Once you’ve been tagged, you have to write a blog with 6 facts about yourself. In the end you need to choose 6 people to be tagged and list their names. No tag backs.

1) The bandaged dressing on my left hand is driving me bonkers. Being unable to do dishes and having to cover it with a gallon-sized ziplock bag tied off with a rubber band when you take a shower is inconveniencing enough, trust me — but just try dealing with this particular sitch WHEN YOUR MAIN MANIFESTATION OF OCD IS REPEATED AND PERSISTENT HANDWASHING WITH YUMMY ROSEMARY HANDSOAP. Yeah. I’m slowly being driven insane.

2) And speaking of that yummy smell, Gregory and I are going on a fieldtrip to the local garden nursery this weekend whereupon I am going to purchase myself both a lavender and a rosemary plant. I am excited to poke around and find just the right ones. I look forward to deeply inhaling the earthy smell of the place.

3) Next Tuesday I am scheduled for a full body bone scan which, according to my rock star rheumy, if all goes as planned, is the very, very last stop on a seemingly neverending four year odyssey to find out just what the fuck is wrong with me. It’s been a long time and I look forward to finally facing this beast mano y fucking mana, baby.

4) In between the last entry and this, I went in and moved a load of laundry around and as I was doing so, an astonishing thought hit me: Living in this screen in front of me, I have very real friends I have never even met…yet whom I still think about and talk about and worry about and laugh about and for whom I feel great, great affection. After all these years, this still never fails to surprise and please me no end. If not for this screen in front of me, I would never have known many of you — so for this screen, and for all of you, I am so very, very grateful.

5) I have realized that I am completely obsessed with European History — to the point of reading about or watching programs about virtually nothing else. Perhaps after I make my fortune and move to Malibu, I shall go back to school and become a professor of European History. Tweed, in fact, becomes me. Hey, a dame can dream, can’t she?

6) For Mother’s Day, along with a priceless poem from my teenage son, I was gifted with two drop-dead gorgeous necklaces and a pair of earrings (all garnet — my faviest of faves), an entire legion of my beloved ol’ school Fisher-Price wooden Little People to add to my increasingly burgeoning collection (if you have any laying around the house that you wish to sell or dispose of, drop me a line!), and the following…which is just the most exquisite object I have ever seen. It occupies a place of great honor in our living room — right on top of our old Danish Modern china cabinet that contains my also beloved collection of Pez, now about 500 strong.

She is just so lovely…you cannot even imagine. I smile and marvel at her beauty every single time I pass her by…and sometimes even affectionately reach out and stroke her spleen:

(Oh, and Clownie don’t play the whole “tag” people thing; do it if you want to, kids.)