Squirrel sought in hit-and-run that stuns cyclist.

I was on my way to the library to return a copy of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which I'd finished reading in O'Hare airport while waiting for my flight to decide from what gate and in how many minutes it would be leaving.

I was on my bike.

I was on the sidewalk.

I was passing a yard that was not on a level with the sidewalk, but rather ran about a foot above it, the boundary with the sidewalk consequently made up by a concrete ledge.

A squirrel did that thing that squirrels do, where they dart to the edge of the road in front of a moving vehicle and then at the last second, Ohhh, no, it's too dangerous, it's too dangerous! Peril, peril! and they scrabble back across the yard the way they came.

This particular squirrel made it across the yard, launched himself from the concrete ledge, attached himself by all paws to my calf for a split second and then executed a perfect flip turn back into the yard and away.

Perhaps he saw the bats?

How to make green beer.

A drop of food coloring at the bottom of an empty draft glass will suffice. Alternatively: forget what day it is every other beer you pull, drop the food coloring on top instead of bottom, and (a) take a spoon to it, or (b) pour the draft into yet another glass. Either effectively diffuses the green.

My hands will be stained for, oh, the next week.

An eventful week.

Spending the evening prising glass splinters from my finger tips (my own fault, as usual). Back to a calm life of liquor-slinging, after briefly taking the city of Valparaiso by storm, then Chicago, where the new play went over well, but I'm slowly accomodating the realization that I'll need at least one actor as crazy as I am to pull things off from here. Also I've been alerted to my acceptance at Duke Divinity School. Whee.

On Today's Episode of "The Love Boat"...

"Ginger! Fornication!"

The Captain cast a plaintive glance in my direction, hoping I'd save him from the other servers' suggestions for a Word of the Day. I sighed, knowing I should leave him in their fiendish hands as punishment for his past use of my Words, but instead I made two decisions: that I'd help him, first, and second, that I wouldn't choose an adjective.

"The word of the day," I announced, after a considerable dramatic pause, "is 'meow.'"

Now, you'd think from his reaction that I'd picked an awfully difficult word to fit into the day's narrated sight-seeing tour. Not true. Example: "All right, if you'll look to your left, right meow we're passing the Don Cesar hotel..." "Meow that we're through the bridge..." The possibilities are endless.

Unfortunately, the possibilities hadn't prepared for the Captain's electing to be a poor sport.

Fifteen minutes into the tour, my nerves were frayed and my every sense electrified as I waited to hear the Captain 'meow' -- but he was refusing. Or at least he hadn't complied, yet, so at last I dialed the wheelhouse and, when he picked up, Meow-ed rather loudly into his ear.

"Just in case you forgot."

He hung up on me.

But then, abruptly, he let out a high-pitched "Rerrr!" into the microphone, and continued the tour.

And then the cruise director had to wander by and wonder why his bartender was crying hysterically.

"Frost Warning" from Frazz, cultural icon

KatieBee is on the move...

I'm moving today -- a process I always find starts with a sense of freedom as all one's belongings sit laid bare and you think, Finally, I can see what's what and get rid of everything I don't need or am not going to take backpacking around the world with me.

Then an hour and forty-five minutes later the thought process is more along the lines of Confound it -- I'll go through all this later -- just scrape it into buckets and carry and I can at least get the moving part done today...

This time the thought process is far and away the most dramatic part of the move (as it's generally the most dramatic part of anything I do). Yes, I'm abandoning the closet, but I'm only headed a few steps down the hall. My brother is making a go of living on his own for the first time, and I'm staking my claim to his old room before our dad can turn it into a home gym. The kid will be fine; he's going into it with a roommate he trusts and a complex that gave him new carpet since the last residents sort of tore up the place. I'll miss Carl, the hamster; but they'll take care of each other out there. Eric'll do well and he'll do it in style, and I'll sit back with the quiet indignity that I'm 23 and living at home, while he's 20 and not.

I know what I'm doing. Rent and a 12-month lease won't fit just yet.

I feel so loved...

The Word of the Day is Precocious

No; I will never go back. I simply cannot choose the word of the day anymore.

This is a feature of how your friendly neighborhood strung-out support staff makes it through a day-cruise, where in addition to trying to get you drunk so your tab stays high enough that we make a livable wage, we suffer civilly through the captain's narrated sight-seeing tour of the intercoastal waterway.

The waterway doesn't change much; the tour doesn't change much. So we pick a word of the day and challenge the captain to insert it at his leisure. Captain Mark is the best captain to accomplish a word of the day challenge: he's not even subtle about it. He'll use the word ("exorbitant," say) in a sentence, then muse, "Exorbitant. That's a good word." Every...time.

I have only picked the word of the day twice. The first time, it was "precocious." I listened attentively, made drinks for the servers, buzzed the captain as is my duty when lunch service was starting so he could make an announcement for anyone who'd wandered under the influence of idle curiosity to the outer decks. He said over the PA, "Now for those of you who are dining with us today, I've just been informed by our precocious bartender downstairs that our lunch service is starting at this time." And then he said, "Precocious. That's a good word."

I buzzed him again. He picked up the phone in the wheelhouse and all I heard was evil-villain mwahahaha-ing into the receiver, and then he hung up on me.

Weeks later I ventured to pick the word of the day again, for a different captain, who also thought it would be funny to use the word in reference to me, in precisely the same manner.

This time I'd picked "depraved."