Lemme See That Escarow!: Luke tries to plan a romantic dinner for Lorelai, but his sister and her incredibly annoying husband ruin everything. Dean tries to spend an evening with Rory, but her grandparents, and Rory's new love of all things superficial, ruin everything. Dean dumps Rory in front of everyone, and Rory immediately celebrates, because she doesn't have to feel like the bad guy for breaking up her first love's marriage because she was jealous that he wasn't in love with her for three seconds. God! Rory sucks!

Woo hoo!

The cover was just sent to my house this past week. I really like it, and can't wait for Amazon to post it. As the title suggests, this is an anthology of five short stories about women deciding whether or not they want to get married. I'm proud of stee for not worrying, even when he read my pages.

Last night's pitch went well, and then I got lost leaving the lot. It gets dark at five now, a pitch black darkness that was even stranger yesterday due to the clouds overhead. I somehow turned the wrong direction and was driving through empty, dark sets. I'd be driving through some town square, then some kind of Brooklyn street, then a Mission, and then some kind of frontier town. It's very difficult to figure out where you are going if your location keeps changing time periods.

I am sipping my well-earned glass of wine. The programs have been printed and folded. I've rehearsed my monologues for tomorrow. The two pitches today went well. Laundry is in the machine. Kitchen clean. Phone calls returned. Originally I thought I'd be able to do a recap today. I don't exactly know how I thought that would be possible. See, after dinner tonight we have to take apart the futon that's been in our living room since we moved in and put it in the office where it belongs. It's a heavy, two-person job, but we have to do it because our couch arrives on Friday.

Our couch arrives on Friday!

For anybody who has been near us since we moved into the house, you know this is a huge ordeal. We bought a couch at Macy's, the week we moved into the house. That was August. We painted the living room around the color scheme of the couch. We were very happy with the comfy couch, which was quite affordable and was going to look wonderful in our new home.

And then they called to say the couch would be an extra week before it was delivered. This put a bit of a strain on things, as we were having Couch Baron over for a week, but we knew he was easygoing, and probably willing to be the Futon Baron for a few days until the couch arrived.

I called Macy's on the date the couch was to be delivered the warehouse, only to find it'd be another month before they'd be able to deliver the couch. It wasn't at the warehouse, and they seemed to be mystified with the whole concept of their warehouse. They told me this was up to the vendor, that the couch was very popular and nobody has been able to get this couch that they sold, in any color, for at least another month.

Don't think we didn't go to the store and sit on that couch again and ask when we could get that couch delivered. When the woman said, "Oh, this week!" I started into her. "Then HOW COME we bought this couch A MONTH AGO and we still don't have it?"

She did a few clicks on her keyboard and told us it'd be a month before we had the couch.

It was at this point we were idiots for believing that Macy's had our best interests in mind. We threatened to pull our wedding registry. We whined and moaned and were escalated from manager to manager. They all said the same thing: One month.

Well, I was working at Oxygen and then stee was going to be out of town and then I was going to be out of town, so we figured another month wasn't going to be that big of a deal. They said the couch would be delivered before Halloween, when we were in New York but Dan would be here to accept our wonderful couch with loving arms.

November 1st they told me they estimated a delivery date of sometime in December.

And that's when I told Macy's to shove their couch wherever it would hurt the most. I got so upset I was pacing our tiny hallway, saying sentences like, "You really want to know how to make me happy? Then I want you to go back into the past and deliver this couch. In the months it has taken for you to continually lie to me about a delivery date, I could have made my own couch. I could have gone to couch school, bought the materials, and fashioned my own couch out of polyester and fabric."

They blamed labor disputes, and said nobody who had ordered any furniture from Macy's since sometime in July had ever received their items. How is this store still in business? And why is that couch still in their showroom?

I canceled the order. We went to Crate & Barrel, because we're keeping it in the registry family, and found a couch we loved. We could afford it and it was close to the old couch that never really existed and we were very happy. Then the saleswoman told us that couch could be delivered in twelve weeks, unless we'd like it in sky blue.

How does anybody own a couch?

We found one in stock, in a color that was fine, that was comfortable and out of our price range, but at least it existed. Macy's said it'll be another two weeks before they'll credit my Am Ex. I asked for an address to write a letter of complaint, but when they said the words "P.O. Box..." I stopped listening. I'm not crafting a letter for some mailbox in Phoenix.

Anyway, the couch is coming on Friday, but stee leaves in the morning for his crazy bachelor party weekend, where I truly hope he doesn't get a tattoo on his hand, so tonight we take apart the damn futon that's been driving me crazy in the living room for months. And tomorrow night I will sit on the floor and watch The O.C. and then recap until my couch arrives Friday afternoon. I truly feel I will find some peace when that couch is pushed through my living room window.

Are you doing NaNoWriMo? Talk about it here.

So the holes in my yard aren't caused by skunks. We've been spraying for grubs, sprinkling hot pepper and keeping motion detector lights on, and while I haven't seen any more skunks skulking around, the holes didn't cease.

Then last week, when I was planting some tulip bulbs in the name of M. Tiny, I found a most interesting discovery: peanut shells. Lots of them. Empty peanut shells dug into the dirt, around the flowers, lying on the lawn. My first thought was, "Wow. That's a weird thing to use as mulch." But I also found a seashell buried in there, so I didn't question it.

