I’m in black today, but I can’t sing “I walk the line”.

I’m pretty much over being sad. It’s hard to be sad when your kitten is so cute and wants to play fetch and pounce.

Today, I’ve got a lunch date with one of my favorite punsters.

It’s Friday, Thank God, and the sun is shining.

The response to my blogs the past couple of days has been amazing.

When you have so many friends who are so loving and caring and sympathetic and … I’m a rich man, even if I didn’t have a dime.

Late in the afternoon, as evening fell and I started a small fire in the living room fireplace, I started a new book by William Gibson, the guy who wrote “Neuromancer”. This book is named “Pattern Recognition” and it’s pretty darn good so far.

After 10 p.m., I ventured out and ran into Sonic Sharon and her friend Nancy at Flip’s and had a chat with them that was pretty fun.

Slept like a rock until 8:30 this morning and I feel again like getting out, doing work, enjoying life again.

I’m very grateful for the many things in my life that are wonderful and that my problems are small enough for me to handle them.

This stuff about growing up and being an adult isn’t all that great, but it’s not all that bad, either.

Post Script: I cut myself on the chin this morning and it’s growing into a pimple the size of Bricktown Ballpark. I’m shy and embarrassed about it, so don’t mention it or I may burst into tears and cut you down with my 9mm, albeit with regret at your passing.

I’m pretending to be snowed in today.

I’m sitting at home playing with the cat and looking at the lovely snowfall out my back window so I don’t have to look out the front windows and see that the roads are clear and I could go to work or anywhere else I wanted.

For reasons that are private, I’m sad today. I’m trying to just go ahead and be sad. To feel the feeling and not try to cover it up with frenzied activity or drugs or alcohol or anything else. I’m not avoiding it for once.

I wrote not long ago that when I have the notion that I’d like to have a glass of wine with dinner, I’m able to have that thought and let it go, like Mcarp’s zen masters do when they are meditating. Today, that’s what I’m trying to do with this sadness.

This is real sadness, too. It’s not my depression. It’s important to me to process it. I’ve not been very adult in my life about feelings. Most of my life, whenever I felt any strong emotion of any kind, I looked for some way to drown it out. Literally drown it in alcohol for many years, but other times to drown it out in some other way. Some of the ways I’ve tried to supress emotions is by reading, watching movies, smoking pot, getting out and going from hither to yon, and, to my shame, often by using one or more women to boost my self esteem and distract me.

The result of stuffing my emotions rather than feeling them and processing them has been that those emotions come out sideways. Sometimes, I’m so successful at stuffing so many emotions for so long that they all come out at once in a suicidal gush. Sooner or later, I’ve found, emotions have a way of being felt and making themselves known and translating into some kind of behavior or another.

I don’t like it that I’m so emotionally stunted and I don’t like it that I’m emotionally fragile. I’d like to be the Marlboro Man. Stone faced and strong. Independent and self sufficient. My reality is that the Marlboro Man is an illusion. That’s not who I am and it’s not who I’m ever going to be.

Men don’t cry. I’d like to find the asshole who thought that one up as the paradigm for American culture and kick his ass from here to next week. Probably the same guy who thought up the idea that all American women have to look like the models on the cover of Vogue. Let’s get that jerk and run him out of town.

Right this very minute, I wish I COULD cry. Just get it over with and done. Nobody’s around and nobody could see me or shame me or tease me or anything.

I think I’m a little afraid to cry. That once I get started, it’ll be like when the suicidal gush comes and once I have that first tear, I won’t be able to stop because all the sadness I’ve stuffed will come out. Would that be so bad? Probably not. Probably the best thing for me. I don’t think it’s possible to cry yourself to death. So, what am I afraid of? Don’t know. I’m just default afraid. Whenever I don’t know what to do or how to act, I’m scared. Non specific anxiety. I’m afraid I’ll lose control, even though the truth is that I’m not in control and never have been.

I know this. If I’m ever going to get better at having emotions and not stuffing them and not being afraid of them, I’ve got to give myself some experience in having emotions and dealing with them honestly.

This is something that most people learn when they are much younger than I am.

I’m a late bloomer when it comes to emotions.

First, I had to drink for 40 years. Then, I had to sober up. Then, I had to have therapy. Then, I had to get my antidepressants right. Only now, in my 50s, am I in a place where I can do what you probably did when you were, say, 10-18 years old. I’m a pretty quick study. I expect that sometime before I retire I’ll be able to get mad, get sad, get glad and get over it.

