Now that Kate’s safely back in school and will likely stay there for a while, I’m daring to let my days take a work-related shape again, if a little screwy in form. I now shower around lunchtime, for instance, which makes for some strange phone calls sometimes.

“Can I call you back? I’m in the middle of something,” I told one of Kate’s friends’ dads the other day. It sounded so much better than “Guess what I’m wearing, tiger. Nothing!”

Actually, he had a pretty good story to tell, and I stood in the shower, head full of suds, listening for most of it. He had been trying to get back to Detroit before Rita hit, and his aircraft had been swapped for a smaller one, so the larger plane could be used to get people out of Houston. Apparently the transition and rebooking hadn’t gone well.

“We could have one of these a week, and FEMA still couldn’t figure out how to handle it.” You don’t say.

Good thing modern phones are equipped to handle shower conditions.

It’s probably good that I work alone, in a little hive of isolation. I’ve obviously lost my news judgment and shouldn’t be in newspapers anymore — I was sure the Ashley Smith meth story was going to be a big talker today, but alas. It probably helps that this was revealed on the same day Tom DeLay was indicted, but even in the morning, it was sort of bleah. I eagerly await Peggy Noonan’s skinback, but I doubt it’s coming. At the end, I think Steve Gilliard may be right: Jesus Christ, if she was black, people would rip her a new asshole.

In the midst of this long, contemplative day I actually worked fairly hard and got a lot of key-clattering done. What this means is: I don’t want to do any more. I encourage you to check the comments on the jelly post down below and read Mary’s account of how she went toe-to-toe with Leona Helmsley and not only lived to tell about it, but made the Queen her very own bitch. (And without giving her so much as a whiff of meth.)

I’ll probably be back mid-morning or so. For now, my red-hot burning eyeballs must rest.

Well, this is comforting: The Army has opened an investigation into whether American troops have sent gruesome photographs of Iraqi war dead to an Internet site where the soldiers were given free access to online pornography, Army officials said Tuesday.

This story is so horrible, on so many levels, that I’m pretty much speechless. Comment if you like. For research purposes, John Aravosis has links.

God’s sense of humor trumps everyone’s, over at the DetNews.

A few weeks ago someone forwarded me a list of some editor’s thoughts about columns — that is, the printed output of columnists, not the big posts that hold buildings up. I was amazed by how many rules the guy had. They should be this, not that. They should say that, not this. They should be about the other thing, not this thing. And so on.

Opinions vary on the quality of my own columnic output, but I did it for 18 years, and I like to think it wasn’t all wasted time. I learned a few things. Here’s the first and, ultimately, only thing I learned: There are no rules. There may be some guidelines. Such as…don’t be boring. You can write about anything from al-Qaeda to spaghetti, but don’t be boring. A newspaper column is, ultimately, a reflection of the person who writes it, period. Here’s another guideline: If you’re an editor hiring a columnist, try to know what you’re getting into. You might be hiring Royko. You might be hiring Dowd. You might be hiring Nall. Choose wisely.

Which is why I confronted this piece with some bafflement this morning. The writer, who was once my main competition in Fort Wayne, seems to be saying it’s a tragedy that he can’t find apple jelly as readily as he once did. In fact, that is what he’s saying:

Time was, you could buy a big jar of apple jelly, a jar that weighed close to 2 pounds, big enough that it would break your toe if you dropped it on your foot, on sale for not much more than a dollar. I used to keep a couple of big jars in the cupboard, just to make sure I never ran out, and whenever I saw apple jelly on sale I always bought a couple of jars just for security.

There was apple butter, but that�s not jelly.

Huh.

Now, I hesitate to say apple jelly is not a fit subject for a column. Jon Carroll writes at least six columns a year about his damn cats, and I read them. I have learned to trust. People say, “She’d go to the opening of an envelope,” and that’s the way I feel about my favorite columnists. Even when they’re boring, they’re better than the sports section. In the hands of a talented writer, no subject is unworthy of 600 words. Cats, a warm afternoon in June, whatever. Pete Dexter once wrote a column about scratching a dog’s belly, accidently fondling its penis, and tied it all in with Michael Jackson — and goddamnit, it worked beautifully. An editor could make that a test for hiring a columnist: Give me 600 words on apple jelly. If I read it to the end, you’re hired.

