Cool, rainy days are good opportunities to accomplish mundane household tasks. I like the tiny victories over The Chaos brought by folding clean towels straight from the dryer or purging the refrigerator of mold colonies secreted away in plastic tubs.

I know that I was battling praying mantises last fall, but I sort of forgot that warmer weather would bring back herds of bugs, fluttering and creeping and dying in my shared living space. These aren't creatures of squalor, just part of living in the woods - the sort of thing I should expect of a house built smack dab in the middle of Outside. It still surprises me, though, when I pull back the shower curtain to reveal a grasshopper or when a june bug has gone gently into that good night on the kitchen counter next to my crate of oranges.

It's the week preceding my birthday. This invites the kind of self-absorbed reflection on Time and its Passage that requires creaking on the porch swing late at night, staring at the love-drunk moths bobbing and diving at the incandescent bulbs. And for once, I'm not drawing sadsack parallels about flinging myself at the same light over and over and wondering why nothing ever changes. No, instead I'm hoping my bedroom window are shut upstairs so that I don't find any (more) insect carcasses in my sheets.

Nick grows a beard for my birthday every year; here he is in my room in beardy times past.

For a while, the "long distance thing" was pretty manageable. I get to indulge in all my embarrassing secret behaviors (consuming spoonfuls of condiments for snacks, watching Jon and Kate Plus 8, white cotton briefs) without having to hear about it, and then when Nick and I see each other, vacation! We go out for brunch and watch documentaries and go record shopping! It's an okay arrangement.

A couple of weeks ago, the whole living 80 miles apart thing became fundamentally very stupid. It's unnatural, it's exhausting, it's..stupid.

So sometimes, in the face of such stupidity, one must spontaneously drive to Columbus to hang out with one's boyfriend and his beard.

I returned from Cincinnati today, completely exhausted from an exciting but emotionally and physically demanding weekend. I came home to an empty house in need of some cleaning, piles of laundry, and looming school work sending my anxiety spinning into overdrive.

Seeing a postcard from Brenda from Rome sitting in the mail slot lifted my heart like a helium balloon so I made this dinner (black beans, feta, corn, lime juice) in honor of her and the janky hobo meals we used to invent for ourselves last summer.

Luck be a parking spot...

Stephanie and I found a parking spot directly in front of the hotel, and when she opened her car door, there was a twenty dollar bill laying on the ground. (It was not a "poo dollar".)

We were thrilled about it, then spent the next hour wondering how we'd be punished for such fortune. (Running across the street to the hotel: "Twenty dollar jaywalking ticket, right?")

At the gas station on the way back to her place, a guy approached us, explaining that his car had broken down and he didn't want to walk several miles home from work with a server apron full of cash through a dodgy neighborhood. She and I, veteran servers, had a silent conversation where we calculated our getting-raped-and-killed odds to be moderate to low and gave the guy a lift. Once we dropped him off and it was clear he had no friends hiding in the bushes to jump us, we breathed a fat, dramatic sigh.

Consider "it" to be paid forward.

I know that every day can't start with my boyfriend surprising me by showing up in Athens at 8 a.m. and end with dancing on tables in a bier hall to an oom-pah version of "Sweet Caroline", but I will take those days when they come. If Sjanneke's wedding is half as wild as her bachelorette party, it will be quite a success.

I did enough apologizing to security guard/bouncer types to last me for a few years though. I'm very sorry, sir. You're right, fountains are not for sitting in.

I was pretty diligent for six months there, so I'm going to do a quick and dirty rundown of the past couple of weeks so I get back into this again. As I fished my camera out of my purse to upload photos, I accidentally palmed the lens into my pillow and it made the dull crunch of a stepped-on exoskeleton. Now it's reading "lens error" and the lens is hyperventilating half-open then half-shut. Tragically, I'm not sure I'll be able to take any more photos on it. Strange, after six months of dropping it on pavement so it snaps open and pukes out its batteries, wedging it beneath heavy textbooks in a tossed-around backpack, and general roughhousing, I killed the ol' girl with a pillow? Really? Gah. It's like the soldier who serves two tours in Iraq and slips on a banana peel at home and dies. That's not a thing, is it? Damn.

Sjanneke is planning a wedding, and teaching middle schoolers, and going to graduate school and writing a thesis. Industrious, disciplined, or fucking insane? Yes, those. A past Evie might have made herself feel bad in comparison to such an impressive person, and made halfhearted attempts to change my fundamental slacker hardwiring. The Evie that writes this now is wise enough to say, "Hey! Congratulations on being an excellent human! Drink a beer on my porch! I will continue to wake up at 10, though."

Something that must be nice about being my boyfriend is that occasionally I will make you veggie meatball subs. Just a guess.

So Lauren has to drive a lot for work and for self and so a dashboard GPS is pretty much a must. What I find amazing is that Lauren's dad, an actor, does many of the navigational voices for GPS devices. So, instead of "Niles" guiding you to your destination in dulcet cadences of the Queen's English, Lauren can be guided around by her dad. She seemed pretty blase about this but I think it's amazing and novel. Having your dad's voice navigate you safely through traffic: comforting or frustrating? At first I thought comforting, but eventually I think I'd revert to an angry adolescent subjected to one of my dad's driving lessons again. My first lesson my dad "let me" coast on the brakes in the church parking lot. What, you thought I'd be allowed to touch the accelerator on my first lesson? False.

This girl has a new place in Olde Towne East that I believe she would describe as both "bitchin'" and "juicy". It is a place where spontaneous painting happens, which I think is the whole idea, right?

Athens is sort of objectively lovely right now. Branches are spitting popcorn balls and shiny green leaf buds are uncurling depth and space into what was once gray and dimensionless. Spring is a tremendous relief, but I have to be honest, my spirits have been completely rotten lately. I think it's been weeks since I went a day without bursting into tears for some abstract, impossible-to-explain reason.

The thing about this house is that sometimes I'll catch a brilliant shaft of lemonade-white sunlight through one of the windows and I know it won't last long, so I'll grab an object (and think, "If only I had a dog or a child to put in this light and photograph!") and I'll take fifty shots of a pocketwatch on my macro setting before it vanishes. And sometimes I take pictures of myself in this light, which is now something you know that I do. So, here's me, resolving (at least for now) not to try my hardest, not to make the most of a goddamn thing, just to get by until it gets better.