Whereas Degas painted the dancing girls, I get to paint a hallway yellow this weekend; a hallway and a stairwell and I can’t say I expect to feel any less satisfaction than he probably did. I enjoy painting.

My daughter who is sick woke me up at about three this morning because mosquitos bit her 20 times the previous night and I told her to wake me up next time she heard them and I’d swat them for her. I couldn’t find the mosquito, though, although I heard it once as it flew past my head, laughing a mosquito’s high-pitched laugh. So I swatted a fly sleeping on the ceiling. It may have had ties to *l-Qua*da. It may have sought to acquire uranium in Africa.

You never know about flies.

Then I went back to bed, glad I didn’t have to hunt burglars.

Cause I hunted burglars the night before last. It was the typical scenario – middle of the night, windy. You hear a burglar noise and walk through the house doing kung fu moves as you round corners and pass through doorways, all the while telling yourself, “It’s only the wind” and recalling simultaneously that’s what people tell each other in horror movies just before the monster/guy in the hockey mask/Texan with the chainsaw gets them. You find nothing, then go back to bed.

Except I found the front door unlocked. I probably forgot to lock it, which is out of character for me, a compulsive door-locker (thanks mom).

I went back to bed and had a bad dream about getting stuck in a car outside an inn that was also a church and a cemetary, throwing the car into reverse although visibility was bad and knocking over a stone structure that had some religious and/or historical significance, and got caught by the innkeeper before I could get away.

Then I woke up, made coffee and realized the thing I had knocked over had the same emotional charge, for me, as our old coffee maker, which leaked. My wife replaced it the same day, although I didn’t tell her anything about that.

Talk about mental telepathy.