Oh dear. I've lost the laser mousie toy. The cats are getting restless.

Yeah, if Kat hasn't lit her backyard on fire, then I haven't been privy. My relatives are still all pretty much Jamaican middle class.

I will ask my friend Cathy to make homemade marshmallows for smores for my birthday if that means you might come to the party, ita. I know I live otherside of the planet far now though.

Oh man. I am fucking tired.

I'd like it explained to me how it's possible that I have walked 22,000 steps today? 8 miles?! What?

Also, new house = no more person hired to clean our house. Which is very fine. Our house is tiny and yet it still takes me two days to get all the floors mopped because I don't have that much energy in time periods where my children are asleep. So I usually get the kitchen and the bathroom done first and then the next day, I can get the hardwood in the rest of the house cleaned and oiled.

The issue, of course, is that it means the floors are never all clean because clean kitchen and bathroom floors last less than a day. Last week, I mopped the bathroom and less than an hour later some fool-headed child missed the toilet. ARGH.

The upside to lots of the housekeeping we've been doing is the cooking. For breakfast, I made poached eggs over salami and polenta. For dinner it was BBQ chicken with fried spinach-quinoa cakes.

My friend Pablo and his wife just had a baby yesterday who they named Louisiana Brett Clarke. Would you guess male or female?

female

(I'm asking because I didn't ask Pablo and I'm genuinely not sure. He sent a photo and they definitely had a baby, but when swaddled, still gender indeterminate).

I'd guess female too.

well, Louisiana is a female version of Louis, so on that basis alone, I would say a girl baby.

I like how you stipulate that it was a (presumably human) baby. Well, Brett Butler was a chick, and Clarke has an e on the end? Totally fem.

But I like names that don't say much and leave it up to the person.

I promised myself I'd eat just the one chocolate bar before bed. But there's this dark chocolate and bacon one right here too...

When's your birthday, again, Kat?

And, unrelatedly, no answer on the swing set question? No one true way?

Ah, fuck it. I'ma have some more chocolate.

I would not hazard a guess on gender.

__Ana? Says girl to me.

I've had a fireplace over a year and have yet to have cooked anything via it (it's gas anyway, and it's the wrong season right now. But for ita, smores that she will find inexplicably disgusting at a time of her choosing!)

I sometimes wish I could plug into bob bob's brain. I should have taken more philosophy classes. My ability to formulate a reasonable argument is often so lacking, and I think when I spot it in others, I'm actually going apeshit on myself in a lot of ways.

Bob Bob is not here right now, otherwise I would get him to say this. But I will tell you the following, not because it is flattering but rather because of perspective: he tells all his classes (with whom he wins lots of arguments) that I'm better at arguing that he is. Which I think you've known me long enough to be unimpressed by, and you're right. I don't know anyone who regularly wins arguments, because context is so important. He was at a Kant conference last week where people he felt inferior to kept arguing that running ruins your knees. I gave him studies. He cited studies! But Robert Pippin [link] said, "well, I have me and five other runners who would disagree with that" and I said this morning in the car, "well didn't you say that the plural of anecdote is not data?" and no. But nonetheless, even top philosophers are prone to acting completely contrary to their training. Winning arguments is impossible.