The cleaning lady came today, and did such a good job I walked around the house for two hours, perching on the edges of chairs and glaring at dust motes, lest they land somewhere and screw everything up. We hired this woman to come in twice a month last winter, when I was working three jobs and figured the choices were:

1) Build up a head of resentful steam over the condition of the bathroom, which is used only by Alan and Kate and is technically their responsibility; or

2) Hire someone else to clean it.

It’s been my experience that life will deliver many, many opportunities to be resentful of one’s loved ones, most of them more important than the condition of a bathroom, so I reversed my long-held vow that I would always clean my own house and gave it over to someone else. Her deep-set Slavic eyes haunt me into a tip, most weeks. Our house never gets that bad between visits. I hope she doesn’t run across too much evidence of American sloth when she’s here.

I’m so middle-class, it’s disgusting.

My neighbor in Fort Wayne cleaned houses. She left me with a collection of anecdotes I will treasure forever — the couple whose intervals between visits could be counted by the number of shoes left by the back door; the ones who refused to even clean up the blowing tumbleweeds of dog hair, and in fact let their infant crawl around on the floor in the midst of them; oh, and a few more. (Some came from another neighbor with the same job, who once told me of the uncomfortable conversations she had to have with some clients, about how she would NOT rinse out their bloodstained period panties, because it’s a BIOHAZARD, and do it yourself, you lazy bitch.)

Eh, it was one of those days. Lovely outside, and I did get out for a bit of it, but mostly it was nose/grindstone/other stuff. Redeemed by dinner, yes: Grilled salmon and Mark Bittman’s spicy-sweet green beans. Which you should run out and make, because damn, they’s good. Now we’re watching “Cedar Rapids” on HBO: “I do a pretty fair impersonation of Omar on the HBO program ‘The Wire.'” I hope the people on “The Wire” think that’s as funny as I do.

So, bloggage?

Why are babies so damn cute? So we’ll have more of them, I guess. (After you watch it once, watch it again and note the hand movements of the girl on the left. Babies are so smart.)

The 10 oddest items in the GOP platform. No. 2:

“Ideological bias is deeply entrenched within the current university system. Whatever the solution in private institutions may be, in State institutions the trustees have a responsibility to the public to ensure that their enormous investment is not abused for political indoctrination. We call on State officials to ensure that our public colleges and universities be places of learning and the exchange of ideas, not zones of intellectual intolerance favoring the Left.”

When I’m 100, I hope I’m…not alive to do stuff like this.

Happy Thursday, all.

Been doing a lot of biking the last couple of days. And the best kind — not the all-out, I-will-be-fit-and-live-forever kind, but the goin’-somewhere-with-friends, got-an-errand-to-run kind. Both involved coming home after dark, which is falling earlier and earlier. Alas. But is there anything sweeter than a night bike ride? Just easy pedaling, my lights flashing, enjoying the night. A bunny flushes out at the limits of the headlamp. It’s cool. Hardly anyone is out in a car, as the sidewalks have been rolled up at their customary 9 p.m.

You don’t even get too sweaty. So I’m just rolling. And soon I need to go back to work, having spent most of the past 18 hours in something that resembles it.

Which is why I have virtually no bloggage! The last time I checked the news, Paul Ryan was milling around on a stage in Tampa with a kid wearing a cheesehead. What’s THAT about?

Why don’t we just toss up an ANIMAL TALKING IN ALL CAPS and call it a day?

See you tomorrow?

It had to happen sooner or later: Driving down I-96 Monday morning, passed a little nook of woods, cut back deep enough that it’s a good bet very little sun ever shines down directly. And saw? A red sumac, living up to its name. Bright autumn color, the third week of August.

Well, summer never lasts forever. As Ned Stark is always telling us.

So, winter is coming. But first will come fall, which explains the next thing I saw: A minivan with what looked to be a professionally made rear-window cling sticker: I WILL NEVER VOTE REPUBLICAN AGAIN.

Oh, what a long, long autumn it will be.

As usual, Charles Pierce has a better handle on this than I have. In the rest of my life, we have conversations now and again about tribalism, which seems to be the only word for a world with bumper stickers like the one above, not to mention party leaders like this one, who took it upon herself to elaborate on what Todd Akin said:

Ms. Barnes echoed Mr. Akin’s statement that very few rapes resulted in pregnancy, adding that “at that point, if God has chosen to bless this person with a life, you don’t kill it. That’s more what I believe he was trying to state,” she said. “He just phrased it badly.”

