Do you need artythings? I bet you do, and I bet you will love the wares my friend Lorien has for sale over at tra la la. She regularly posts about items as she makes them, so keep your eyes open for new stuff!

Plans are afoot. Those of you who have been around for a while might remember that nearly a year ago, I drove up to Seattle to visit my parents, my brother—who was about to move to Korea—and some of you nice people. I talked my mom into coming along with me on the way back down so that we could stop at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. I had wanted to go to the festival for years, but had never gotten past the brochure stage. The two of us had a fabulous time, and before we left, we decided that we should go every year.

I was talking to my mom on the phone last week, and I happened to see the booklet for this year's festival, which I got in the mail a few months ago. "Hey, are we going to go to Ashland again this year?" I asked.

Within the next twelve hours, we had talked my dad* and Jeff into coming along, purchased our tickets, and reserved a couple of hotel rooms at a 50% discount, courtesy of my mother's impressive travel agent mojo. We'll be seeing Wild Oats, Present Laughter, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. There were only 50 tickets left for A Midsummer Night's Dream when we called, and as it turned out, one of the only blocks of four seats left was a four-seat box up on the right. While I'm not sure that the box will provide us with the greatest view we could get, we will no doubt make up for it with the opportunity to make jokes about the unwashed masses below: "Tom's of Maine deodorant doesn't work, you dirty Oregon hippies!"**

Soon, our plans had expanded. Over Christmas, Jeff's parents had invited us to go camping in Tahoe with them this summer. Their camping trip starts just after our Ashland visit ends, so we'll be piggybacking the two. In addition, since our dogs love hiking and swimming—and since we prefer not to leave them home when we travel if we don't have to—we're bringing them along. However, since we can't bring the dogs to Ashland, we'll be dropping them off in Carson City, then heading to Napa, then heading to Ashland, then going back to Carson City, and then to Tahoe. Then home.

It sounds so simple when I put it that way!

* When I say "my dad," I usually mean my stepfather, since he's been my stepdad for nearly twenty years.
** I have nothing against hippies or Oregon. I actually mesh quite well with hippies. A friend once told me that no matter what I was wearing, random hippies on the street always shot me an "ah, a fellow traveler!" kind of look. I wondered if maybe they had a sixth sense that enabled them to ferret out people who knew all the lyrics to "Box of Rain." Sixth sense or no, despite my affinity for hippies and Oregon, I refuse to budge from my "Tom's of Maine deodorant doesn't work" stance. And those "deodorant crystals"—you know, the rocks you're supposed to rub on yourself to neutralize smells—are the psychic hotline of personal care products. You might as well just pray that your stank won't envelope you in a Pigpen cloud.

Today, I went to Home Depot, and I bought some bags of dirt and some bags of rocks. I also bought some thirsty little plants in dirt and some unthirsty little plants in rocks, as well as a little tree that I soon need to put in a large pot. I then pulled all the weeds out of the bed that lines one side of the patio and covered the dirt with rocks. After two years of trying to get different types of plants to grow there, I have finally accepted the fact that even if cultivation of anything but clover or miscellaneous weeds is possible in that spot, it isn't possible for me. Rocks I can do. I then weeded my succulent bed, which is in a rather odd-shaped area on the patio that used to be a koi pond or something along those lines. Not a whole lot of planning has gone into the succulent bed. Basically, I buy things I like, and I then just pick a spot for them at random. So far, this has worked out okay for all the plants except the lithrops, which lacked the strength and stature to defend themselves against the crushing weed onslaught.

After that, I spent a whole lot of time hacking away at bamboo. A friend who visited not long after we moved into this house told me that lots of people really hate bamboo. At the time, I didn't understand—the plants added some nice color to the end of the patio, and they required virtually no care. What I didn't know is that bamboo wants to be everywhere, and when you only want it to be in one or two places, you have to battle stalks that grow like seven feet a day and have a bizarre root system that seems to run horizontally for a mile or so in every direction.

I was in fifth grade when I got chickenpox. I had a run-in with some poison ivy on a school field trip just a month or so later. Both were bad; I spent what seemed like half the year taking baking soda baths, trying to see through eyes that were swollen shut, and just generally feeling miserable and ugly. Even my mom told me a good ten years later that she had secretly feared my face would somehow stick like that, and I'd end up looking like Mr. Magoo with a bad sunburn for the rest of my life. I got away with three or four barely-noticeable scars instead. The only thing that truly stayed with me was a recurring fever-dream from the worst days of the first illness. I would lie in bed, with the socks on my hands held in place by tape—I ripped them off my hands while I slept if they weren't held in place by tape—and I would find myself inching as far away from the edge of the bed as I could get. Since the bed was in the corner of the room, I'd eventually end up at the spot where the two walls met.

