On Saturday, I sat down at my laptop, notes and manuals to my right, coffee cup to my left. I wrote a brilliant recap of part two of the ANTM premiere. I uploaded it. I backed up some, but not all of my site, and, before I began the coding of Paypal into Mild Burning Symptoms, I decided that it would be advantageous to update the software that runs this site. I was wrong. I was wrong in ways I have still to count. To say that I blew up Girlyshoes would be an understatement like saying that George W. Bush wasn’t the best president we’ve ever had, and maybe not the brightest. It would be an understatement like saying that George Clooney and Brad Pitt aren’t too bad looking. It would be an understatement on a par with saying that Paris Hilton is maybe not the classiest girl to ever climb into a limo and onto a trustfundnista. Perhaps I am belaboring the point, but I fucked Girlyshoes right out of the world wide web.

I’m not a total dolt, and I was able to reconstruct my data base, missing only two entries. One (ANTM part one) I was able to find cached in Google. The other? Maybe. Maybe not.

I’m sorry that you’ve not been able to keep up with the fabulousness that is my pathetic life, but them’s the breaks. Hah! Get it? I broke my site.

God, I’m pathetic. And also tired. It took four days of constant help desk consultations on, not one, but two sites (my hosting company and the software company) to rebuild and repair Girlyshoes. And I still have to sit here and figure out the Paypal thing. All I want is to go back into my studio and sit at my spinning wheel. But no. I have to write code. And more code. And try not to fuck anything up again.

And then? More photos, more code, and launch the virtual garage sale.

In the meantime, the birds are mocking me. I hear them, and I see the seed levels go down in the feeders, but the little feathered bastards won’t show themselves while I’m out there watching. Mocking me, I tell you. And the squirrels? Oh, my lord. The squirrels have attitudes. These Miami squirrels don’t do dried corn. My brother’s squirrels up in St. Lucie County, they love corn. My guys? They turn up their furry little noses, and refuse to eat it. They didn’t eat the pumpkin seeds, either. I had to give a big bag of squirrel chow to my brother, because the fluffy-tailed tree rats only want peanuts and sunflower seeds. The little beasts eat better than I do. At least my hummingbird is faithful and doesn’t complain about her sugar water.

The dogs are unimpressed with this sudden influx of fauna. They bark a little now and then, just to establish their territory, but really? they don’t much care. The only birds who’ve come and made a regular stop are the mourning doves, and a couple of ring-neck doves. I like them fine, but I’m doing this for color and song, and the doves have neither. Oh, a little cooing now and then, but half the time, I can’t even tell they’re out there because they are the same grey brown as the dirt under the palms.

That’s it. I’m exhausted. And so, to bed.

Once more into the bitches, dear friends. The Number Three Surrogate Daughter arrived, the popcorn was made, and Miss Tyra commenced torturing the dumb and the ghetto and the delusional and the just plain weird. We begin, for no apparent reason, at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. The #3SD and I anticipate all sorts of torture, in which the clueless hamsters are made to strut like showgirls with a stack of books on their heads. Alas, such is not the case. The theme this year is Fierce Goddess, and so, with much squealing, the girls are all given gold gladiator heels and micro-mini togas and told to work it.

There are profile shots. There are unusual names: Fo. Aminat. There is the first runway, where the fog machines are working overtime, and the girls are told that they are walking on clouds. Clods, maybe. Clouds? Not so much. We get our first view of our first whack job: her name is Monique and she’s a conspiracy theorist. In the few minutes we see her, we get the Tri-laterals, the Elite, that Pearl Harbor was a set up to get the US into a war and a tin-foil hat. Just kidding about the tin-foil hat. Up next, London and her twee little brow-band. London is a street preacher who wants to praise Jesus all day and stomp the runway all night. Miss Jay says (and rightly so) that she looks more like a street walker than a street preacher. Miz Shoes and the #3SD look at each other and decide that London will be falling the day she has to get naked for a photoshoot, and we hope that it’s the first challenge.

Someone in the pack voices that OMG, here come some “staunchy dudes” and they are escorting in Tyra. This sets off another round of squealing. Tyra delivers (and by delivers I mean hams it up with a bad accent and worse “acting”) the back story that the Goddess of Fierce (herself) is tired and retired and seeking a new goddess to take over. Yeee-ah. Ain’t gonna come from this crew, darlin’. Unless it’s that 8-foot tall glamazon with the afro there in the back. Holy mackerel, is she hott! And tall. And she seems capable of walking in heels.

Angelea has three-inch long blue acrylic nails. She’s this season’s cha-cha diva, I think. She claims to be from Buffalo, but she talks like any other ghetto-girl-wanna-be, with the vague accent of somewhere and the chonga earrings and the plastered down side bangs. And a jaw like Jay Leno. She is rough. On to the interviews.

