press. Elderly people are grandparents, and they will generally need the same sort of assistance as the guys in suits.

But most of our customers are fairly affluent women between 25 and 55, casually dressed in stuff from the mall, with some men in the same category. Polo shirts abound, and capri pants are as common as blue jeans. They laugh a lot and talk on their cell phones and (the women) say things are "cute."  There are lots of children, and a high level of ethnic diversity relative to our population's level of diversity, but we could gather up all the customers in the store and put them down at a nice barbeque without anyone noticing anything odd.

Well, I guess the whole transportation part would be odd, but once they were there, the other guests would find nothing amiss.

The ones who come in dirty, with oversized clothes and baseball caps, are almost always buying test tubes. Sometimes they want larger beakers than we carry. We have to keep ourselves from saying "Oh, yes, you'll have to steal that from the chemistry department." They often have stories about their nephews or their swimming pools. Sometimes they claim that they are buying the stuff for their mothers.

So yesterday I was trying to create alluring vistas with a new shipment of magnets, and this woman came in. Oversized clothes, baseball cap, stringy hair, smelly. I offered to help her, because it is always possible that a person with this self-presentation is just planning to brush up her calculus or tutor someone in German, but she refused.

When she came up to the counter with her glassware, I was seized with a desire to refuse to sell the stuff to her. "I know you are planning to use this in your meth lab," I wanted to say. "Have you considered what you are doing to the lives of the people you sell that to? To the environment? To your children or your neighbor's children? To yourself?"

Obviously, I didn't do that. I just sold the stuff to her. I did not even, as I sometimes do, ask what kind of experiment she was working on.

But it stayed in my mind through the rest of the afternoon. Why, I first was asking myself, was I so sure that I could tell at a glance who was cooking meth and who was a bona fide user of scientific equipment? Perhaps I was being unfair to her, and to all the men and women who come in to buy lab equipment and just don't happen to look like our typical customer. Maybe some of the folks in polo shirts and capri pants have meth labs, and I never suspect them of it. I imagine that I am above judging people by their looks, but that sure is what I was doing.

I also was troubled at the thought that I was supporting the meth trade -- on a fairly regular basis, too. Here I am, a woman who won't buy things from companies whose business practices I disapprove of, and I am actually providing equipment to people who make meth.

It's a dilemma.

Egged on by Ozarque and Selphiras, I gave up all thoughts of frogging the back of my sweater and started in on the ribbing. I actually did so last night while I should have been at choir practice.

This is not because I decided to skip choir practice. I had come home from work -- where I left about eight things half-done because all of them were of such a level of urgency that they had to be begun all at once -- and made a shepherd's pie and helped #2 son with his summer assignment (for which you may read "bullied him into starting it, even though none of his friends has yet done so"). Then I settled down with my knitting and the crossword.

"What day is it?" That's me, four minutes later, in an alarmed tone of voice. "Is it Wednesday? What time is it?"

I had missed choir practice. I also missed Book Club this week.

It is because I had the month of June without any weekends, and then four days off, and will work on this Saturday as well, so I no longer have any idea what day it is.

Summer.

For this sixth week of the Summer Reading Challenge, I began with A Midsummer Night's Scream, a rather poor mystery which I would not recommend to you even for summer. I am finishing today with Miss Mapp, the second book in E.F. Benson's Lucia series. Lucia does not appear in this book at all, but it sets the scene for the occasion when Lucia and Georgie move to Tilling.

Yesterday at the gym I read an excerpt from The Omnivore's Dilemma, which was quite fascinating, and is by the author of the excellent Botany of Desire. I am now plotting how to get my hands on it, though I am hesitating because it is still in hardcover. In general, I wait for paper. But will a book which appears to be about Nazi scientists and corn ever make it into paper? Will it be like The Da Vinci Code, which I didn't get to read until after everyone else in the world had done so? 

I may have to break down and go to the library.

Bbmills asked her readers for a list of five xangans worth reading. I had to think about this, because a) she had already listed some of my choices and b) I don't think of xanga in those terms. For example, Leonidas is worth reading because he is interesting and informative.

But there are a number of xangas that I read because I know the people, or I take a motherly interest in them after having met them here at xanga or at their school, and I want to know how they're doing. That is sort of like asking for a list of people worth talking to on the phone. There are a few people to whom I will talk on the phone (and you know I hate the phone) because they are entertaining, but mostly I call people for communicative purposes, not for the sake of being an appreciative audience to them.

This is not true, for me at least, of other blogs. I have a list of blogs which I read because they are better than the columnists in my local paper, such as Granny, or because they are a good source of knitting inspiration, but none outside of xanga on whom I drop in just because I'm fond of them. Xanga is, for me, a community.

So I think I will not take up bbmills's challenge.