30 April 2002, 9:41 ayem

I feel like hell. I have a fever and I'm achy. I think I have to go home when my coworker gets here.

We did not win last night, but both sets ended in tiebreakers. It was a good match, and we both played really well.

29 April 2002, 3:33 peeyem

Happy birthday, Ellen.

I have taken the extremely sorry measure of dropping off my laundry to be fluffed and folded. Now I'm going to go get it and then take a nap before my City of Decatur Tournament match with Leanne tonight.

Photos tomorrow from the great saran-wrapping-the-bed-to-the-car adventure.

26 April 2002, 9:59 ayem

Firestation Fun

Wednesday night at practice I went to the firestation to go to the men's room. I do this all the time during practice. I had never noticed that there are two doors in, but I locked the one outside one that I had entered through. I went in one stall and found magazines but no toilet paper. I went in the other one found toilet paper but no magazines. I eschewed the urinals altogether. I was about to sit down when I heard the door open. Then I looked down and saw feet facing the wrong way. I didn't know what to do, so I put my hands over my eyes and said, "don't be nekkid when I come out of here." T he fireman said, "'scuse me?" I told him I was just making him aware there was a woman on board. Mostly I didn't want him to do anything disgusting while I was in there. But then he couldn't go and I couldn't either. I didn't want to leave because I just knew I'd have to put a face with it all and I think he felt the same way. so we both stayed in horrible silence until he finally did his business and left.

25 April 2002, 3:33 peeyem

Ha. Not only did I postpone my slammogram until next week, but I moved my eyebrow appointment to today. I know, I know, it's craziness. But they were big and bushy and annoying and I couldn't do a thing with them. I was having to part them with a rattail comb to look through them.

I've been making updates to my site. If you look around, you'll find them.

24 April 2002, 3:45 peeyem

Another beautiful day in Atlanta. Tennis practice is tonight, and it doesn't feel too humid out there...whoever said It's not the heat, it's the humidity was on to something.

I had an eyebrow appointment for Monday, but I can't stand it that long, so I've postponed my mammogram appointment on Friday in favor of getting my brows zipped. My priorities are clearly out-of-whack.

23 April 2002, 4:33 peeyem

Clearly it's not always easy to come up with an update. Sometimes my day seems mind-numbingly boring. Today is one of those days. I dropped a prescription off at the most expensive drugstore in the world (but man, the service is stellar) and dropped my sewing machine off at the repair place.

I'm helping someone with a little project. I don't know how I get myself into these things. I have a bad feeling I'm going to devote a lot of time to this and it will all be for naught. Gak. Oh, well, I waste time like it's going out of style.

22 April 2002, 3:51 peeyem

Happy Earth Day. Love your mother.

My headache has abated, and I am leaving shortly to go get a prescription filled that will, theoretically, prevent a horrid recurrence.

While it's on my mind, go here to read a funny letter. Not hysterically funny, you understand, but moderately amusing.

The house is partially painted. I like it. I like it a lot. I'll post a photo later, and then you can imagine it with the foundation mossy green and the burford hollies planted around it, their shiny red berries glistening in the sun.

Before I even started my match yesterday, I bent over to get a pen for the scorecard and tore my shorts. No one had a safety pin, so I suppose the world has seen more of my underwear than they'd prefer. No matter, we won...good thing, too, because it was hotter than the hammered-down hinges of Hell.

(4:23 p.m. – Patience is a virtue, but it's not one of mine. I don't have time to be screwing around with this, but here's the house)

19 April 2002, 1:28 peeyem

Today is Andy's birthday. Happy birthday, friend.

My head still hurts. I'm not sure how long I can live like this. I have an appointment with my GP on Monday, and they're just going to have to do something. I cannot imagine that with all that education and all those books and all that technology that this can't be prevented.

Email from Beaufort:

When I was little we had whippoorwills – actually chuck-will's-widows, their Southern brethren – around the house, but there hadn't been one for 40 years when my mama died. We still heard owls, though, barred owls hooting and cackling at each other in springtime like crazy cats. It'd make yr hair stand on end to hear what love sounds like to barred owls. I have no idea what love sounds like, really.

I responded to him that I think love sounds like the shower running in the morning when I'm not in there. It also sounds like the refrigerator being opened and closed by someone else, and like the passenger side pillow being flipped in the dark.

But what do I know? Maybe it just sounds like the whir of the VCR as it rewinds. Beaufort and I have been corresponding for a number of years. How a good Southern boy from Milledgeville, Georgia ended up in Detroit I will never know.

18 April 2002, 1:50 peeyem

Christ. It's only April 18 and it is 97 degrees in Atlanta, Georgia. Ick. I hate when it's so hot you get stuck to the couch on the porch.