Sandra is first, and she is black and beautiful. When Tyra tells her this, she totally breaks down in tears. London shows her street preaching skillz. Jessica has an ego. Tahlia has some wicked ass scars over her belly and legs. When she was 8 months old, her mother left her alone in the kitchen with a coffee pot. She pulled the cord and pulled the pot down on herself resulting in major burning. Many surgeries. She is proud, she says, of her scars and wants to be a role model. She has the face of an angel, so good luck. Monique comes in and delivers another lecture about Pearl Harbor and government and what not. In her bikini, she is revealed to be stoop shouldered to the point of looking like a scrawny yet pot-bellied question mark. She will not be staying. Mark my words.

Natalie is a spoiled rich bitch. Animat is our glamazon. She is 6’1” and she does indeed walk in heels. Combined with the afro, she guesses that she rolls at about 6’7”. And she is just drop-dead beautiful. If she can keep it up, she’s our winner. Some hamster has panic attacks. Celia has a Really Bad Blonde bleach job, with bleached out eyebrows to match. She’s our oldest hamster at 25, and that hair and her bad makeup combine to give her that Rode Hard Put Up Wet look we all love. On the other hand, she knows her shit about fashion, and she can even twirl aswirl. And she dresses like a model. With the right make over, she could be another contender. The next girl collects gimmicky pens, and has brought some for show and tell. Tyra is not impressed. Tyra is less impressed when the girl can’t name five working models, or five current designers.

We next see another white ghetto trash talker, this is Alex from Tampa. She’s making Angelea look classy. Isabella has Julia Roberts’ smile and epilepsy. Fo is a little gummy when she smiles, has freckles and self-identifies as a Blaxican (black New Mexican, but she didn’t know she was black until she was ten or so and met her dad for the first time. I’m guessing mummy didn’t talk about him much.) Angelea has to take off the chonga earrings and the My Little Pony wig, and she still looks like crap, but she has a great set of stems. Kortnie is our marginally plus-sized girl. Allison is a lemur.

She looks like a Keene painting or a Japanese anime and she has a fascination with blood. She tells Tyra that nosebleeds are beautiful. Tyra says that she used to get them as a child. Allison says, with a valley girl inflection: Jealous. The seismic tremor you feel is the entire viewing audience getting the shivers at the same time. Eww. Teyona is tall, black and tight. She will now be known as Wind In Her Face. She is declared to look fashionably alien. If you say so.

In order to whittle down the numbers to a lucky 13 (it being Vegas and all) the girls are tossed back into their goddess gowns and given a goddess to portray. There is the usual elbowing at the makeup table. There is a horrible bitch-fight between Sandra and Angelea (of course). Angelea has given herself magenta cheeks and eyes. She is attempting to be the goddess of love, but she says that, and I am not making this up, “Sandra has been trying to pull my buttons” and so is not feeling the love. Pull. My. Buttons. Where do they find these freaks girls?

With this photo shoot in hand, the judges (Hi Nigel. Call me) bring it down to: Aminat, Allison the Lemur, Isabella, Celia (2 cups of crazy in her eyes, says Miss Jay), Fo, Jessica, Kathryn (who is the goddess of who knows what), Kortnie, Someone whose name I missed completely, LondonPraiseJesus, Nijah, Natalie, Sandra and Tahlia (not skinny, not plus and scarred.)

I have two train stories today.

On the morning commute, there was a college writing professor sitting across from me, reading papers. About two stops in, a burly young man wearing ID badges from the local VA, and those hung on a lanyard that said MARINES, sat down next to her. All of a sudden, through my earbuds, I hear her yelling at him that he’s touching her. I look up and she is pointing to where his jacket hem is in the crack between the two seats. I hear him say, quite calmly, “ma’am, you are touching me. He scoots forward on the seat, and folds his hands over the top of his cane. For the rest of the ride, that woman rode him, elbowed him and complained at him.

It’s only because I have been less than on my best game that I didn’t think to say to her “Don’t make me separate you two. I’ll turn this train around if you don’t stop.”

What I did do was this: when the train stopped downtown, and all three of us got up to leave, the woman made eye contact with me. I pulled my earbud out and said, conversationally, “You know, even with the headphones on, I could hear you bitching at that man.” This made her think I agreed, apparently, because she immediately launched into the “he was sitting too close to me” rant, but I interrupted her. “No,” I said. “You were rude. It would have been rude to talk that way to anyone, but the man is a veteran, fer Christ sake. Show a little respect and appreciation.” She started to squawk, and I interrupted her again. “No. You were wrong. You were rude. Period.” And stuffed the earbuds back in and stalked off the train.