Jon Carroll could pull off a column about the apple jelly shortage. He does a certain daffy silliness better than anyone. This writer… alas. Check out this ending:

People today leap at all-fruit preserves such as apricot and peach, and are drawn to expensive jellies such as lingonberry or blueberry preserves or name-brand raspberry preserves. A miniature $3.95 jar of jam made of something they�ve never seen before is what appeals to people today, something that looks good on cheesecake or dribbled on the side of the plate next to quail.

That�s too bad.

Yes, that’s too bad.

(I should add this, in sympathy: Everyone has a bad day, a bad week, a bad stretch. Columnists don’t have the luxury of sliding out of the spotlight. So I’m pretty forgiving, most days.)

Perhaps you’re wondering if there’s a punchline to this piece. There is: At my last performance review, the one where I knew I was well and truly screwed, dead-ended and ready to spend more time with my family, the editor doing the review suggested I might try to model my work after apple-jelly man. There’s only one thing you can do when someone tells you this, and dammit, I did it: I slammed the door as I left.

It felt good.

And now here we are. All in all, it feels like a better — albeit much poorer — place. But I don’t want to stir my jelly here.

It was a good day. Clear skies, crisp temperature, a few chores crossed off the to-do list. For some reason, I had an inordinate amount of mail about the Dylan documentary, the ending of which is unspooling now. I’m watching with half my attention. It’s not a revelation, nor is it Scorsese’s apple-jelly work. I’m amazed by what I didn’t know — Maria Muldaur was a playa in the early-’60s folk scene? I liked little things: The footage of Mario Savio, the pictures of Greenwich Village, the old film of Hibbing in the ’50s. Hibbing! Minnesota! Jews lived in the Iron Range? Talk about a diaspora.

And I’m amazed, anew, at the power of these songs. I’m not the world’s biggest Dylan fan. I’m happy with but two albums — “Bringing it All Back Home” and “Highway 61 Revisited.” I’ll probably add “Blonde on Blonde” to the collection at some point, but those two do for the basics. I listened to both on a long drive to Minnesota last spring, and boy, do they hold up. Now and forever.

OK, bloggage:

You don’t want to go here if you’re at work — it’s technically an adult site, and you don’t want your boss walking up on you. But there’s no nudity, only a few f-bombs and so many laughs I wept my mascara off as I read it. “Chestfro Agonistes,” a story about the erotic possibilities (or disappointments thereof) of waxing one’s chest, did not disappoint.

Still want more fun? OK: Christian mimes.

Thank you and goodnight!

Is it, technically, wrong to make a meal out of potato pancakes? I know it’s traditional for Rosh Hashana and all, but we’re not Jewish, and when you think about it, basically it amounts to eating french fries. For dinner.

Oh, well. I remember when sometimes dinner consisted of three beers and a peanut-butter sandwich. Sometimes it was peanut butter three nights in a row. Ah, poverty. In my earliest salad days, I would cash my paycheck on Friday and ask the teller for $5 in quarters. I would put these in a decorative purse that hung on the wall of my apartment. Every morning, I’d take four quarters with me; this was bus fare at 50 cents each way. No matter how tight money got by the end of the week — and it always got tight — at least I’d be able to get to work. Payday was Friday.

I hadn’t been at my first job long when a new vice president was hired. One of his first acts was to significantly boost newsroom salaries, to head off any union activity at the pass. My salary went up 30 percent in a year or two; suddenly, I didn’t have to hoard my $5 in quarters. I could buy a round of beers. I could go on vacation and have a savings account. I didn’t have to live on peanut butter from Wednesday through Friday.

In other words, without even meeting him, he had a significant beneficial effect on my life. He only stayed at the paper a few years before his career took him to bigger and better things. Earlier this summer he was charged with possession of child pornography. One more turn of the wheel.

OK, then.