Blessed. Hmm. I remember, many many many years ago, when the idea of adopted children searching for their biological parents was just starting to take hold, watching a TV documentary about it. They’d had a couple happy-ending stories, and then one that was, well, the opposite: A woman who had been raped — legitimately! — in the classic sense, dragged into a dark alley and raped by a man of a different color. She had the child, gave it up for adoption, and 20 years later opened the front door to find a biracial young man standing on her doorstep saying hi mom. The woman was horrified and, frankly, terrified.

She’s probably dead by now, and I can’t imagine the reunion went anything other than badly. Maybe the son would like to talk to Rep. Akin.

Well, let’s not dwell on this unpleasantness, shall we? We need something fun. How about…dog shaming. Via Hank. I laughed so hard I think I aspirated a bit of food.

You could try a cat shaming site, but face it — cats can’t be shamed.

Happy hump day, all.

Forsooth, “Henry V” was a disappointment. It’s really too bad, as it’s my favorite of the history plays and one I was really looking forward to. I told Kate all the way there that it contains one of the greatest follow-me-boys speeches in the English language, and she should watch for it. Alas, as drama the St. Crispin’s Day speech played more like Ben Stein in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” than, well, this:

Love me some Kenneth Branagh. What’s he up to these days? I heard him interviewed on NPR around the time this film came out, and he talked about the day he was playing Henry V onstage, and lost the glove he needed for a key scene. Shakespeare doesn’t specify many props in his plays, but the glove in “Henry V” is key. So he had to turn to the actor at his side and ad lib, in Elizabethan English, something like, “Fluellen, hast thou seen my glove?” Fluellen blanched and ran offstage to fetch another out of wardrobe, while Branagh wandered around the stage, freestyling in iambic pentameter to the other actors. As he did so, he spotted the glove; he’d dropped it a few feet away. He picked it up, returned to his mark, and continued the scene, just as Fluellen runs back onstage with a second one. I doubt if many people who were unfamiliar with the play even noticed the glitch, although he said that when he was leaving the theater that night, a passing car stopped, the window rolled down and a voice came from within: LOVED THE BIT WITH THE GLOVE.

Fortunately, the weekend improved after that. “The Pirates of Penzance” was a great deal more fun, and “42nd Street” even better. But you know, it’s really hard to go wrong with a) tap dancing; and b) “We’re in the Money.” I remember when the show opened in 1980, it wasn’t well-reviewed. It must have aged better, because it passed as a pleasant blur of tappin’ and singin’ and lots of sparkly costumes.

And now I’ve had my dose of theater for a while, at least until someone presses tickets to something else in my hand.

Stratford has changed since we were last there, and hasn’t. Same restaurants, same tourists, same townie kids hanging downtown after dark. I considered asking if any of them knew Justin Bieber, but thought better of it. After all, there’s plenty of Bieber-material on the web. (David, Adrianne? CLICK THAT.)

And so concludes the week of vacation. I saw friends and family, absorbed culture, rotated my tires. I’ve had worse weeks.

You guys, on the other hand… Did I mention what my heart did when I came home, after 36 hours without internet service, and found 136 emails waiting for me, nearly all comments? Did I? Well, it sank. It sank because I knew I’d soon have MEGO syndrome, and I did. Is this what it’s going to be like through November?

Please, say no.

On the other hand, when this is part of the election-news cycle, how can things not get crazy from time to time?

So, because I have to get ready to go back to lovely Lansing, a few notes:

Would my fifth cousin a million times removed, my reader in Connecticut who does Nall genealogy, get in touch? I got an inquiry from a Googler looking for Nall family info.

While this story in Salon takes some cheap shots at Tampa, I do think its foundational thesis is sound: If a world run on Tea Party principles is something we want, then Tampa is what we’ll get.

A good week to all.

Because the laptop is in the midst of a 30-minute software upgrade to Mountain Lion;

Because you guys spent all day fighting, not that I object to those things, because it made cleaning Kate’s closet more interesting, what with the many, many breaks I was taking;

Because no one wants to hear about anything else I did today, which boiled down to biked/swam/cleaned/sorted/grocery shopped/software upgraded…

here are a few links.

