Mirabelle came over today and spent part of the afternoon with me. We had a deep discussion about the meaning of life, followed by a long and involved argument on the proper way to pronounce "doggie." I'm convinced the word starts with a D, but she insisted it started with an M and sounded something like "meemeemeemee!"

After our long and sometimes bitter arguments, we decided to take a walk. We tooled around the block, then around another one when I realized that the reason I had won the "It's not too cold!" argument was because Mirabelle had fallen asleep.

After a short nap, on Mirabelle's part, I only wished I had napped, we went into the garden to check out the soil, eat rocks and throw tomatoes at the dogs, who promptly ate our ammo.

Megan stopped us from eating too many rocks, showing up just as we thinking of trying the sticks. She and Mirabelle then said their goodbyes and dashed up north for Mirabelle's Great Grandma's birthday.

A brief, but pleasant, visit from the littlest Smith.

"I bought Safeway out of vegetable stock. They were on sale."

"How many did you get?"

"Twenty cans."

"Hmmmm, that's not a lot. Remember when we thought we had an infinite supply of veggie broth?"

"Yeah, those were the days. What ever happened to those cans?"

"You kept making soup."

"Oh... yeah."

Mid-September, I attended the introduction meeting for the Master Gardeners program of Santa Clara County. I've been gardening in the back yard ever since Chris Doyle tore up the concrete and I dumped 12 cubic yards of compost on the spot five years ago, and container gardening for years and years before that. Mom had a lot to do with my green thumbs, though I'm sure she takes no credit for the bitter zucchini incident.

Speaking of bitter zucchini, during my MG interview, which is part of the application process, I mentioned I heard of the MG program through the local co-op, which I contacted at Mom's suggestion when I had the bitter zucchini in the yard. One of the women interviewing turned to me and asked me when the incident happened. When I answered two summers ago, she grinned in delight, then exclaimed I was famous, everyone knew the bitter zucchini story in the office. Everyone!

Great! Not the way I really want to be famous, but I guess it's better than, say, Mrs. Smith going in and saying, yeah, she's the one who was poisoned by the bitter zucchini.

After finally processing that ginormous stack of mail, I found the envelope with the letter of acceptance into the program. I'm very excited. I'll finally learn the "right" way to plant a garden and (my trees will like this) prune a tree.

Megan asked if she needs to address me as Master now. I giggled and said no, but I get to put an "M.G." after my name when I'm done.

"I think I scorched the yams."

"Uh, what do you mean by scorched the yams? As in, burn down the house scorched the yams?"

"Maybe."

Three weeks without a good, reliable Intarweb™ connection, and I'm half bald from pulling out my hair in frustration.

Another DSL guy came out today and, unlike the last DSL guy who seemed to be a moron, this guy seemed to know what he doing. He checked the inside wiring, pulled out two dust gremlins, cleared the cooties from the broken connectors in the phone jack, climbed his ladder to check the filter fairies and finally sacrificed 10 feet of phone cabling to the Intarweb™ connection gods. He then declared (one hour and $120 later), I was good to go, try to make a connection.

Never has a steady green light looked so good.

Whee! Connected! I can finally post all of my blog posts from the last two weeks and upload all of my pictures. Yay!

Time now to go find a good girl-toupee to cover my head until my hair grows back.

For those with Yahoo/SBC DSL, when you call to make an appointment with a technician, ask for John with the operator number 6CN. He rocks.