Miss Parton emitted a delighted giggle, and mr. Ingelby who hated giggles, fled.

We’ve been eating lots of fruit… peaches, pluots (that’s like a mix between a plum and… something)… it doesn’t taste very good, though. More like someone’s experiment gone bad—I wonder how it got in the market. Well, besides those, we’ve also got cherries—the good real ones, and honeydew… I wish we had watermelon; the weather is perfect for spitting seeds at each other. That is if the watermelon is extra cold because you can go outside for just a few minutes and get sweaty just standing there. It’s been getting up to the nineties almost every day now, and I’m not kidding—it’s hot! I’m so glad we have air conditioning. This morning it was real cool out and Tim and I sat on the deck just chillaxing and talking about stuff. It feels like a day to go toobing or white-water rafting, it really does. It doesn’t seem like Summer… it’s like it came so soon I missed the starting point.
We took Matt Houston out for dinner at the Big Cheese in town---a very, very postponed birthday gift from last year. I haven’t seen him in months and to tell you the truth it really wasn’t the least bit awkward. But then I wasn’t in the happiest of moods and didn’t notice much. He looks absolutely the same, but he has gotten funnier—that’s for sure… I don’t remember him so funny. We ordered spaghetti with meat balls, which was also part of the gift because it’s Matt’s favorite. The spaghetti sauce had a strange sweet taste to it and I didn’t really like it, but I was starving so it didn’t matter, and at least the giant meat ball invading my plate was delicious. We all had to get to-go boxes because they gave us so much food.
Saturday night we went to the drive-in theater in Blue Ridge to see Confu Panda. It was incredibly packed so we had to park way in the back and sit in the gravel parking lot. Matty came with us, Jesse, the Abbotts, Ayla and Beth too and we sat on the cars and lawn chairs and April and I sat on a blanket on the ground. After a while your butt was so sore it went numb so you couldn’t feel anything anyways, but it got harder and harder to see the screen because this stupid man parked right in front of us and he kept walking around his truck and blocking the screen even more—no kidding, during the WHOLE entire movie---until I was just about at the point of either going over there and personally telling him to hit the road, or throw rocks at him. And just before the end of the movie these stupid girls came driving by with their brights on—in our faces---and they parked next to the stupid guy walking around his car... and then I really wanted to tell them to move. It wasn’t the greatest first experience of a drive-in theater, but it was still fun despite how hot it was, and then how sticky I felt afterwards.
I’ve started reading Song of Solomon… I don’t really know why, just the book I came across and decided to read. Some of the words like most of the “breasts” I crossed out when I was little because I thought it was disgusting. Well, this one verse Solomon wrote I just really, really love goes like this: “For love is as strong as death.” Isn’t that beautiful? I’m sure all of the book is beautiful poetry, for that time, but right now to have a man tell me my breasts are like fawns and my teeth are as white as the sheep coming up from washing—wow I think I would have to laugh at him… or puke, either one seems good.
I love those tiny sand boxes with the rakes you know, the small ones you usually find in therapist’s offices on the desks (and I would know because I've been to so many ;) ...the kind that is supposed to sooth you while you draw pictures in the sand. I absolutely love those things!!! I know I would never get any school done if I kept one on my desk.
I’ve been reading Murder Must Advertise and I’m only on the fourth chapter but I know I’m going to like it because Mr. Ingleby is hilarious, and you know how I love hilarious characters. Here are some of my favorite quotes of his (so far): “Three years in this soul-searing profession have not yet robbed me of all human feeling. But that will come in time.” “Let me take you to your dog-kennel.” “He has been on the point of leaving us for the last five years.” “Damn and blast Nutrax,” said Ingleby, “May all its directors get elephantiasis, locomotor ataxy, and ingrowing toe-nails!”
I love this part in The Catcher in the Rye:
“It was dark as heck in the foyer, naturally, and naturally I couldn’t turn on any lights. I had to be careful not to bump into anything and make a racket. I certainly knew I was home, though. Our foyer has a funny smell that doesn’t smell like anyplace else. I don’t know what the heck it is. It isn’t cauliflower and it isn’t perfume—I don’t know what the heck it is—but you always know you’re home. I started to take off my coat and hang it up in the fower closet, but that closet’s full of hangers that rattle like madmen when you open the door, so I left it on. Then I started walking very, very slowly back toward old Phoebe’s room. I knew this maid wouldn’t hear me because she had only one eardrum. She had this brother that stuck a straw down her ear when she was a kid, she once told me. She was pretty deaf and all. But my parents, especially my mother, she has ears like a dang bloodhound. So I took it very, very easy when I went past their door. I even held me breath, for goodness sake. You can hit my father over the head with a chair and he won’t wake up, but my mother, all you have to do to my mother is cough somewhere in Siberia and she’ll hear you. She’s nervous as heck……..Finally, after about an hour, I got to old Pheobe’s room.” (Really most of that has cuss words, but I decided to make it decent for you.)
You know why that book is called “the Catcher in the Rye”? He only mentions it once or twice and somewhere near the end of the book this kid is singing this poem by Robert Burns that says something like, “if a body meets a body in the rye.” Well, he decides he wants to be in a field of rye and catch kids who go running off the cliff… isn’t that crazy? I think it’s hilarious they named the book after that.