After Gregory, the Sheltie my folks had owned longer than they’d owned me, died, we mourned for him and were dogless until Megan, the dog across the street, got knocked up. She was owned by the mother of our neighbors, the Dodds. A tri-colored Shetland sheepdog, her manner was sweet and her eyes were clear and dark.

We told them that we would like a puppy from the whelping. They agreed. A puppy was secured. One morning shortly thereafter, Mom called me out of fourth grade to watch the pups get born. It was amazing. I remember being surprised that the puppies were born with their eyelids closed shut. I also remember being grossed out when Megan ate the afterbirth, something that the Dodds took in stride.

I visited the puppies every day. There were 10 in the litter, a group of squirmy blind small silken beasts. The Dodd’s other dogs, including Misty, a prize-winning Norwegian Elkhound with a cinnamon-roll tail, felt left out so I was always sure to pay attention to them on my way in and out of the door.

When we brought Chaucer (named by my Anglophile mother) home, he was a handful of puppy fuzz. His favorite place was our yellow vinyl beanbag chair. Dad constructed a wire-mesh puppy-pen for Chauce in our backyard. Chaucer taught himself to climb up the mesh ladder until he reached the top coil of leftover mesh, at which point he would whine piteously and I would lift him into the air and call him “Super-puppy”.

It was around this time in his life that we discovered Chaucer’s other talent. I was practicing piano when I heard a wail in the background. Chaucer was sitting on the floor beside my piano bench, howling. I tried to not take his action to heart. From that point, I shut him out of the room while practicing. The next summer, Frank Dill and Mike Cleary, then the morning men for KNBR-68, started talking about a festival. The festival was conceived by one of Mike’s character voices, a fellow named Gus. Gus decided that KNBR should throw a festival in his own honor. The name? The Gus Festival! Frank and Mike commenced on-air petitioning for listeners to send in their wacky act ideas. Mom looked at me. I looked at her. I wrote a letter that same day.

Christian, my first friend in the whole world (my Mom and I drove her mom to the hospital to have her when I was six months old), was visiting from North Carolina when I got a response from KNBR. “Miss Benson,” it read, “congratulations on being chosen for the stage of the Gus Festival, to be held at Pier 32 on the Sunday of Memorial Day Weekend.” I think the echo of the scream that left my lips is still echoing in the distant peaks of the Himalaya mountains.

Soon after receiving the letter, I started to hear my name on the radio. Frank would talk to “Gus”. “Soooo, Gus, how are the acts lining up for your festival?” “Well, Frank, we’re going to have a fellow who wrestles chaise lounges.” “Hmmmm. Interesting. Got anything else?” “Well, let’s see. Oh! We’ve got Marilynn and her Singing Dog!” “Wow!” Frank would exclaim. It was all terribly thrilling.

I chose a Rondo from one of my more advanced piano books and practiced ceaselessly, bringing in Chaucer only occasionally so he wouldn’t strain his voice.

When the day of the Gus Festival arrived, I dressed up and made a placard that would be propped up on the stage for our act. We arrived with plenty of time to spare so we wandered the perimeter of the pier. People came up to us, asking, “Is this Marilynn and her singing dog?” They were thrilled to find out that it was, we were. KRON-TV filmed me standing with Chaucer and our placard, but I spent so much time telling Chaucer to look at the camera that they didn’t show the clip.

Finally, it was our turn to perform. Chaucer and I mounted the stage, my hand clutching his leash, the spotlights blinding me to the 2,000 people who faced us. I set up the placard and went to the piano they’d provided stage right, sat down, cleared my throat, and began the rondo.

Chaucer didn’t sing. I continued to play. Chaucer sniffed the edges of the stage. The dog wasn’t singing. The dog wasn’t singing! After all this, the dog wasn’t singing!

W.C. Fields said that you should never share the stage with animals or children. Well, I was a child sharing a stage with an animal, and the only thing I could think to do was to finish the rondo. So I did.

