My brand new tree

Lynn leaves on Friday and I am truly married to my phone now for the next seven weeks. My solitary life of swimming and dog walking and dancing and writing and reading and waiting for the contractors to begin their noise and the late nights when I come home, get a flashlight and go look to see what has happened to the remodel (if anything)---is about to end. I'll be hassling with Felix if I can't get home to let him out, to feed him and the katz, you know the drill.

It's ok.

Tonight I met with strangers in a room to read applications for school scholarships, a local college. We were to decide, after reading 150 applications, which person came in first. And second, sorta like the Miss America contest with the first runner-up.

How the hell to decide. The scholarship was for leadership. And one of our number was quite brittle and didn't like how the rest of us were behaving/deciding. She thought we could be objective (really?) and I was impressed by our biases, our backgrounds and our own struggles to go to school, our families and communities and our life experiences informing us while we read.

There was a young man whose parents were farm workers with a 5th grade education. There was the single mother whose husband had just died. There were the First Americans who planned to return to their tribes with a social work degree. There were jocks whose recommendations came from their teammates.

We narrowed it down to the top five and then gave all the piles of papers back to the facilitators to sort out.

Sheesh.

There is a new bathtub in the remodel. It's sitting on a handcart and it's DEEP, really deep. Some day I will take a bath in it. It will be installed. In the meantime, Jim got a bid for insulation and drywall. People, it's really going to happen. I will stop looking at stud cavities and wires and I'll have WALLS and FLOORS and LIGHT SWITCHES.

This is a miracle.

Meanwhile, I'm almost done with 'Going Clear,' the Scientology expose. After this I'm gonna listen to essays by David Sedaris. I need some humor in my life.