Listening: To the new Liz Phair CD, which I guess isn't really all that new, but hey, it's new to me. It's good. There's a song on there that's... interesting. I mean, it's one of those where you're just driving along listening to it and all of sudden you find yourself saying "Did she just say what I think she just said?" possibly even out loud even though there is no one actually in the car with you. Those songs are always fun though. Except when you sing it to yourself as you are walking down the hallway of your office without paying much attention to whether or not there are people around who can hear you. Hearing: "Sex and Candy" by Marcy Playground, on the radio, three times this week. What is up with that? This song is like five years old, and yet for some reason I keep hearing it. It's not like it's a classic, either. Reading: The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson. Why do we have an active verb for death -- "to die," obviously -- but no equivalent active verb for birth? Watching: Nothing. TiVo is saving all kinds of things up for me, though. Someday I will have the time. Oscar Pool: $79! Enter, you freaks!

Today was the Virginia Democratic Primary. Not a whole lot of point to it now, I suppose, but I'm all about voting, and I figured today was my only chance to actually cast a vote for Howard Dean, so I left my house this morning rather excited about doing so.

Until I turned the corner out of my parking lot to go up the street to my car, and I noticed a nice big yellow metal thing attached to my back wheel.

Oh, brother.

According to the notice stuck helpfully to my windshield, I owed the City of Alexandria a little bit of money for some parking tickets I received while I was working in Old Town last fall. As is my history with vehicular citations, I had completely forgotten about them.

So I kept on walking, up the hill to the bus stop. I got on the bus that I used to take to that job (on the days when I wasn't parking at the meters and forgetting to feed them), took it down to City Hall, went in one side of the building, paid my parking tickets, exited the other side of the building, and caught the exact same bus back to my house. (The bus driver was mightily amused.) I sat in my car for about twenty minutes until the nice parking lady came to remove the boot, then went on my way to the polling station.

Of course, the voting is electronic. This makes me nervous for some reason. I know that by doing it this way, we avoid the nightmare that was Florida in 2000, but still, I'm a little wary. I like to know that there is hard copy evidence of my vote somewhere, but apparently those days are gone.

The whole thing took less than two minutes. I turned the little wheel until Dean's name was highlighted, pressed one button, and pressed a second button to confirm it. As I walked out, a woman handed me my trusty "I Voted" sticker, and that was it.

All this business about "electability" makes me want to scream. Kucinich was asked about this issue in one of the debates, and I liked his answer: "I'm electable if you vote for me."

I still believe Dean is electable, but apparently I'm one of a dwindling few. Once this part is over, I will replace my Dean bumper sticker with a Kerry one, and come November, I will happily return to my polling station and turn the little wheel to his name, and I'll be beyond thrilled and incredibly relieved to see him win. I just won't be as excited as I was today.

I bought a new handheld after Christmas, a Sony Clié, bright and shiny silver with a color screen. My old greyscale Palm bit the dust, mostly out of lack of use and subsequent corroded batteries, and I found myself actually needing one again, so I upgraded a little, although I think I paid just about the same amount for this one.

Anyway. I do use it for all the things you're supposed to use it for, names and addresses and scheduling, and it has become invaluable. But I'm also a little bit obsessed with a game called No Mess.

It's a fairly straightforward game. You start with four different pieces (i.e., a heart, a house, a star, a tree) that are placed at random on a checkerboard. You have to line up five of the same pieces in a row, and then they will disappear. The trick is that every time you move a piece that doesn't make the row disappear, three new pieces appear at random on the board, possibly getting in your way. You get one point for every piece you make disappear, and every time you reach 500 (or 1000, or 1500, etc.) an entirely new kind of piece starts appearing.

It's so ridiculous, but I can't stop. I play it every time I have to wait in line for anything, I played it this morning while I was waiting for the parking lady, I play it in between my scenes during rehearsal. Totally addicted. I even paid the $8 to register it so I wouldn't have to deal with the registration reminders that came up every 50 points.

I know. It's pretty sad.

One thing I'd like to say to someone I almost literally ran into today.

Listen, jackass, it is called a sideWALK, not a sideBIKE. Do not get huffy at me if you have to stop and actually put your feet on the ground to avoid hitting me. I am not in your way. You are in mine.

Here's the story of how I accidentally wore pajamas to work yesterday.

See, I work a lot, and when I'm not at work, I'm at rehearsal. When you live alone, this kind of sucks, because if you don't take out the trash or buy toilet paper, no one else is going to.

But if you don't do laundry, I have discovered, you can, for the low price of 90 cents a pound, have someone else do it for you, like the lady who runs the small coin-op laundry next to my 7-11.

So I've been taking my laundry there, dropping it off on the way to work one morning, picking it up the next, and I have to say, it is glorious. It comes back all nice and folded and wrapped in plastic, with the socks matched up and everything. A steal at twice the price.

I genuinely don't have time to do it myself these days, but I am still kind of lazy, so if I don't have the arm strength to carry something in from my car at the end of the day, it stays there. I do not make two trips, and if you have been to my house and understand how far it is from the street to my front door, you may have a smidge of understanding.

Anyway, yesterday morning, the black pants I wanted to wear to work were still in the car. I decided to put on my yoga pants -- which, I must admit, I slept in the night before -- and just wear them in the car as I drove to work. I was then going to carry the real pants up to my office and change in the ladies room.

You can see where this is going.

I dropped the car off at my parking garage, which is two blocks away from my office, and it was only when I reached the lobby that I realized I had forgotten the pants.

Alas. Fortunately the yoga pants were black, and I was wearing a nice sweater, so hopefully no one noticed. But still, I essentially wore pajamas to work yesterday.

At least it made me bring the rest of my clothes in the house when I got home last night.

The play is coming along. I'm almost completely off book now, which makes it a lot easier to focus on the actual acting. My accent is still too high class and the accent lady keeps trying to make me say "Oy" for "I" but I just can't do it, and the director doesn't seem to care, so Perkins is simply going to have to be a high class maid.

And I think I have a little bit of a crush on Dr. Watson. He's quite a few years older than I am, easily in his 50's, so it's weird, but I can't help it. He's just so English and charming and has great dusty blue eyes. He's also easily the best actor in the cast. He and I end one scene on a big note of cheese, and we've had to start doing it where he doesn't look at me as he says the very last line because either he makes me laugh or I make him laugh, and that just doesn't work.

The whole cast is actually a pretty flirty bunch. There's a lot of talk about the potting shed in the script, people are always either coming from it or going to it, so there have been many jokes about just who is doing what with whom in the Potting Shed of Sin, as it has come to be known. And there are several lines about what a ditz Perkins is, and that has evolved into her becoming known as the Ho of the Baskervilles.

Hee. I still don't know how good of a show it's going to be overall, but we're certainly having a good time doing it.

Jeero wants to hang out with you. Why? He needs you. Jeero thinks
life is so complicated, so he needs you to comfort him. Wage and Babo
ask him so many questions, and he isn't sure what makes them think
he has any of the answers. Maybe they think his red nose means he's
Jeero the Wise.

Well he's not.

What time is it? Jeero has no idea. How do you get from here to there?
Don't ask! Jeero doesn't know. Jeero just wants to sit on the couch with
you and eat some snacks. Is that too much to ask? Jeero doesn't know,
but he does know that you know it is time to cancel your plans and hang
out with the Uglydolls.