UPCOMING APPEARANCES:

Friday, August 8th: Barnes & Noble, Lynchburg, VA, 7:00 p.m.

Sunday, August 17th: Barnes & Noble, Cary, NC, 3:00 p.m., with Cynthia Fox (owner of Chapel Hill's Wild Bird Center and fellow guest on WUNC's "The State of Things")

Well, I'm back. The boys and I spent the weekend zooming (in the word's loosest sense, as I foolishly attempted the I-95 corridor on Friday afternoon and could barely manage an amble or a mosey, let alone a zoom) all over the mid-Atlantic states and are now home for a week or so, except for my appearance in Lynchburg, VA, tomorrow night. It's been a busy time. Here's some of what I recall:

*Dining on my cousin Molly's delicious scrod, chili, and Thai noodles w/peanut sauce.

*Playing with my six-year-old cousin's ball python, Snacob, who impressed us all by constricting and consuming a white mouse in mere minutes.

*Finishing Mary Roach's surprisingly delightful Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, which both made me laugh out loud regularly and taught me a lot about embalming, decomposition, organ donation, and dissection. Highly recommended for those of you with a cheerfully morbid streak, as evidenced by a fondness for the Addams Family or Edward Gorey's Ghashlycrumb Tinies.

*Spotting my first Northern Waterthrush on a branch over a pond in Brooklyn's Prospect Park.

*Discovering that our luggage, along with my Discman and a friend's purse, had been stolen from my car in the Prospect Park parking lot.

*Meeting friends from Readerville.com at Prospect Park and later at Blue Ribbon (home of a really yummy grilled chicken sandwich with olive and garlic on focaccia). If only we hadn't been 90 minutes late because of our long chat with the boys from Precinct 78.

*Getting spanked in Risk by Ian and our young cousins; I should have known that trying to occupy both South America and Australia would spread me too thin.

*Meeting a friend from Readerville.com at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education in Philly and getting to listen in on his chat with my publisher, Paul Dry. (Plato and Updike were among the subjects.)

*Getting a good look at a wild Eastern Box Turtle for the first time in many years while walking the SCEE nature trails.

*Eating Philly cheesesteaks with friends in Lansdale, PA.

*Completing Terry Pratchett's The Wee Free Men, which I'd been reading aloud to the boys for some weeks. Crivens, but it's hard tae think I'll nae be speakin' in the dialect o'the Feegles noo. Ach, waily waily waily!

*Spending several nights in the delightful company of our cousins in the Poconos.

*Finally getting a look at a male Blackburnian Warbler in his brilliant orange, black, and white summer plumage, rather than the drab brown-and-yellow fall plumage in which I'd seen one before.

*Taking a canoe trip into a shady cove full of fallen leaves with my cousin Juliana, and spying two wildly teetering Spotted Sandpipers on a rock near the shore.

*Watching Dixon handling himself pretty well in a kayak.

*Watching Iron Chef for the first time with our friends John & Elaine, barely unable to control our giggling at the bad dubbing and the outfit worn by the host (I think it was a matador's suit of lights, plus a cloak and black velvet gloves) as he presented the show's culinary theme: onions!

*Bringing Kelly a jar of wild blueberries, fresh-picked by Dixon, and a superball, bought by Ian.

*Getting invited back to the Poconos by Mother Marge.
8:22 AM

.................................