Don’t be concerned for me. Be glad for me. Rejoice that I’m on my path to humanity. Be happy that this time I’m going to be a little sad for a little while and then be OK. It’s so much better than the alternative.

Peace.

three days since my last blog. wow. dear readers, had you given up on me?

this morning, I wrote a very long blog about the last three days and just as I got to the very last, I lost all of it. I don’t know what I did, but page after page of me pouring out my little life onto the computer screen all went away and I can’t retrieve it.

The ironic thing is that I had mostly written about my search for serenity in the AA sense of that word (think: serenity prayer) and then I lost the post and lost my serenity.

God can be such a prankster.

So, here’s the short version …

You may recall that a couple of weekends ago, I spent Saturday night restlessly going from one bar to another, one band to another, looking for something I didn’t find.

It was another wakeup call to me that I’m too far from my AA program.

I was “restless, irritable and discontent.”

That is a huge and major signal that I’m skating too close to drinking, even though I didn’t come close during that weekend to having a drink. Nevertheless, it’s my disease working on me.

Unchecked, that attitude will lead me to a place where I have no defense against the first drink and then I’ll be off and running.

My alcoholism is desperate right now because I’ve dedicated myself since the New Year to return to those things that helped me so much nearly 11 years ago when I first stopped drinking.

I’ve dedicated myself to 2 AA meetings a week this year. I’m actually doing that.

The second Friday in April, I’ve accepted a request for me to speak to an open meeting at the Western Club.

I’m going back to the basics and trying to work all 12 steps fresh, anew, and with the same dedication and desperation that I had when I first started.

Part of the motivation for that is that last year, I let romance and finance ruin my sobriety and serenity. No, I didn’t drink, but I’d let lots of my drinking behaviors creep back into my life. I was in the problem and not the solution. I spent too much time in that dangerous place between my ears. I let a dangerous resentment over my lovelife work me over and make me miserable. I let my own procrastination and perfectionism destroy my ability to work productively.

I’m trying to change that.

I’m trying to get more calm in my life. I’m trying to get back to my “center”.

I’m eating out far less often.

I’m dedicating myself to doing a minimum of productive work every day. Sunday, for example, I spent most of the day producing documents that were necessary for court hearings yesterday afternoon. As a result, when I went into court yesterday afternoon, everything was calm, I knew what was going to happen, I was prepared and my tendency to be afraid of the unknown was dispelled.

Last night, I stayed home and listened to music and read James Lee Burke’s “The Moon of Red Ponies.”

Saturday, I did things around the house and ran errands and tried to make my life better in small ways.

I refuse to spend my time seeking dates, sex and relationships. I’m very open to the women in my life and new women as well, but I’m trying to focus on friendship and emotional openness. It’s served me well in the sense that I’ve spent some time with some special women and I was able to enjoy them without making myself crazy about trying to date or bed them.

I wanted to become a domestic terrorist over my political discontent with the anniversary of the Iraq invasion and instead I prayed for the safety of my son in law and for my daughter’s strength.

I have a friend who has recently annoyed the hell out of me and instead of blasting him, I’ve decided to go to him in private and ask how I can be of help.

I’m seeking to identify the self destructive behaviors in my life and to substitute reading, writing and painting and other behaviors that enrich my life.

I spent an hour on the phone this weekend with an AA friend talking about the friend’s failed romance and the emotional upset that follows such failures. I suppose I got the call because I have so much experience with failed romances. (I’m laughing at myself there, folks, so laugh with me, OK?) Often, the teacher learns more than the student and I was able to use that conversation to examine my own behaviors, understand them and see through the friend to my own mistakes and shortfalls. I’ll never know if that conversation helped my friend, but I’m sure it helped me.

Somehow, in the crazy world that’s between my ears, the counterintuitive always seems the better choice. By thinking of someone else and their troubles, my own troubles seem to disappear.

So, what did I do since I last blogged?

No much. Pretty quiet, really.

A lot. I wrestled with my disease by surrendering to it and seeking calm and to be of help to others.

I looked for solutions rather than keeping the focus on the problems.

I gave up my expectations and avoided the resentments that inevitably follow.

By expecting nothing, I was showered with blessings.

I stopped striving and was given accomplishments.