And then, I'd open my eyes and find that the bed had stretched out; it had moved away from my corner while remaining part of it, but it had moved so far that I couldn't see the edge, and it had taken some of my breath with it. Everything had become a sterile white: the comforter, my pajamas, the space where the far walls used to be. And my corner felt smaller. Constricting. It was refuge that wasn't refuge, but I preferred it to the vast white bedland that I was pretty sure never stopped. I would lie as far as I could get from the edge of the bed, smashed against pillows that didn't have any cool spots left, and I'd curl up into a ball. Small, to match my corner.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who's had this fever dream, though I don't think I've talked to anyone about it, so I can't say for certain. Really, though, these sorts of things are rarely unique. My subconscious might come up with a bizarre sequence or two on occasion, but the symbolism is heavy-handed and sometimes embarrassingly Freudian. That might concern me more if I were a poet, but I'm not, so it doesn't bother me much. It certainly doesn't make the memory of the thing less vivid—especially when the thing returns to you, plays itself out again and again, is served up repeatedly by your cooking brain. Memories of things that really happened aren't always more powerful than memories of things that never happened, and that's why real life can remind you of something that's only real in your head.

Curling up never really works; everything looks about the same when you can see again. It's better, I think, to stay busy: to avoid getting lost in the looking when you can't seem to take anything in, to keep the smallness from swallowing you. You have to make a plan. Right now, mine involves going to Home Depot, buying some bags of dirt and some bags of rocks, coming home, and then sticking my hands in the ground. Despite thoughts of poison inspired by recalcitrant bamboo stalks, it's working a little, I think. Besides, if I keep pretending that I'm good at this, eventually, it will just be true.

We are refinancing our house. For several days, pretty much all I did was look at amortization charts to try to figure out how to get the best deal. Our mortgage payment will soon drop by $267 a month, which is a lot, so that's good. The whole research and chart-staring process created something of a bee in my bonnet, and so we are now trading a variable-rate home equity line of credit, a car payment, a personal loan, and two credit cards for an enormous home equity loan with a 60-month term at a low, fixed rate. While it's rather frightening to commit to a payment of that size, the amount of that payment will actually be much lower than the minimum payments alone on the debts we're replacing, and we'll end up saving $239 per month just on interest. Plus, since it's a fixed-term loan, we won't have the option of hanging out and making interest-only payments for the next ten years, which is currently what we're doing with the home equity line of credit.

I realize personal finance isn't the most exciting topic, which is why I haven't been updating. However, if I haven't lost you already, and you're actually interested in things like this, then here are some other things you might be interested in:

1. bankrate.com is a really great site for comparing rates on all sorts of loans and savings accounts. That's where I found our new home equity loan.

2. I love this little program.

3. If you're looking for information on debt reduction, go here. Many of the steps outlined in the lessons are more common sense than anything else, but the workbook that accompanies them is excellent.

4. I've been getting mail for the last couple of years from companies offering very low rates for student loan consolidation, but it was my understanding that I couldn't consolidate my student loans until after I was out of school unless I wanted to start repaying them now. That's wrong—or at least it's wrong if you're me, or anyone else who has at least one Direct Loan from the US Department of Education. If you have a Direct Loan, you can get a Direct Consolidation Loan even if you're still in school, because unlike other lenders, the Department has a special in-school consolidation program.

Federal rates on Stafford loans are the lowest they've ever been, and they're expected to drop even lower on July 1st. While students paid 8.19% on Stafford loans in the 2000-2001 academic year, students this year are paying 4.06%. The projected rate for July 1, 2003 to June 30, 2004 is 3.42%. This is a huge deal, especially if you owe an amount that you're pretty sure exceeds the operating budget of, say, Rhode Island. For me, the difference between 8.19% and 3.42% is a savings of over $90,000 in interest over the life of the loan. It's also the difference between a monthly payment of $628 and a monthly payment of $377. It's big enough that I was actually considering going into repayment early so that I could lock in the lower rate. Now that I know that's unnecessary, I'll wait until the rates drop in July, consolidate, and once again start pretending I never borrowed all that money.

