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I had an annual check up with the doctor this morning and she had a young woman fresh from med school accompanying her. I was talking about how bad my hot flashes have been lately in my hormones’ last gasp on the dance floor. Then the heat got so bad I pulled my $2 fan from Chinatown out and fanned myself furiously. One of the nurses called to me, “can I have that fan?” – she said “my hot flashes are so bad I can’t sleep at night.”

Sleep, I said, who sleeps? To think we give up bad cramps every month for this! [We both laughed.]

The young doe-eyed intern whispered to my doctor, “I don’t want to grow up.”

In my stay-in mode Tuesday night, G decided to make us both chopped salads and bring them over to the LaLa to sit and eat on the bayou. BUT the porch had just been painted so it was more like sit in the screen porch in back with the hurricane lamps and eat and then walk out to the bayou and sit in the chairs that my neighbor has out there with our glasses of wine.

G was in the dumps due to a ruling on a client from her criminal attorney past. Sometimes “they” make decisions that are so stupid and there is nothing “we” can do about it. Even knowing she did the best job she or anyone else could have done doesn’t give her solace.

Staring at the water, a glass of wine in hand, we both were silent from the thoughts in our head – her’s a death row client – mine an amalgamam of disparate dark thoughts – one being the link S sent me to NOAA showing how this was going to be an exceptionally bad hurricane year – another my friend’s daughter’s MRI – and still another my mother’s precarious existence.

How did the 90’s excess give way to such much woe in the 00’s? It’s like the world seemed to be stretching out towards the land of milk and honey and suddenly a new decade brought us instead to chopped salad – all our tangibles and connections abruptly amputated and mutated and resituated in a fresh new way that defies identification.

The sky grew dark as coal – next lightning zipped around from each coordinate, North, South, West – then the rains came down. It’s such a warm fuzzy feeling to have a good old fashioned thunderstorm – especially after all the painting has been done!

At this point in life all women want is a good night’s sleep but it seems like insomnia plagues us all due to the hormonal shifts that are displacing our inner thermometers and the general feeling of achiness that drags on our joints. But last night due to a long hot soak in the tub and some inner peace I happened upon, I got seven hours of uninterrupted sleep – bless the small miracles in life.

I came home from Pilates and decided I needed to do extra time to get my girlish figure back, so I put my IPOD on and walked to the park and fast walked around the lagoon and then looped by the museum and back out to the bayou across Esplanade. There was fowl everywhere – swans, geese, ducks, herons, egrets. I had my IPOD on shuffle and the first song that started was Christina Aguillera’s Beautiful – how appropriate – and then Dave Alvin, Elvis Costello, Lucinda Williams and by the time I had looped back around the bayou, crossed back over Esplanade, and come across the Magnolia Bridge, Roy Orbison was singing Blue Bayou. How cool is that?

As I turned to go up my brick path to the LaLa, my neighbor – the psycho one – was sitting up on his porch with his daughter – I yelled up “HELLO THERE!” and with a big smile went inside. Always keep them guessing is my motto.

I was sitting at dinner the other night with a man on my right and a man on my left. If anyone had walked in, they would have noticed the one on my right because of his classic good looks – tall, square jaw, nice smile – but the man on my left had my attention for the entire evening. How do you define beauty? The man on my left looks into my eyes and pierces [at least] the first layer of me – it’s the law of attraction – chemistry – that zing.

This evening, I was returning from Pilates, which in and of itself was so challenging that I wanted to hang my head in defeat, and a truck pulled up beside me as I was listening to the 20th anniversary of Fresh Air. The guy rolled down his window as if to ask me a question so I rolled down the passenger side – he said, “I just wanted to tell you that you are beautiful.”

Aw shucks – I said – you’re sweet.

Beauty definitely is in the eyes of the beholder because at that moment I was a woman with a few too many extra pounds on me, with my brow furrowed from looking at the road without my glasses, and hair that needed something.

Maybe all he saw was a red head in a pick-up truck.

Last night I went to my neighbors house for a barbecue and someone was visiting from Chicago and started talking about how much she loved El Lay – and so all of us at the table chimed in – I told my “I lived in San Francisco for 16 years and found it soul-less” tale and R told his “I got off the plane in El Lay and wanted to turn around and get back on it” tale – and everyone more or less said California sucks, New Orleans is where I’d rather be.

Then I said, when I hear someone who lives in New Orleans put it down and say they’d rather live somewhere else, I say go then, get out. And R said, “Hey I don’t like it here either, but I’m not leaving.”

A week went by where nothing that was supposed to be done to complete this LaLa project was started or even attempted to be completed. Now George says he will have the landscaping finished this week – uh huh. Marty’s guys are a no show thus far. Bud’s guys haven’t returned to finish the windows up front. The only person around is Terry doing the irrigation – he rang the door bell and I was so annoyed because I was reading media blogs that I wanted to scream – it’s only Monday morning.

Whatyagonnado?

Was listening to one of my competitors speak about research versus Wall Street intelligence and he said, “it is not hard to stay ahead of the pack in Wall Street.” That was clearly evidenced this last week by the insane money paid for companies in the internet space.

My mother has been driving me nuts lately with conversations that border on the bizarre – the most recent was her tying together of disparate events and creating drama – so she donated the Mercedes to Bridge House and they came to pick it up, meanwhile the day before she had read in the Times Picayune that there were about 40 Hondurans arrested because they were known felons, and then she ran into her downstairs neighbor while the tow truck was pulling up and she said he looked despondent so she thinks he was part of the felon round up. Good grief.

This reminds me of right after 9/11 and the poor Middle Easterners who lived below her had a white van that said “Middle Eastern Catering” and she was convinced they were terrorist and called the FBI numerous times but (hard to believe) the FBI was unresponsive.