Mercifully, that was when Frank and Mike stepped out onto the stage with us. One of them picked up the dog as the other welcomed the festival-goers to the event. After a few minutes of easy banter, they looked out into the crowd.

“Whaddaya say?” they asked. “Should we give the dog another try?”

The audience cheered.

I sat back down at the piano and called to Chaucer. Upon hearing the opening notes, he ran to the piano. And sang his little fuzzy heart out. When the song was over, I picked him up and nuzzled his neck with my face, and it was in this position that we took our victorious bow.

Chaucer doesn’t sing anymore, which probably has to do with the fact that he’s old and deaf deaf deaf. But until the rest of my days, I will be thankful for him, for the thunderous applause he brought to me… to us.

OK, so I’d been *wondering* why my hit count has doubled this month. Silly me, I figured it was due to my recent spate of updates. Fortunately, my buddy Ben K. set me right. Via e-mail.

“Hey Lynn,” he wrote, “did you know that your domain name is in MicroTimes this month?”

He saved me from driving out into the night to look for the magazine by sending me the URL of the article that mentions dear sweet Motormouth.com. Of course, the use seems to be entirely fictional. As far as I know, I’ve never met the author, David Strom. No, smart aleck, I didn’t pay him off, either.

It’s a real trip. He’s got me (or rather MotorMouth.com) as the content-rich competitor of HarleyWheels.com and HotRod magazine. Guess they know I’m a leadfoot at heart… “The MotorMouth folks have pages of parts galore and are starting to draw lots of traffic. Worse yet, the print ad sales rep from HotRod are starting to hear more and more about the competition from these MotorMouth guys.”

Uh, *gals*. Actually, *gal*. Also amusing is that he mentions the side issue that Harley Davidson might come down on our “two friendly [fictitious] Web gurus because of the nature of their domain name.” Uh, been there, done that.

So, if you ended up at my site due to this MicroTimes article, a hearty welcome to you. Sorry, I don’t have any motorcycle parts for sale. And there aren’t any nekkid pictures around here either. I hope that you’ll stick around for a while, regardless.

Yeah, OK, it’s been a while.

Seems that right after I finished revamping motormouth.com into the lovely, classic site you see before you, I got really sick of Web sites (might have had something to do with the fact that I was also knee-deep in a revamp of IBIS’s site at the same time).

To make up for my neglect of you, I’ve typed long and hard until the wee small hours of the morning.

I promise to never neglect you for this long again.

Well, for a while, at least.

***

My summer began with a camping trip to Yosemite with the junior-high youth group I advise.

Three advisers, eleven junior-highers, no running water. We all had a blast!

Steve, the male adviser, was quickly dubbed “MacGyver” for his now-I’ll-make-something-out-of-twigs-and-string prowess. Kimberly (the youth director) and I borrowed an extra tent — a six-person tent — from one of the campers. The kids called our tent “Buckingham Palace.” Other tents were nicknamed “Taj Mahal” (a dome tent, natch) and “Hearst Castle”.

One night I was sitting near the campfire with two of the boys in the group. They asked me, “Lynn, do you know how tents are rated as one-person, two-person or more-person tents?”

I had to plead ignorance.

They continued talking amongst themselves. Pointing to a very small tent, Josh said “I bet not even Yoko Ono could fit in that tent!”

Matt replied, “Yeah, but he has a really cool Web site.”

I was thoroughly confused, so it was time to interrupt. “Guys, I don’t think that Yoko Ono is that big.”

They looked at me and burst into simultaneous laughter.

I continued. “I really don’t think that Yoko Ono is more than five feet two.”

Then, a light bulb flashed above my head.

“You two don’t mean *Akebono*, the sumo wrestler, do you?”

“Of course!” they replied. “He has a really cool Web site, too.”

I sucked in my cheeks to keep from laughing before I could explain to them, “Yoko Ono was John Lennon’s wife.”

