Weekend Update News Team

composition in water ice and sticks
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Let us all now give thanks to St. Martin Luther King Jr. for this day off. Here it is 9:45 in the morning and I am not at work, hurrah, no, I am wandering around my house thinking about repotting plants and trying to keep myself from sinking down into the big comfy chair and reading all day, which is what I've been doing all weekend between baking cakes, battling hangovers and coddling my right foot, which, it turns out, has something awful yet common called acute planar fasciitis. You can google that yourself - every time I start looking at the diagrams of feet on the results my foot seizes up and I start to twitch and moan. It's painful as hell and if that wasn't enough, take my word for this: you never, ever, ever want to allow a strange, skinny old foot doctor to shoot steroids directly into the sole of your foot. No. You don't. But it's slowly getting better and today I'm going to clean up the whole house and take the dogs hiking, or at least that's the plan until one of my children thinks up something else that I must do immediately.

Probably that will be giving my son driving practice, a terrifying procedure. He is not actually a bad driver for a beginner but still there is nothing quite like the pure fear experienced by the parents of beginning drivers to get the old adrenaline racing and the heart attack looming ominously. "It doesn't help when you scream!" he says indignantly and of course he's right, it doesn't help, but hey, it's hardwired into the primitive brain: ancient cave mother must scream equally when a sabertooth lands in front of her and when ancient cave son, driving around narrow streets in ancient cave Buick, accelerates over 20 miles per hour.

The weekend was great: Friday evening I went to the Admiral to sit outside and drink beer with Susan, Zen, Helen and Kyle. Let us all now praise St. Martin again for the clement weather in which you can actually sit outside the Admiral and drink beer at least until the sun goes down and the frost tigers come out. Once that happened we went on over to Susan's house to drink more beer with Jodi and Jay. It was probably too much beer, but, whatever, I kept thinking: all I have to do tomorrow is bake a cake. That's it.

And that was all I did on Saturday: bake a cake. A two layer chocolate devil's food cake with mocha whiskey cream cheese icing, so there. Then it was time for the Capricorn birthday party at Annie's, where there was much merriment and we celebrated Annie's and Bill's and Audrey's and Dianna's birthday party with a giant spread of Chinese food, more beer and the aforementioned cake. Capricorns are all about cake. It says so in the astrology books.

Yesterday I did nothing but read and eat cake. I did make it over to the fabric store because I have these plans to make a skirt and, then, gods help me, I went into that big new used book store by River Ridge, where I bought a bunch of books and am immersing myself happily in them. I'm reading a Peter S. Beagle book called Avicenna which I'm not sure whether I've read before - I would have sworn that at some point I had read every single thing he has ever written, probably twice - but if I did I don't remember it and so it is amazing. And I read a book called Thraxas which was hilarious and terrific as well and I read a Megan Lindholm book called The Windsingers as well as finishing up Cecilia Dart-Thornton's book Weatherwitch, which, I'm sorry to say, Cecilia, was not so terrific because, among other things, it's annoying to have struggled through three whole books full of forsooths and lists and ballads only to stumble upon a plot in the last 100 pages of the third book.

However, I do have one piece of real news: I have heat! Heat! Yes! The iBoiler is cranking away and it's a little disconcerting, actually. All winter walking around my house has been like swimming across a lake: there are pockets of warm and pockets of cold. Now, though, it's just all warm everywhere and I don't even really need fuzzy socks. I fear I will grow soft and weak. I probably will grow soft and weak - in fact, I am already soft and weak if we get right down to it - and that should be a fairly awesome and warm process.