God bless us everyone, Tiny Tim.

Peace.

This is my least favorite day of the year.

St. Pat’s Day.

A celebration of alcohol abuse.

A parade for IRA terrorists who blow up innocents today over Henry VIII wanting a divorce during The Reformation.

Most of the “Irish” songs you know were written by New York City Jews who had never been to Ireland. Real Celtic music can hardly be classified as music it’s so noisome.

It’s a culture of victimization. Every problem in Ireland and every problem “the niggers of Europe” face is blamed on the bloody British. That’s bullshit, of course, but what do you expect from a culture that lionizes “blarney”?

The epitome of Irish culture is the 1916 uprising. A bunch of drunks, halfwits, poets and musicians talking in pubs over too many pints thought they could take on an army and be backed by the Irish people. They were slaughtered and the Irish people didn’t rise up, they cowered in their hovels.

Don’t get me started on Irish literature. Unreadable crap, in the main. James Joyce saying of Finnegan’s Wake that it took him 30 years to write it so it’s your problem if it takes you 30 years to understand it. What a load of arrogant crap!

Just try telling me that Ireland saved western culture. Yeah, I’ve read that book. Ireland “saves” western culture by being so backward, barbaric and isolated that no one came there to burn down the monasteries where the Irish scribes were trying to copy the books of other European writers. Yeah, that makes me admire the bog hopping, maudlin, mother obsessed drunks of Ireland.

Men who sire a dozen children because contraception is murder get together to build bombs to kill Protestant children because it’s not murder to kill the bloody Brits. Huh?

Don’t think about that, though. Have a green beer and puke in a gutter instead. It’s St. Pat’s Day!

Here’s something I’ve learned, even if I can’t always put it into practice.

It’s a mistake to compare your insides to another’s outside.

We look at people we know and think we know what their life is like. Sometimes we envy their life and sometimes we feel sorry for them and other times we make other judgments about them.

We compare what we think about their life AS WE SEE IT — which means we’re not seeing what they are like in private — and compare that slice of their life to how we feel about ourselves.

Some people look at my life and they think they would be so happy if they could trade places. I’ve got great things going for me that everyone sees: house, car, clothes, law degree. Man, that John Long, he sure is lucky. It would sure be great if I could have HIS life instead of my boring old life.

It doesn’t work that way.

If you read this blog, you know that I struggle with alcoholism, depression, relationship problems, morals, ethics, boredom at work.

Life isn’t perfect for me. Sometimes, I get depressed and want to run away or kill myself. Hasn’t happened lately, but it’s happened.

If you’ve never been clinically depressed and suicidal, it’s hard to explain how painful that is. It’s a dark, gray fog that covers everything and seeps into every thought.

Trust me. If your problems can be fixed with a little cash, you don’t want to trade problems with me.

You don’t see the times when I’m raking myself over the coals in fits of self loathing. You don’t know my frustrations and tears.

Maybe you think you’d like to be some kind of convertible driving playboy and think that’s what my life is like.

It isn’t.

Not at all.

More to the point, you wouldn’t like that life nearly as much as you think.

The playboy’s life is better as your fantasy than it is in real life.

In real life, one woman with whom you have a great connection and can talk to and laugh with is the much better choice.

Less drama, more emotional fulfillment and, trust me on this, better sex as well.

One night stands and short term flings sound great, but for me personally, I find them dreadful and avoid them at all costs.

It goes the other way as well.

You might look at someone and think their life is terrible. In your superior stance, maybe you feel sorry for them, pity them.

If, however, you had a chance to be inside them, you might find they are exactly the way God intends them to be and they are perfectly happy without your big screen toys and camera cell phone.

Maybe you think you’d kill yourself before you slept with that pig they are paired with. Inside, they may love that person beyond all reason because of other qualities like kindness and thoughtfulness.

So, let’s make a deal, dear readers. I won’t assume I know what your life is like and you don’t assume you know everything you need to know to judge my life.

Someone will always be better off and someone else will always be worse off. If you focus on that, you’ll always be unhappy.

If you are unhappy with your life, don’t envy mine; instead, do something to make your own life more like you’d like it to be.

And, don’t pity me because I’m making a different decision than you would make — maybe it’s the decision I really believe will make my life better in ways you don’t imagine.

That way, we can both enjoy our own lives and love each other for who we are and not who we might, could, should be.