When Kimberly came back to the campfire, it took us five minutes before we could all stop laughing long enough to explain why we were laughing.

The Saturday we were there, we hiked up the Mist Trail to Vernal Falls. It was exhilarating and humbling at the same time. There’s just so much water! My fingers prune up just thinking about it. A couple of the kids had a tough time making it up, but everyone arrived at the top in one piece. On our way back down, five of us sang “The Ants go Marching”. We got up to 20 before we ran out of rhymes, so we sang up to 20 another two times.

🙂

***

What else? Sabrina and Dave (my married neighbors across the street) have had members of Sabrina’s family in from France for the past four months.

Her brother, Michael, was a lot of fun and got me and Alex hooked on World Cup Soccer. So hooked, that while driving to my Mom’s house on the day of the championship game, I searched in vain for a radio station with a live broadcast. The only one I found was in Spanish. When I heard the announcer say en Espanol that France was leading Brazil 2-0, I thought “naah, must be my rusty Spanish.”

Upon arrival at Mom’s, and after presenting her with her birthday present (a wicked cool Coleman gas barbecue with side gas burner), I rushed in to catch the rest of the game.

I talked with Michael a few days ago. He said that when he watched the championship game (he was back in Bordeaux by then), it was in a large hall with a big-screen TV. “Lynn, it was great. People were smoking and drinking, and when France won, well, I partied until 8:00 the next morning,” he told me.

Sorry, Alvaro. But I wore my Brazil futbol cap for the weeks preceding the championship, so I feel your pain.

***

And, while I’m on the subject of Dave and Sabrina, they had their baby nearly two weeks ago. Their new daughter was 20 inches long and weighed 8 pounds, 4 ounces, which, incidentally, is what I weighed at birth.

(Jeez… I’ve put on like more than 100 pounds since then… 🙂

The baby is really amazing. I got to hold her today and in the span of five minutes, she spat up a bit, and then she started hiccupping, and then her face like froze for ten seconds until she sneezed! Truly, she’s remarkably intelligent.

When they brought her home from the hospital, the song playing on the radio was “Daughter” by Pearl Jam. Honest!

***

The vegetable seeds I started four months ago are bearing vegetables. I’ve got 15 ears of corn and God knows how many tomatoes. I got some heirloom everbearing raspberry bushes today from my friend Larry’s grandma. The bushes grow wild on her property and bear the most luscious berries I’ve ever seen.

Larry has been teaching me how to shoot hoops. It’s really fun, and I even beat him in a game of H-O-R-S-E two weeks ago. “Larry’s a HO.” I singsonged. It was even more fun to sing when he had H-O-R…

***

Yesterday was Johnny P’s birthday. He’s 28 years old, so I get to be two years older than him for another few months, which I’ll be certain to remind him if the opportunity should arise.

I had dinner with him, his mom and his grandma last night and we had a great time. Buck’s Restaurant in Woodside is terrific. I’m eager to go there for breakfast. Any takers?

No, you wouldn’t nudge me, you’d meet me there. Smart aleck.

***

OK, so I guess I’ve talked about everyone and everything else by now so I have nobody left but myself.

My job I are no longer one. I’ve been doing some consulting and am *really* enjoying it. It’s so wonderful to work at home, and the projects have been right up my alley — tough to argue with that! My Duo is all hooked up to my 56k USRx2 modem and my Color StyleWriter 4100 (got a great deal on it at Fry’s — thanks, Dragon!). I’ve also appropriated the kitchen table as a desk: Figured I might as well because we never *eat* on it.

In my free time, I’ve learned how to sew and have two new dresses to show for it. I’ve read 20 books this summer, tended my garden, and have seen Kevin as often as his schedule allows. I think he enjoys suburban life, though it pains his citified heart to admit it. We went to Portland in June to visit his grandma, and recently spent a weekend at the Blackthorne Inn in Inverness Park. Magical!