Not much happened today; can you tell? The high point was when I found my watch, missing for five days. I’d looked everywhere — under every bed, behind every table, at every place I could have possibly taken it off. I checked in all my pants pockets, in bags I might have touched. I was thisclose to putting an ad in the paper, on the chance it might have fallen off my wrist during a bike ride and ended up on the street somewhere. I knew this would be a waste; there’s no way I could have lost it that way without noticing but hey — it was stone gone.

Today it turned up in the basement, in a wad of dirty laundry. No. Idea. How it got there. Of course I wondered if this was the beginning of Alzheimer’s, if the next step will be putting the sugar in the refrigerator and going out for milk, ending up in North Dakota.

If so, I’ll let you know.

This entry may be the first, distant warning sign, eh?

So, then, bloggage:

I have staunchly avoided having an opinion about Cindy Sheehan. I just…don’t have one, except this: Women whose sons are killed on the battlefield get a free pass from me. If they want to dye their hair purple or start wearing push-up bras or write 1,500-page screeds or go straight Job — shaving their head with a potsherd and sitting in the dust? Fine with me. And I don’t care if she got arrested for mooning the Pope, until the frat houses are emptying and the College Republicans hanging out a sign that says, “closed for staff shortages due to enlistment,” no one else gets to say anything about her to me, either.

Yep, she appears to have gone a little cuckoo. What would you do?

Would you believe there’s a swingers’ club in Fort Wayne, Indiana? There is. The bad news: Check out that wallpaper.

The things you miss when you don’t keep up with Martha Stewart. This is my first Halloween here, and apparently the thing here is not the giant plastic bag that looks like a pumpkin stuffed with leaves, and it’s not the inflatable yard goblins (although I’ve seen a couple in Harper Woods), and it’s not the full-goose-bozo yard-littered-with-tombstones-plus-skull-lights-everywhere.

It’s the heirloom pumpkin stack, seen here: Pile an assortment of exotic varieties of gourd and pumpkin atop one another in graduated sizes. Price for the one pictured above: $40.

Uh, no. But it’s rather cool. We went to the Eastern Market Saturday and bought two of the boring conventional orange variety and one white one, just because I’ve never had a white pumpkin before and they’re sort of different. Plus a pot of mums. At heart, I am a deeply conventional person.

Oh, the market was the place to be Saturday. (The photo above was taken at the season-ending festival at the West Park Farm Market, in GPP, which was also a place to be, but not the place to be.) You have never seen such bounty — peppers of every size, shape and heat-delivery efficiency. Tomatoes. Cucumbers. Greens. Apples. Grapes. This, that and the other thing. There was even a guy selling live chickens. I watched a Vietnamese man buy one and carry it away by the legs, as thoiugh it were a bag of acorn squash. I wonder where it met its end. Did he wring its neck in the parking lot, to make the drive home easier? Or did it face the chop in his back yard?

(I freely admit: I’m a carnivore who would be a vegetarian if I had to do it myself. Although I could probably manage the occasional chicken.)

And that was the weekend — food-gathering and porch-decorating and spaghetti and meatballs. A pretty good one.

Oh, and Amy got published in the New York Times. Don’t bother calling her anymore — her rates just went waaaaay up.

(I actually knew someone — a pretty mediocre feminist writer — who said being published on the NYT op-ed page was the turning point in her career, the key that opened all future doors. So there.)

For some time now, I’ve been mulling the idea of writing a piece on the Fearsome Wildlife of Detroit. Nature is red in tooth and claw everywhere, but I’m convinced it’s a little redder here. At least by the standards of the Midwest; we’re not talking Montana here.

I’ve mentioned the comeback of the pheasant in inner-city neighborhoods, where they find the vast unmowed plots of vacant land a fair approximation of their native prairie. Coyotes long ago found their way to the outer suburbs, and surely a few have followed rail lines or the riverfront or some other efficient route into the city, where many tasty pheasant live. When I did that rowing camp in July, the coach spoke of seeing fox at daybreak along the river.

