Baking, this morning, and then Sunday School and church, and then my parents and #1 daughter and Son-in-Law are all coming over and the boys are going to barbecue. #2 son's special plum marinade is involved, so we know it will be good. My husband has decided what kind of rice he will make, and there is talk of strawberry cream puffs.

  Yesterday was a sultry day. We bought food, spent a little time at the store where I work, got some errands done, went to #2 son's gymnastics lesson, got #1 son's graduation announcements done, and did a bit of gardening.

Not much, frankly. The weather was not conducive to digging.

I got a flat of impatiens to add to my woodland glade of a perennial garden. It is possible that I bought too many.

This is the garden that #2 son and I made a couple of years ago.

When we moved in, there was a crape myrtle and boxwood, two spindly azaleas, and some phlox with white flowers. As the nursery people say, that phlox looks good for about three weeks out of the year. And the crape myrtle also has white flowers for a few weeks later in the summer.

It was a neat triangular green patch, with the crape myrtle at the apex, three boxwoods before it, the azaleas weakly trying to anchor the sides and the phlox in front between the azaleas. It was predictable and visible from the road but undistinguished.

I like a wild garden, myself, and a bit of color, too.

So we planted a nice assortment of shade perennials. Some have done well, some have died, some haven't made much of a show yet. This is how it is with perennials.

Here are lamiastrum, hostas, and some box. The lamiastrum is very pretty, with its pink flowers, but tiny. Not a splashy sort of flower. The tree-like leaves are the leaves of trees which grow as weeds in this garden. They are very hard to pull, especially they ones that are growing back there amid the prickly boxwood.

Here are salvia, columbine, and violets.

And that spotty-leafed thing, which has forgettable little yellow blooms but really charming leaves. It might be another variety of lamiastrum.

There are a few of the perennials which have never bloomed. The circumstances, I suppose, have not been perfect yet.

The salvia (Midsummer Dream) is just getting started with its purple spikes. As long as it gets regular haircuts, it will get much bigger during the season and keep blooming, long after the violets and columbine have finished.

The hostas also have white and purple spikes of flowers. But, as is the way with most perennials, they are a brief show. They will poke their flowers up in June or July.

The azaleas only got to bloom for a day or two this year before a cold snap nipped them. These are weak, puny, unhappy azaleas, though, and I feel sorry for them.

In general, perennials just bloom for a short spell, and they they let their neighbor bloom, and the woodland glade is mostly a collection of interesting foliage.

You will have noticed that about real woodland glades, perhaps. You go for a walk  there one week and there are bluebells. Next time, some other flower is having its turn. This is a nice effect in nature, where there are several acres of bluebells or violas or whatever it might be. In a small garden, though, it doesn't have the same effect.

So we plant annuals. They provide nice color all season, and then die.

As shady as it is, impatiens are really all that will grow there steadily, in the way of colorful annuals. I have planted torenia, snapdragons, and cornflowers there, but they all seem unhappy. They yearn for the sun. The cornflowers actually moved themselves out to the front of the garden where there is a bit of sun, even though they looked very silly, knee-high raggedy sailors amid the dianthus. They did this over a few years through self-seeding, of course, not by uprooting themselves and leaping, but even when they grew where I wanted them to, they were stretching out over the front flowers.

I don't have the heart to do that to them again.

Pinks thrive as plants in the shade, but don't bloom much. So it has to be impatiens. I like the double-flowered ones best, the ones that look like little roses, but this year I bought a flat of single impatiens. I planted a few in the afternoon, but it was like gardening in a sauna, so I went back out in the cool of the evening and planted some more. I still have half a flat left.

I tried to get my husband's opinion on whether I could squeeze in a few more without making them feel squished, but he prefers to see annuals in neat geometric patterns, preferably sorted by color, and would really rather they were vegetables, so he finds it difficult to make suggestions about my wild garden.

I'll go on out once I've had my tea and gotten my pie in the oven and see whether it looks too crowded in the light of the morning.

Here is something thenarrator said over at Leonidas's xanga:

"Societies make choices every day. Americans vote for abusive employment tactics, bad service, and illegal immigration every time they go shopping. They vote for poverty and lack of health care with every discount purchase.

I commented to someone yesterday that Americans cannot seem to understand the idea that Europeans would choose higher taxes and higher prices in order to live in the kind of society we desire. The typical reaction is that this is "Marxist Slavery." But it is not, it is caring about neighbors, and caring about society.

