For You

We have had just the most glorious, uh, 3 days (I started this over the weekend, oops!). It's been clear, warm, and sunny, my favorite type of weather. Even I—sun-shunner that I am—have gone out to catch a few rays, until I noticed some red blotches on my arms. With the feeling I was watching skin-cancer in progress, I quit the balcony for the less carcinogenic (except for the fine dust) living room.

Now that the sun's come out properly, I can see that the neighbors' yards are taking on prarie-like proportions with the deep grass and wildflowers. Remember the opening credits to "Little House on the Prarie", where the individual Ingalls-es are running down a slope? Put a white, 4-story house at the top of the slop, and an apple tree halfway down, and that's what I see out the front window.

We're way past "the days are getting noticeably longer," but it came as kind of a surprise since it's been so overcast lately. Dinnertime tends to sneak up on you when it's still full sunlight outside until after 7 p.m. I mean, the sun is not even casting shadows yet. Even the street lights don't come on until after 8:30. It would be even worse if we didn't live down in a valley; when the sun goes over the rim, we get evening, but the people living out in the plains are probably already getting zombified by the late light.

Even half a week after the last rain, we can hear the water rushing through the stream that flows under our street. The city had to do something with the water to keep it from washing away their nifty roads, I guess, so several streams spend part of their course underground. It makes an interesting white noise at night. I don't generally require white noise to sleep, but I have to admit it's soothing.

Darling Daughter did a fantastic job of cleaning her room over the weekend, so I got her a Barbie magazine as a little bribe for continued good behavior. Or reward, it's all the same. There are a ton of magazines for little girls—Barbie, Disney Princess, some other princesses, and about 80 pony magazines. D.D. got one last week that has 14- or 15-year-old girls in it who like ponies, and who like boys, and who have problems with their ponies and boys. This magazine has everything an almost 8-year-old could want!

Speaking of Barbie, D.D. was playing on their (her?) website, a charming little game called "Room Makeover." You get to pick from an astounding array of crap to decorate your virtual bedroom, and one of the Barbie friends pops in at the end to congratulate you on your fantastic talents. I thought my eyes would bleed at the sight of the psychedelic nightmare that adorned the computer screen. For one thing, I don't know how anyone could *sleep* in such a room. I for one would certainly develop some kind of psychiatric disorder.

L.H. and I are generally anti-knick-knacks. Horizontal space has a disturbing tendency to get stuff piled on it around here, so the fewer things we have to dig out of the mess, the better. L.H. is more mess-averse than I am (as evinced by the current state of my side of our room), but I do my fair share of picking up. But ceramic doodads and posters are not my idea of decorating. I guess I lean in the Nordic decorating direction (woo! hoo! IKEA!).

D.D. has become a prescriptive princess. She declared that "luv" looks dumb (as seen in an "email" on the Barbie site). She had noticed it once before in a book we were reading, and now it's firmly entrenched in her mind. Her dad will be so proud.