Yesterday was migraine day. It started Tuesday evening and bad went to worse and I thought I was dying. I got up and got myself dressed just in case I did, insofar as I really don't want to be found five days later in my Don't Mess With Texas t-shirt and flipflops. My head is still faintly throbbing, but I think I'm past the part where I see my life flash before me.

As for the house, the die has been cast. It's going to be red.

16 April 2002, 2:39 peeyem

I just couldn't stand it anymore so I got a haircut. Actually, I got them all cut. On the demand of the lovely and talented Christine, I have been growing my bangs out. Really, I thought I was done with that nonsense. I used to get this notion to do it every few years or so, so I'd let them grow and live through the bad hair era, and then once it was all the same length, I'd become so agitated with it all that I'd get a pair of scissors and cut bangs back into myself. And really, most people look better when their foreheads aren't hanging out all over the place. So today I woke up feeling like Fraggle Rock, and it's been cut, but not my bangs so much. I have a bad feeling they might be looking like Farrah Fawcett Majors c. 1978.

I'm getting the house painted this weekend, or at least I think I am. I'm having decisional difficulties with the colors. On the one hand, I want it barn red. On the other hand, conventional wisdom tells me I better just pick white and be done with it. Maybe I'll just leave it up to my number one brother to pick something.

It's summer roster time and I'm short a man or two. Yuk. This happens every summer. It's really just too damn hot for decent people to be running around sweating.

15 April 2002, 4:57 peeyem

Happy Tax Day!

It was a busy weekend. It's been a busy day.

Friday evening I managed to get myself somewhat tight before the evening's activities began. I don't remember the last time I was housedrunk alone. This would all be a bigger deal were I not such a cheap date. It all started because I like the beer to be in the crisper drawer, and the last one wouldn't fit, so I drank it. I hadn't had a beer in months and it was quite tasty so I had another. Somewhere along the way I had a few more.

Saturday I needed a nap. And yesterday was tennis, where we not only got spanked, but I got sunburned.

Now it's practically time to go home and I have been busy, busy, busy, rush, rush, rush, when am I ever gonna wash my hair and rinse out a few things?

More tomorrow. And maybe I'll update my links page and other things, too.

12 April 2002, 3:49 peeyem

Yesterday...

I went to my hometown for a memorial service for my Uncle George, who was the last of my grandmother's brothers. I have thought and thought and thought about why I was so singularly upset by his death (see 3/12/02), and have come to the conclusion that it's because not only was a I fond of – fascinated by, even – him, but because it's the end of an era. He was the last person I knew who knew my mother when she was a baby, and the last person who could tell me stories about my grandmother and about those times.

Enough of that, though.

I had a great time at home. I had lunch with my sister, who really is one of the only people I know who you could call up and say "I need you to come over here with a shovel and a big tarp," and she would just do it without giving you any grief about it.

I saw cousins and aunts and uncles that I don't see nearly enough of, that I haven't kept up with, who have children I've never met. I sat with my Uncle Harold and my Aunt Carolyn, with whom I spent so much time growing up.

I saw Cathy and Jaime, who I haven't seen since I was eight or something ridiculous like that. I met Skip (Little George? George Jr.?) who I don't remember ever meeting in the first place. I have spent all this time being fascinated by them, and I see that I was right to be.

Ben was there, all grown up now. Ben was my primary playmate. Everything was an adventure to us. And Al, my favorite relative of all, because we see each other and are pleasant and pleased and he's never given me a hassle about anything.

My aunt Betty and her sister, Miss Virginia, played the piano and the organ, Aunt Betty on the left side of the church and Miss Virginia on the right, just like they have been my whole life.

I sat there in the service and remembered all the other times I have been to Blue Water Baptist Church, the most poignant of which have been for funerals, and I remembered how I've never been to a Currie service that didn't have How Great Thou Art and a reading of the 23rd Psalms. I looked around and remembered how big the little church used to seem to me and realized that it is not cathedral-like in proportion. There are perhaps 40 pews in there. I guess I've just gotten taller.

And I heard my Uncle Lee lead the congregation in How Great Thou Art and Amazing Grace, and I will tell you here and now that no matter where I go or who I become or what I do, there will never be anything sweeter to me than Lee Currie singing.

It all makes me miss home, but not enough to go back there.

10 April 2002, 2:09 peeyem

Every day, I read and hear about extraordinary people doing ordinary things. But those people are Over There, doing their thing.

Every day, I am surrounded by ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Those people are Right Here. In many cases, they are right in my house or as close as my email.

I am fortunate that I recognize extraordinary when I see it. I am more fortunate to be surrounded by ordinary.

