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I came back from four days away and there were 178 unread items on my google reader.

You guys are chatty. I like that about you.

(But I am worried I will never catch up.)

Disappeared to Philadelphia for a few days to frolic through Rittenhouse Park with one Miss Rachel, who is leaving Center City after three smashing years to go study brains for a living at a large Midwestern university. We had a ball as always: wine and tapas (including the fanciest little cheese plate) at Tinto; the Mutter Museum (a totally sketchtastic haunted mansion full of medical weirdnesses; they have an entire wall full of human SKULLS and it tells you how they all died, and also they have a tiny little piece of John Wilkes Booth in a jar. Rachel said: “You’re going to love it for half an hour, and then you’re going to want to puke,” and she was right); an Office/30 Rock/Community marathon; cinnamon and basil gelato; drinks at a cozy little jazz bar; two street fairs (with puppies!); long walks, large coffees, hilarious facebooking, good talks. Rachel: you are and continue to be the awesomest. I am so glad I have known you for so long.

Other things: the iPhone leak, volcanoes, everything about Homeland, which is finished and made me cry twice, my feisty college roommate coming for Lost tonight, the blooming tree outside my office window, iced coffee and a walk to the library this afternoon, sangria, thank-you cards, words words words.

Happy Tuesday.

001. I was going to talk about my garden today, but whatever. I planted some arugula. It will grow or it won’t. I suspect this is the lesson of gardening.

002. I can’t believe they got rid of that kid on American Idol with the mullet who barfed from nerves and made up his own language, but they KEPT Tim Urban. America: sometimes I just do not understand you. I am, however, quite fond of that Casey James. Shocker.

003. I have been completely overwhelmed by all the love in my life the last couple of days. Love in bunches, like fistfuls of coins. I am so humbled. Honestly. I want to remember this feeling.

004. Things I would like to bring back: Adidas shelltops, the ready-to-heat pizza from Turco’s Supermarket in Hartsdale, overalls, the Macarena.

005. I have been listening to Jesse McCartney Pandora, and I’m sorry but I’m pretty sure Ryan Cabrera is the long-lost Moffatt. Except his last name is Cabrera. Not Moffatt. Anyway, and this is the truth, I will send a prize to anyone who can name all four actual Moffatts. Well. Anyone except Sierra.

006. Foods advertised on TV last night that sound seriously, and equally, disgusting: Taco Bell Tortada. Olive Garden Fonduta.

007. I am still obsessed with long dresses. There’s one at Old Navy that’s cheap. I think it only comes in blue.

008. The problem I’m having with this short story is that the writing is ugly, so I’m reading BK’s Homeland, which is so beautiful even in its first sentences (wildcat families, forest people) that I wanted to find her immediately and give her a giant hug.

009. Tonight: Carbon Leaf with Leslie! Let your troubles roll by.

010. Coffee’s perked. Happy Wednesday.

You guys are so awesome. Thanks SO MUCH for all the writing love yesterday. And an extra-special shoutout to Abbey and Nikki, both of whom offered to break the legs of anybody who was snotty to me about my relationship. My general attitude about that kind of thing is u b u i’ll b me, but I do so love the idea of having a couple of lady enforcers in my back pocket.

I made tomato feta salad last night. Tom grilled sausages. He said, congratulations on being so fancy.

Other than that, I have nothing to report.

Here I am.

I may have squealed a little.

Gotta go eat dinner bye.

I found our first kitchen table on the street in Jamaica Plain in the summer of 2006, and I made Tom jam it into his car. He was still driving the Maxima, which was the first car he ever bought, and it was so shiny and always smelled like seat-cleaner and in the cupholder was always Orbit gum and the puka shells I brought him from Hawaii, where I went in 2002 before we started dating but after he kissed me in the elevator of an apartment complex in Yonkers, New York.

“That table is a giant POS,” he warned me, but he wedged it in the backseat anyway, because he always does.

