Purple Haze Lenin

So, this was a fairly relaxed weekend. Other than baking cakes and going to one baseball game, I didn't do much. On the way home from Oliver's game, he screamed out Look, Mom! Lenin got a cotton Schwab! That enormous sculpture is right around the corner from our house -- it's a sort of art installation at a gallery that used to be a car dealership and now hosts raucous parties instead of art, except for the great leader. It appeared overnight last fall and is entitled "Lenin with Madame Mao." That's evidently her on the top. My mother takes great offense to this installation as she imagines it's another sign of the great Liberal Conspiracy That Has Enveloped Her Daughter. I try to allay her fears by only wearing my Communist pajamas at night. This weekend, another installation appeared, a dirty cotton swab. My quip was that it apparently signified the reason why Lenin didn't actually listen to the people. He had wax in his ears.

I also made a second cake, this one milk chocolate. I think chocolate is my specialty, to tell you the truth. I'm hoping that I get lots of orders for cakes and cupcakes over the next few months -- enough to buy a new pair of communist pajamas.

This afternoon, a large iguana was sighted strolling through our neighborhood. Here it is on the pathway leading to the Crazy Cat Lady. That thing gave me the creeps, but actually far less so than the Crazy Cat Lady and her infernal cats.

And here is Sophie and me in the late afternoon, as the sun goes down and makes a sort of purple haze in her bedroom. She had a fairly decent weekend. I took her for walks. She stayed in her swing outside while I watered the flowers. She had some seizures and lay beside me while I read a TC Boyle short story in the April 15th issue of The New Yorker. The story satisfied me and had one of the best ending lines I've read in a long time. Sophie loves words on a page and stares intently as I read. I like to imagine that she, too, can read and has a wealth of stories in her head, things to turn over and over and never feels the need to talk about them.