***

Best of all, it’s still only August, which means hot days for corn to grow and long days for shooting hoops.

Aaah, it’s a good life.

[Ed. note: I wrote this based upon suppositions into Ms. Lewinsky’s character based upon her reported actions.]

I haven’t said much to this point. Can you really blame me?

I guess that this whole thing can be traced back to when my parents divorced. I was just a kid when they split, and although they still paid for my tennis lessons it just wasn’t the same. Parents like to think that their actions have no effect on the children. If they think that, why do they have children in the first place?

My Insecurity (I tend to capitalize that, apologies) caused me to eat.

A lot.

Despite my mother’s wishes. She put me on the Scarsdale Diet when I was 7 years old and there was no looking back. Not that the diets helped or anything.

My weight ballooned. I was the fat girl.

My high school nickname was ‘paperweight’. Naturally, that was bestowed upon me by the anorexics. Lucky bitches.

I sought recluse in the fact that they couldn’t think of anything more clever than that.

Eager for some male attention, due to the fact that my Dad was rarely around and my brother was a geek, I sought the company of my male upper-classmates. Sought a great deal of company. I can say in my defense that I always felt I loved them. Quality, not quantity. Doing it gave me power. I loved to see men writhing, wanting me. So what if it was just physical? At least they wanted my body, which was more than I wanted of it, so why shouldn’t I just enjoy it?

So I graduated high school, went to college and got a job interning at the White House.

I felt an affinity for Bill. We’d both “lost” our fathers (his from death, mine from divorce) at a young age, and we’d both battled weight problems for our entire lives, but he didn’t wholly manifest his power by sleeping with people — he was the President of the United States, for crying out loud.

I’ve never admired anyone the way I admired him. He dazzled me.

I always made certain to smile at him whenever he entered the room.

He noticed.

We got to talking one day and he took me seriously! What an incredible rush. When our initial conversation was over, I felt my heart beating rapidly inside my (heaving) chest. Here was a man I could get serious about.

So his job is really stressful and we’d play around. I can’t even explain what it’s like to kneel down in the Oval Office and take the president’s Executive Branch in your mouth, watching him as he leans back against his desk for support, moaning above your efforts.

He bought me presents, called me late at night for marathon phone calls, most of which left me moist and gasping. Any woman who doesn’t find Bill attractive, well, hasn’t had a three-hour phone call with him in the middle of the night. What a thrill to pick up the phone, half asleep in bed, and realize that your midnight caller is the leader of the Free World.

As tends to happen when one of the parties is 21 years old, things soured between us. I’d rather not go into why. I told my friend Linda about it, which was probably a stupid thing to do but I had to talk to someone and since she was so much older than me, I figured she’d have some practical experience to pass along.

Now I know that the only thing she had to pass along was tapes of our conversations to Kenneth Starr.

What a bitch.

So, I’m no longer welcome in Washington. The job at Revlon that Vernon lined up for me came crashing through the minute the story broke (so much for the advancement of women).

I’m 24 years old and my life is ruined. And he didn’t so much as ever get me off.

Bastard.

It’s been a pretty kick-*ss December. Nope, make that a pretty kick-*ss year.

Kevin’s Web Word Wizard is selling like gangbusters. He’s even sold it to someone in Norway. Ahhh, I love the Internet!

I ended up going to Internet World in New York City a couple of weeks ago. It was on very short notice — found out I could go on Monday, and was on the plane Tuesday night. Actually, Wednesday morning. Do *not* fly on Tower Air under any circumstances, ever. With the time I spent waiting at the airport for their planes to depart, I could have flown cross-country TWICE. Grrrr. The real kicker was arriving at JFK at 2:00 for my 4:00 flight and being told, “Oh, that flight has been rescheduled for 8:30.” In the six and a half hours I had to wait, I finished one book (Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn), started and finished another (Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut), plus a magazine. Oh, and I painted my nails (Kevin would be meeting me in SFO, after all). By the time I got off the plane, I had read two more magazines and was 280 pages into another book (A Thousand Acres, by Jane Smiley). So at least the time was spent productively. I’d rant more about it, but hey, it’s nearly Christmas.

