Well, I haven't had much to say of late because I've been felled by a completely bizarre illness. Sometime around the 4th, I seem to have developed a pretty extensive, comprehensively itchy skin rash . . . I will spare everyone the gory details, but as is typical with rashes, this one began and flourished in the areas of my body that are usually clothed. By my estimate last evening, patches of rash appeared over 60% of my body surface. This is not to say, as Emil was quick to point out, that those areas are completely covered - but to give you an estimate of the scope of the general itchy frontier. I have the rash behind my ears, on my eyelids, across my stomach and back, in the creases behind my knees . . .

So basically I've spent the last week running around the house in varying states of undress, howling with itchiness and pain and frustration. I finally went to the doctor day before yesterday, got some (useless) cream, then called and got some Prednisone last night. I am feeling much, much better today. I'm cautiously optimistic . . .

At the same time that all of that was going on, we've moved into the Next Phase with selling the Ann Arbor house. We got a message from the realtor saying that the seller wants to close two weeks earlier than planned, which means we have much, much less time to hold the necessary bake sales and car washes to come up with the cash to close. We tend to forget that we have options in these circumstances, and we have a pretty respectable track record (especially recently) of doing the wrong thing when we think our backs are to the wall, so I'm really trying to fight the impulse to act on impulse. (No mean feat when half your body feels like it's on fire . . . I just want everything to go away for a while so I can crawl off into a corner and flog myself to make the itching stop . . . Maybe it's the real estate angle, but I feel like I'm trapped in a David Mamet play.)

But again, I'm cautiously optimistic. I think those issues will work out, and three weeks from now, it'll all be behind us.

And the really good news is: Emma. The afterburners seem to be kicking in with that kid, and it's really fun to watch. She called me a few days ago, all breathless with excitement, to tell me that she had a 90.5% average in her online logic class, and an 88% in her online Sociology class. She couldn't ever remember doing so well so late in the semester, and she had to tell me all about it.

Then, yesterday she had an interview at Meijers for a cashier position. (The mother in me says: Well, at least those cash registers do all the math for you.) Somehow we jollied her along into getting appropriate clothes for the interview (rather than wearing the really-cute-on-a-daytime-date outfit she had selected), and she and Emil went off to purchase them. She called me from the car on the way home, telling me that I would love the outfit she bought; it was something Rory Gilmore would wear. (Let me just say that I have no great affection for Rory Gilmore, but I do think they dressed her well.) "Excellent!" I said to Emma, "And that's excellent fashion advice for life in general. Whenever you have to go into a formal situation and you are unsure about your attire, ask yourself, 'What would Rory wear?'"

From her accounting, anyway, the interview sounds like it went really well, too. At the end of it, the interviewer asked her if she had any questions. She asked, "Why would you recommend working at Meijers to someone like me?" and then "Do you recommend working at Meijers to everyone?" The interviewer responded positively to those questions. So I'm cautiously optimistic about that, too. But I've had too many great interviews that resulted in nothing to be counting any chickens there. More to the point, though, the long-haul prognosis for The Divine Miss Em is excellent, I'd say; any 18-year-old (especially one who has about 9 1/2 formal years of education and not even a GED) who can come up with [a] questions like that and [b] the moxy to ask them (especially for an $8-10 an hour job) is going to be ju-uuust fine.

I told her to remember those questions; they'll come in handy many times in her job-seeking career . . .

Well, that's it for now. Time to throw on a barrel or a tent (how I wish I had a caftan!) and go see how the garden grows . . .