So, you shop at Wal-Mart, you get an impoverished nation as a result. You shop at Circuit City you help to destroy families.

(But of course Circuit City continues to fail - now no one in the store knows anything, if you want no service, you'll shop online)" 

 And then, responding to my concurring comment, "Anyway - ryc - thanks. It always amazes me that your average American will throw their neighbor out of a job in order to save five cents on a can of soup, or deprive kids of health insurance to save ten bucks on a tv. We may not like the price floors in Ireland, but they keep all of our workers earning a living wage, let everyone go to the doctor and every qualified student go to university. But yes, our houses and cars are smaller, and we usually watch TV in the same room as our children. Maybe that seems like too much of a sacrifice to live in a fair place, but it does not to me."

Yes, well, I've written at length on how our choices as consumers affect other people and the environment, so I won't add to this impassioned plea, but I will say that I hope you think on these things a little bit when you do the weekly shopping today.

The Chemist invited me to a soiree yesterday in an email headed "How to go to jail..." The event is a lecture on civil disobedience given by a group that made headlines a few years ago by walking starkers across a busy intersection.

I asked around, and none of us could remember what their point was. I couldn't even find the article with search engines. It did indeed catch people's attention, a bunch of naked woman in the street, but it didn't have any effect in terms of changing people's minds or leading to action. We didn't even know what they wanted to tell us.

Civil disobedience has a long and noble tradition of effectiveness, but the American consumer en masse has more economic power than many national governments. The way you choose to spend your money today will have an effect on the world, whether you think about it or not. You might as well take some responsibility for that fact.

The Wall Street Journal yesterday had two articles about issues of right and wrong. I know we finished that topic here already, but we have elasticity of the brain, so we can hark back mentally and add these points to our thinking on the subject.

The first was a report that some neurobiologists have found that damage to a specific site in the brain impairs moral judgement. The researchers used the work of Marc Hauser, which we've discussed before. Hauser found widespread cross-cultural agreement on moral issues. These researchers tested people with the particular type of brain damage, people with other forms of brain damage, and people without brain damage, using the questions that Hauser used. Only those with damage in the particular area of the brain in question differed from the pattern Hauser found.

The other was a review of a book on excuses. Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) by Carol Tavris and someone else whose name escapes me. The book is not out yet, but the review focussed on how we justify and excuse wrongdoing. In a nutshell (and I haven't read the book, so it may have lots more to it that this), we say it was someone else's fault or claim special circumstances that made it okay. Special mention was made of the truly lame excuse "Everybody does it."

This may be a lame excuse, but it is probably the favorite when it comes to using more than our fair share of energy, treating cheap goods as the summum bonum, and ignoring corporate responsibility for environmental and social wrongs.

So it is the farmers' market for me, and a brief visit to the store where I work, and time with my kids, and housework. I do not plan any civil disobedience today, just a bit of voluntary simplicity.

 After another day of school visits and computer stuff, I made dinner and then realized that I didn't have to go anywhere or do anything.

This has been rare lately, so I made the most of it. I stationed myself in the front porch rocker and enjoyed the rain.

It is not quite like being on the beach, but you can see and smell moving water, so it is as close as we landlocked people are likely to get.

I also knitted up some more Plymouth Stone Cotton. It has a nice, crunchy sort of hand, a good cotton feel. We'll see how it behaves in a garment, always the question with cotton.

#2 son came up when I was wearing the Bijoux Blouse and contemplating what to make with the Plymouth Stone Cotton and said "Isn't that a little baggy?" And of course it is. It's designed that way, like a sweatshirt.

But I am not supposed to be wearing sweatshirts, so I determined to make something non-baggy for my next project, and I am making Cherry Bomb from Big Girl Knits. I reviewed that book here on May 13, 2006 (you can go look at it if you want by using the calendar buttons on the left) but haven't actually made anything from it. In general, I don't think reviews of knitting books by people who haven't knitted anything from said books are useful. I sometimes get rather cross over ar Amazon when all the reviews of a knitting book I am considering are by people who have merely looked at the pictures. But this is my diary, so I can do that. After I knit something, then I go to Amazon and do a review as a good example.

