Hi, how’s it going? I’ve sort of forgotten how to do this, or why I ever thought it was a good idea in the first place. It’s been way too easy these past several weeks to throw myself into whatever work at work needs working on, or play some very silly Internet role-playing game as though my life depended on reaching Level 11, or follow a mailing list hissy-fit/meltdown/dogpile, or curl up into a ball and feeling guilty as I watch the number of visitors to this site dwindle down to nubbins.

It’s weird. A couple of weeks ago, my shrink upped the dosage of my meds. I think it’s actually made a dent in things, but it’s also (I’m pretty sure) effing up my sleep to the point where I wake up around 4:00 a.m. every weekday, with some random earworm chewing away at my tympanic membrane (They Might Be Giants’ “I Palindrome I” — that a direct result of playing KoL; Laurie Anderson’s “Language Is a Virus,” De La Soul’s “The Magic Number”) and no hope of falling asleep until 20 minutes before my alarm goes off.

But. The holiday weekend was pretty great, kicking off with drinks at CBC with Teresa, Ted, and Kevin and followed by dinner at Rustic Kitchen with Ted and Teresa. Sunday, Terri and Ezra had us over for a truly wondrous barbecue: there were burgers of beef and soy, dogs of quorn, corn of corn, and a grilled vegetable salad with pain grillée that I swear made me see the face of god or someone very similar. I also (finally!) got to see Help! in all its silliness.

And I hate to sound like some kind of daytime commercial shill, but that Oxy-Clean stuff? Is amazing. I might marry it, if the union between some crystals and a woman would be recognized in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. I think my past experiments with trying to remove wine-on-tablecloth stains were too tentative, because that shit totally, I’m talking completely put the smackdown on the several blueberry blotches that had landed on my shirt when we were walking a still-warm pie to Teele Square.

Then yesterday, we were a couple of giant lazyheads whose main accomplishment was to grill some zuchinni and stray veggie burgers and frankfurters. We ate some cherries from the backyard tree, watched the evening bat exodus, and listened to our neighbors’ rapidly devolving Clash and Nirvana and James Brown and Mellencamp and Foreigner and Bad Company. (Our puny Hitchcock? Couldn’t compete.) No fireworks — if I’d been on the ball, I’d have realized last Thursday that what sounded like a fairly bitchin’ display was happening in West Somerville (instead, I ate a very late sushi dinner and listened to the crackles and booms, the scent of gunpowder on the breeze, reading a book from my witch-obsessed childhood [The Wednesday Witch by Ruth Chew, a very funny and creepily satisfying novel] and darting onto the front porch at intervals to see red or green flashes over the treetops. I’m not too keen on the big Boston Pops dealie on the Esplanade, what with all the crowds camping out the night before and Porta-Potties and crowds and stuff. But maybe next year, we’ll get to our local display.