Oooh, it’s nearly Christmas! My shopping is done (I did most of it in October while in France). Kevin started his shopping on Sunday, but he bought my gift first, so that’s good. Heh heh heh…

Life at work continues to go well. I got a wonderful performance review and feel so blessed to be working there!

So I’m going to my Mom’s house for Christmas Eve and Christmas morning, and for Christmas dinner the two of us will go to Kevin’s parents’ house. We all spent Thanksgiving together, too, so everyone already knows everyone else. I’m looking forward to it (and looking forward to giving Kevin his gift, which I purchased more than a month ago…).

The only fly in the ointment of my life is that Kevin and I still haven’t determined what to do for New Year’s Eve (no, besides that). We might go to a party if we can work our way around the transportation issue. We wanted (well, I wanted) to see SuperDiamond at the Fairmont, but it is already sold out. If you have any New Year’s tips for San Francisco, let me know!

Merry, Merry Christmas to all of you who are into that. Happy day off to those who aren’t. Bless you all!

… and it was magical.

Really. I was never one to get all misty-eyed at the idea of Paris by moonlight. When I was in eighth grade, my entire family pushed me to take French. I rebelled. “No, I’m taking German.”

Typical eighth grader, huh?

I guess I’ve held off on writing about our trip because I didn’t really know how to put it into words. In a way, I still don’t. But I’ll try to muddle through anyway.

We had such an extraordinary time. And I’m not saying that because the trip was perfect – actually, we both ended up getting sick, and I probably would have ended up in the emergency room one Saturday morning if not for the kindness of our hosts and France’s socialized medicine. But we handled all the stressors without stressing out or hollering at one another. It was thrilling.

We spent the first week in Paris, and we rented a car for the second week and drove all around the country. Kevin drove (I can’t drive a stick), and I navigated, with the help of his Michelin France Road Atlas and a 99 cent compass suctioned to the windshield.

Although I thought a week would be too long to spend in Paris, we ended up seeing maybe 1/200th of the city. Paris is the size of San Francisco and the similarities don’t stop there – terrific shopping, incredible food (I swear, it’s a good thing we walked as much as we did or else my clothes would no longer fit) and the friendliest people! I was very surprised. Last time I was in France, the people were so horribly snobby! This time, they could not do enough for us. With the exception of a crotchety old mapseller, every person we spoke with was warm and friendly. I was even trying to speak French and they *still* treated us nicely (my French is murderous. I arrived in France armed with nine polite French phrases and one *really* dirty one, and that was enough to get us through).

Paris was enchanting. It’s nearly the best place in the world to be in love. We did a lot of walking, shopping, talking, and eating. We had duck nearly every other day. Yummmmm…

Kevin celebrated his birthday while we were in Paris. We went on a boat cruise of the Seine, the river that runs through the heart of Paris. That night, we had dinner “at the most beautiful brasserie in all of Paris” (so claimed my guidebook – and they were right!). It’s called Bofinger. I had a duck there that changed my life.

Both in Paris and the countryside, we stayed in some of the most amazing hotels I’ve ever seen. In Normandy we stayed in a 18th century chateau all done in pink brick. Our room overlooked the grounds and pathways. They even had a hotel dog who greeted us every time we drove up to the parking lot. Their closest neighbor was a stud farm (Kevin joked, “I have an appointment there at 2:00 this afternoon.”), though we could hear the bang bang of trap shooters in the distance.