Speaking of books, I am reading Resenting the Hero. It is science fiction. Lostarts recently told me I should read some science fiction. I do read some science fiction, actually. Considering that 40% of American adults never read any fiction and 3 books a year of any kind represents the national average, I probably read more than the average amount of science fiction. It is, however, a small fraction of the total number of books I read, so I was trying to mend my ways and got this book from Booksfree.

It reminds me why I don't read much science fiction.

There is always a lot of explaining in science fiction. This is necessary to the genre. You can't be having a world completely different from our own without explaining things, and have it make sense. My favorite science fiction authors -- Suzette Haden Elgin, Harlan Ellison, Terry Pratchett, Elizabeth Scarborough, Christopher Moore, Peter David, Isaac Asimov, Douglas Adams -- either manage to embed the explanations in the story or make the explanations as entertaining as the story itself.

Moira Moore, though she has some engaging characters and a good plot, thunks down the explanations in great dull chunks, or, worse yet, doesn't explain things until you have quite lost the thread of the story for wondering what the heck she's talking about.

I am going to finish the book, and I am even enjoying it, but it isn't making me think "Gee, I should read more of this genre."

There are a couple of genres that I never read. I never read horror, haven't since reading The Exorcist back in the 1970s. Gothic novels, yes, including the classics that sometimes get included in the horror genre but are really just spooky. And I never read Westerns, unless you count Lonesome Dove.  I don't read pornography or romantic suspense, either. And I guess that there are probably some genres I'm not aware of. I mean, there might be a whole canon of novels set in tattoo parlors, or ones that have vehicles as the characters, and I've missed them entirely.

Other than that, my tastes in books are pretty catholic. As long as they are well-written, I don't care what genre they are in.#2 daughter and I are coming up on the deadline for our writing contest, though, so perhaps I should be reading more romance novels right now.

Not today, though, because I will be at the store. Since I haven't been there since last week, I don't know what I will be doing, but I am guessing that there will be a lot of cleaning involved. My husband has just politely requested that I do some cleaning at home, too, since that has sort of been bypassed in favor of work and partying.

TGIF!

 #1 daughter and Son-in-law have come to visit. Very exciting.

Yesterday, she came with me on my school visits. We were just whipping around and dropping off deliveries and schedules for the summer workshops, so it was mostly driving, with the occasional stop to go into the schools.

We were able to get a lot of talking done. We started with what had been happening in our lives since we last spoke, and then got on to religion, music, laundry, marriage, global warming, and the weather. Probably other things, too. It was, as we drove 37 miles around the town, a very discursive conversation.

Then Son-in-law and the boys joined us and played Wii. We had caramelized chicken for dinner, with rice and vegetables and pineapple salsa.

Then  I headed off to bells and choir.

I am still quite bad at the bells. One of the ringers was talking about a trio at the handbell festival. These ladies were, she thought, from 82 to 93 in age, and the three of them played all the bells that our entire bell choir plays, holding four bells at once.

If I keep trying from now till when I am that age, perhaps I will able to do the same.

It was a little better, actually, because for some reason the bass section was meager, so I got moved down to middle C. Only one bell, and a note I can recognize. I actually played it at the right time on several occasions. The move may of course denote a sense of the hopelessness of it all on the part of the director.

In one of the pieces of music (new music, of course -- we have never played the same music twice since I've been there) there was a new-to-me bit of musical direction: "simile."

Music, you know, often has words written in it: sforzando, lunga, sempre, finger snaps. But "simile" was a new one on me. A simile is of course a figure of speech comparing things: "He is like a bear when he wakes up." So I thought perhaps this meant to play it like something else.... I was already playing like nothing on earth, so I asked.

"Simile," said the director, frowning. "It means 'the same as.'"
"The same as what?"

Many possibilities suggested themselves to me.

In the event, however, it turned out that it referred to the pattern that had been established of doing a measure of LV (let vibrate, meaning don't let the bell touch your shoulder and quit ringing) and a measure of R (meaning count those suckers and don't let the bell ring more than the number of counts written). So it was essentially "work pat" or, as the modern knitting books put it, "Continue in pattern as established."

Now you know.

Perhaps you would also like to know how to make caramelized chicken. It is easy and delicious. You simply mix something sticky (i.e., plum sauce, honey, something like that) with cayenne pepper or chili powder. Rub it on  chicken filets and saute that chicken in a little oil at quite a high heat. I usually make some of it a bit black because some of the family members like it that way, but you can quit cooking as soon as the chicken is done.

