The only way you can turn is right

I love my town.

Partly I love my town because of its idiosyncrasies. I don't understand them, but they do give me a chance to chuckle.

My town lies smack-dab up against the university where I work, except that that's a different town. It starts just across the street from the end of my block, five houses away from mine. It wasn't that way when we bought this place three decades ago; I'm pretty sure School Town's city limits were where they are now, but my town stopped a few miles short of my subdivision; we lived here a couple of years before our little municipal utility district (I always loved that that made it a MUD) was absorbed into the city. The city limits sign out on the highway has "leaving" my town and "entering" ST on the same post.

That's not a new practice; I don't remember a time when we could drive from the house where I grew up toward the college without passing signs like that. The two towns—cities now—have completely separate governments, and that has manifested in different business models, but they've always lain shoulder to shoulder on the city maps.

But I'm never quite sure which way I'm heading here, and this week, that just got more confusing.

I grew up a couple of blocks from the most direct route from the downtown of my town to the college in the other town. That street is called South College, which my little-kid brain somehow interpreted as "South of the College" rather than "South to the College," which assured me that my house—and thereby my town—was south of the school. I never entertained the possibility that that didn't align with larger maps of our community as a part of our state; after all, half a dozen blocks from our house toward the university was a street—in our town, not the college's—called North Street.

So if we got on South College and headed toward the school, we passed North Street, so surely we must be headed north on the street that, obviously, had to be south of the college. That took most of my life to straighten out; even now, if I take South College toward downtown and pass North, I'm pretty sure I must be headed south.

The school once had gates all around it, and they were named for the relative sides of the campus: north, east, south, and west. The student bookstores and, later, eateries and bars lined up along the side called Northgate, which in my kid-brain meant it was the side of the campus north of my town. Mother's favorite fabric shop and beauty parlor was on the other side of campus, but I don't remember hearing that area called "Southgate" until I was at least old enough to drive.

"Westgate" has always been somewhat undefined in my mind; it may have been the campus entrance to the student center, but I couldn't be sure of that. "East Gate" has always been perfectly clear: it's the main drive that extends eastward from the main campus building to the street that was once the main highway through the two towns. I'm okay with that.

Our downtown area has its requisite "east" and "west" streets, too. I grew up thinking the "east" streets run east of the old highway and the "west" streets run west of it, although in fact they run pretty much southeast, parallel to—you may have guessed it—South College (and the "south" part of the old highway). So "east" and "west" streets parallel "south" streets, and at one point, because of the bend in the old highway, two "east" streets intersect. So how would anyone guess which way they're heading?


A few years ago, the city started a big new housing development near my neighborhood. The main drag from town to its main entrance is one of the east-west streets, which is fine with me since I've sort of figured out directions on  my side of town.

The street into the subdivision runs perpendicular to West X, then splits into a horseshoe-shaped street so that the base of the U runs briefly parallel to West X. Logically, the two parts of the U should be "East U" and "West U" (since they run parallel to West X), but instead the developers decided to designate them as "North U" and "South U." Most of "North U" runs mostly eastward and "South U" runs to the south or west.


When these streets were built, North U joined up with the street at the top of our block that parallels West X but had an old family name. Since it has only about four addresses on it,  the city decided to rename it to match the longer length of North U. So now I can drive west on West X, turn south on a stretch of highway, and turn again to the west on North U.

And people wonder why I stay confused.

Wolf and Fuzzy

Alpha Bitch has been doing more than her share of barking lately. I'm not sure what has caused most of it, but she has somewhat exceeded my idea of warning me that something is moving around outside and veered right on over to irritating the bejeebers out of me.

A couple of nights ago, this went on to the extent that I sent her to her kennel for time out. She's been there enough lately that I can tell her to go into her time out, and she'll sit in it patiently until I have time to put down my laptop, slush across the room, and shoot the lock for her.

Tank usually gets the idea and climbs back up on the couch to wait for the end of her sentence, but this week he was loath to leave the window where she had been barking. He wasn't as noisy as she was, but he was clearly interested in the unusual activity, so he hung out for some time at the front windows.

