The squirrel chirps angrily.

Ben tosses his head back and laughs. "I think my work is done for the day," he says, gleefully.

Our neighbors have a walnut tree just across the fence from our back patio. Two squirrels live there, picking walnuts and dropping them on the patio to break them open and extract the meat. They make a mess, then run down to grab their food and taunt the cats. It's loud and obnoxious, and when the nuts hit our grill it can be quite alarming.

Today, the squirrels crossed the line. Too much mess, too much noise. Too much taunting. Ben stepped outside. Turned on the hose. Let loose. When I started this entry, I thought he'd succeeded in fending off the rodents. But just now a dry squirrel - the companion to the wet beast he hit earlier - loped across our patio.

Ben headed out again. Reached for the hose.

"I guess my work isn't done," he said.

I guess not.

I had applesauce a few minutes ago and flashed back to childhood. I'd ask for applesauce, and my grandpa would say, "Do you mean applesass?" And I'd freak out and practically throw a fit because he said it wrong, me three years old shaking my head of strawberry blond hair. "Noooo!!!!! It's not applesass, it's applesause!!!!" And my grandpa would laugh at me.

Now Ben plays the same games, only instead of crying and throwing a fit like I did when I was three, I laugh and throw his made-up words back in his face.

I sent my old passport away today so I could get a new, unexpired, replacement. The old one was a diplomatic passport because of my dad's job. The new one will be normal, only fancier because passport technology has come a long way since 1995.

Ben said, "Now you'll get a gooflomatic passport." I could have freaked and thrown a fit. "Nooo!!! There's no such thing as a gooflomatic passport! I HAD a diplomatic passport! And now it's gone!" I could have said. Well, maybe I did say that. But then I pulled myself together and told Ben that he's the goofl0mat. And he laughed at me anyways, just like my grandpa used to do. But I know the truth. He IS the gooflomat. And I control the Internet, so I have the final say.

"I'm going to bed now," Ben said, a few minutes ago. I said I'd be up soon, but first I had to post here. "What should I post about?" I asked. "Turtle butts," he said. He was looking at my pajamas. I guess these turtles have butts, as they greenly march across fields of pink. Turtle butts it is.

Good night.

What is it about the late teens and early 20s that makes boys and men speak in deep-voiced murmurs and one-syllable words? Maybe I'll get more out of Chance when I drive him to the airport tomorrow. He starts his senior year of high school on Thursday, two days after the rest of Herndon High. I suspect a little adventure was worth the academic lapse

So next time when stars are the goal I think we'll head east of the Cascade Mountains.

But. But it was beautiful. The air was clean and green. Ben coaxed a fire from scavenged wood. With friends we hiked nearly 8 miles. We saw steam rising from a scalding spring. We toasted smores, cooked dinner in the camp fire, brewed coffee in the morning. I'm glad we went.

In addition to all the regular expenses, I paid tuition for my database class ($350 or so), paid my share of our January airfare to Florida, renewed my lapsed memberships in the Society for Professional Journalists and Investigative Reporters & Editors, and had a couple of meals out with friends and family. It was a nice month, and I had more than enough money in my savings account to cover the extra expenses.

Last time I spent more than I made I didn't have any savings. I churned through all my cash trying to fix my old car, then had to put a rental car on a credit card so I could keep going to work, and then but another $500 on a credit card to cover the down payment for the new car I had to buy to stay employed. That was stressful. It took me more than a year to dig out of that hole.

I prefer just to save a lot of money and spend less than I make, but if every five years I lapse I have to say it's much better to lapse with a savings account.

Morgan and Robin are at Burningman, and I'm checking their mail and their cats. I stopped by today on my lunch break. There, arrayed on the bookshelves in chronological order, was the history of my literary life.

I moved to Oregon in March 2001, and when I left Virginia I left a lot of books behind. I've gone back a few times and returned with bulging suitcases of literature, but it's been clear to me for years that some of my favorites had gone missing. Now I know that Morgan stole them.

On the top of a stack of sideways books I saw "Sirens of Titan," an early '90s reprint of the Vonnegut novel, and I remembered how its happy ending made me cry. At $6, it was more than a week's allowance, more than an hour's babysitting pay, but when I finished that book I got on my bike and headed back to the Little Professor Book Store to buy "Cat's Cradle." Its tragic ending made me laugh. That's when I knew that I loved Vonnegut too much to keep buying his books new. I couldn't afford them. I was in high school, on a budget. I bought "Piano Player" next for 25 cents at a used book store. There it was, on Morgan's shelf, right under "Cat's Cradle," right above "Slaughterhouse Five."

