I am a firm believer that when things look their bleakest and all hope seems lost, you will hear the sound of the cavalry off in the distance, rushing to your aid.  Maybe I watched too many old westerns as a kid, where the good guy was always the white guy, where anyone standing in the way better step aside, because truth and justice and all that was right was about to come blairing across the prairie behind the sound of a bugle.

Okay, I agree.  Nothing much has changed.

But I did hear the sound of hope this morning, as Keith (yes, we’re everywhere) of random thinks took the time to answer a distress email I had sent out only yesterday afternoon.  Or maybe he never received my email at all, but simply saw the smoke pouring from my test site, as I struggled to master the art of drop down lists.  Anything is possible.  My son, roaring around the house for two straight days in his underwear, refusing to get dressed, terrorizing and destroying the order of the house, was looking very much like a wild renegade to me.  We were very much under siege.

But whatever the reason, Keith’s email came charging across the hill and into my laptop, led only by the soft, soothing twinkle of the email arriving bells.  No bugle sound at all, just a little ding, ding, ding, DING.  I guess something has changed afterall.

I just came across a site that posted a list of clear and precise bylaws for all to read.  The particular writer, who I will not reference out of sheer fear that I will have violated one of his bylaws, was of course, a lawyer.  Who else would have us reading fine print on a page already bloated with fine print?

But I think I’m forced to agree with the idea of his bylaws, no matter how desperately I want to smart off.  Maybe I’ll adopt them myself.  You know, to keep my own direction as clear and precise as a practicing attorney.

Maybe I should decide to offer no legal advice, just like him.  This sounds easy like an easy bylaw to keep.  Kind of similar to my Speak No French Rule.  I can do that.  Matter of fact, I can do even better then that.  I can crank it up a notch, I think, and will boldly proclaim my first bylaw:

I will offer no advice.

Now that’s a bylaw!  I decided the only appropriate thing to do was send our nameless attorney an email.

Dear Sir:

As for your other bylaws, we can discuss those in detail when . . .

And that’s when I stopped writing, realizing that I had already broken my own bylaw.  Broken it before I had even had a chance to officially post the thing.  Can an attorney I don’t even know sue me for breaking my own bylaw?

Blogging, I’m finding out, is tricky stuff.

I’m not sure whether to be thankful for the ease of iTunes or not.  When I first got home with my new PowerBook and oohed and aahed and loaded all my music and realized how simple and reliable it was going to be, I never counted on my eight year old son discovering the huge stash of Beatles songs and deciding to burn one CD after another.

Yes, thanks to iTunes ease, I now have the words I am the egg man . . . I am the egg man . . . I am the walrus . . . kook kook a choo stuck in my head.  Two straight days of I am the egg man . . . is more then enough, I think.  So I’ve decided that the only way to purge this thing is to bundle up, brave the freezing rain, and walk the few steps it takes to get to the nearest diner and have them whip me up one of their delicious omelettes.  I give up.  I will be the egg man, hoping that it stops there.  I have desire whatsoever to be a walrus.

Curiously, in the fresh little blog Lines (which I’m hoping will blossom into the nice little writing & art combo blog the owner is also hoping for), I found a reference for what’s ailing me.  It seems I have a case of ear worms.

One of the charms of the house that I live in is the mail slot in the front door.  So around 11:30 each morning, if I’m hard at work at my desk, concentrating diligently on whatever particular diversion I’ve chosen for the day, the mailman can scare the living crap out of me when he flips open the squeaky metal flap and drops the mail through.  The first time I saw the mail slot I smiled, the first time the mailman used it I nearly jumped out of my skin, and now, nearly three months later, I’m beginning to wonder when my scare tolerance will begin to build up.  But I’m getting better.

Like yesterday.  I don’t think I jumped at all when the slot suddenly squeaked and in dropped one lone envelope.  Nearly all of my mail has that familiar bill-shape, but this one looked different.  Smaller, more square, more card-like then bill-like, so I headed right over and picked it up.

I’m not sure what takes me more by surprise - my age or some of the things that come along with it.  Who could possibly anticipate that their one and only valentine (yes, one single valentine!) would drop through a mail slot in Oregon from someone they’d never even met from the far off land of ice and snow and 10,000 lakes.  That same someone, it turns out, that I’d encountered while “researching” the whole blog concept and was trying to decide whether or not this was something I wanted to do.  The same someone who I saw made the blog experience a personal one, and not just a collection of rehashed news articles and opinions.

Jodi, Jodi, Jodi!  Thank you for the valentine!  What a nice surprise!

If I was in Minnesota right now, I’d sweep you out the door and off to dinner.  Well, depending on the weather and the time of day.  Maybe I’d just shovel the walk and ask you to lunch.  My only dilemma would be whether I would reciprocate your kindness and thoughtfulness with a bouquet of roses or or bouquet of books?  Roses are nice, but books smell great for centuries.  Wait, do they even arrange book bouquets?  Well, if they don’t, they should.