"There once was a man from Nantucket..."

I am stalled about halfway through Mr Y. Gina tells me to keep reading, but I just can’t right now. I will. I swear I will. But I am sleep-deprived and brain-dead right now, and slogging through the troposphere just isn’t on my list of desirable activities at the moment.
In the meantime, I took the boys shopping this morning for groceries down in the Strip District, where biscotti sprout from the sidewalk and the Nutella grows on trees and...wait, no, that’s not right. But the Nutella IS three dollars a jar cheaper than the supermarket, and the domestic Parmesan cheese (which is just fine for cooking) is four dollars a pound, so I bought two one-pound chunks and froze one. I hate running out of Parmesan. Plus, we bought ripe avocadoes and mangoes, and gorgeous spring irises, and chocolate, and the best Italian bread in the city.

Then we stopped at the library for story hour.
I picked out a gazillion books for Primo, including four more Boxcar Children mysteries (“Mom! The Bobbsey Twins are SO GOOD! But the Boxcar Children are good, too.”) and a Matt Christopher hockey book he’s been asking for. Seg was thrilled to find a brand-new Titanic book we haven’t seen before, with a huge fold-out centerfold of the boat, and we checked out the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey book YET AGAIN. Because Terzo was busy trying to get into the restrooms and navigating the elevator by himself, I only had time for a quick gander at the New Books. But I snagged Susan Isaacs’ newest, and - who just recommended this to me? – Virginia Ironside’s No, I Don’t Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a Sixtieth Year. When we arrived home, I gratefully handed off the boys to their babysitter who had come so I could go to work tonight, made myself a bacon-and-avocado sandwich for lunch, followed up by a nice Kinder Bueno, and read about twenty pages of the Ironside book before I passed out for an hour. Those twenty pages were enough to convince me that I will keep reading; it’s wry and funny and honest, and while I suppose eventually the harping on the “I am enjoying getting old” bit could turn out to be a little annoying, the joy with which the heroine greets her first grandbaby and collects her free senior metro pass more than makes up for the smugness and faint protests-too-much air of our heroine Marie.

Now I am off to compose a limerick with the first line like: “I once knew a girl from Uzbekistan...” (except that has too many feet).

It’s probably better if you don’t ask.