9 April 2002, 4:26 peeyem

As I was driving up Peachtree to Lenox Square this afternoon, I was cut off several times by the same gentleman in a rather large white Chevrolet...no blinkers, no arm out the window, no nothing. I cannot think of a single good reason to eschew use of signals when turning or changing lanes, and I spend more time than your average person assbound and thinking.

The stuff for my fine lines over my lips must work, because it burns like Hell.

8 April 2002, 5:37 peeyem

I'm getting fine lines over my lips. I think it's because I purse my lips when I'm thinking. Whatever. I don't like it. I don't like it one bit. In aid of this, I bought some ridiculously expensive bottle of some sort of lip fix serum elixir from the spa where I get my brows done. It smells good and tastes good, but if it doesn't help the situation, I'm going to have to get a peel or something. I can't live this way.

I did not paint the bedroom. I knew that I wouldn't. Instead I ran errands (finally got the car washed! Huzzah!) and took a nap on Saturday, and on Sunday I slept in and went to a matinee. It was all I could do to stay up until The Practice was over last night. You'd think I'd be well-rested from all of the sleep I got over the weekend, but no.

It's looking like rain here in Atlanta, which means yet another tennis practice to make up. It also means yet another practice that I need. Hopefully the rain will wash away the pollen and I can cease and desist with the big sneezing.

Feh. I'm going to the bookstore to lie on their sofa for a change.

5 April 2002, 4:49 peeyem

Paint the bedroom? Don't paint the bedroom? I have the paint and the supplies, it's the gumption I'm lacking.

4 April 2002, 4:43 peeyem

This is the kind of person I want to be sometimes:

I don't want to espouse those causes particularly, but I'd like to have enough passion about things that I'd plaster my car with it. It must say something about me that the only bumpersticker I've ever had was to Save Deacon Burton's. Aside from that, I've had two small window stickers, one for Young Harris College and one that's an Apple logo. That's it. Fried chicken, college, and Mac.

There was just some woman in the ladies room with her shoes off. Who hangs around an office building in their stocking feet? Good grief.

4 April 2002, 4:12 peeyem

Roostercoot. My grandmother called me that. It was horribly embarassing then. Now I just miss it.

I think it's going to rain. Yay rain.

3 April 2002, 4:38 peeyem

This just in!!! Leanne's site is up. Go see it!

3 April 2002, 4:05 peeyem

There are men in the parking lot high-fiving each other. Why do men do that? Worse, why do men try to do it to me? One in particular continues to do it, despite my having said in very distinct syllables Susan does not partake of the High-Fiving.

It is a beautiful day here in Atlanta, again. This is the third really glorious day in a row. I want to call in good weather and go play, but no one is available to go and play with me. Carol pointed out yesterday, in reference to the rainbow, that she saw that same rainbow and that she had noticed things being more vivid and intense and liked to think that it's not because we are destroying the atmosphere. But we are, I am afraid. I note from year to year the changes in the weather, and I know that things are on a downward spiral. Of course, total destruction won't probably come in my lifetime, but if I think too hard on it I get a little wiggy.

Check in here later to see Carol and Brenda. You'll love them.

Next Thursday, I have to journey to Dublin for a memorial service. I wonder if my number one sister or my daddy is reading this and might like to get lunch or something?

That's Dublin, Georgia, by the way. Every now and again, someone asks me where I'm from and I tell them Dublin. Invariably their response is Really? You don't have much of an accent. One man asked how I got here and I told him that I came in the car and he was mystified as to how I drove across the ocean. Dublin's a nice little place to be from.

2 April 2002, 11:32 ayem

Yet another reason I'm so proud to be an Amurrican citizen:

I wonder if he didn't look so stupid if I'd mind less? I mean, he's cute and all, but he just reeks of I can't find my ass in the dark with both hands.

1 April 2002, 1:05 peeyem

So. The fallout from my falldown is that my shoulder blades ache and my butt's a funny color. I am pleased to note that I don't think I'll be needing the nursing home just yet.

I read in the paper today that people are now dosing their pets with Prozac. Who are these people and where are they getting all this money?

Last night while I was doing laundry, a very pregnant woman came in and took something to her car. I glanced up and went back to reading my magazine, but she shook my foot and very excitedly told me to LOOK! I did, and there was the most remarkable rainbow (thumbnail to the right) I think I've ever seen. I haven't seen one in I don't know how long, and this one was breathtaking. Somehow I felt that it meant everything will be okay. Of course, realistically speaking, everything will be okay, one way or another, and, as my daddy says about things that aren't okay, we'll all get over it if we live long enough. It struck me, though, how odd it is that I look for signs. Do you?

I wasn't done with March!

Hey! What happened to February? It's Right Here.