It would seem that I'm in the middle of a full-blown insomnia phase. I accepted this fact when I realized that it had been well over an hour since I had taken a muscle relaxant that would normally knock me out in under 20 minutes. I took the muscle relaxant instead of Ambien because all the tension in my body is currently concentrated in my neck, jaw, and the upper part of my head. I've obviously started grinding my teeth again when I do finally get to sleep; I could hardly chew tonight because of the jaw pain. The muscles in my forehead are actually sore from crinkling themselves up too much. I keep trying to massage my face into some sort of zen-face-master state, but it only works for about ten minutes at a time. Plus, it hurts. So, now, my mind is good for absolutely nothing, but I still can't seem to switch it off, as I've developed a drug-resistant strain of a wakefulness virus. I wonder what they give horses. Maybe I can convince our vet that we have livestock out yonder with a hankering for some good downers.

On friendster, my email address is listed as majorweather@yahoo.com. My full name is Shasta Turner.

We have signed up with a gardening service just for the front. They are going to mow the lawn, edge the sidewalks & walkways, trim bushes & shrubs, sweep the driveway and sidewalk, rake the lawn, weed in all cracks and crevices, clean the street in front of our house, and fertilize every 2-3 months for $9.95 per visit. I feel kind of bad for hiring them; I keep imagining their staff as a bunch of 8 year-old ex Nike employees from Indonesia. Of course, it's much more likely that they'll be adult males who have immigrated illegally from Mexico.

In a state like California, in which the labor of illegal immigrants has an enormous—though not officially acknowledged—impact on the economy, it's sometimes hard for me to decide whether or not I feel okay about my own role in these economic transactions. Always, there's the dilemma: am I providing necessary employment to people who need the money or contributing to the exploitation of an unenfranchised class of workers? Perhaps it's both, a catch-22. I suppose I'll wait until they come and then decide how I feel about it.

Do you remember that song by Randy Newman, "My Life Is Good"? I think it was on the same album as "I Love L.A."

"A couple weeks ago
My wife and I
Took a little trip down to
Mexico
Met this young girl there
We brought her back with us
Now she lives with us
In our home
She cleans the hallway
She cleans the stair
She cleans the living room
She wipes the baby's ass
She drives the kids to school
She does the laundry, too
She wrote this song for me
Listen
Yeah."

The man's a genius, really. It's astonishing to me how many people are incapable of wrapping their minds around the fact that the primary feature of much of his older work was irony. There are a whole lot of them. They are, as "I Love L.A." the official anthem of the City of Los Angeles. They're the short people who were offended by "Short People." They're the ones who think that when Robert Frost wrote "good fences make good neighbors," he was promoting the sanctity of property lines. They think the people behind blackpeopleloveus.com are obviously racists, and they probably don't think bonsaikitten.com is even a little bit funny.

Today was Day Two of my "Get Up in the Morning Like A Normal Person" plan. I've been a night person since I was a kid, and I'm fine with that. I do not want—nor have I ever wanted—to be a morning person. Something about morning people just after they've woken up strikes me as vaguely inhuman. Morning people don't need to do a whole lot of research before they buy an alarm clock, because they don't need to know exactly how many minutes will elapse between presses of the snooze button, or how many times total the snooze button can be pushed before the clock just gives up on you. I bet the morning people among you didn't even know that it's possible for an alarm to give up on you. That's because while I'm trying to ignore the existence of the world for an extra eight minutes (times four), you're busy making yourself a wholesome breakfast and directing lively comments towards anyone who enters the room. If you're a tolerable-variety morning person, you understand that no matter how I feel about you, your lively comments are like fingernails on the chalkboard of my caffeineless psyche. If you're an insufferable-variety morning person, you chatter incessantly despite my baleful glares, and if you're really bad, you also take a break from your monologue every ten lines or so to ask me what's wrong.

So, no. I don't want to be a morning person. Even if I did, I don't think you can change your preference if you lean heavily in either direction. I know plenty of night people who get up early every day because they have kids who get up early every day, or because they have to get to work. They can maintain this routine for years, and they'll still think it sucks. If they have a partner who isn't of the same sleep persuasion, they'll probably spend about twenty minutes each morning wondering what they did to deserve eternity with Julie Fucking Andrews.

My goals are more modest. I just want to stabilize my schedule to help fend off insomnia, start lifting weights again—I've been going to the gym, but I got lazy and stopped lifting—and gain the ability to make phone calls to the East Coast during business hours. I've decided this means I should get up at around 9:00. So far, the plan is working fine. I bet I'll like it even better when I lose the sensation that my arms are maybe about to fall off.