I don’t know what’s more depressing about this story, that an IQ of 125 is enough to disqualify a person from service as a police officer in certain parts of New York state, or the fact it apparently took 16 years for the case to make its way through the courts. But hey, here you are: Court of appeals upholds job discrimination on the basis of intelligence. The plaintiff chose a career as a prison guard instead.

Well-known local personal-injury attorney, who is blind, suffers significant but not life-threatening injuries when he’s hit by a cyclist in Central Park. P.S. He is blind, and was in a pedestrian walkway. So far the chatter online is about the police estimate that the cyclist was traveling at 35 mph at the time of the crash. Most seem to believe this is a wild exaggeration. I think they’re missing the point; serious urban cyclists travel at breathtaking speeds these days, and I saw them with my own eyes when we were in NYC a few years back. It may not have been 35, but it was way up there. I can’t imagine what would happen if, say, a blind person took a wrong step or two. (I guess we know now.)

Anyway, I’m sure the conversation will center on the fact that this is a PI lawyer who was hit, and ha ha ha, that cyclist better hope he has a good lawyer, too. I’d rather it be about the WTF speeds of travel in a crowded urban park.

Me, I’m still enjoying being off. Play nice today, if you can, eh?

Back at home after a little gallop through the addresses of my life. Fort Wayne, Columbus, then back up I-75, a chunk of it with Kate at the wheel. We spun through the Ohio State area on the pretense of a college visit. As usual, the whole place seemed to be under construction. As long as I lived in Columbus, the OSU campus was under some sort of construction. That’s good, I guess — a place needs to grow, and living in the land that progress forgot, sometimes it’s easy to forget that. But there’s nothing like a few orange plastic fences to make you say, “Eh, well, that’s the place right over there. You think you might want to go here, we’ll make a formal visit later.”

We went to Magnolia Thunderpussy, a record store, aka the Place That Could Not Be Named in the Columbus Dispatch. Every time the football team had a big win or loss, reporters would head down to High Street to interview business owners. If you chatted up the clerks or managers there, the copy desk always changed the name of the business to “a High Street record store.”

Good times.

Kate got a Sublime CD, a Wavves LP, and I got a De La Soul CD. And then the mother/daughter team trundled out for Sally’s Hillbilly Cheeseburger.

I will say this: Columbus looks like a thrive-o-polis. The Tea Party should stop disparaging government, because show me a place where government is the foundation of the economy, and I’ll show you a place where things aren’t so bad. At least better than, say, Fort Wayne, where all my old landmarks are now spouting weeds and FOR LEASE and AVAILABLE signs. The cheese and onion enchiladas at La Margarita are still the platonic ideal, however, so there’s that. To be sure, it’s not so much that things are collapsing as changing — Dupont Road and West Jefferson seem to be hanging in there.

Alex lives closer to Dupont, and we spent some time wondering when the real estate wave would reach the shores of his little sliver of a lake, which has the advantage of being a little sliver, which means no ski boats, which — to me, anyway — spells D-E-S-I-R-A-B-L-E.

And that was my long weekend. The next two days I plan to exercise without worrying about when I get home, clean closets and then heading to Stratford for some theatuh.

You?

Bloggage:

Olympic swimming fanfic. Wonderful.

Friend-of-NN.c Laura Lippman has a new book out. Here’s how she came up with the main character.

Why, Fareed Zakaria, why? Why?

Vacation continues. I’m enjoying it.

I know I’ve said cruel, cruel things about California peaches in the past, but I’d like to make a qualified walkback today.

(I know, I know: EDGE OF YOUR SEAT.)

My fruit guy at the Eastern Market warned me a while back not to expect much during peach season. Their whole crop was KO’d by the crazy spring weather. But they are offering an alternative – white peaches from Cali. This would normally leave me cold, but I trust my fruit guy. They were hard, but had a nice peachy fragrance. I took them home.

Thirty-six hours later, they were soft and people? These were some seriously good peaches. And white! What will they think of next.

This is my super-favoritest time of year, foodwise. Every breakfast is peaches, blueberries and melon. Every lunch is vegetable frittata. Dinner is…well, today it was a tomato-corn pie, made with the last of Saturday’s fresh mozzarella from Zingerman’s. What a life. It doesn’t take much to make me happy.