After a bit, Number One Son went out to the front porch for a date with a coffin nail and came back reporting that two black Labrador puppies who didn't have collars or tags were the focus of the racket. "They're just puppies, Mom, but they're as big as Tank!" he said. "Do you have any idea where they live?"

I remembered hearing that a neighbor up the street—who doesn't happen to have a fence around his yard—had told me recently that his daughter had adopted a new black Lab puppy, and since Dad also has Labs, I thought two could possibly have moved in. NOS strolled up the street to ask about them, stopped at a house or two on the way back, but came up empty. Alpha Bitch stayed in her kennel.

Tank kept a fairly close vigil at the window, checking in periodically with the pups outside, especially when NOS went out later for another coffin nail. Tank has a bad habit of knocking on a back window when he wants in, especially at night, and after a couple of hours, the window knocking began. I fussed at Tank, who turned around to see what I wanted, but the knocking didn't stop; the mutts outside must have been doing it.

I hollered upstairs at NOS to get his help: "Come see what you can do with these dogs!" NOS is one of those people who just seems to know how to get along with animals, so I figured he could come up with a plan; we had already agreed that they had to belong in the neighborhood and we weren't about to call the animal shelter.

A couple of minutes later, NOS came scrambling down the stairs with the kids' friend Shrek, who is living with us while he settles back in from several months on a mission trip to Africa. Shrek grew up on farmland near the edge of town, where he frequently had to shoo stray or feral dogs off the property, and he was confident that he knew what to do.

The next thing I heard was Shrek making a lot of really ugly noises to frighten these puppies into leaving, so I followed the guys outside to try to negotiate a different solution. One of the puppies had taken off into the darkness, but the other was stubbornly still on the driveway, and I saw in a flash that NOS was right; this animal must have been pushing 60 pounds, but he was almost as raggedy as squishy stuffed toy. I wasn't convinced that he was a Lab, but he was definitely a big dog, and to me he looked lonely and scared.

Our dogs are perfectly happy to go to their kennels when we send them to time out, the office, or night-night, but usually they spend nights on our beds. While Alpha Bitch's kennel was occupied at the time, Tank's wasn't, and it was marginally big enough for two somewhat outsized puppies. I dragged it outside, and the boys set it up next to the curb behind Shrek's car where the puppies would be far enough from the house to stop annoying our dogs but caged up so they wouldn't take off toward the highway a couple of blocks away. If owners came looking, they'd be visible and safe.

These guys clearly hadn't been trained to get into kennels; we managed to grab enough of the first one's scruff to push, pull, and drag him into it. He wasn't eager to get in, but he seemed eager to please, and as soon as he was inside, he lay down and looked pretty comfortable.

By that time, Tank had let us know where to look for the other one; although Shrek had seen him take off in a generally easterly direction, I had sent Tank out to the back yard while I dragged the kennel out, and Tank's barks let us know the other pup had headed west.

NOS grabbed a flashlight in hopes of spotting a black puppy in a dark yard and was just about there when a neighbor showed up in the street with a pair of leashes in her hand. "Have you seen a couple of—?" was as far as she got when she spotted the first one in the kennel. "Omigosh! What is he doing here?"

A few seconds later, NOS came back up the driveway with the other pup in his arms. The neighbor explained that the dogs were part bloodhound and part setter and should reach 150 pounds or more. The daughter's boyfriend is planning to train them, like their sire and dam, to be search and rescue dogs, but mom and dad were puppy sitting with their big, fenced back yard. The fence didn't slow the puppies down too much; they had clearly dug their way under it and lost their special, see-the-black-dog-in-the-dark collars somewhere between there and my house.

"What are their names?" I asked her.

"Wolf and Fuzzy," she answered.

Go figure: exactly the name most people called my ex and the pet name I used for him.

He hates dogs.

Adventures in puppysitting

When my brilliant but slightly scatterbrained friend at work popped into my office this afternoon and asked if I had a key to her house, I told her sure, but it was out in my car; I sort of assumed she'd locked hers into her house and wanted to borrow mine to get herself in. I suggested that she could drive me to her car (she parks right behind our building; I park a couple of blocks away) to get it.