But there’s more spice in the stew. The other day I stopped in the Eastern Market, where a collarless pit bull bitch, pendulous teats waving, trotted right through the middle of the place, a bowl of some sort clenched in her jaws. (There was a woman in Fort Wayne who walked a pit bull through our neighborhood sometimes; the dog was never seen without a stuffed crab plushie held in its mouth. Must be a breed thing.) A TV reporter told me that several times she and her crew had to wave off the 11 p.m. live standup on breaking news in the city, because the wild dogs were menacing them.

And don’t even talk to me about the black squirrels. After three seasons of observation, I’m convinced these suckers are genetically modified for extra craftiness and boldness. A while back I noticed one on the street outside my house, acting oddly — it kept jumping on and off the tire of a parked car. After about five jumps, it had figured out how to get from the tire to the fender, and up the windshied to the roof, where it entered the car through a two-inch gap left by a cracked window.

I thought the neighbors might want to know a live squirrel was plundering the car, so I went over and knocked on the door of the house the car was parked in front of. It wasn’t their car, but we watched together as the squirrel emerged from the car with a slice of stale pizza in its mouth, taken from a Little Caesar’s box on the floor of the back seat.

And, of course, we’re the birthplace of “Animal Cops.”

I’m interested in what happens when all these critters get together, the coyotes and the pits and the ballsy squirrels. I’m thinking it’s pretty amazing. I’m thinking it’s Sharks v. Jets. I’m thinking that observing such things will probably require a blind, an infrared camera and hours and hours of freezing my butt off. For 50 cents a word, maybe not.

Bloggage:

I’m sorry, this is funny.

I had a job interview in Houston last summer. Didn’t get the job. (The job didn’t get anyone; it was reabsorbed into the company, I think. Just so you know I’m not a total loser.) Well, thank God. Although I’m kind of sorry I won’t be covering it — I’ve never done a hurricane before. I would take a vow not to call them “whirlygirls,” as Travis McGee does, from back in the day when they all had women’s names.

Over at the DetNews, Nance gets her rant on.

This, that and the other thing took me downtown today. It’s always exciting to dress up — to shed the gym shorts and Killian’s Irish Red T-shirt for worn blue jeans and a shirt that doesn’t advertise beer — and go mix with adults. Adults! God bless adults. They’re old, they’re flawed, they’re set in their ways, but I feel about adults the way Steve Martin feels about men. And I miss them, working at home.

(Yes, I know that adults much like these made me insane when I worked in close proximity with them. Life, she is a swinging pendulum. Anyway, I think we can agree that in controlled doses: Adults are good.)

One of the assembled adults was an editor I work with, who told me about his wife’s trip to Chicago yesterday, to see an actual “Oprah” taping. (Show topic: “Secrets of the Stars.” Air date: TBA.) Oprah factoids I learned today: The waiting list for tickets is six years, and the audience is sorted by attractiveness and grooming, with the better-looking folks seated in camera range. (There’s a shocker.) My editor’s wife was put in the second row, so she was pleased.

Last fall I wandered into my neighbor’s house during the “Oprah bestows gifts upon teachers” show. She packed the house with teachers, whom she believes are woefully underpaid, and for the next hour it was Queen for a Day, only with more stuff. Everyone in the audience was weeping, my neighbor was fascinated and we all marveled at the largesse that is Oprah.

I went back to my house and told Alan about the gifting orgy taking place on channel 7. His reaction: “Jeez, don’t those teachers know what they’re getting? They’re going to owe thousands of dollars in taxes on all that stuff.” Men don’t get Oprah. Which is why she’s on in the daytime.

After lunch, I stopped at John King Books, the world’s greatest used bookstore, a place that’s old and creaky and so crammed with words on paper that the first thing you do is identify the fire exits, and THEN the fiction section. I was looking for an Annie Proulx book of short stories, because I wanted to read “Brokeback Mountain” before the culture warriors of the right start gas-bagging about the movie, which, if we’re lucky, will cause Michael Medved’s head to explode later this fall.

The story was every bit as good as I’d been told. We’ll see about the movie, but early signs are good.

And now for another hurricane?! Where’s Pat Robertson and his magical storm-clearing powers when you need him?