That’s my rant for today, sparked off by a discussion last night of the movie “Lost Highway”.

TTFN

I know some of y’all think it’d be cool to be a lawyer, but this is sure one of those days when I think about my creative writing teacher, Clay Lewis (a really great guy) who said to me as I tried to choose between a master’s in the English Dept. and law school “John, I know you’d like to BE a lawyer, but do you want to DO what a lawyer does?”

If I’d listened to him, I’d at least be starving doing something I liked doing.

Today is a draft documents day. I’m trying to compose: a covenant not to compete, a non-disclosure agreement, and an Order Allowing Final Accounting in a probate.

Yawn!

A big piece of the action is getting a computerized form and filling in the blanks. Another part is throwing out the parts that don’t apply and also altering parts that do apply to fit the exact situation of my clients. Another part is finding the info to fill in the blanks. It CAN be challenging and, at times, as I’m considering competing values like flexibility and certainty, it can be mind bending. Mostly, however, it’s just a big bore.

I keep telling people that if this job were fun and easy, then everyone would do it and we couldn’t charge so much per hour.

And, when my clients get the bills for $400 or $500 per form, they will scream bloody murder about how it’s just look it up in a book and fill in the blanks, anybody could do it.

Of course, knowing which book and which form and how to alter it, that doesn’t count.

And, it’s not my clients’ fault that I have to type the damn things myself since I don’t own a paralegal like the big time guys, so I don’t charge them for the time I put in just typing.

Which means, I’ll charge an hour or two but actually put in three or four of my time.

And, about every third paragraph, someone calls with their “emergency” and then it takes me forever to find where I left off and … boo hoo! I’m feeling sorry for myself now, you betcha.

Good thing it’s Wednesday Paseo dinner and movie night.

Poor kittykat.

He thought he was going to be the heavyweight champeeeen of the world.

Turns out, he’s not even a contender.

Sinatra got his ass good and whipped by Tuxedo.

Confidence will only take you so far when it’s your first fight and you pick on someone twice your size.

He’s a changed cat.

No pouncing last night.

No playing with toys.

No asking out.

He hid and didn’t even want to be held, petted or spoiled.

He did finally crawl up onto the bed and sleep at my feet sometime during the night.

He was still quite subdued this morning.

And hypervigilant. He kept staring out the door without going near it and was spooked by every small noise. The fridge compressor started up while he was standing in front of it and it made him jump and move away.

I’ve tried to be soothing and reassuring, but the boy is by gosh rattled by the experience.

In polite terms, he’s had his paradigm shifted. In street talk, he got his ass whipped good.

I may have to start sharing my anti-depressants with my cat.

Or not.

Love: 10 crazy scientific facts

By Laura Schaefer

1. It’s like looking in a mirror! It turns out we all have a little something in common with Narcissus—the mythical fellow who fell in love with his own reflection. Scientists at the University of Liverpool recently concluded that our brains favor people with familiar faces. The research team asked over 200 participants to view a number of digitally altered human faces. They found that subjects preferred the features they found the most familiar—whether that means his or her own visage or that of a family member. This may explain that common phenomenon of couples looking like they could be siblings.

2. Manner, schmanners: Go ahead and stare. Another new study says that when a woman walks into a room, she is considered more attractive if she turns her eyes directly toward a certain man. Men would rate the same woman as less desirable if she doesn’t make strong eye contact. In this study, conducted at Dartmouth University, lead researcher Malia Mason had male participants sit and view a series of faces of fashion models, digitally enhanced to either be gazing toward or away from the participant. The study authors asked the viewer to rate the likeability of each model and found that those who turned away were seen as less agreeable. The study’s researchers went on to suggest that a woman’s gaze can be a powerful arousal cue and that our impressions are largely formed by nonverbal communications such as eye contact. So start locking eyes, ladies!

3. You’ll know it when you see it. A recent study at the University of Pennsylvania reveals that regardless of what people say they are looking for in a dating situation, they don’t need a lot of time with or information about a person to tell if they’re interested. Single people’s behavior suggests that individuals know “it” (a person who appeals to them) when they see it—almost instantly. Lead researcher Robert Kurzban and his colleagues studied data from 10,000+ daters. They found that men and women assessed potential compatibility within moments of meeting, using primarily visual cues such as age, height, and attractiveness. Says Kurzban, “Somewhat surprisingly, factors that you might think would be really important to people — like religion, education, and income — played very little roles in their choices.”