Pineapple salsa to go with it is easy, too. Put a can of crushed pineapple in a small bowl with a bit of lime juice (whatever there is in the lime), a couple of cloves of pressed garlic, chopped green onions and cilantro, and more hot peppers if you like spicy food.

It is good to serve this with rice and raw vegetables like cucumber and romaine lettuce, in case it gets too spicy.

I am doing some knitting, but it is another of those rectangular things, so there seems little point in photographing it for you, since I do not have the skills to produce lyrical photos of a rectangle of stockinette. Some people can do that, but I am not one of them.

My working at home is settling in. In some ways, this is the perfect job for me: lots of variety, lots of learning, opportunities to use my training and skills, flexibility as to time and place. I am certainly enjoying it, and working hard, and doing my best.

So last night, when I got home from class shortly after 9:00 and returned a call from The Empress, I was pleased to hear that she thought I was doing a good job (as I've said before, it is hard for me to tell) and slightly alarmed to hear "It can't go on forever."

This sentence was embedded in a discussion of today's school visits, so it slipped past and it wasn't until after the conversation ended that I began to wonder what she had meant.

Because actually, I figured I was in this for the long term. Computer, conferences, school visits, workshops, and someone else minding the physical store while I did the virtual store, that was my plan. As long as I succeeded at it. I have been somewhat prepared for an announcement that the whole moving of the store thing had failed and we would all be out of work, but we were talking about strategies for next fall.

I had been starting to relax slightly.

My concern of course is that I will be asked to give up my research and writing and teaching and visiting job and drive to the store every day. I won't go into all the reasons that I am unwilling to do that; most of you already know most of them. I will be driving up there most days in June (for workshops) and probably all the days in July and August, we've already agreed, but I figured I would return in September to what I am doing now. Except that by then, of course, we would have made it through the perilous stretch and I would really know what I was doing .

I was looking forward to that. Having heard The Empress talk about next fall as though we were confident that there would be a next fall for us made it seem more likely, too. And now I am wondering whether she is planning to pull the plug on the virtual store as the physical store is beginning to pick up speed.

Ah, well, if I find myself job hunting in the fall, I will be doing so with the newfound ability to toss around words like "saturation" and "linkage" with reference to computers, and up-to-date teaching experience after a couple of years without any, so if my sojourn into home-working fails either for the store or just for me, it still will have had benefits for me.

And I think it possible that I am partly responsible for the picking up of the physical store. I just can't prove it.

#2 daughter has a solo in Samuel Barber's "The Prayers of Kierkegaard"  this week, so go and hear her if you are in the Kansas City area.

I wouldn't want you to have a false impression that all is always sweetness and light chez fibermom

We don't quarrel much, but there are source of friction here. Mostly about food.

Here are some of them.

1. I don't like to be asked what's for dinner. My mother didn't like it either. If we asked what was for dinner, she always said "Fish heads and rice." I have tried this at my house, without success. My husband and I have conversations like this:

"What are you cooking?"
"Chicken."
"How are you cooking it?"
"In the oven."
"With what?"

And so on, with both of us getting more snappish and the boys joining in with "It's not time to cook yet, Dad," or "Just tell us what you're cooking,"

I honestly don't know why this irritates me so much. At one time, I took to making little menu cards for the week and posting them on Saturday, so that I could direct all inquiries to the little menu card. I also don't know why I gave up doing that, since it worked pretty well. I guess this is just an area of irrationality for me.

2. My husband believes that we spend too much on food. He has never actually done the grocery shopping. He does sometimes go shop for food, but his idea of a week's groceries is a chicken, two kinds of vegetable, and  a loaf of bread. This irritates me because I know that I am actually a frugal shopper and spend less on groceries than most. It irritates him because he believes that if I would shop at Wal-Mart and give up luxury items like frozen vegetables, it would only cost $30 a week to feed us and our two teenage boys.

3. The boys complain incessantly about healthy foods. I am not serving them bowls of millet with brussels sprouts and seaweed. We are talking here about whole grains, fresh fruit and veg, nonfat dairy foods, and lean meat, chicken, and fish. They sneer at buckwheat pancakes, let out cries of distress at fish, and roll their eyes at homemade salad dressing. The inclusion of mushrooms or spinach in anything results in dramatic stomping, and they seem to believe that the right to eat sugared cereals is guaranteed by the constitution. They wail, "Aren't there any snack foods in this house?" and are unmoved by my suggestion that apples are an excellent snack.

