I'm getting good at writing my biography in the third person.

My Master Gardener biography:

"From farmlands in Indiana to the Valley of Hearts Delight by way of Arizona deserts, Kitt Hodsden has been around plants and gardening her entire life. An avid ultimate frisbee player, Kitt enjoys building community websites at her day job, being outdoors hiking with her husband and two beagles, and gardening. She continually wonders if this year will be the year her front yard ceases to be the disaster it has been for the longest time."

What is it with the lack of forks in this office?

Every time we order lunch and eat in, I have to scramble for a fork. We have a bazillion knives, and a dozen spoons around here. But no forks. Maybe we should just go around saying, "fork you!"

Heather called last night, sorta to talk, sorta to complain, sorta to ask advice on what to do about her car getting towed. She was clearly blue, so I listened, offered as much advise as I could, given that my car has never been towed (knock on wood, throw salt over the shoulder and touch the doorknob three times).

Kris knew what to do, and told me to call her back to tell her to call the police. Whenever a car is towed, the police will have a record of the towing, presumably so that when you call to tell them your call has been stolen, they can tell you it's been towed. After she called back, having talked to the police, and yes, the car was towed, it became very clear she needed someone to help her get her car back. What a crappy situation to be in, car towed and no way to get to the car to get it back.

I offered, she accepted, and I drove up to Oakland for the Great-Grand-Car-Retrieval.

Perhaps needless to say, there are parts of Oakland two women should not be in as night falls.

We waited in the wind for the towing company employees to come back to the facility so that she could pay for her car. We stood in the lobby waiting for the supervisor to release the car. We endured the supervisor's indignation when Heather (rightly) refused to sign the release form that waived all rights to claims for damages resulting in the towing before she saw her car and had a chance to inspect it. We followed the towing company guy from storage facility to storage facility, chasing away cats and claiming rights to short semis, looking for her car before we finally found it hidden in the prosecutor's garage where the good cars were stored.

We went to dinner afterward.

I felt bad for Heather. Having a car towed is stressful. Having to spend money on an unexpected expense is never fun. Ending a stressful week with an even more stressful event super suck-a-sauruses. I just hope the bottle of champagne (bubbly!) I bought for her helped ease the rough day. We toasted to the start of good days, beginning with that first swig.

(Note, I didn't feel badly. Feel is a linking verb requiring an adjective as the object of the sentence. To say I feel badly means I am unable to sense or touch something well, as if my nerve endings are shot.)

I smashed my left middle finger today and broke it.

Not a clean break like my ribs, but squished like my collar bone back in 1998, a few months before Kris and I started dating. Kris and I were cleaning the front yard, as we have been doing every spare minute for the last, what, five years? I moved from the blueberry patch to the front rocks, ripping weeds out and avoiding the one or two flowers that somehow survived.

Why I thought I could move a twenty pound rock, pull the weeds out, and put it back without difficulty, is beyond me. Yet, strangely enough, a belief not really foreign to my mind.

I dropped the rock the last centimeter, the point of the rock landing straight across the top of the second joint on my left middle finger, crushing it. Of course, like all truly great crushings, it didn't hurt until I couldn't get my hand out from under the rock.

And then it hurt like hell.

I managed to melt two ice cubes icing the joint before I could move my finger again.

The smooshing made me think about the other bones I've broken: four ribs two years ago, another rib back in '94, another rib broken sneezing back in '90, my collar bone in '98 and maybe a toe when I was in the sixth grade.

At least it was my left hand, and I can still throw.

Today was the second day of the Steven, James, Dries, Earl and his wife (who I hope doesn't hate me because I can't recall her name), and happily Kris joined Mike, Doyle and me. All of us but the {Ch|K}rises and Earl's wife went out after dinner to buy alcohol and descend on Dries' room for a mini-geek fest afterward.

Surprisingly, no one other than I likes whiskey. Not even the Johnnie Walker Blue good stuff.