Tiptoe through the Tulips

This being San Francisco in citrus season, I may not be the only girl walking around the city with 4 kumquats, a tangelo and a cherimoya in her purse. Ok, two kumquats and a cherimoya, because I ate the rest, dripping juice down my sleeve and biting through that aromatic kumquat skin to the sour pulp within. It's a breezy early-spring day, the stripy, frilly tulips out in buckets in front of Heartfelt, our local card-and-giftie store, and it's pretty, pretty, pretty out there, yet again. And I'm skipping around on this, my day off, singing that Be Good Tanyas song "The Littlest Birds" over and over again and hanging my laundry out to dry in the backyard, so it will come in smelling of sunshine and eucalyptus.

Another reason to be happy: you didn't wake up today as Eliot "Mr. Clean" Spitzer, a man who's having a Very Bad Day, the specific sort of Very Bad Day you have when you pledge to clean up corruption in the Empire State and then get busted as "Client 9" by the booker of a high-class escort service, who, alas for the Gov., was wearing a wire when he set up his NY-to-DC assignation with "Kristen" the petite brunette. Did he really think that paying the Amtrak fare for a NYC working girl to come down to DC was somehow more discreet than booking a date with a local? Now, as the result of that train trip, he's doubly busted for the whole crossing-state-lines-for-the-purpose-of-prostitution thing. Politicians: Toujours Stupides!

On another note: good books! Almost finished with Amy Bloom's novel Away, yet another in the sub-genre of Jews in Alaska, stories about (see also Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union). A rambling picaresque, and better than almost everything else I've read by her, except for the small, perfect story "Love is Not a Pie", which remains unsurpassed.