C'mon. Tell me that you did. Tell me that your day just was not complete without reading my whining and complaining and general all around bitching about the world. Tell me that you had a panic attack seeing that little page not found message.

And then I'll tell my brother in law, who switched servers without telling me, thereby sending this and my other sites into (say it with me a la Riffraff) O-blivion?

But a quick note to the geek gods of Register.com and here I am, 48 hours later. Happy to rag about just about any and everything that crosses my field of vision.

Item 1: Standing in front of the entrance to a small mall, a small boy. He is pissing in the hedge. His mother is standing nearby, encouraging him by telling him that if he will only face INTO the hedge, and not look back at her, nobody will notice that he's peeing. Except, of course, that we all do, and she looks me right in the eyes and smiles and explains that her boy "is making pee-pee." Really? No. I'd never have guessed. I reminded her, coldly, that there are public bathrooms in the mall.

Item 2: Did you know that the U.S. post office doesn't consider mail lost until it has not arrived at its destination after a full month? And that's for their PRIORITY mail. I shudder to think what a mere first class letter has to do to get itself declared missing. The exact response from my friendly mail clerk was "Well, it's the mail, it'll get there. Or not." Thank you.

Item 3: Oh. I guess there isn't an item three. How about this, then? I'm getting a mammogram at 2:30 this afternoon. I suggested to the service that they offer a glass of ice cold chardonnay afterwards to all their patients. While the lovely woman at the other end of the phone allowed as how that would be nice for us, she also noted that the staff would drink it all and there wouldn't be any for the patients anyway.

Tomorrow I have a date with my surrogate daughter. We're going out for dim sum and then I am going to teach her how to drive a stick. We are going in the Cabrio. She will not be learning how to leave a patch. She will benefit from the wisdom of my earliest college boyfriend, Steve Berger, who taught me two important things about cars.

The first thing was "It's just as easy to park your car correctly as it is to park like an asshole." I still hear that in my mind every time I pull into a space. It's why I'm the jerk taking time to position the car between the yellow lines, and not over them.

The second thing was "Always listen to your engine. It will never lie to you." Your tach can, but the engine cannot.

I hope it sounds as good coming from me as it did from Steve.

Long weekend. Lots of naps. A whole night of uninterrupted sleep that lasted 12 hours. Loafing about in the pool, floating on a raft. Friday night: Thai food. Saturday lunch: Dim Sum. Sunday: home made tabouli with loads of garlic and fresh parsley. Monday early morning: gym. Monday late lunch: Mexican.

Thought for the day: Why, if they hate it here so much, do people stay in Miami and bitch about their life choice?

Solution: move and leave the city to those of us who love it. Less traffic, shorter waits at restaurants. More and more pleasant conversations with those left.

And now, back in the office, refreshed and ready to be a good corporate worker bee.

The birds I saw sitting high in the bare trees along the edge of the Everglades were ospreys, easily identified by the black band across their eyes. Or if I'd remembered that fact, it would have been easy.

I didn't, and so had to go digging through the guide books. Books, plural. Once I got to the top of the home library shelves I also took down the field guide to amphibians and reptiles, and identified the big green lizard in the royal poincianna.

Big. Green. Lizard. So big that it is mistakenly referred to by the locals as an iguana. We're talking a foot and a half of neon green lizard with lemon yellow head stripes. Quite the handsome fellow, with a light pink throat flappy thing. He is a knight anole. Native to Cuba, introduced to a very small area in and around Miami, where he took a liking to the climate, so similar to his home.



I will forgo the obvious jokes.

The distance between my front door and that of my elderly parents is 132 miles. I have driven it four times since Saturday. On Sunday, on the drive south, I went through a thunder storm of biblical proportions. There was lightning. There was thunder. There were raindrops the size of figs pounding down at a 45 degree angle. There were entire flotillas of cars pulled onto the shoulder, waiting for the deluge to lessen before they attempted to drive. And then there were the idiots with their hazard lights on, driving in front of me. Just to clarify, once and for all, for you morons who think hazard lights are for moving vehicles, hazard lights are for use when your vehicle is stopped, and on the side of the road with the hood up. All you need in the rain is a decent set of wiper blades, and your headlights. Not your parking lights, but your headlights. Putting on your flashers while you are moving makes for unnecessary confusion in the person driving behind you. And that would be me. Believe me when I say that I don't need to be any more confused than I am.