We had just gotten out of a lunch meeting, and I was firing up my computer to start my afternoon, but a delay to go get her key would be no problem. As we headed toward the parking lot, BSB launched happily into an explanation of the steps she takes to care for her two new puppies at lunchtime, and I thought she was on her way home to do all that. She mentioned briefly that she needed to be in her office shortly to meet with the luncheon speaker, so I assumed she wanted me to go with her to help her get into the house, care for two puppies, and get back to her meeting.

We piled into her car when it hit her: She didn't need me to get her a key; she needed me to go care for the puppies so she could stay on campus for her meeting. And I didn't really need to go to my car; she had a garage door opener that would get me into the house, and she didn't mind letting me drive her car. I shifted into the passenger seat and started the car (which is new enough that the "key" only has to be in the car to start it), shifted into gear, and stalled. The engine kept going, but the vehicle didn't budge. BSB realized what was going on: She had set the parking break and I hadn't released it. I realized I didn't have pockets, so I didn't have my cell phone on me in case anything else went wrong.

She came back and showed me how to release the break, pointed to the radar detector and said something I didn't catch, and headed back to her office. I bravely maneuvered her classy vehicle out of the parking lot and safely to her house a couple of miles away and reached for the garage opener.

Only I couldn't find it. I have two options for mine: a clip-on device that lives on the visor or a key-fob device I use when I drive my son's car. Hers didn't have either of those. I was sure she had an opener; I just couldn't find it anywhere on the the visor, the instrument panel, the console, or the headliner. Stuck in the street without my cell phone (her driveway is being repaved, so I couldn't pull into it), I hunted for buttons all over the radar detector, all to no avail. I finally found a row of little house-like icons along the bottom of the rear view mirror, so I systematically pushed each of those—to no avail.

Not quite ready to give up, I backed up the car, circled the cul de sac, and took one more shot at the buttons, pushing the first one down as soon as the car started to point to the house and holding it until, low and behold, the door started to open. I pointed the car into a space between mailboxes on the cul de sac and headed in to the dogs.

They seemed happy enough to see me, although they'd never seen me before and probably wouldn't have remembered me if they had. I snatched them out of their wire kennels and zipped to the backyard so they could potty, then sat down on the deck to watch them play. The boy puppy was the first to find a toy, but the girl was the first to run off with one. As soon as she did, he took off after her, and I distracted him by squeaking and tossing another toy for him to chase. My puppy at home is a couple of years old now, and I enjoyed watching these babies tumble over themselves and each other.

Knowing I had work waiting at the office, I let them play for several minutes then scooped them up to go inside to eat. BSB had told me she was in the habit of hand-feeding them, but I had learned that her previous "hand-fed" dogs ate just fine for me if I scattered their food on the floor; that worked pretty well for these babies, too. I found one puppy dish and then another, and as I dropped a couple of handfuls of food into each dish, they happily ate until they seemed full.

While they were eating, BSB's cat (who has not quite decided what to make of these puppies and who usually doesn't hang around the house when I am there alone) showed up at the glass door between the sunroom and the kitchen, where the puppies were eating. I twisted the knob just enough to let her in and slipped out of her way. She eased in far enough to stretch out just inside the door and observe the munching.

Girl puppy had brought a little squid-shaped squeaky toy into the kitchen with her, and when she finished eating, she picked it up and headed for the door. Where the cat was. Since these animals have not quite made their peace, the cat backed into a sitting position, almost daring GP to try for the door.

GP tried once, then twice, to push through the door, each time rebuffed by the cat, who gazed at her as if to say, "Surely you don't think you're coming through."

The third time, GP determinedly turned her head away from the cat, who gave in, turned her head the other way, and slithered into the kitchen. Boy puppy, who had been observing this interchange, realized that the cat was out of the way, GP had made it into the sunroom, and GP had a toy. He bounded out to her and, realizing she wasn't about to give up the toy, sat on her face.

