I thought I'd give her space and come down to Angell Hall to get some work done. It's a gorgeous sunny day here in Ann Arbor, Michigan; too bad there are still many ugly things remaining in this world.

This time the Property Disposition dumpster was full of network hubs and fairly fast 386 machines, all guarded by an impressive airforce of rapacious mosquitoes. I wanted lots of stuff, but I had no way to carry it. I ended up heading back into downtown Ann Arbor and eating a hamburger at the Fleetwood. There were lots of teenage girls hanging out there tonight, loudly telling scandalous sexy gossip about friends not present and bursting predictably into laughter. I was a generation removed, reading the local newspaper. The waitress told the teenagers they'd have to order something if they wanted to continue hanging out, a stipulation that somehow the striking seventeen year old natural blond managed to completely disobey.

Back at Kim's place, the massages were not completely done, so I hopped in the Dart and drove back up Plymouth Road to Property Disposition and grabbed the things I wanted.

But Kim had a small bag of fresh peppermint in the refrigerator, so I diced it up and made both of us vodkatea. The mint wasn't very strong, though, so we squeezed in some lemon. What with all the mint floating around in the vodka, I joked that the drinks looked like "lawn clipping martinis." Kim had been needling me for the past 24 hours about my insistence on buying only the cheapest liquor, but she claimed she actually liked this horrible drink.

Kim also said (again) that she doesn't like the way I portray her pot smoking in these musings. She says I make it out to be a nasty old habit she could never break, whereas I portray my vodkatea drinking as a cute, perhaps even refreshingly subversive, ritual. Especially egregious, she says, is my account of Sunday morning, when I said "especially Kim" regarding the smoking of some hippie pot we'd discovered. I'd thought about the wording when I'd been writing that account, and I knew it would tick her off, but damn it, it was true! And I'm aware that I need to deliberately fight inclinations to write watered-down prose for the sake domestic tranquility. Still, I told Kim that in the future I'd write about my vodkatea at least twice as much as her marijuana smoking. Shucks, if she's lucky, maybe I'll even write about vodkatea as if it's a shameful little fetish that it pains me to discuss.

In the evening as we walked Sophie the Dog in the park down along the Huron River, Jupiter was so bright I mistook it for Venus, though of course Venus could never be so far from the sun. I still couldn't quite believe it really was Jupiter. "Maybe it's a supernova!" I enthused.