Beacuse I can, I am blogging from a coffeeshop at the Mall of America. Alex, my 19-yr-old sister, is across from me reading a book on forensics; Brittany is to my right, and so is Veronica, in a stroller. Veronica is stirring quietly. Brittany just said, "Her umbilical cord fell off today." I thought she said her vocal cord had. "I picked her up, and it was laying on the couch. I said, 'OK.'" I kicked their asses at Scrabble earlier (Super Scrabble, the double-the-tiles/double-the-squares version of the game I got Alex for Christmas last year) and will do so again in about an hour. Update: I did nothing of the sort. Alex beat me in a two-person semi-speed match and Mom beat Alex and myself both afterward. Brittany was tending to Veronica and sat out both games.

Briefly, my laptop conked out yesterday, but it fixed itself last night; I aided it along by burning 20 CD-Rs' worth of MP3s that were clogging the hard drive, then deleting them from the system. It works just fine now. Apologies to all who endured my bitching about it (all six of you, plus miscellaneous folks who saw my irate post before I deleted it at 5 this morning). That means I can work some more on (a) the book proposal and (b) the 2007 page-a-day calendar, which is a lot of fun to plan out--find good songs on paid download sites, jot them down on calendar dates. Repeat 365 times (plus 25 alternates). Time-consuming. Therapeutic. Easy. For a geek like me, a very good time.