I had located a water bowl, convinced them both to come back for a drink, then led them back through the sunroom for one more chance to potty before I left. Since they need to learn to use the doggy doors, I slipped outside first, held open the flap, and encouraged them to tumble through. They followed me out into the yard, romped and played and took care of business, and followed me back onto the deck. I squatted by the doggie door, opened the flap, and pushed them back inside.

I rounded up a handful of puppy treats and headed back to the kennels. A coupe of treats in GP's kennel had her inside in a flash, with BP hot on her heels. I backed him out, tossed treats into his kennel, and pointed him in. He somehow managed to bounce a treat outside his kennel, but I scooped it up and pushed him in after it.

I did much better at getting the car started, but I somehow clipped the curb on my way back out of the cul de sac. No apparent damage, but I think next time I'll drive my own car, even if it means I have to operate locks with ordinary keys.

And I'm wondering if I'll get a chance someday to own a tiny little Schnauzer.

Ok, I wasn't expecting that....

After a long consulting session this afternoon with one of my graduate students, she commented that she liked my fingers.

Since my typical sessions entail sitting at a small desk shoulder-to-shoulder with the student and working through the assignment in question, I wasn't surprised that she had had opportunity to notice my hands, but let's face it: my square palms, stubby fingers, and erractic nails are not exactly model quality, even if you discount for wrinkles and age spots.

I was wearing a new silver filigree butterfly ring that I bought on the cheap a couple of weeks ago and another costume-jewelry ring that I've had for a couple of years—not things of beauty, but the only thing I could see that might have caught her attention.

"My rings?" I asked; she couldn't possibly have otherwise meant my fingers.

"No, your feet," she answered.

Fingers? On my feet? Okay, she is a lovely lady from the Middle East whose English, by her own admission, isn't strong, although her command of the jargon of her discipline is quite good.

But my toes? What could possibly draw her to comment on my toes?

I was wearing a new pair of Dr. Scholl's sandals that I kind of like, and I had recently trimmed and polished my toenails (mostly to hide the bruise under one of them). But I have the kind of toes that people make fun of because only very small children have shorter fingers, and I've pretty much always been able to pick up small objects off the floor with them—saves bending over.

"My toes? Are you saying you like my toes? My polish, maybe?"

"No, the fingers," she insisted. "You have nice fingers."

Turns out that somewhere in this world, toes that lie together as if they fit in a shoe rather than splayed out like a claw are worthy of admiration. Mine only fit in round-toed, double wide shoes, but they do all play nicely together.

But I don't think I've ever been complimented on them before.

My dogs won't let me play hooky

My dogs won't let me play hooky.

I really wanted to today, for at least an hour or so. I deserved it; Friday I stayed at the office until after 7 p.m. working with an online student who was having a problem with my class.

And I needed it. I didn't sleep well last night for reasons I don't know. My day yesterday was a pretty normal Sunday: worked on the computer until around noon; cleaned up and went to lunch where I read a couple of chapters of a fascinating book one of my former students left me in appreciation for my class; an hour or so at the grocery store. It diverged a little after that because instead of dropping in on the former in-laws as I have been doing for several months now, I came home to a phone call from one of their daughters laying out the plans for what could be the weirdest (but maybe the neatest) funeral I've ever attended.

About the time I finished off a note to the kids to update them on their grandfather's deteriorating condition, a friend from my high-school days showed up on the front porch to show me how to take care of a couple of problems with windows. Long story about how Jim reappeared in my life, but nice to see him again and catch up on his life, his wife, and the fact that we both seem to have turned out okay, in spite of being liberals in central Texas.

I fiddled on the computer a while before bed, but I wasn't terribly sleepy, so I did the Sunday crossword and snuggled under the covers. And my eyes flew open.

I had taken a couple of honest-to-goodness pseudophedrine tablets earlier in the day (in hopes that its stronger formula than the standard knock-off now easily available would help me breathe better), but I don't know of pseudophedrine keeping anyone awake.

Around 4 a.m., I got up and let the Alpha Bitch out to try to keep her from waking me once I finally dropped off, and when the alarm went off at 6:30, I let her out and left the door open so she and the cat and Bubba could come and go without me.