Which is, perhaps, one reason I can’t even say how many shits I do not give about Chick-fil-A. As we all know from the occasionally updated Gay Agenda, fast food is tacky and fattening, and many of my gay friends and acquaintances are superb cooks. Nevertheless, if you didn’t see the slideshow Cooze unearthed yesterday, of politicians enjoying fried chicken products, it’s worth a look. Huckabee is showing the difficulty of lasting weight loss, it seems. Mike! Stop digging your grave with a knife and fork! Grilled chicken, no bread, and lose the waffle fries.

And now that we’ve switched to politics, a very good column by Brian Dickerson at the Freep, who’s been gone too long this summer. It’s about the stealth endorsements of Michigan’s Right to Life, and two Oakland County judicial candidates who say they forgot to mention the endorsement when directly asked:

Because all judicial races are nominally nonpartisan, all voters participating in either the Democratic or Republican primary next week will be able to cast their vote in the circuit court contest. My surmise is that Christ and Sakwa want conservative Republicans voters to know they’re in Right to Life’s corner, but would prefer that Democrats and independent voters remain ignorant of the RTL connection.

But let’s not go into the weekend with thoughts of single-issue voting! Let’s do it with Animals talking in all caps. This one.

Happy weekend, all. I’m going to a Tigers game.

Down the tunnel, under the river and out into the gun-free (or gun-fewer), single-payer health care world of Windsor! America Junior! Now this is what I call a midweek palate-cleanser.

And why am I here? Because I got a note from our sometime commenter Jason T., who is in the neighborhood honeymooning with his new bride, Denise. They came over from Pittsburgh, where they were wed this past weekend. I should probably add they’re not honeymooning in Windsor, but in the Ontario coastal area of Lake Erie, where it’s pretty and Canadian. They thought it might be fun to get together. And I agreed, so here we are, in some faux-English pub, with a Morris Minor permanently parked outside and some rather mediocre fries. (Not that this stopped me from eating a bunch of them.) My eye keeps getting snagged by the TV over Denise’s shoulder, which is tuned to something called TSN, which I believe stands for The Sports Network. (This is Canada, after all.)

And can you believe it? They’re not covering gymnastics or swimming or very special stories about pluck and grace under pressure. They’re covering rowing. What a miracle.

When I got home, I tried to find CBC or some alternative to NBC. Nothing. People, THIS IS NOT A FREE COUNTRY.

Jason and Denise and I went to a couple of places in Walkerville, a neighborhood of Windsor so called because it exists in the shadow of the Hiram Walker distillery, which during Prohibition was a little like having Gus Fring’s underground meth lab operating across the street. They took the tour. So should we, some lazy winter Sunday.

Why am I facing 10 p.m. as a puddle of fatigue? Maybe because I woke up at 3:15 a.m., laid awake until 6, dozed fitfully until 7 and then called it quits. Fortunately, some good bloggage.

What divers look like, mid-dive.

Another excellent Detroitblog, on one day of police activity.

And if you haven’t seen Stephen Colbert riding dressage, you are missing something wonderful.

OK, I’m just going to say it: Synchronized diving, while an impressive display, is not a sport. It’s a stunt. An awful lot of the competitions we’ll be seeing in the next two weeks aren’t sports. But what the hell, let’s watch ’em.

As a former equestrian, I’m sensitive to this charge. “You ride a horse? Oh wow, I bet that’s really hard — for the horse.” My reply was always that if golf is a sport, then riding is, too. And for the next two weeks, the Obscure Sport/Stunt Color Commentators Union will see full employment, and we’ll get to repeat their lines at work: “As usual, the Chinese set the standard for synchronized diving.” Try it out.

Diving is a sport, I should add. Surely, synchronizing with another diver is an added skill. But honestly, after watching for a while, I think it’s all about another opportunity to show beautiful bodies in bathing suits.