If they were writing this, they would say that I insist on serving them foods that they don't like, even though they have made it clear to me that they dislike them. They would say that this encourages waste and that they don't care about healthiness. Meatitude and sweetitude are the categories of foods that they recognize, although now that #1 son is going into horticulture (he got notice yesterday that he is receiving a scholarship, and we got the FAFSA forms back again, but I digress) he does like to have a salad every day.

4. My whole family seem to think that they are food critics for some very narrow-focus magazine column. They discuss my cooking as though they had just attended a play.

"This would be better without the carrots," one will say.
"Yes," another will agree, "They are really too sweet for the dish."
"I thought," I will chime in, defending my cooking, "that they added piquancy. And crunch."
"But do you really want crunch?" they will ask consideringly, as though questioning whether the set was really in tune with either the author's intent or the director's vision.

I was brought up to believe that is was unmannerly to salt food at the table, suggesting as that does that there was some lack of perfection in the meal. And yet my children do this sort of thing at the dinner table.

Sigh.

Well, I had a hectic morning, in an abstract sort of way. I had research to do, and had to drive my kid to school, and hadn't properly prepared for the week (excessive partying, plus church and meetings, and then of course I had to loll around and knit and read some) so there was a sort of scramble about lunches and so forth.

So I drove the kid to school and went ahead to the gym for a quick jump on the treadmill with my mind still on my research, and then dashed home to get on with html and communications with webmasters and other stuff that I find complex and challenging. I was enjoying myself, but there came the point at which I was just going to have to eat something, so I walked out to the mailbox to try to shift out of the abstract and into the real world enough to prepare a proper meal rather than just noshing on leftover birthday cake while constructing flyers.

And look what was in my mailbox!

dcstarlette made these lovely necklaces for me in the giftingmamas exchange, and sent them with a festive card in a way cool tie-dyed envelope.

It was quite a wonderful punctuation for the day. As you can see, I opened them right up at my desk and took a picture, and even put one on.

What a nice surprise!

Now, refreshed, I can plunge back in.

We are beginning to get a bit of blooming at last. I've planted a couple of tomatoes, and I expect to do the rest of my planing this week.

Here you see columbine, salvia, violets, and some other stuff that hasn't yet bothered to bloom. Now that they all seem settled and unlikely to die or anything, I will fill in around them with some bright annuals. Well, given that this is a woodland shade sort of garden, we all know that means impatients, but they can be doubles. And I can do some pinks (dianthus) at the edges.

We like to think of all that garden debris as mulch, and leave it there till the annuals get planted. It adds to the woodland glade effect, don't you think?

Here is #2 daughter's dress. Unfortunately, you can't really see it well (I simply cannot be trusted with a camera). It is the slinky Vogue 8280, and it looks very good on her.

Since she bought a black straw hat for the Derby party, she will be able to wear this with the hat and some black pumps and look like Audrey Hepburn at all her late-afternoon cocktail parties.

This will only be true after I have done the hemming and other hand finishing.

I am so busy today that I cannot offer any deep thoughts. Or any shallow ones.

Maybe tomorrow. 

Yesterday morning we went to the farmers' market and got some greens and bamboo shoots and hothouse cucumbers and tomatoes and breads. We ran into people from the university and the church and the Chamber Singers, so it was a rather lengthy shopping trip, and we had to hurry from there to our first party of the day.

It was at Partygirl's, so there was champagne and delicious brunch food, and we saw old friends and met some new people, and left there just in time to get #2 son to his gymnastics class. There #2 daughter and I spent an hour admiring #2 son and catching up on each other's lives, and then we all zipped over to the grocery to get things for my husband's birthday cake.

Following the birthday celebration, we went and bought straw hats for the Derby party, and got back just in time to take the price tags off before Janalisa showed up to fetch us for the party.

The party was quite fun. Our hostess had put the names of the horses in a bowl, and each of us put in a dollar and picked a name. The one who picked the name of the winner got the dollars. Our hostess had also laid out a lovely spread of food, and I was able to take a plateful of fruit and vegetables (okay, there was a phyllo cup involved at one point, but it was mostly fruit and vegetables). And she had mint juleps. I assume they were juleps. She had a blender going out on the screen porch, and was pouring out frosty glasses and pouring in more and more Old Crow, and the bourbon fumes reached your nostrils long before the cup reached your lips. I drank about a quarter of an inch of mine.

