I have a pet sister. I've had it since I was 15.

So, this is what I think: that Holly, the red-headed, rough-and-tumble, cancer surviving, scarily smart 8-year-old who thinks she's big enough to push me in the pool, has decided to remind us all that trips to the hospital are really, truly, as they always have been, units of measure for just how great your childhood is going.

Holly came home with a cast on her right ankle last night, which I promptly signed, while she told her story for the umpteenth time of how she got it.

Seems she was at a little indoor play park with her summer camp when she spied a bunch of her friends leaping off an eight-foot platform onto a big inflatable below. So she followed suit, except she caught the landing (apparently) a little differently from the rest of them. Just a sprain, they said, wrapping it and issuing three foot crutches at the hospital. Stay off it for a few days.

Picture me getting flustered and saying, "Holly, if all of your friends decided to jump off a bridge, would you do it, too?"

And then picture her imperial condescension as she reclaims her Sharpie and replies, "Clearly."

The night my dad and I DIDN'T get kicked out of Le Ritz Hotel, Paris.

This is a great conversation starter, by the way. Particularly if you find yourself behind a bar, which I did, today, and do, often. Usually the conversation starts when one patron or another sees me take a sip of water.

They inevitably ask the following: "Is that cucumber?"

And I say, "If you think a lemon makes water taste clean, you've never tried it with a slice of cucumber."

This is not something I came up with on my own. This is how they roll at Le Bar Hemingway, located in Place Vendome's Ritz Hotel, in Paris. Which I visited for obvious reasons. With my dad. Before we left, we had stolen six coasters, two monogrammed cloth napkins and a menu insert. And run up an almost inconceivable bar tab with just one round of drinks.

Pretty classy place, that.

And a bit different from the Green Iguana, where I found myself today because, well, I'm a sucker. It's stamped on my forehead. When I can, I do people favors and cover their shifts. The pastor at my church has picked up on this.

"Hey, will you cover tonight's devotion for the beach walk?"

"...Tonight?"

"Yeah."

"...Yeah."

Like I said. Stamped on my forehead.

And then very many things happened at once.

First, for the people who don't know what "balls to the wall" means: calm down, I am as anatomically equipped to use that phrase as I would be to preside over Divine Service, I ASSURE YOU. That's not to say the guys who came up with "balls to the wall" don't delight in the words' ambiguity -- I think it's a safe bet they do. Those guys are fighter pilots, for whom maximum acceleration is reached by pushing the throttle (that thing that looks like a handle with a ball on it) as far forward as it will go (i.e., to the wall). Okay?

Second: I'm tentatively committed to a house-sitting gig in Durham, North Carolina, for a Divinity School prof who just moved to Atlanta but still hasn't sold his place next to the Duke campus. No rent, in exchange for keeping up the place while buyers continue to check in. And no, I don't know how these things keep finding me. Oh, but I only get this house if a certain professor joining the Duke faculty and moving to Durham from the Chicago area this summer doesn't decide to buy it.

Third: I got a preliminary call from Holden. That's really all I can say right now. Into the woods? Maybe...

Fourth: two women walked into the Green Iguana last night, landed at one of my tables, and we talked about this, that, and the other thing, and before they left, one handed me a phone number and a web address and the offer of an obscene amount of money to stay in Florida for one more year and work for her. Obscene, like, I would be able to pay for Duke.

Ugh. Divinity School. Holden Village. New job. Every one of them a stellar option. But right now, they all think I'm coming their way in a month's time. So there's a lot on my mind all of a sudden. Making calls like these is just a part of growing up, I guess. I told somebody recently that I refuse to grow up into a person I don't want to be. I think I'm going to pretend I meant that.

Why I Wear a Bike Helmet

Fact.

Katie has an abstract thought. In Spanish.

My most recent shift at the bar, I was unloading dinner plates at Saul's dishpit when he asked me, "Katie, tienes novio?" I replied in the negative, and he followed up by asking if I was happy.

I shrugged. "A veces." And continued, "Creo que tener novio es como tener un trabajo en la iglesia." (Saul knows I do children's ministry.) "Cuando no lo tengo, lo extrano, y cuando lo tengo, es como, 'Ay, por que hago esto?'"

Saul laughed. And then we talked for a while about the wife and daughter he has waiting for him back in Mexico, waiting, mostly, for him to make a lot of money and then quit this crazy scene.

"Septiembre, quizas," he says. And I say, "Espero que si."

Things I'm Glad Happen to Me and Not John Nevergall.

I drove my car today. The paper said 60% chance of rain, and the sky concurred, and I thought I'd just better suck it up and drive. Church, the restaurant, and my house marked on a map make an almost equilateral triangle, seven miles each leg, and that's a long way to be from your next destination when it's pouring rain.

Now it's happened before that my car, sitting unused under the Florida sun for days at a time, becomes a cozy, shady spot for some creature or other to camp out. A favorite camp site seems to be right under the windshield wipers. You can imagine, since it usually has to be raining for me to get in the car, and since rain means going for the windshield wipers, I tend to get a rather abrupt introduction to my car's little tennants.

Lots of spiders. Occasionally a lizard. (You know the anoles they sell at Valpo Pet N Hobby for $9.00? Come visit me in Florida and I'll catch you one for free. I'll catch you eight. They're everywhere.)

I was two miles down 66th Street and hadn't turned on the wipers yet when I saw the little reptilian head, staring reproachfully at me from its new flat: right you-know-exactly-where on the car. Then he disappeared, and half a mile later, when the rain picked up, I thought the lizard (I THOUGHT it was a lizard, stop getting ahead of me) might have scampered away, the way you DO when your house rumbles to life and runs away on you.

I went for the wipers.

And my wipers dragged a foot-long snake across my windshield. An upset, writhing, foot-long snake.

Allow me to describe that moment for you.

In a moment like that, you don't think about the glass separating you. You spit, sputter, and swear, and bat frantically at the wiper control, and turn it on MAX before you manage to turn it off, and the snake's gone who-knows-where, before you know it, and that's it. It's over. The CD changes tracks and you're still safely in the center lane and, hmmm, your heart's on the dashboard, that's different, but really perhaps none of this ever happened at all.

The tires kick mist into the exhaust and you shoot on down the street through shades of grey.