and San Francisco is much closer than New York. (Not that I want you to kick my ass, but I totally want you to come up here and threaten to kick it, so I can roll my eyes at you and take you out for coffee.)

HA!

I definitely feel like I need a little SF time soon. I'm quite busy over the next couple of months, but it means I'll be making some very good money. Which in turn means I'll be able to make a nice SF trip soon. Probably around the holidays.

I'm also hoping it will mean that I'll be able to make a PNW trip eventually, and maybe even a NYC trip some time next year, but I don't want to make any promises....

the next time you see her she'll probably still be quiet and standoffish and stare at you like you must be insane if you ask her to say your name, but she's totally saying it as long as you yourself are safely out of sight.

Eeeeee! My charm clearly only works from a distance. I promise, as soon as I get the bike out of registration hell, I'll come over and visit and Matilda can pat the actual bike.

(Your story of her looking at my work and saying, "Lady? Lady? Oh. No lady." killed me.)

Heh--a friend just emailed me and told me about the childrens librarian they just hired at the library he works at. "She is a nerd out of the Kathy [A] mold. OK, not entirely like you - I do not think she likes romance books. But other than you, she is the only female-type I have met who likes the SF/Fantasy genre."

I'll have to remind him that there are a lot of us out there. Heck, I can think of at least three at the bookstore, let alone the women here!

I think I'm doomed....

The Stigma Of The Never-Married Man

"These guys get labeled playboy, loser, commitment-phobe," says Carl Weisman, author of So Why Have You Never Been Married? According to U.S. Census Bureau statistics, in 1980 only 6 percent of men between 40 and 44 had never been married; in 2008 it was 16 percent. But even though there are more of them around, men with long-term single status still have a hard time explaining their situation to potential dates, who see a guy entering middle age without ever having been married as damaged goods. In fact, a man whose marriage failed spectacularly tends to arouse less suspicion than a straight, still-single 41-year-old. "If he's over 40, you would hope that he's divorced," says Janis Spindel, a high-end matchmaker in New York who gets calls from hundreds of single women asking for setups. Evidence that even unmarried men in their mid-thirties are suspect is in her fee structure: The up-front charge for guys under 35 is $25,000; for those 35-plus it's $50,000.

Hee! JZ, that's hilarious.

Lillian often asks things like "What's Baby Matilda doing?" when we look at Flickr. She has invisible internet friends she only knows from pictures! She's especially fond of Noah, who is always doing such interesting things and making such interesting faces, but she digs all the b.org sprog and will force me to look at "pictures of babies" for hours.

Actually, FLAT is one of the few landscapes that freaks me out. I couldn't stand driving through Nebraska (the long way), and the only reason I can tolerate driving through California's central valley on the way up to San Francisco is because I can see the Diablo mountains off in the distance to the West.

DUDE, no kidding! Flat's just WRONG.

DUDE, no kidding! Flat's just WRONG.

Thanks to the glacial moraines, Michigan is hilly. Not foothills hilly, but hilly enough that didn't know what flat was until I drove through real flatlands.

I have been told that our mountains here (HUGE! CRAGGY! VOLCANIC!) are alarming to people from less rugged turf. I don't really get this, and the things I see called mountains back east confuse me, on account of them being puny little hill things.

I also went to a national forest in Idaho once, and the lack of dense ground cover like we have here shocked me. It's like the rest of the country is half dressed or something.

The other FLAT place I've been is Texas. Most of the time I've spent in and around Houston was deep enough into the city that I couldn't see the FLAT. And Austin is into Hill Country, and reminded me of a hotter, muggier Michigan.

The one saving grace of all the FLAT places I've been is that you get BIG SKY.

And in Texas in particular, the majesty of truly towering clouds and thunderheads is a sight to behold.

Which (as I have mentioned before) is the one thing I really miss living in SoCal -- real actual genuine thunderstorms. A couple of weeks ago, I got to watch a storm that had lots of lightning pass through the south and west of town, but it never got close enough for me to hear any thunder.

I still remember when we moved up to Cleveland and experienced our first freeze. We called some local friends and asked at what point would it be a good idea to leave the faucets dripping.

There was this silence on the phone, then a quizzical, "Why?"

And we were like, "To keep the pipes from freezing?"

After about five minutes of hysterical laughter, they assured us we didn't need to do anything so bizarre because in Ohio, they can bury the pipes below the frost line. Then they asked us why they didn't do that in Florida.

"Because is no such thing as a frost line. You go too far down and you're in a swamp, that's why."

Clearly, they never had to deal with burst pipes, either...

Flat freaks me out.