So there we were, surrounded by ladies in hats calling out "Hey!" (casual local version of "Hello") as more and more ladies in hats arrived, and greeting #2 daughter with things like "Come over here and give me a hug, you precious thing!" and having the standard girl party conversations. The ages ranged from 20 to 80, a thing which I always feel improves a party.

When the race began, we distributed ourselves among the rooms with televisions. In our room, we determined that we would shout. While we watched the horses coming around, we debated what might be good things to shout. "Come on, Hard Spun!" sounds fine, but "Come on, I'maWildandCrazyGuy!" is not so good, so we wanted some alternatives. We came up with a few, and one of the group recommended the line from My Fair Lady: "Move your bloomin' arse!" So when the actual race part began, we were ready.

Our room was lucky. We had the women who had picked the two frontrunners, Cowtown Cat and Hard Spun, so once the rest of our horses were off the screen, we all rooted for the two of them, mostly just alternating "Come on, Hard Spun" and "Come on Cowtown Cat" for fairness's sake. So when another horse came up on the outside in the final seconds, we were all taken aback. We thought is was Sedgefield, and had already agreed that "Come on Sedgefield" would sound silly. Then we saw that it was not number 1 but number 7 -- and the person who had pulled his name was in our room, too. You can imagine that we had plenty of excitement there.

We then returned to the random chatting business of the party, and got home in time for #2 daughter to get ready for her date with Arkenboy. He is seriously overworked right now (and I know seriously overworked when I see it) and had a study group later, so #2 daughter rejoined us in time to watch a movie -- Keeping Mum, which was very good. We went to bed early and got up extremely early to send her off to her church (she is the music minister) in another state. She left me a lovely dress she made, so that I can do the hand-finishing. I'll show you a picture later. I have also completed a skein of the Plymouth Stone cotton, and I'll show you a picture of that later, too. I left my camera at the store on Friday.

What I should do today is clean house and weed the garden. It is possible that what I will actually do is read and knit.

Last night's new experience was bingo.

Partygirl and #2 daughter and I went, along with other women from church and work. Blessing brought her sister, of whom I had heard many adventuresome stories, and I also saw lots of customers from the store, since we live in a small town. It was a very girly evening. This was particularly true because it was breast cancer charity event, so there was a lot of pink being worn. There was even a boy there in a "Tough Guys Wear Pink" T-shirt, though Partygirl prefers the "Save the Tatas" slogan. I think it might be open to misinterpretation.

Perhaps you, like me, have never played bingo before. You get these little cards with windows over rows of numbers, and they have sliding red shutters which you push back and forth. Mine said "Father Bandini Council," Father Bandini being the priest who defended the church from the vigilantes -- I told you that story last week.

I expect you know the rules of bingo -- even I knew the rules. So  basically you have an evening of conversation interrupted by little spells of concentrating on bingo cards. 

I had a "bingo" and won a top-of-the-line slotted spoon. I'm sure I'll get a lot of use from it, though at that moment I would have preferred to take home the bingo card. It was so clever.

Unlike handbells, bingo requires absolutely no skill. We are skipping the handbell festival today. We have a brunch at Partygirl's and a Derby Party with Janalisa, plus #2 son's gymnastics, my husband's birthday (he has announced that he is too old for birthdays, but we will be ignoring that), and of course the normal Saturday stuff, so we will be too busy for the handbells.

This was a Pampered Chef event, and I was hostess. Pampered Chef  is a cookware company, which sells at parties like Tupperware. They have raised 5 million dollars for breast cancer research with these May events. I host Pampered Chef parties about once a year, and when you do this, you often end up with free things. I never try to sell things or pay any attention to that aspect of the party, considering it rather a social occasion where someone else  does the cooking, and so it is always a delightful surprise when the consultant says to me "You can have $60 worth of free stuff," or whatever it might be. But this time I was really surprised that people bought things, since we were playing bingo and not watching people cook. I spend my working life selling people things -- or, actually, helping the people who need the things I sell to find what they need -- so I obviously don't want to sell things in my free time. But here I am, surprised, deciding whether to be practical and replace my elderly kitchen utensils, or to give in to the lure of the gorgeous bamboo cheese board.

Does it sound as though I am being frivolous today? I am. I have to come up with a hat for the Derby party. Have a fun weekend!