Then we saw the squirrels running through our backyard, carrying peanuts in their mouths. Did they bury them last summer and now they're harvesting, or is someone in our neighborhood leaving out a pile of peanuts that they're carrying here because the floor show (Cal Goes Crazy, coming to a window near you), is just that good?

When I asked stee where the squirrels could be getting the peanuts, his answer cracked me up.

"Dodger Stadium?"

As I planted the final batch of bulbs last week, my right eye was itching and watering. Finally I couldn't stand it anymore, and went to ask stee if there was something in my eye.

I walked up the stairs, hands covered in dirt, and asked, "Hey, is my eye okay?"

Stee's eyes widened and he stood up, still holding his laptop. "Oh, my God! Did you get stung in the eye?"

My eye had swollen almost shut. I held my head under running water for what felt like forever and called my Blue Cross nurse. She asked what I was doing before my eye swelled, and determined that I probably got fertilizer in my eye.

It wasn't just swollen, though. It was kind of lumpy. "Like cauliflower," I told her.

She got real quiet and then said, "Honey? I don't want to alarm you? But I want you to go to the emergency room, okay? Your eye shouldn't be lumpy. You call Poison Control right now, okay?"

So I did, and Poison Control told me that fertilizers, even organic like I was using, have ammonia in them and that's what could cause my eye to swell, if I rubbed a bit on my sensitive eye parts. He told me to keep rinsing my eye under water for at least another ten minutes, and then go to a doctor if the swelling didn't go down in about an hour. He also suggested I take a Benadryl, as the swelling appeared to be an allergic reaction to the chemicals on my skin.

I called my eye doctor, who said I could come in at any time. So about two hours later I walked into my eye doctor's office. He's a really great doctor. Anyway, he told me I had done everything correctly (See? He knows I like to get graded at all times), put some drops in my eye, and told me that everything was fine. "Most people only splash water on their eyes for a few minutes and then three days later they come in because they can't stand the pain anymore and we have to cut out whatever foreign object is in their eye. You did the textbook answer for what to do if you get something in your eye. Run your eye under water for as long as you can stand it, and then do it some more. Good job."

The Blue Cross nurse called a few hours later. "Baby? Are you alive? I was so worried about you. Tell me what they said. What was it?" And while I'm touched she cared so much, shouldn't the 24-hour on-call nurse be a little more confident that I wasn't going to die?

And then all of my friends took great delight in telling me I got shit in my eye. Friends I hadn't even talked to in years happened to call right then because why not, and still found time to call me a shithead.

I'll tell you what happens when you look at yourself in the mirror and your right eye is all swollen up like that: "Oh, no! This is what I'll look like when I walk down the aisle!"

We almost got hit by a car yesterday. Stee immediately said, "That would have sucked for the wedding, huh? Me in a huge leg cast, hobbling around?"

"You've got plenty of time to make any changes," the owner of the rehearsal dinner location said to us last night. "So much time."

"Huh," we both said at the same time. "Yeah, right."

But on the giant to-do list that is the days leading up to New Year's Eve, I did manage to finish one biggie: I turned in the first draft of the new manuscript. "I cannot believe you have written three books," Dan said, as did Chris, upon hearing I was waiting for notes from my agent and editor. I can't believe it either.

Today's schedule:

* practice pitch for this afternoon (done. the cats totally want to buy this movie. will write for puke!)
* go for run (done: 5 miles! (Which is mostly because I got lost. Still learning the new neighborhood.))
* donate bag of clothes that are too big (thanks, five miles!)
*buy shoes for wedding (This has become harder than I thought it would be. But I went ahead and made the alteration appointment because I have to. I wish I liked shopping for shoes more. I have stupid feet that hate shoes, so no matter what shoes I find, they're going to hurt on my wedding night. They just are.)
* Pitch
* Rehearsal with Liz
* Dinner/ Gilmore Girls with Dan (write recaplet)
* Make programs for Thursday's show
* Laundry

And tomorrow's even busier. I'd post that to-do list, but uh, this is really only interesting to me.

Her contest may be over, but you can still help the cause. I helped fund microscopes, because I'm a big ol' geek.

Ew! You Got Your Ernst In My Liebenkorn!The Gilmores take turns taking swipes at Luke's ego as Rory lets herself be kidnapped by fancy-pants kids with too much time on their hands. Lane and mfTL go on their first date, which is exactly the length of half of a David Byrne movie. Wow. Don't move too quickly there, kids. Luke gets drunk as Pamie tries another recapper drinking game.

Dear Lovely Person,

Please come and see LETTERS NEVER SENT: Pamela Ribon and Liz Feldman's state-of-the art two-woman show that tackles the tough issues, like babies and butt sex.

LETTERS NEVER SENT
THURSDAY, NOV. 11th 8:00PM
@ The Stages Theatre
1540 N. McCadden Place
(one block e. of Highland, one block N. of Sunset)
Valet Parking Next Door at Cafe Des Artistes

The show is FREE! Please lend your support as we try to weasel our way into the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival...

Thank you!

RSVP to: csassistant@management360.com