We were still living with the boys then, and we didn’t need a table, so it leaned against the wall in pieces in the lobby of our building for a long time, next to a stack of phone books and a five gallon bucket of rock salt and the mail bin that Quack added my name to after I moved in, the last roommate and the only girl. I felt weird and out of sorts and like I didn’t belong there, but Quack put my name on the mailbox, and that was where I lived.

When Tom and I moved to this apartment in 2008 (right after my birthday, right after my parents, the summer I cried every day and didn’t read any books) and DID need a table, we didn’t have any chairs to go with it, so I found two of them on the street on garbage night (things that are always on the curb on garbage night in Southie: chairs, toilets, empty cases of Bud Light) and painted them a clayish gray that was in the messup bin at Home Depot for a dollar. Marissa gave us two more when she moved home to Ohio after she quit law school to become a baker.

I am pretty sure this is the story of all of us learning to be grownups.

It was too big for the kitchen, this table, and the chairs were too big to push in, but we made it work the way you make things work when you’re too poor to buy things like a new table when you have one that works just fine, when you are using this table as a desk and an ironing board and a stepstool to change light bulbs and a flat surface on which to chop peppers for chili at the same time as you seal letters to magazines that will reject you more times than they say yes. I threw a hundred haphazard dinner parties on that table. I made one million egg sandwiches. I put my head down on it and laughed and sobbed and cleared beer bottles and studied Spanish index cards (la mesa) and iChatted and baked birthday cakes and no matter how many times I wiped it down it never looked entirely clean. Once I spilled some water over a stack of papers and didn’t bother wiping it all up and when I went to move them later the ink from the magazine on the bottom had come off on the laminate.

Boston, it said on the table, only backwards.

All of this is to say that on Saturday, after talking about it forever, we went to Ikea and bought a new table and four matching chairs, a sweet little set that fits the space and makes the kitchen look rather lovely and trim, like it belongs in a house where people have their shit together. “You like it?” Tom asked about a thousand times yesterday morning, while he drank a giant iced coffee and put the thing together. “You’re sure?”

“I like it,” I promised. I like it very much.

Haney came with us to Ikea. She needed drawer fronts for her entertainment unit. Haney was in the car that night after the kiss in the elevator at the apartment complex in Yonkers, New York. She lived with her mom in a studio apartment and we used to hang out there whenever we could, because her mom worked nights and wasn’t home to know if we strolled in a few minutes late or talked incessantly about boys until four in the morning, which we occasionally (usually) did.  We bought denim skirts and magazines. We were sixteen years old.

When they dropped me off at my parents’ house that night, at home, I wandered into the kitchen, where the legs of our kitchen table and all four chairs had been throughly and systematically gnawed by our golden retriever, Eloise, when she was a puppy and teething. She’d come up and whine while you ate your dinner, rest her heavy head in your lap.

1. Who’s got two thumbs and sold her first piece of writing this week?  THIS GUY. There is an actual website out there that is paying me actual American dollars to put words together. ACTUAL AMERICAN DOLLARS. Details to come, but this…this is the goal. So.

2.  Dreams From My Father: completely engaging. Taking Woodstock: intermittently delightful. Bones: oh hey those partners sure do love each other huh?

3. Things that are happening this spring: Philadelphia to see Rachel, a road trip to Bamboozle with Marissa and Sierra, a week at home to see my sister graduate summa cum awesome at Yankee Stadium, Dave Matthews in Hartford as always, an inevitable Lost-related brain melt, three weeks during which I am the only gal in my office, a transcontinental visit from one Jennie Palluzzi, and my twenty-fifth birthday. I…should probably start taking some vitamins.

4. Our mail lady at work is named Karen. She has clear braces and wears a pith helmet in the rain.

5.  I ate nachos twice this week. I mean, that’s disgusting, but it’s also pretty fab.

to my mama, who just started reading this blog.

She says: “It feels like I am spending time with you when I read it.”

She also says: “Don’t waste your tears on the porch swing” and “Please see a doctor about that cough.”

I miss you, Mom.