Bubba's routine is to come downstairs when Number One Son gets up around 7:30, and he's used to checking on me in my lounger, where I'm usually already settled into getting the day's work done—yes, even on weekends. I don't know whether he went out before he came to the bedroom to check on me, but before 7:45 I was well aware of his flat-footed presence next to my face: he was happily sloshing me off with his washrag tongue as if to tell me it was time to get up.

Alpha Bitch was right beside him, forepaws up on the bed, not so much as if they wanted to hop in bed with me as to let me know they thought I needed to get up.

Even when he wasn't licking me, Bubba was hovering over me, warm breath on my face to let me know he wasn't about to leave. I reminded them that the door was open and they didn't need me to go out.

I finally gave in—still not yet 8 a.m.—and dragged myself out of bed and into the kitchen. Bubba and Alpha stood guard at the refrigerator until I dragged out the milk and got out my morning vitamins.

I showed them the door and asked if they wanted to go out, but they seemed to be not interested. Instead, they went to the door to the dining room, and I followed on the way to my chair.

As soon as they had corralled me into the right direction, Alpha took up her post on the floor in front of me and Bubba draped himself across his favorite chair. They both went immediately to sleep.

Which was okay, apparently, as long as they were sure I wasn't playing hooky!

S(c)ore!

Yesterday I woke up (too late) to the knowledge that I had managed to schedule myself to teach one class from noon to 4 and another from 3 to 5 on the same day. My alarm went off at the right time and I got out of bed at the right time, but it was mid-morning before I really realized that I had managed to double-schedule myself in front of the classroom—and almost noon before I realized that I might actually also have another meeting at 2. (That one, thank goodness, had been canceled.)

The 3 to 5 class is my regular weekly gig; the noon to 4 job was one I'd been volunteered for by my mentor, Billy Jack. Billy Jack sort of adopted me early in my career with this department (whodathunk I'd still be here almost 18 years later?) and had saved my butt more than once when things looked sketchy for me. So when he first asked me maybe a decade ago to fill in for two days during the summer courses he teaches every other year, I was happy to comply; I sort of didn't realize that I was signing up for a repeat gig every couple of years, but that's really worked out okay.

What I do in his reservoir management class is a condensed form of the tech writing course I teach on my own job description, and teaching his class gives me a chance to update a couple of slides sets that I wind up using in my own classes most semesters. So it's not a bad deal in the long run.

Yesterday I got to the noon class a few minutes early, and a couple of students asked me if I was likely to run as far past class time as I had the previous week. Didn't plan to; I had spent the morning tweaking the slides in an effort to cut the show to about an hour and a half. Too bad, they said; the World Cup Soccer match between Germany and Spain would be coming on at 1:30, and if I ran past then, they could sit in the back of the computer-equipped classroom and watch the match instead of having to go to work. I apologized for not expecting to be able to help them.

What I hadn't factored in was that Billy Jack was on campus yesterday, and he wanted to start class with a few housekeeping items. That entailed tweaking a spreadsheet to update his student presentation schedule and then briefing the students on their responsibilities relevant to it. That took up a half-hour or so of my scheduled time, but I figured I could still finish plenty before 3, and the students might get a chance to catch part of the Word Cup.

I hadn't counted on Billy Jack to sit in on the lecture, either. I'm pretty confident about what I do, and I have worked pretty closely with him in developing my philosophy and my approach—but that didn't make me eager to deliver the lecture with him in the room. Besides, he's older than I am, and I wasn't at all sure he'd be thrilled to sit in class for that long. But there he was.

I fired up the slide show and dove into the presentation, which went smoothly for maybe 10 minutes—when the bald guy in the back of the room stopped me to ask questions. I knew the answers were going to come up in a later part of the show—the first part was only an overview—but since I didn't know if he'd stick out the whole class and I didn't want to be rude, I answered his questions as completely but succinctly as I could.

He didn't leave—not for the whole class. And he continued to interrupt with questions all through the lecture. I never mind answering questions from the students because interruptions during the lecture give them more timely answers than questions at the end, and I can tell them what I think, after which I normally remind them that they are adults, and if they don't agree with me, that's okay, too.

