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Day’?s Verse:
Since we have these promises, dear friends, let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit, perfecting holiness out of reverence for God.
2 Cor. 7:1
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Normally Ian and I spend our weekends in PJs, reading our books and avoiding the outside world. Occasionally we might venture out for donuts, milk, or other necessary weekend food supplies.

Not this last weekend. It started Friday afternoon, when I met up with Michelle and we went to Nancy Chang’s for dinner. Then we went to her new apartment and chatted for a while, killing time until 7:00, when we left for Dave and Sharron’s house. At Dave and Sharron’s we met up with Ian, and the five of us watched Mr. and Mrs. Smith (amusing since Dave and Sharron are the Smiths). It was fine, although having already seen it a few times I didn’t really feel any need to see it again. But we had fun at Dave and Sharron’s, and managed to extricate ourselves at about 11:00. Ian and I dragged home about midnight, but still woke up at 6:30. Darn.

Saturday morning, I eventually gave up pretending to sleep in and launched into cleaning the kitchen at about 7:30. This turned into a deep-cleaning that included turning on the self-cleaning feature of the oven — more on that later — as well as scrubbing the counters, stove, stove-burner thingies, and, shockingly, the kitchen floor. What with all the scrubbing and cleaning, I found myself exhausted three hours later, but with a gleamingly clean kitchen. I also vowed never to have totally white countertops ever again. About the self-cleaning feature: Whoa. I will also not do that again; three and a half hours hours of extremely an extremely hot-burning oven combined with two fire alarm episodes has convinced me that I will just live with gunk on the bottom of my oven. Self-cleaning oven sounds cool, but it’?s not halfway worth it.

After a brief break during which I just picked up and straightened the living room, I went to start on the bathroom, but lack of baking soda and vinegar (not to combine) aborted that plan fairly quickly. So we ate lunch, and at noon went to Landry’?s Cycle to pick up my newly fendered mountain bike, and order a bike rental for Ian. When we go to the cape, Ian’?s going to ride a rented Specialized Globe. Then we briefly stopped at home for me to drop off my bike and grab my camera. That accomplished, we zipped off to the Alewife station and took the T in to the City Hall in Boston, where we spent the next couple hours wandering around AltWheels, a festival of alternative transportation and energy. I enjoyed myself, looking at all the cool alternative-fuel cars, the little model energy-efficient houses, the hundreds of bikes parked all over, and most of all just looking at the people. Then we wandered around Cambridge for a while, just enjoying the day, and finally made our way back to Alewife and our car. That evening we rested.

Sunday morning we went off to church, met up with our much-missed pal Eric, and went out to lunch with him at Finders Pub. Eric had a PB&J;, three hot dogs, and pineapple juice; I ordered curly fries with lettuce, cheese, tomatoes, and bacon; and Ian enjoyed a lobster roll with clam chowder. This was a very eclectic place to eat, and on top of that, we paid a total of $30 (with tip and tax) for the whole thing. Excellent. Then we went home and spent the rest of the afternoon resting. I read Time Traveler’s Wife again — still excellent and still brought me to tears — and later we finished reading a really bad romance novel we started a month or more ago. That also nearly brought me to tears, but for a different reason. It was literally painful to read and listen to, and once again reinforced that I really ought to see about getting my romance novel published. It was much, much better than the one we just read.

Monday I got back into the groove, rode by a roadkill skunk in the morning and then had to jolt and jitter over a long section of ripped-up road that is going to be repaved soon. Work turned out quite busy, and I got home exhausted. We crawled into bed about 8:20, turned the light out at 9:05, and I slept most of the night like a dead person. I did wake up feeling really sick, with a stuffy nose, sore throat, burning eyes, and headache; the morning came with little improvement, so I took a Tylenol and dragged myself to work. And here I am, feeling like I could just put my head down and sleep for days.

PS – The spiders are mostly all dead and lying on the ground, many squished, at the train station. Cold weather? Anti-spider warfare?