It's Friday! Hooray!

I've been looking forward to today all week. Porter & Maggie are taking me & Skully walking on the woodsy part of Baird Creek Trail, our #1 favorite trail. (Oh, did I tell you that one of the yogis told us last Friday that he'd heard that the "loop" segment of Ken Euers Trail out along the bay is a gay meet-up spot? Goodness.) Then we've got a prospective tenant stopping by, and I get to do a little sewing, go to yoga & knitting, then spend the night at Porter's house so DS & DIL1 can run away to visit her brother & SIL in Minneapolis. Should be fun. I'll bring Porter with me when I come home to sew etc. and then can go pretend I'm out of town (well, I will be on the east side across a big river so it'll be kind of another town). I'll take my laptop and all my assorted electronic toys as well as my knitting, and they've got a Wii Fit so I can play with that if I get bored. I'd better check if it's operational. Ah well, maybe me & Porty will take more walks. The weather's supposed to be excellent for the next week. Tomorrow night's the dive shop staff appreciation party. I'm looking forward to spending time with Bonnie, Terry, Kevin & Deb--we don't get to see them enough. Perhaps we should invite them over. What a novel concept, eh? Having friends over--whooda thunk it? And then in less than 3 weeks (one day less, but still, it's less) I'll be down in Sheboygan with Lala playing with origami, her new laminater (ooh, I should pack the big paper cutter... I'll put that on my list), my manuscript, walking on the beach, maybe geocaching... There won't be enough weekend, I'm afraid for all the cool stuff we want to do. Durwood and I watched a documentary on PBS last night (it's their begging campaign time, ugh) about paper folders. It was riveting, so riveting that I bought it on Amazon and downloaded it to my Kindle Fire. I'm loving that toy. Loving. It. Once I figure out/learn how to convert my iTunes music & books to mp3s and get all that stuff over there, I'll love it even more. (can you help me, Cookie?) I did, quite by accident, manage to download the app so I can borrow books, etc. directly from the library onto there. Soon it'll be my bitch, instead of the other way around.

March 15--Jean Fouquet, Portrait of an Ecclesiastic. So few lines to make a man, Roger thought. His gloved hands hovered over the parchment wanting to touch it but knowing he shouldn't. He leaned over to look closely, to see the way the metalpoint of the artist had scored the thick parchment that the black chalk had been rubbed into. In nearly six hundred years it hadn't smudged which said something for the old ways of preservation. The look of the man's flesh, the absolute certainty of the structure of bone and muscle beneath that skin, tightened Roger's throat with admiration. Few artists had the gift, or the skill he supposed one might say, to infuse life into so few lines, to imply dimension, to make it a certainty on a single sheet of paper. His eye was drawn to the two dark letters in the lower right corner. "RH" They were so dark, such an assertion that Roger felt sure that they were the product of the brazen hand of a forger. Today's work in the lab would prove him right or wrong. He reached for the ultraviolet filter to start with the simplest of tests when all the lights went out, plunging him into total darkness.

Dun-dun-duuuuun. Now, this story? I want to go on, want to know what happens next. That's a good thing. But first it's Cheerios, prunes, and walking with Porty McPorterpants. I'll put a big star by this notebook page or maybe a bright pink Post-it. You have an awesome Friday. I can smell by the warming air that I will.
--Barbara