Another place we stayed was an ivy-covered Tudor-style home in Tiffauges, home of Blue Beard’s castle. The proprietress spoke no English, but was quite happy to chatter at us in rapid, lilting French. The next morning we hiked around Blue Beard’s castle ruins and admired his catapults and siege tower. The castle was actually closed for renovation, but nobody was there (except for five suspicious-looking goats) and the door was unlocked so we just walked in. It was a foggy day, and a bit creepy to roam about on a site where infanticide and alchemy were committed (the former much more successful than the latter). We took a self-timer picture of the two of us on the ruins of the chapel steps.

From Tiffauges we drove to Cognac, where the buildings are covered in a gray soot that is acutally the evidence of evaporation in the cognac-making process. We drove through to Bordeaux, well, Cestas actually, the home of my neighbor Sabrina’s family. Sabrina moved to the US to marry an American, and her family insisted that we stay with them while we travelled. Meeting them was the high point of the trip (well, nearly the high point). The night we arrived, we ate homemade duck pate, duck confit, and an incredible prune-custard torte that tasted *much* better than it sounds.

While in Cestas, we hooked up with Sabrina’s best friends, none of whom I’d met but it seemed as though I had, based on all the stories I’d heard and pictures I’d seen of them. They all spoke English pretty well and we had a great time eating at a Turkish restaurant until one in the morning.

After Cestas, we drove through a city I can’t mention because that’s where I did the bulk of my Christmas shopping, and I don’t want my friends to know what I got for them. We then drove back up to Paris, after spending the night in a roadside automated hotel (if you arrive after 11:00 p.m., you stick your credit card into a machine and it spits out a room key, very cool).

We went to the very top of the Eiffel Tower on our last night in France. We’d hoped to do that on Kevin’s birthday, but it had been cold and rainy that evening so we figured the view wouldn’t be as spectacular. The night we went, though, the overcast day turned into a beautiful clear night, and we could see lights for miles and miles. After going to the top, we went down to the first level and had a drink at Altitude 95, the bar in the Eiffel Tower. I caught Kevin peeking in the mirrored wall while we were kissing. After leaving the bar, we hopped into a cab and went to Ile Saint Louis, one of the two islands in the Seine where we spent most of our time. We had dinner in a small restaurant, lingering until we’d burned through not one, but two tableside candles. We didn’t leave the restaurant until past 11:00 (I knew what time it was thanks to the beautiful Tissot watch Kevin gave me earlier that day).

Our flight back to San Francisco was uneventful. Customs cleared both of us, with no hassles (Kevin didn’t even have to pay taxes on the amount he’d spent over $400). For the first time ever, no security guard opened my suitcase and pawed through my dirty laundry. Guess I don’t look as suspicious at 25 as I did at 17. Good.

We were met at the airport by Dave and Sabrina, who drove us home in their late-1960’s Lincoln Continental. Kevin spent the night and left the next morning.

I watched his train until I couldn’t see it anymore.

And yes, my vow has been broken. Unregretfully.

Well, even though yesterday was wretched, it turned out OK in the end.

I got a phone call from a net.friend last night. After asking “are you naked?”, he wished me a happy anniversary.

I smacked myself in the forehead. How could I have forgotten??

The first time I had contact with this person was on Election Night last year. I was hanging out with my roommate and a couple of friends, hoping that by drinking too much I’d wake up and find that Bill Clinton *hadn’t* been re-elected, when my pager went off. This guy had sent me a cyberPAGE asking if I knew the election results. I left him a message on the VM number he left for me, cause I’m just “an Internet sort of gal,” and thus began one of the strangest friendships I currently hold dear to my heart.

I’ve seen this person exactly once: He came to my 25th birthday party last year. I recognized him before he even spoke. Nice guy. But we’ve both been too busy (and I harbor a sense that he doesn’t think I’m good enough for a ride in his convertible) to meet ever since then. So instead, we have these amazingly personal (No, not erotic, not intimate, but personal) telephone conversations.

Very odd.