But when the kid asking the questions is your friend and mentor and the class you're addressing is his class, not yours, the situation feels a little different. In addition, a good deal of the time he was playing the devil's advocate, challenging me on some things that I knew he agreed with and on other things that I wasn't so sure about. If I'd been in my own classroom with my own students where my word gets to be the law, I'd have just said what I thought without thinking about it much; standing in his classroom with his students whom I was supposed to be helping get ready for his assignments—a little different.

I typically tell stories along the way to try to reinforce the points I'm making, and one of my favorites is about the discussion Billy Jack and I had had when I was still new to the department (and, really, to both engineering and technical writing) where I was able to support my opinion with evidence from his own writing. I've been telling the story in class for years, and it's always gotten a laugh from the students when they catch the punch line. I told it in a class in the spring where Billy Jack was in the room but far enough from me that I couldn't see his expression in dim light; the students laughed, but I didn't know how he felt about it. He didn't mention it after class, so I figured I'd skated—but yesterday I couldn't possibly get off that easily.

I reached the point in the lecture where the story fit, walked away from the podium, and picked up some papers lying on a nearby desk to use as "visual aids." I got through the story as usual, but not one of the students seemed to respond to it, which rattled and disappointed me. But as I dropped the papers and started back to the podium, I caught Billy Jack's expression: he was grinning from ear to ear.

Between the late start and the interruptions, the hour and a half had stretched to well over two hours, so I figured the students in the back of the room were still behaving politely because they must have had the World Cup match on their computers. I finished the lecture a little after 2:30, scanned a draft of one of the students' papers, chatted momentarily with another, and headed upstairs to my 3 o'clock class.


I stopped by my office to refill my tea glass, zipped through the restroom, and landed in the classroom right at 3 o'clock, much to the apparent disappointment of the half-dozen young men in the room. One of them gutted up enough to ask the question they all were thinking: can we go back to our offices to watch the rest of the match?

"Why?" I asked him. "Can you watch it on your computers?"

Nods.

"We've got a perfectly good screen right here," I pointed out. "Put it on, turn down the sound, and you can watch the game and listen to me."

Really? Yeah, really. I watch television while I'm doing other stuff all the time. (I have a set on now. Don't ask me what's on it; not sure I know.)

Before the nearest student to the computer got the match on, I had sat down in one of the comfortable chairs in the conference room I use for class—and suddenly felt nearly three hours on my feet and talking. By the time I got my bearings with the "futbol match," I realized that only 10 or 15 minutes were left in the game. For that, I could delay a 2-hour class a few minutes and run over time if we needed it. In fact, the computer operator had carefully turned the volume down to a whisper; I had him run it back up loud enough to here the hum of the vuvuzelas in the stands.

The game ended and went into a couple of minutes of overtime, and the guys saw a couple of chances for Germany to tie it up with Spain. But when time ran out it was Spain 1, Germany 0, so we all knew the championship was going to be the Netherlands and Spain, and my group of Middle Eastern students was ready to go to work.

The lesson of the day was writing SMART objectives, so I laid out the rules and practiced examples for various students, and most of them took notes furiously. Several are writing literature reviews that won't need objectives, so we worked on how they might approach writing their methods for their next assignments. All in all, I thought it went pretty well, and I wrapped up everything I needed to cover in time to let them out at 5.

On my way out of class, I stopped to tell the post-doc in the office next to our room that I hoped we hadn't disturbed him, and he looked at me in surprise. "You let them watch the match in class?" he asked. "That's cool!"

It hadn't been a big deal to me, and in fact I had appreciated the few minutes to rest. But it was neat to know one of the other young men in the department had seemed to think I'd scored.

Or at least my throat was telling me something close to that; after almost 5 full hours of lecturing, it was at least a little sore!

Isn't she lovely?

When my favorite oldies radio station played Stevie Wonder's "Isn't she lovely?" the other day, I thought, as always, of my own daughter and was struck by how lovely she really is.

I can't remember many times in her twenty-something years that I haven't been proud of her. Oh, sure, she's pulled some stunts from time to time that have made me want to wring her little neck, but she's almost always wormed out of those by reminding me that she has done so much that's good—and sometimes outright amazing to me—that I've never been able to stay angry with her for very long.