Yesterday's drive south was beautiful. The storms stayed in the west, over the Everglades. The vistas of flat green land and clear blue skies butting up against walls of purple-grey cloud walls were breathtaking. I saw hawks along the border canal, with the Glades shining behind them, but still haven't identified the species, because I haven't located the Audubon Guide.

Now I'm back in the office, unsure what day it is, unsure what I'm on deadline for, and very sure that I'll be doing the drive again next week. If the sun's out, I'm going to take the convertible.

For the last, oh, I don't know, eight years or so, my husband has gone out on Thursday night with the boys. It started as a Boys' Night Out, morphed into Poker Night, collapsed under the weight of Boys Who Had To Win, went on a brief hiatus when he taught on Thursday nights and is now back in full press Boys' Night Out.

This makes Thursdays My Night In. Oh, the vision of me in my chenille bathrobe (lime green) and bunny slippers. Bottle of red, bowl of popcorn and the remote. With our recent acquisition of full digital cable TV, my mind is positively reeling with the possibilities. Mystery Channel. Yoga Channel. Food Channel. Movies or other movies, or classic movies or indie movies. (Insert Homer Simpson voice) mmmmm, Movies.

You may have guessed, by the fact that I couldn't stop at a mere 100 movies in my lame lists, that film (or fil-um, as some would have it) is a huge part of my life. It is, unless you make actually going to see them in theaters at first release a requirement. Because, you see, I hate movie theaters. I hate the sticky floors. I hate the cell phones. I hate the babies. I hate the packs of teenagers. I hate the volume of the kick-ass sound systems. (Note to theater operators: you have great sound, that's why you don't have to turn it up.)

And this brings me back to a frequent, and passionate rant. Just because you have a cell phone, that doesn't mean you have to be speaking on it all the time. If you are expecting an urgent call, here's a thought: stay home and wait for it. If you'd rather be talking to the person on the other end than watching the movie, leave the movie, and go talk to your friend. Or, maybe, the whole idea of being out is to be unavailable. You remember, way back in the dawn of time, you'd get a call and the person would say, "Hey, I tried to reach you last night." and then you would say, "Yeah, but I WAS OUT." Like, out of touch, out of reach, out of pocket, out of the house, out of town.

Here's the next part of a predictable rant: if the child is too young to follow the plot, the child should be left at home with a baby sitter. Remember them? Older kids who watch younger kids while the parents are out. (Out, there's that concept again.) When I went to see "Finding Nemo", the little kid behind me kept asking mom and dad what was happening. My friend finally turned around and said: "The barracuda ate the mother and the babies. They are dead. They are ALL dead." Shut that kid right up. I don't think he wanted to know what was happening after that. But, hell, it was a kid's cartoon, so it's almost a given that the mother or father had to bite it in the first reel. Isn't that Disney's First Law?

Anyway, with digital cable, I don't have to endure the common mass of humanity. I can pay per view. I can watch rugby. I can watch non-stop sci-fi.

Or I can turn everything off, and read a book. Sigh. Boys' Night Out. I love it.

Someone needs to take Mother Nature aside and remind her that rainy season in the tropics means rain every afternoon, not steadily for days on end. And yet, and yet, there is something so soothing about this steady rain. The sound of it on my roof. The incredible variety of greens it brings to my yard. The coolth (and yes, that's a real word) that it gives the air. And the lightening. God's own light show, daily, from my office window.

I guess going to the gym actually does do all those things gym rats swear to, like lowering your blood pressure and releasing the feel-good endorphins into your brain. Three quarters of an hour on a treadmill and an elliptical trainer and I feel both virtuous and far less filled with free-floating rage than I did yesterday.

Either that or my bi-polar swing is set to manic today. Or at least mellow.

I'm not even raging over the network manager's inability to filter out spam and viruses. Hell, I've got the latest Norton virus defense shield running, updated only yesterday. So who cares if the webmaster account is being drowned in virus spam? I'm just methodically dumping them. Gives some rhythm and meaning to my day...