How was your weekend? Mine was fine. Sailing, cooking, shopping — basically the perfect summer trifecta, made even better by the fact all the shopping was for Kate, and I didn’t wave to face a fitting-room mirror. We went to Forever 21, one of the higher circles of hell. All I can do, shopping there, is think of how wretched the lives are of the people who sew this shit. How is it possible to grow the cotton, harvest the cotton, process the cotton, dye and loom the cotton, cut it, sew it, blah blah blah until this row of tank tops hangs on a rack in Troy, Michigan, priced at 2 for $8? But it’s undeniably a good place to buy cheap dresses for a teenager, so here we are, and here I am on an ottoman in the fitting-room area, and a girl across the row steps out in a dress that is the full trifecta of sluttyville — short, tight and low-cut. What’s worse, it’s sort of shirred, too, and the seam cleaves the crack of her ass. She looks at the mirror, and seems to be trying to make up her mind.

Her friend steps out of the adjacent fitting room. “Oh. My. God. That is so awesome. You look so hawt.” I’m thinking, nope, what you need is a nice sheath in a non-stretchy fabric. Something that skims the body, but doesn’t hug it like a drowning swimmer. Raise the neckline two inches — a scoop, not a plunge — and I’ll give you the mid-thigh hemline. Then you’ll look like a pretty lady and not Tatiana Petrovna, Russian prostitute.

She went back into the room, and emerged a few minutes later with a hot pink tight/shirred/short/STRAPLESS number, which was even worse. Her friend agreed THIS was the dress.

I guess she had a date for a sex party or something.

Kate got two dresses that were sorta Betty Draper-ish. Plus some fierce boots from Nordstrom’s anniversary sale, and a new pair of skinny jeans. I think we’re done for a while.

Back to the Olympics.

But first, some bloggage? Sure.

When it gets very hot in the Carolinas, our Coozledad finds little reward in farm work, which is good for us, because he blogs instead.

A very very long read from Outside. I opened the print window — it was broken into so many takes I got tired of clicking through — and lost the original story. But it’s a great story, about a veteran who walked into the Bob Marshall Winderness and hasn’t been seen since.

And while it’s wrong to laugh at children, someone obviously needs to point this girl in a new direction, and maybe this will be the turning point.

The week awaits! Let’s make it a good one.

I don’t know about you guys, but all I really want to do today is watch bears fish for salmon. It’s 11 p.m. as I write this, but still plenty of daylight in Alaska. I haven’t seen any of the bears catch anything yet, although a couple of small fish have jumped. The bears stare at the water with a certain comical level of concentration.

I can’t deny it: These bears are my husband. It’s why I can’t stop looking. I recognize the concentration.

And now it’s the next day, and you can see how my writing hours are going these days. Well, last night was Project Runway, and I made an actual dinner (stuffed portobello mushrooms on the grill, plus corn on the cob). It included wine. I got tired. So now, a sugary breakfast (lotsa fruit), and a lot of coffee, and let’s see what the new day reveals to us. (Pause.) It just revealed a commotion outside, which I thought was a late-retiring raccoon, but no: A blue jay and a grackle, mixin’ it up on the deck. I think the grackle won, because the jay just took off. The grackle strutted around for a bit, ate an ant, preened its feathers. These birds are hard to love, but they certainly have attitude to spare.

In the meantime, this is what was revealed on my morning media run:

The Instagrams of Wall Street. Evocative and depressing. (Who wants to work on those trading floors? Hell. On earth.)

Every so often I consider doing one of those 23 and Me DNA scans, but didn’t I read somewhere it’s a big joke? Can’t remember. (Can’t remember much these days.) But somewhere along the line, perhaps I’d meet some interesting ancestors.

Via Hank, that rare treat, a Michael Kinsley column, and a good one. It starts with the victory of gay marriage and asks what will be the next thing we’ll look back on and wonder how we ever tolerated it otherwise. Kingsley’s nominee:

My own favorite nominee will win me no friends: high school football. In 20 years I think it may seem incredible that loving parents used to send their kids out to bang their heads against each other in the certain knowledge that this was damaging their still-growing brains. “Certain knowledge” may overstate the case now. But this smells just like smoking, about which the evidence dribbled in until it was undeniable. Let me add (for my own self-protection): I hope I’m wrong.

This week was the 45th anniversary of the Detroit riots. I will look at any picture of this event, any time, ever. Here’s a slideshow.

Late add: If you’d like to die of Cute today, the Green Bay Packers participating in a long-standing start-of-summer-practice tradition — riding kids’ bikes to the stadium.

Enjoy your weekend, eh?