Some days it's the little things.

Oh, good. I was about to see if I could scare up your phone number.

Dear Universe,

Stop screwing with vw. Don't make me come up there.

me

vw, I hope you're okay.

Just got an email from my father - totally out of the blue. Oy.

I need to do dishes and take out the trash. But, Emily's going to take out the trash, so I only need to do dishes. Then I can go to bed.

Toto's confused and mad. He just peed on the floor.

vw, I hope that tomorrow is a much better day for you. And the tomorrow after that is and improvement on that. Etc.

Emily, I'm glad you were there.

I talked to my Mom last night, after they'd arrived in Richmond and she told me that the across-the-street neighbor, a woman who had grown up in that house and now lived there with her own family, had never come by to say, "Good luck, it was nice knowing you," or anything like that. She's known my parents for 38 years, her father and my father car pooled to the train station for, oh, probably 10 years, my father had kept up his practice of clearing their driveway and front walk with his snowblower through this winter (something he started when he was getting a ride to the station with her father) even though that carpooling stopped 15 years ago. And, gah! The woman couldn't walk across the street?

La vw has gone to bed. Oy, it's been an exhausting couple of weeks. I wish I could be here more, but the student teaching isn't leaving me a lot of leeway for being home.

Anyway, it's a wonderful thing that people are here, and that there's pretty much always somebody to talk to.

Anyway, it's a wonderful thing that people are here, and that there's pretty much always somebody to talk to.

Except for the times she's falling over for no reason!

::orders large roll of bubblewrap to be fitted around vw's head::

ION, identify the author of this Buffista quote:

I have no idea whether mysteries still qualify as genre, but this was back in the late 80s at an East Coast college whose English dept. faculty revered the short, spare, dry as a dry martini left undrunk on the small side table of a New England home inhabited by characters in Carver stories, left there after a perfunctory but necessary cocktail party attended by weary prep-school faculty members who occasionally moonlighted as characters in Cheever novels and discovered weeks later by yet another prep-school faculty member who was housesitting for the homeowner, who spent many hours of his housesitting time regarding the now-empty glass with its now only faintly visible rime of evaporated gin and pondering the growing awareness that he had not been invited to this faculty cocktail party, then going into his colleague's bedroom bathed in the bleached-out comfortless light of a New England winter afternoon, opening his dresser drawers, and contemplating his wife's underwear for hours, short story.

That kind of story.

ION, identify the author of this Buffista quote:

Either (1) your wife or (2) Nutty. t edit Or (3) possibly Madrigal.

Either (1) your wife or (2) Nutty. Or (3) possibly Madrigal.

One of your answers is correct!

I think you are also correct in identifying the three most likely people for that kind of riff. However, the giveaway is the bitterness.