So he called me last night, and was so surprised that I answered on the first ring that he blurted out, “Are you naked?” I immediately knew who it was. He always calls me after I’ve had a couple of beers, don’t know how he always knows when I’ve been drinking but maybe he’s one of those Psychic Friends Dionne Warwick is always talking about.

I was on the other line when he called so I asked him to call me back in 10 minutes. Once 13 minutes passed I found his number in my Franklin Planner and was reaching for the telephone to call him and say “Nice ability to call me back in 10 minutes” when the phone rang.

Pretty funny. So I told him about my trip to France with Kevin (yikes, I haven’t even told *you* about that yet. A story will happen soon, I promise!), and after a few conversation tangents we hung up the phone, me feeling much happier than I had when, say, I wrote yesterday’s column.

Have you ever had a day so frustrating that you just wanted to stick sharpened pencils into your arms?

Yup, I thought so. And it was probably today, November 4, that drove you to it.

Just call it woman’s intuition.

***

I seem to have lost my command of the AP Stylebook.

***

OJ never came back home to me. Minute loathes me (probably because she associates me with that mean OJ cat).

***

A voice from my past thought that *he* was the ex-beau to whom I refer throughout this site. Even though he doesn’t know what a “bot” is.

***

I don’t have that much going on in my life, but even so can’t seem to find an appropriate date to meet with my cousin or my ex-coworker.

***

I wish I were back in Paris, eating duck and being happy.

***

My office-mate has been having an equally frustrating day.

“Has it just been one of those days that makes you want to stick sharpened pencils in your arms?”

“Not *my* arms, *other* people’s arms!” she cried, storming out of the office.

Good point.

Oh dear readers, I’ve wholeheartedly neglected you, for which I apologize from the bottom of my little grrl heart. You’ve been patient with me, which I greatly appreciate.

My silence was for a good reason. See, August was a pretty amazing month. I did another triathlon and shot a high-powered rifle for the first time!

The triathlon was the third of the Tri For Fun series. This time I swear that the swim was at least 300 yards longer than the first one. Couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that I hadn’t hit the pool for weeks… naah… Anyway, the bike went OK despite horrible headwinds, and the run was actually almost enjoyable. For those of you keeping track, here are my split times from this, my second triathlon (all times are in minutes:seconds, not hours:minutes or even years:months):

Swim split (about 600 yards): 9:10

Transition One: 2:50

Bike split (11 miles): 47:45

Transition Two: 1:15

Run split (3 miles): 32:06

Another good experience. The Tri For Real is September 21. I have a lot of training to do before then. But first I need to buy new shoes – I’ve blown through three pairs of running shoes this year! Ugh!

At the height of my anxiety about my life, Dragon took me to the Los Altos Rod and Gun Club, where we shot his Eagle Arms A2 rifle. It was incredible, such a feeling of power! Plus, gunpowder odor makes my uterus tingle. Now if I could just keep from flinching when the bullet engages I’ll be set. Maybe next time…

So as I’m stumbling into work this morning, late, I see a floral delivery truck pass by and park next door to the warehouse.

I think “Oooh, flowers! I hope he comes to my desk,” and enter the warehouse. Michelle (our graphic artist) is on the phone.

I tell her that there’s a floral delivery man in the area. She asks her boyfriend (with whom she’s speaking) if they’re from him.

They’re not.

So I turn on my Mac and knock knock knock, it’s the flower guy bearing roses. *Beautiful* roses.

The moment of truth…

“Lynn?”

Woo hoo, they’re for me!

I set them down on Michelle’s desk (insult to injury) and sign my name on the “received” line, thank the driver (who thought the sign on our door was far too small), and grab for the card before the door even closes.

Ohmigod! They’re *not* from Kevin!

There is something strangely illicit about receiving flowers from someone other than your significant other.

Especially when that significant other has recently been elevated to Boyfriend status.

So, if you’re the person who sent me flowers with a card that read only “Nice Website,” thanks.

God, I love the Internet!