When I shipped her off to New York at 16 with a suitcase full of pasta salad and macaroni because we didn't know what she would find to eat on her tiny budget in a big city, my sisters worried that she was too young for such an adventure and would certainly suffer some horrible doom. My personal feeling was that if they believed God was taking care of her south of the Red River, they ought to trust his judgment north of it, and if something horrible happened, maybe that was the way it was meant to be. She had a wonderful time, and I loved the Saturday I got to spend there with her, walking up and down Manhattan, riding the escalators to the top of the Macy's in Times Square, soaking up sunshine in Central Park—things I would never have done if she hadn't gone ahead to learn to be my tour guide.

When I sent her to college at 18, my biggest worry was probably that the car she was driving was completely unreliable and the road from here to San Marcos could get dark and lonely and even treacherous at night. Her biggest worry seemed to be that I wasn't ready to let her grow up: she had started experimenting with hair dye when she was in middle school, and my rule had always been only that she had to keep it to "real" hair colors, like blonds or browns or auburns rather than anything out of the Crayola box. It may have been her first weekend back home that she refused to take off her cap until she told me she had dyed her hair Crayola red and she didn't want me to be mad at her. So she was at least a little surprised when I reminded her that she was an adult and on her own, and as long as she wasn't living with me, I didn't much care what see did with her hair. As it turned out, she had only sprayed a few bright-red streaks into it, and it was much less annoying than some dye jobs I've seen on adult friends since then.

When she moved to California to go to school at 18, I bit the bullet to put her into a new car that would let me rest more comfortably (although she was pretty ticked off at me for taking away her sporty little T-top), and I knew that she wasn't likely to come back to Texas for more than a visit once she was gone. Her adventures in college, getting a job, and building a life for herself are her story, but she went about all of them with the same determination and talent that she had displayed growing up. And she never lost sight of the fact that I was always here, supporting her where I could (it took me 3 years to pay off the car, and I was the cosigner on her student loans) and ready to listen when she ran into walls or had reasons to celebrate.

Three or 4 years ago, she found herself in a position where she wasn't optimally happy with her life. Mostly, she was living with a boyfriend who had a lot of good things going for him, but she was beginning to realize that he wasn't the man of her dreams—or even one she wanted. The phone calls became more frequent (okay, partly because she and her brother had set me up with a cell phone that she still pays for, so calling was free), and the questions became more focused on my opinion of how she could handle things. I've always thought of her as mature for her age, and I've always thought we had a pretty good mother/daughter relationship, but I knew something was changing since she was asking more than telling and really seemed to be taking my advice earnestly, even if she didn't always follow it.

Ultimately, after a particularly tense visit there, I sent an email that told the two of them what I had observed. I didn't consider the situation hopeless (and I told them so), but I did think they needed to bring some issues to the table and work them out. Shortly after that, she called me and asked me how to go about picking out a dog.

The Junkyard dog moved in a few weeks later, and before long, she and my daughter moved into a new apartment, where my daughter had the good sense to take some time off to regroup before she got into another relationship.

That lasted for about a year before I got a message that newest man in her life "might be the one." I heard lots of good things about the young man (including that his dog played well with hers), but before I had a chance to go to the left coast, he took off for school somewhere too far north to drop by for a visit, so I never had a chance to form an opinion about him. In fact, before I got to travel again, she had already begun to express some disillusionment. She had been concerned about the notion of another "long-distance" romance; she had learned a hard lesson about those during her first year of college. And she had begun to get feedback from the young man that suggested that he wasn't exactly focusing on his studies so he could hurry back to her.

So by the time I did go west again, I was a little surprised to hear that she was pretty sure she was about to call off the relationship with that young man, but she was almost equally concerned about the reason: one from Texas had come to tour the wine country and had invited her along. Texas is even farther away than the other young man's school, but the tour of the wine country had shown her that this one had some very positive qualities that she wanted to know more—although she had known him through a working relationship almost 10 years earlier.