The ride home could not have been more different. I was sitting near a young black couple and their adorable son (corn rows and a Miami Hurricane jacket). I was working on one of my nellyphants, and she asked me what I was knitting. I pulled a finished-but-for-his-ears nellyphant out of my bag, and she grinned. “It’s an elephant, but he doesn’t have ears yet. Still, if you wouldn’t mind…” Oh, no, she said, she wouldn’t mind at all. So I gave the ear-less nellyphant to her son. He dug it and started playing with it immediately. The father kept telling the little boy to say thank you, but he was too busy playing. “It’s OK,” I said, “he’s too shy.” They told me that he had just turned three on Valentine’s Day. What a great present he was, I said and the mother smiled. Then the father said “he may not say thank you, but he can say the President’s name.” We asked the little boy who the president is, and he piped up, loud and clear “OBAMA”. I just about cried.

This morning: the hummingbird (which has become a regular), two blue jays and a male cardinal, who didn’t quite get the feeder: he sat on the top.

Day four of laying around sleeping and being sick. The RLA comes in and tells me that I simply must update my operating system to Leopard, because he just did and it’s the shit, man. I say, no, I don’t wanna. I’m fine. My laptop is fine. No, he insists, it takes a long time and you can do it while you are napping. It’s no big deal. Maybe because of my weakened state, I let him convince me. It took hours. I napped. And then, when it was all over, my laptop was dead. It wouldn’t boot. It just sat there, spinning its little gears. For a really long time. And then I had to crash it out. Several times. And so, I put on clothes for the first time since Saturday, and dragged my sorry ass over to the Apple store. This was not without incident, as the electric yellow Smartcar seems to be invisible, even when I am directly in front of someone’s headlights. Miz Shoes is also invisible when crossing a brightly lit crosswalk, at least to the driver of the Cadillac SUV who both made eye contact with me and tried to run me over. Once in (also not without incident, as I was complaining at the RLA via my cell phone, laptop in the other hand, large book under one arm and purse over the other shoulder. I came face to face with the closed door and a man standing in front of it. He did not acknowledge me, and did not open the door. I juggled.) In short, by the time I made it to the Genius Bar, I was breathing fire and not willing to take no for the answer to the question, “Can you look at/fix this?”

Nevertheless, the very nice ten-year-old boy behind the counter could not fix this, and I left with a still inoperable machine. The good news, the hard drive was fine, and all data still there. The bad news, I’d probably have to back everything up and wipe the hard drive in order to reinstall the OS.

So. Back home by nine, and back into the flannel pyjamas. At 9:15 there was an enormous grinding, crunching and shattering of glass outside my bedroom window. A lost double-decker flat bed delivery truck had gotten lost in my cul-de-sac, and made its way out of same by driving through my fence. Eight feet of fence. And we’d moved it six feet back from the curb the last time a lost truck flattened the same. This truck wins the clueless prize, because the driver also went over a chunk of coral rock about three feet long and two feet thick, and BROKE IT, and still claimed that he thought he’d only knocked some branches off the tree.

The RLA went after the flatbed (which of course did not stop), and I called the police. The Very Nice Officer reminded me that he’d come here the last time this happened. The RLA found the truck, still sporting its crown of black olive branches in the parking lot at Home Despot. Insurance information was given. Ditto apologies. Then the VNO went to follow up with the driver. Today we’ve had lots of calls from the driver, the owner of the trucking company and their insurance agent.

When I went out to take pictures of the damage, I discovered that my old pocket digital is wasted. There’s really cool and jiggy distortion in the finder, but unfortunately that doesn’t translate to the digital image. Those are just washed out and mostly blank. Bummer. A good damaged digital is worth its weight in gold.

That was yesterday. Today, I have spent since eight this morning backing up this machine and reinstalling the system. As it turns out, I didn’t have to wipe the drive. Now I just have to remove all of my backup files from the RLA’s computer and Bob’s your uncle.

Tomorrow, I go back to work.

I have coughed so much and so hard that my ribs hurt and my abs feel like I’ve done a thousand crunches. The hummingbird is now a regular at the feeder. The squirrels seem to have put my backyard into the “newly opened” section of the squirrel Zagat, but the birds just aren’t coming around. I can hear them. All sorts of tweeting and chirping comes from the palms and the oaks. I’ve tried to entice them by putting a platter under the feeder with mixed seeds and peanuts. I figure blue jays can always spot a peanut, and well, once the blue jays come, there goes the neighborhood. Since that’s my aim, peanuts on the ground is my game plan. I’ll report later.

In the meantime, a whimpered plea to amuse me resulted in this:

I am amused. And about to go back to sleep.