4. Listen up. The next time you call up a potential love match, pay special attention to how they sound. Researchers at the University of Albany had 149 men and women rate the attractiveness of a series of recorded voices on a scale from 1 to 10. The researchers also gathered information about the sexual histories of the people whose voices they recorded. They found that the voices found to be the most appealing belonged to people who had sex at an earlier age, had more sexual partners, and were more prone to infidelity than those rated as having less appealing voices. So know that what’s a seductive voice to you may be linked to a person with a bit of a past…

5. I couldn’t help it baby, it’s in my genes. There may be a genetic component to infidelity, says a professor at the Twin Research Unit at St. Thomas’ Hospital, London. This is based on the fact that if one twin exhibits infidelity, the other twin strays 55% of the time. In the general population, the number is 23%. The tendency to remain faithful is a component of personality, the scientist elaborates, which is governed both by a number of genes and societal factors.

6. It’s official. Love makes us crazy. For one, it causes serotonin levels in the brain to drop, which may lead people to obsess about their lover. (The levels of serotonin, a chemical produced by the body, are also low in people who have obsessive-compulsive disorder.) Next, it ramps up production of the stress hormone cortisol, leading to slightly higher blood pressure and possible loss of sleep. Finally, a scientist at the University of London has found that when people look at their new loves, the neural circuits that are usually in charge of social judgment are suppressed. All in all, love kind of leaves you obsessive, stressed, and blind. And we love it.

7. Why broken hearts hurt… A recent UCLA study suggests the psychological hurt of a break-up is just as real as a physical injury. Two areas of the brain that respond to physical pain also become activated when a person is dealing with social pain, such as being dumped. The study’s authors used an MRI to monitor brain activity in participants while they played a game simulating social rejection. The researchers believe that the pain of being rejected may have evolved as a motivating force that led humans to seek out social interaction, which is crucial for the survival of most mammals.

8. Blushing is best. If we take our cue from apes, rosy cheeks are crucial in the dating game, says a new study. Scientists at Stirling University in Great Britain have found that primates prefer mates with red faces. A rosy glow might also act as a similar cue in humans, say the British researchers, sending a message of good health. They speculate that it could explain why women use blusher.

9. Kiss this way. Did you know there is a “right” way to kiss? People are more likely to tilt their heads to the right when kissing instead of left, says a report published recently in the journal Nature. A scientist from Ruhr University in Germany analyzed 124 pairs of smoochers and found that 65 percent go toward the right.

10. Meet for drinks before dinner. Researchers at NYU and Stanford have discovered that hungry men prefer heavier women. By staking out a dining hall, scientists had hundreds of students fill out questionnaires about their preferences in a mate. Men who filled out the questionnaire just before they entered the hall described their ideal woman as an average of three or four pounds heavier than men interviewed after they ate. Incidentally, researchers did not find the same change in women’s preferences, so guys: Go ahead and schedule that drinks date for before or after dinnertime.

Laura Schaefer is the author of “Man with Farm Seeks Woman with Tractor: The Best and Worst Personal Ads of All Time.”

Just got back from a noon AA meeting. I love the Monday noon meeting. It’s called “There is a solution” and it’s THE meeting that helped me sober up.

I don’t always talk about being a recovering alcoholic. It’s my problem and not yours and I figure most of you will be bored by my stuff in that area of my life.

Anyway, during the meeting, someone talked about quitting drinking forever and having to change playmates and playgrounds.

It’s very typical talk for the Monday meeting since that meeting is often filled with people who don’t have much time in the program. Also, the really sick fucks like me.

Anyway, I get asked at times about how long I’ve been sober and how can I do like I did Saturday night and go to bars, maybe even a bunch of bars, where people are drinking and at least some people are drinking hard.

Well, I’ve got to admit that I’ve had it much easier than most folks who have a drinking problem. I “got it” pretty early on.

One of the things I “got” was that there was no need for me to think about quitting forever and not even quitting for the 11 years I’ve quit. If I had ever tried to quit forever or for a stated long period of time, I’m not so sure I could have stayed sober.

I just try to not drink right now.

Sure, I still have the thought come to me that a cold beer would taste really good or that some red wine would top off this Italian dinner or that a flute of champagne with a strawberry floating in it looks very tasty.

