is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.

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I (now) Live (part-time) in a Small Town.

I (now) Live (part-time) in a Small Town.

Today my 17 boxes arrived. And, unlike my San Francisco UPS man, who has been known to express rage when he has to carry a mere 5 fifty pound boxes up the stairs to my apartment (h2so4 delivery), the Amherst UPS man was very friendly about the 17 boxes, 12 of which weighed 40-50 pounds. And not only did he have to heave them up a flight of normal stairs. No, after that he had to maneuver them through an odd narrow door and two steps into my ramshackle back hallway entrance. He even offered sympathy for my now having to unpack them all. And then he said, "what department are you in? political science?" I said, "law, jurisprudence and social thought." And he said, "that's right, I thought I'd seen your name." After he brought up the last load I offered him a pepsi, he refused, and then said, "see you on campus!" I live in a small town.

Dead Mouse Part Two: this does not involved dead rodents. It involves having two hornet nests in my apartment. Luckily both are between the interior window and the outside screen, so it's easy enough to keep them out of my space. But I'm going to try to get them removed anyway, because a) they are hornets! or wasps? what do I know?, 2) they are creepy and, more importantly, can sting me! and c) their nests have that disgusting dried-calamine-on-chickenpox texture that has freaked me out ever since I had chickenpox at age 7. Or was it age 9? Anyway, that texture makes me shudder almost as much as a dead mouse that looks like it has been swallowed by a cat and then regurgitated whole.

I am not making this up: in case you don't know this, cats really do sometimes swallow whole mice and then throw them back up. I have seen it happen more than once. Perhaps because I once had a particulary unclever but loveable and loud cat named Duster, who was very aggressive with small moving things. Unclever, but smart enough to live 20 years! His idiosyn-cat-ic ways inspired many pieces of writing by the people who had (the pleasure) to catsit him. Like Hans Blix and The Rhombus, he saved his worst behavior for when I wasn't around. Anyway, cats are sometimes not so smart about what they eat. Just like dogs, especially Sunny's dog Paco aka Cookie Nose aka Handsome Gorgeous aka Beautiful Fantasy, who once ate a bunch of plastic and then had to have surgery, which made Sunny have to organize a benefit so she could pay for the surgery. This is why I need to find out where the rat poison is in this building, before Hans Blix (the cat, not the U.N. weapons inspector) arrives and starts looking for W.M.D. And trouble.

Do you have an opinion? I have to get an ISP for the first time ever because I've always just used Berkeley's service or the service of where I worked. Amherst doesn't have dialup service so if I want internet access etc. at home I have to get an ISP. Any advice, recommendations, definitely-don't-go-there statements? Let me know.

4:02 p.m. - September 07, 2004

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