Live From the Home Office...

Greetings! I'm back! I stepped out for smokes and was gone for almost two months! Crazy, that, especially given that I don't smoke. Or perhaps not so crazy...

But enough of explanations! Tonight is not about explaining things. Tonight is about doing things. Many things. And live blogging the whole shebang.

Things I am doing tonight include:

Making a strawberry-apple pie. Never heard of one? Me either. But the rhubarb I froze last summer has come down with terminal frostbite and I wouldn't feed it to a pig, let alone my good friend John Lowe for whom the pie is being made. (You'll note I've made no effort to disguise his identity. That's because he only uses his computer to admire his own new site -- plonk.cz -- and he'll never see this. But just in case he does, JOHN I'M KIDDING! The site is actually vineyards.cz and it's where you should all go to buy wine. He'll deliver. He might even bring you smokes, which, I gotta tell ya, would have saved me some heartache.)

But anyway, besides making this pie, I am defrosting the refrigerator and recharging my ipod nano (which does require a certain amount of human intervention -- I have to keep the cats from chewing through my STEVE JOBS YOU OWE ME SIX HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-FIVE FREAKIN' CROWNS USB cable -- pictured above in all its deceptive simplicity) and monitoring the U.S. mid-term elections (via the BBC World Service) and cleaning the kitchen.

To find out how it all ends (I'm betting tears!) ... stay tuned!