I do a kind of Mike Carpenter Zen thing. I have the thought and let it evaporate and go away.

I just don’t have that drink right now. I’ll have a drink tomorrow or the next day or some other time if I still have that craving. Right now, I just think I’ll pass.

After all, the last time I had a drink I went off to kill myself because I just couldn’t stand the thought of living even one more day like I’d been living: waking up to a hangover, drinking coffee, smoking cigarets and taking aspirin in the shower, hating every single moment of my life, refusing to leave the house, go to work, answer the phone or even coming to the door if you knocked on it. Drinking left me with nothing but remorse and self loathing.

And, I learned that it wasn’t the fifth or eighth drink that got me drunk, it was that first one. It wasn’t the caboose that was killing me, it was the locomotive.

Eventually, I understood that I would stay sober because of what was going on in my own head and in my own heart. If my sobriety depended on what was going on around me, I would always find a reason to drink. So, if you’re around me and you are drinking, that’s fine with me. It doesn’t make me want to drink. It’s like I’m allergic to strawberries and they give me hives. No matter how many people around me are eating strawberries, I’d still get hives if I ate one. So, I don’t eat strawberries, even if it’s strawberry festival.

Therefore, March 17 will come around and “everyone” will be drinking green beer on St. Pat’s Day. Not me. I’ve puked green beer and been puked on. Been there, done that and no thanks.

Drinking isn’t any fun for me anymore. It’s dreadful. It’s death in a glass.

No longer do I wish that I could “drink like a gentleman”. I wasn’t much of a gentleman when I drank.

Quitting drinking was the smartest decision I ever made.

I hope that when you are drinking, it’s good for your palate and that the red wine is good for your heart health and your mental health. That’s as it should be.

Even the best medicines have side effects and bad results for a small part of the population given the medicine. I just happen to be one of the ones that has a bad side effect from alcohol.

I can’t begin to tell you how much better my life is without drinking. Even when I have problems — and I’ve been through the death of my father and a divorce from my wife of 30 years while sober — those problems are better and my bad times are better than when I was drinking and couldn’t get out of bed and into the office.

Everything I have today, including my law office and wardrobe and car and house and the best circle of friends any man could wish for, everything I have today flows from my sobriety. I would not have all that if I were not sober. I would likely have completed my wish to die and be dead, but even alive, I would be in hell.

Thank you God and Thank you to AA.

Peace.

Sunday was the perfect antidote to Saturday night.

Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you to the lovely Juliet.

I mostly stayed home Sunday and enjoyed the beautiful weather. Eventually, who would have guessed?, I had to get out in the Miata and drive around.

I went to the grocery to get some cat food.

Then, to Barnes and Noble, but the one up on Memorial and not the one right next to my house. I bought three mind candy trash mystery novels, one by my all time favorite, Elmore Leonard, one by the truely magical James Lee Burke, and one by Neuromancer author William Gibson. I dove into the Elmore Leonard immediately upon returning home.

I sat for 100 pages in the sunlight from the south in the open door to my back yard, interrupted only twice by a needy Sinatra whose belly just had to be scratched at that exact moment OR ELSE!

It was like taking a really long breath. A sigh out of all my “troubles” and a breathe in of good, sweet, smokey and tree pollen filled fresh air. Yeah, I’m stopped up as can be, but it’s OK. It’s not much different than a really tight starched shirt collar.

Anyway, went for a late coffee at Nichols Hills Plaza Starbucks with the lovely Juliet and we hatched a terrific plot.

I gave her a little cash and she went to the grocery for bell pepper and onion.

I went home and put pasta on to boil.

Yes, I actually cooked and ate at home.

Whole wheat penne pasta covered with marinara flavored by sweet garlic and Italian sausage. I paired this with a romaine lettuce salad drenched in Flip’s dressing and some garlic toast. Sweet Iced Tea as the beverage, YUM!

Juliet is such a good dinner companion. She’s so relentlessly upbeat and happy that she even turned around my restless and discontent mood and I became giddy with content and serenity.

She even brought with her a wonderful DVD to watch after the meal was put away and the dishes were in the dishwasher.

We cuddled on the couch and watched “Central Station,” a Brazilian movie that I liked quite a bit.

Thank you, Juliet. You were perfect, as usual. J’adore.

Now, it’s Monday morning and back to the grind. This Monday, though, I’m ready to face whatever shall come my way.

TTFN