Catching Up with Depeche Mode

Not really. I'm not Depeche Mode, although I did see them in concert that one time when I lived in Detroit. I had a crap time, by the way, mostly because of a girl I used to call Sunshine Super Shannon. As the young kids say: Bish plz.

Anyway, you're catching up with me. I spent the best Saturday morning ever watching the last episodes of Season 2 of Angel (so much fun was going on with Angel while so much horrible stuff was happening with Buffy--it must have been marvelous comic relief for those who watched both when they originally aired), working on my mom's sweater, and talking on the phone.

I usually hate talking on the phone, for the most part, but an old friend--and I mean old enough to have raced me through second grade homework assignments--called because "he needed to hear a sane woman's voice." See, he's a state cop and Marine, and had spent two weeks away doing Marine stuff only to come home for 24 hours before having to go away again for cop stuff. He was calling me from the road, though, having had to leave the cop stuff early because his wife called him, "crying and having a breakdown."

I'm not quite sure what he expected to hear from me, but I had to give him the speech about how hard it is to be a mom when you love your kids so much, want to be perfect for them, feel so lucky to have them and be able to take good care of them, and yet feel horribly guilty because all you want is for them to LEAVE YOU THE HELL ALONE. Because good, grateful mommies never want to do anything more than be with their loving broods.

And then I reminded him how, sure, there's pressure on dads/husbands, but that the fatherhood bar is set SO LOW that all men have to do is change the odd diaper, cook a meal, and show up to a school function, and they're GREAT DADS.

Ugh.

I think I schooled him. I actually think I got through to him a little bit. Here's hoping.

And here's the sweater so far:

This is the back, and there's still a long way to go. See the pattern up in the corner? That's what it's supposed to end up looking like. Believe it or not, I'm actually starting to think maybe it will.

And now I have to have some lunch and get some housework, and then figure out what to make for dinner. We have a new employee at work who moved here from Miami. She'd been staying in a long-term hotel deal, but now she's in her apartment. The trouble with that is that her FURNITURE isn't in her apartment yet. Poor thing. She doesn't know a soul here besides the people we work with, so . . . I'm thinking she might enjoy an evening of eating something home-cooked (not to mention getting to eat it while sitting at a table).

Off to the grocery store . . .