She sneaked a trip back to Texas at Thanksgiving to spend time with him, and they decided to see where life took them. On the one hand, I was a little hurt that she hadn't let me know she was here; on the other, I suspected the apron strings were being cut in a different way from any of the little knicks they had seen before. Last summer, her Prince Charming quit a good job in Houston and packed his bags for LA.

My visits there—and theirs here—have been fun for me. She acknowledges that he's not "perfect," but the "flaws" she sees are mostly attributable to testosterone, and she's okay with that. On the matters that count, he measures up very well—including having taken over the heart of the JY from the very beginning. I have always considered my daughter high-maintenance (although I know she knows how to squeak by on a tight budget) and high-energy; she says he often presses her to keep up. They're really a pretty neat couple.

Her recent visit home, though, is what flashed to my mind when I heard Stevie Wonder. On the last day we were home together, I had had to work during the morning, and she trooped off to visit her grandfather, who is in hospice care following a couple of rough years combating prostate cancer that has probably metastasized to the bone. We got our signals crossed on who would decide when to leave for our family reunion, so she stayed with him longer than she intended to. In some ways she was glad, because she knew these were likely to be her last few hours to see her grandfather alive; in others, she was sad that she had so few hours to spend.

When she finally called me to see if I was ready to go, I was actually wrapping up from work and tossing clothes into a bag for travel, so her timing was great. She stopped by a favorite taco stand for the salsa and chips she loves, grabbed a burrito for me, and headed home. A light rain was falling as she juggled bags and drinks through the front door, and her brother's dog bounded out past her into the street. It wasn't the first time he had gotten out past her in the rain, but like me, she considers him prize property: that brother has orders to go to Afghanistan, and right  now the dog is the closest we can get to him. But the dog also has been known to dart out into the nearby highway or charge around the neighborhood, and neither of those makes him any fun to catch.

By the time I got to the door to help her, she was in a much bigger puddle than the rain could have caused; the stress of losing her grandfather and possibly losing her brother's dog was far more than she was ready to take. I grabbed a ball, bounced it on the driveway, and starting calling the dog to play fetch, and within a couple of minutes, my smaller escapee dog had led him back to the fold. We penned the dogs in the backyard, spread out our food, and enjoyed a sense that somewhere, somehow, we'll get through all of it okay.

But I realized then that I wasn't just sitting there eating lunch with my daughter this time. I had pitched in to help her with the dog because I've done that drill before, and I know that calling him to play fetch is about as good a way as any to get him to come home; she hadn't learned that yet. It wasn't at all the adult helping the child; it was one adult pitching in with another.

She's been an adult for a long time—surely since long before that weekend when she came home from San Marcos with the Crayola-red hair. And we've had lots of adult conversations about things going on in our lives. But this time it felt different; this time, I really think she's found who she really is and where she really belongs.

And she is lovely.

Rats!

I knew this day was coming; it had to be inevitable. But I didn't expect it this soon.

I typed away on my laptop at home this morning on a project I wanted to have posted to a course site by noon, and I got it just the way I wanted it. But the website had timed out, I forgot to copy the text before I saved it, and saving cast it off somewhere into the ether. I had to do it over.

I got to the office a while ago, handled some immediate business, and opened a new file, determined this time to capture the text in Word and copy it over to the website, thereby skirting the possibility of being timed out. (And Word has gotten pretty good about recovering documents if something happens before I save.)

But it's turning into a miserable experience. I'm sitting at my desk, typing on my full-size, high quality keyboard with my dual 19-inch monitors to display my work (and lots of other stuff if I want it, like, right now, this blog...), and I hate it.

I want my laptop back. And my easy chair. And my dog.

When I first got a laptop, Soldier Son had told me I might as well get rid of my PC; I stubbornly held onto it for a couple of years, at least, although I seldom turned it on. Until today, I have often bounced into the office, ready to go to work on the nice office PC with the dual monitors and plenty of space to blow things up to as big as I wanted them to be. (And better speakers if I wanted to watch a video.)

But SS was right: I thought I'd be able to regenerate the missing file in a matter of minutes on the "business" equipment, but today I officially want my laptop back.

And I have miles to go before I sleep.