So we set a small budget and got ourselves a camper. 

An elderly, somewhat frail camper with hideous plaid upholstery.

Okay, full disclosure: a squalid, dented, fake-woodgrain-interior trailer with leaks and a gimpy set of windows. 

A camper on the verge of being junked.

Because the spirit of Frickin Betty-Jo Crocker took possession, I also made cream-colored curtains, scarlet slip-covers for the upholstery, and customized linens to fit the odd-size mattress. 

(Note to do-it-yourselfers. If you need to cut foam, get one of those electric carving knives. The kind used by Dr. Frankie in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Works great and encourages you to say non-crafty things like "It was a tender subject," and "Transvestites, start your engines!")

Summertime is hard on the small dog. Never mind being abandoned on a regular basis while her Graven Food Idols go gallivanting in boats -- it's hot like a roaring brick oven in Florida for at least four straight months. 

We fondly refer to her as a fat-head, but truth be told, the small dog DOES rock a thermally efficient physique. Her chesty form and densely packed cranium act like a pressure cooker.  

She's an outstanding panter -- it's an artform for her -- but venting heat is an uphill battle.

Between bouts of lolly-gagging, she takes to gazing importantly into the middle distance. Eventually, she holds quite still except for one shaking leg. She is a paragon of canine civil disobedience who resembles -- just a bit -- a runty little Elvis impersonator.

When simply calling her name does not work, we find ourselves clapping or pssting for her attention, tjingling her leash, chivvying her along, and tugging on the harness (the same escalating techniques used by police forces facing nonviolent resistance).

The story is told from the collective point-of-view of three sisters rather than alternating between each one, as they face a variety of family crises. Here's a quotation showing the clever sleigh-of-hand the author uses to tell us about one of the sisters while maintaining the sense of being a group of sisters:

"Cordy had never stolen anything before. As a matter of pride when our friends were practicing their light-fingered shuffles across the shelves of Barnwell's stores in our teens, she had refused to participate, refused even to wear the cheap earrings and clumpy lipstick or listen to the shoplifted music. But here she was in this no-name desert town, facing off against the wall of pregnancy tests, knowing full well she didn't have the money to pay for one. A Wild West shootout: Cordy versus the little pink sticks at high noon."

A book-end companion to The Weird Sisters is Jeffrey Eugenides's first novel, The Virgin Suicides -- a novel narrated by the collective "we" of the boys in the suburban 1970's-era neighborhood who observe and try to understand while a family of girl-children implodes.  

"We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn't  fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them."

There's probably a mock-credit-card commercial in here somewhere: 27 blank notebooks: $377.  14 12-packs of disposable fountain pens: $133.  Adding a fiction publishing credit to the list: priceless.

Or maybe not, but a very short story of mine has been published by an audio magazine called 4'33".  The website is http://www.fourthirtythree.com/ 
It's story #99, "In Which I Propose a Handful of Questions to Three of the Citizens Involved Who Are at Present Unable to Answer."  

Big shout-outs of thanks to sailing sound-guy Rod Koch, who connected me with Jon Shea at jonsheabass.com, who made me sound remarkably like myself. Only better. 

The special vocabulary of sewing can be confusing –– as with so many skilled fields of endeavor, needlework has its own way of using familiar words.

I freely admit to not paying attention in Home Economics. I was obliged to attend it in high school (girls WERE allowed sign up for Wood Shop, but only those from the first half of the alphabet in my year. Dash it all.). 

Being fortunate in my friends, I skated through most of Home Ec with minimal hands-on work. Cooking –– well, there was no escaping the assignment to make from-scratch biscuits. 

Anyway, all this dithering on the way to something like a point (a word which also has a sewing-based meaning, natch)...Quilting.  

Technically, "quilting" is the process of stitching fabrics together with some sort of fluffy middle layer. Like anchoring the layers of a big fat club sandwich with a frilly toothpick.  Quilting makes the difference between a down pillow and a down vest. 

I shuttled to the sewing machine as a break from working on revisions to that novel. Two hours of rewriting, a cup of tea, two hours of piecework. Repeat until both "The End" and a 96 x 76-inch fabric creation were achieved.  It's astonishing, really, what a bit of stick and carrot can make a person do.

I completed the revision (that story another day) but after finishing the piecing, and sending it to a talented mother-son-operation to get quilted to some cotton batting and a backing, I didn't take the last step: binding. (Ironic vocabulary choice for an aspiring novelist). 

Closure is another word with a variety of meanings.  In sewing, "closure" might refer to buttons or zippers.  

In mourning, it's the (alleged) last step, when the loss somehow ends.The desire for closure –– to finish things –– is part of our basic human aversion to ambiguity, so they say. 

At the Would Be Farm -- our stretch of abandoned farmland in Northern New York -- things are pretty basic. We spend a few weeks at a time at the small camper we fixed up, making frequent visits to my sister, where we raid the freezer and empty her hot-water tank with impunity.  

Still, while at Base Camp, the laptop and the cell phone need charging, and it's civilized to have electricity for lights and running water inside the tin-cabin-on-wheels.

Since part of the goal of the farm is to keep things low-cost and low-maintenance, we decided against hooking up power.  There's electric service at the road, but it's placed awkwardly for our use. We'd need to install at least three utility poles, which would make an ugly slash through the open vista of meadow and rock. Plus it seems silly to outlay more cash for poles than we spent for the farm's pickup truck...

(P.S. doesn't it sound very Mother Nature-y to "design a Solar System"?) 

The small dog cannot bear conflict. Tickling, soccer, play-fighting. She's just not having it.

She seems to believe that we should all either get along or keep our G@%^- d!#$% mouths shut and our butts plastered to the couch. Unexpected dashing around the house by any human is liable to get her dander up. 

And if, by chance, somebody has to dispatch an insect with a fly-swatter? Katie bar the door. A fly-swatter transforms the small dog into a frantic cartoon Tasmanian Devil, whirling about in a blur, charging the business-end of the swatter. Talk about waging war for the cause of peace.

It's enough to make a person want to research her past: what has made this elderly Boston Terrier so determined to keep the calm? She won't stand for even the implication of violence: smack a palm against anything, and she bows up like a wee tavern brawler preparing to throw down. Do it again, and she'll bark and dash in. A third time, and the hair on her back will stand in a ridge and she'll push her open gap-toothed mouth at the offender.  

I know, it's my fault, this bad behavior. No matter how upset, no dog should bite. Still, because of the gum-to-tooth ratio in that face, I found the whole production so comic and ineffectual that I didn't stop her the first time. As I should have.

At twenty pounds of bark and with a mouth that needs to be angled just so in order to gain purchase on anything -- she's not much of a threat. 

This may be the single most perfect pop song from its year (1986). 

Okay, okay, it's not Madonna showing off a voice in "Live to Tell," from that year. It's not Run DMC and Aerosmith paving a new road by Walking that Way, or Bon Jovi giving love a classically Bad Name, Bad Name. It's not the Dream Academy one-hit-wondering in a Northern Town.