I am getting the itch to rip everything out of the house that I don't like. This includes certain cabinetry, flooring, random sections of drywall, some clothes, selected computer equipment, and, in some cases, entire rooms. (But not, I promise you, people.) I'm not sure about this itch, but I want to scratch it, and scratch it hard. I will draw blood if that's what it takes to relieve the itch -scratch away until the flesh is torn and the bone ground down. Scratch until it's gone, and the house finally satisfies.

Something tells me that that will never happen, that the itch will nag ad infinitum. Ad nauseum. Ad noendum. Bummer! So I spent some time in the garden on Saturday, well, okay, the yard, ripping stuff out that was bugging me. (Pots with dead plants! Pathetic!) But it is mid-September, and time to switch out to some more hearty, seasonal foliage. I poured out all the old soil from every pot on the property and amended it with mulch and fertilizer, where it sat on the patio ready to grow something on its own, a wayfaring poppy seed on the wind, perhaps -when someone opened the screen door and the kids came out and promptly sat in it.

They're growing, plenty. They communicate with each other now, and it's a wonder to watch. It mostly amounts to the Little Digger playing Godzilla to the Little Ditchman's dollhouse, and the resultant toddler reprimands that ensue, but the little guy seems to laugh it off with a smart, albeit primitive, sense of humor. I was pleased to see this arrive before an actual vocabulary, as it denotes a certain intellectual mystique in a 10-month-old. The jokes run simply, and are the same every time: he puts the back of his hand up to his mouth and smacks it while he makes a noise. It sounds like a dimwitted Apache: bwah-bwah-bwah-bwah-bwah, ha! But I guess you have to be there. Anyway, it makes the big sister laugh hysterically. He's picked up on this, so he goes again: bwah-bwah-bwah-bwah-bwah, followed by more laughter. He pulls it out at random times to make her laugh, and I could watch the exchange all weekend. There's something fantastically reassuring about it. It's something smart, something real. And, for a 10-month-old, it's pretty clever (being so obviously hilarious to a 3-year-old.)

We spent Sunday doing a little winetasting -since we live so close to the premiere winemaking region in all of Southern California! It was nice, actually, and we tasted a goodly number of interesting grapes, fermented in interesting ways. Anything outstanding? Yes; the weather, the company, the Sangria... It was a good Sunday, followed by a long Monday, in which I sufferred a nasty gash to the leg, first thing. It wasn't too bad, and there wasn't much I could do about it. I just stared at the blood dripping down my shin all day, thinking, bwah-bwah-bwah-bwah-bwah.

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