One of the things you’re spared, out there on the other side of the curtain at NN.C, is the work that goes into keeping us spam-free. Never fear — you won’t call up this site someday to find a weenie-enlargement advert where the daily update goes. The problem is the comments, where ‘bots daily deliver great bushels of spam to old threads, to pick up search-engine traffic, I guess. Every day, I go to my secret “recent comments” page, look up the source of the bad ones, add them to a blacklist and kill them all.

It’s a minor chore, but one I refuse to neglect. Who the hell do these people think they are?

You probably know how a blacklist works — it’s basically a version of closing the barn door after the horse escapes. The problem is, there are lots of barns and lots of horses, and…never mind. The point is: They leave certain fingerprints, and we — that would be technical advisor John and I — banish them and take them off the guest list.

The problem is the fingerprints. Many of you have wondered why your comments were blocked, and the answer, 9 times out of 10, is that you included the word “info” or “information” in your comment, and “.info” is one suffix beloved by marketers of cheap Rolexes and e.d. drugs. This week I got a particularly noxious dumping from a porn site that uses the URL “.drive.to” and I added it to the blacklist, then deleted it, because the filter kept turning up a comment by a loyal reader and poster who used the phrase “you can drive to the city.”

The day after I deleted it from the blacklist? Eighty pieces of porn spam from the drive.to people.

So. What this means for you is, someday sooner or later we’ll probably switch to a better spam-blocking software — WordPress or another. And if you leave a comment, use “data” or “particulars” as synonyms for “info” and “navigate your motorcar in the direction of” instead of “drive to.”

And we’ll be happy all around. Carry on.

I think I may have found a job that fits my current station in life. From Craigslist:

We are in need of 1 Sleep Tech Supervisor. You will be in charge of watching 3-5 people sleep a night, making sure all equipment is running properly and that our clients have no troubles.

Hours are M-F 8 p.m – 6 a.m., every other friday off. Starting pay is $13.

Honestly, it beats what’s happening in the newspaper business especially these days. Not many stress-free jobs available in that racket.

Mine’s not bad, though, although it’s free of many other things — a decent salary, most obviously. A salary, period. But penury is a powerful goad, and I’ve actually been getting some work done. Oh, the joys of a home office. This afternoon I watched out the window while a flock of grackles descended on our little green acre and looted the place of edibles before moving on. The dog and I strolled out in it and considered the change in the light — distinctly autumnal, clearer, at a sharper angle in the afternoon. Watch it slip away, get all melancholy…and then come back inside to thoroughly enjoy the paper.

Well, “enjoy” probably isn’t the word for this story, about a hearing over a proposed Wal-Mart, although the objections raised weren’t the usual ones:

During public meetings in August where about 500 residents came out to hear plans for the store, several opponents of the project — which would replace retail areas at the old Wonderland Mall — repeatedly peppered the air with racially tinged comments. They include fears about black people from Detroit coming to Livonia to shop and work, and the suggestion that Livonia would become a ghetto.

Huh. In the fullness of time, I’ve come to prefer come-right-out-and-say-it racists to the speak-in-code-words racists. So there’s something to recommend Livonia’s Wal-Mart objectors, right there.

But I did enjoy this story, detailing “an influx of upscale prostitutes” to one of Detroit’s strolls. To me, an “upscale” prostitute is Jane Fonda in “Klute” — works on outcall only, keeps an appointment book, dresses nice. Not in Detroit:

The out-of-towners stand out from local prostitutes in big ways, law enforcement officials say: First, they dress glitzier, earning the nickname Hollywood hookers from some deputies. Second, they are less likely to be hooked on drugs. Law enforcement officials say addictions lead many local prostitutes to the streets. There’s a price difference, too: The out-of-state prostitutes charge more and can earn up to $1,000 a night. Local prostitutes sometimes earn just enough to get their next drug fix, Sutton said.

And these girls walk the streets with the $20 crack whores. I guess it’s all in the comparison, eh?

Maybe they should find work at sleep techs. The pay’s a little bit of a comedown, but the hours are comparable and you stay out of the bed. That’s gotta count for something.