Still staggering onwards! Not feeling too horrible, though, which is great. Yesterday I was actually feeling rather good, and went to see 21 Grams with Lucia and Susan. Today I took those photos (and more!) in my friend Annie's store, got my water from the artesian well (last public one left in Olympia), and went grocery shopping while I was hungry, which has resulted in me eating a Cherry Garcia Peace Pop and buying other, similar crap which I'll stuff in my face AS SOON AS I CAN!! Annie was the first person I met in Olympia (in, maybe, 1980), when she had an antiques business. She and her store are always evolving and changing, and now (and for the past many years) she has a spice shop and a dog-things store. Same spot. At one time she had a restaurant and I worked as a waitress (my only time ever) and a (under duress) cook. I'm an excellent cook but I hate it. Waitressing I looked upon as a form of theatre and also nursing and spy-work. I worked with an extremely mean and rotten cook, so when someone would ask for, say, a slice of cheese on their sandwich (unforgiveable) I would fall to my knees in the middle of the restaurant and approach the cook with hands raised in a gesture of worshipful pleading. I made the cook laugh and she'd give the cheese -- "But make sure you charge $.25!" Anne got a shipment of 5-foot-long pencils in stock once, and made me wait tables with them. I'd rest it on my shoulder like a rifle, as I stuggled to write with it on a normal-sized pad. I loved it. Anne is amazing and zesty and fearless -- and you either "get" her or you don't. People would come into the restaurant all grumpy with low blood sugar, then turn into happy little customers after I fed them (nursing). I always felt that I saw way people really were -- the way they behaved to minions revealed how they really were. At that time Kathy was working at a gallery next door framing in the basement. We loathed and despaired of the gallery owner as she treated most people like... they were worth nothing. She would take "valuable" people to lunch at Buck's. After one lunch I found a piece of paper on which was written "M.F.A.=serious artist." AAAwwwk.