In the first half of the '90s when you fell in love with an author you couldn't google him or look him up on wikipedia, so as I worked my way through Vonnegut's corpus that summer I also spent some days at the library reading about his life. School was starting again when I learned that Vonnegut's recurring Kilgore Trout character was modeled on sci fi writer Theodore Sturgeon. I read my first Sturgeon book in the first week of school, then shared it with a friend, and we talked about how weird it was. There it was, "More Than Human," one stack of books over on Morgan's shelf.

There was "Walden Two" next to "The Handmaid's Tale." I read those in 1996, my first term in college, a tutorial on utopias that included some studies of distopic worlds. Did Morgan steal these? I recognized my second-hand imprint of "Walden Two." I wasn't sure if it was the same edition of the Atwood novel.

I wasn't sure if that was my copy of William Gibson's "Idoru," either, or Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon." I was pretty sure that was my Tim Robbins book, but Robbins never blew me away so I didn't care. "The Communist Manifesto," which I've still never read, still had the Grinnell College book store "used book" sticker on its cover. I think another book was one I bought for a linguistics class, even though I never read it, even though I should have.

I felt robbed. Years of reading, hours of babysitting and bike rides to bookstores, my life, arrayed on Morgan's shelves.

After checking the mail and the cats, I left most of the books behind. I grabbed a few important Vonneguts. "Snow Crash," by Neal Stephenson, and also his "In the Beginning Was the Command Line" - because that one was a gift, I felt like I had to bring it back home.

A couple of the books I took with me, however, left me feeling guilty instead of robbed. "A Canticle for Leibowitz." I stole that from my dad years before my brother ever had a chance to steal it from me. My copy was printed in 1968, a decade before I was born. I remember finding it downstairs on the shelves with my parents' books, reading it, and hiding it away with my own favorite tomes.

"Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead." Did I steal that one from my dad or from my mom or from my high school? I know I read it in AP Literature in 12th grade, the cumulative work in a long study of plays. We read "The Frogs" by Aristophanes and learned about humor, then "Hamlet" by Shakespeare and learned about tragedy, then "Waiting for Godot" by Beckett and learned about existentialism, then "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern" and learned about allusion and humor and tragedy and existentialism and how entertaining they can be when they're all wrapped up together. Whoever I stole it from, it was later stolen from me.

I grabbed some of the books that Morgan stole from me, and some of the books that he stole only after I stole them first, but I left his bookshelf mostly full.

I came home and looked at my own shelves. I've paid for the library books I never returned. But not for "Henderson the Rain King," which has my mom's social security number in the cover, her student ID number when she went to college the first time around in the '70s. Not for "Bleak House," which my dad took with him to the hospital the night that I was born. It has contraction times written in the back cover. I'm stealing that one forever. Nobody can have it. I never paid for "The Horse Whisperer," either, which Fatima let me borrow in high school, and which I still haven't read and still haven't returned. I tracked her down on the Internet a few years ago to say hi and to apologize for the theft. She was surprised. No big deal, she said.

I guess that's the thing about books. We're supposed to buy them, to scrounge them, to borrow them forever, to read them, to love them, and to steal them when we have the chance. It's part of loving words so much they drive you crazy.

And that's why I'm feeling guilty and conflicted. How can I resent my brother's theft from me, when some of what he stole I stole from someone else, when upon discovering the theft my first response is to steal it all back? And at the same time, when those books are in my blood, when their words are the building blocks of how I view the world, how can I not resent a theft, although I myself am eager to commit it?

2. I got an A in my database class. Now I have to decide what to do with this knowledge that has few applications in my day-to-day life.

3. I think I may also take the next class in the sequence.

4. I'm determined to go camping over Labor Day weekend.

5. Friends are coming over tonight to make pizza.

6. Ben and I have booked a just-us Florida vacation for the first week of February.

7. I really, really, really want to go to China.

8. My passport is expired, but I just got new passport photos taken.

9. Why, yes, I have been watching the Olympics. Why do you ask?

Untitled from Courtney Sherwood on Vimeo.