Walking around a clean, air-conditioned building in what passes for business casual with a cloud of mosquitos surrounding my shaggy head o’ hair

At least that’s what it felt like all day. I also felt like my hair was covered with bug spray. And the whole thing wasn’t even a bad feeling. Mental illness setting in? I do not know. Go figger.

Anyway, I’ve been patiently waiting for bugging Lizard Breath to blahg about her new home for weeks now and she has and she has posted pictures. She recently moved from Berkeley down into San Francisco. No, I’m not gonna post her address! What were you thinking? I loved Berkeley and her shabby little ant-infested apartment there and I will miss Sluggy. Actually, I think Berkeley is the first place I’ve ever been that made me think something like, “if the blasted Great Lake State ever disappears into a giant sinkhole, I could actually live here.” Can’t explain exactly why. It just fit. But she had been looking for a new place for a long time and I am happy that she found one she liked and ecstatic that I was too far away to help her move.

And that’s really all I’m gonna say. I have a really hard time blahgging about my kids. I sometimes think that if the Internet had been a viable medium when they were babies, I’d’ve probably invented the whole “mommy blahgger” thing. But back in those days, my job involved hooking up a Decwriter II terminal into a mainframe on the Merit Network via a 300-baud modem. We used cumbersome text processing applications to write documents and if you wanted somebody else to read what you wrote, you had to either tell them the file name and where it was or print it out. (Veeelhelm, keep me honest here but don’t be too long-winded.)

And photographs? Not. I do remember walking into my boss’s office one day and being astonished at the sight of him sitting next to his printer watching ASCII art nude women coming off of there from somewhere on the ‘net. I’m sure some sort of digital camera existed then but it didn’t in any way, shape, or form resemble my current Canon Powershot whatever-it-is. Or my iPhone camera. Or even that first (wonderful!) Sony Mavica we had that saved photos to a floppy disk. I kid you not! But that thing had a 10x optical zoom!

Anyway, the Internet had been invented by the time the beach urchins were babies, but it wasn’t a viable mechanism for the average moom to publish stuff about her life and kids. So only people that I talked to face-to-face or by phone (email wasn’t even viable in those days) were lucky enough to hear anything about the sleepless nights, hissy fits, and bodily fluids that drove our lives in those days. Of course, they were also the only people who heard about any of the good stuff.

Now? Well, blahgging about my kids just kind of falls flat. I love how they’ve turned out *despite* whatever I tried to beat into their brains. I think they may have learned more about how to conduct their lives from Anne of Green Gables than from me. But they are young adults engaged in building their adult lives. They have highs and lows, good days and bad days, just like the rest of us. It isn’t up to me to tell their stories and, on a good day, I don’t ask too many questions about their lives. And I *try* not to give advice… Anyway, click here or on the pic to see a few more from Lizard Breath’s colorful new neighborhood. Love you, baby girl.

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