0. Rebecca spends the day with me at work, teachers still on strike, school still holding firm. She's so bored that she even tires of talking with her friends online and reorganizes my file drawer.
1. We drive home.
2. We spend precious little time actually in the home, marching back out to take Caitlin to a friend's house.
3. Drive back home. Spend even less time in the house, because we have to immediately take Rebecca to a football game so that she and her friends can freeze in 48 degree weather.
4. Husband and I drive all the way back past our house to go out to dinner. I read an article in Fortune about how everyone admires Carly Fiorina, but no one wants to be her. I'm thinking her life sounds pretty good right about now.
5. Stop to get cash on the way home. We apparently get cash every day and it just evaporates into the ether. We never buy anything with this cash, it simply is not there the next time I look in my wallet. 6. Drop husband off at home. Have just enough time there to feed the cats, who are rolling around on the floor, their tongues lolling out, pretending to be starving.
7. Drive back to the football field to pick up younger child. She complains that I'm always early and that I should have her father pick her up instead because he's always late.
8. Drive home, have enough time to wash the dishes and notice that another movie has arrived from Netflix, which I will not have time to watch. I am one of their best customers - I pay every month to watch no more than 2.2 movies.
9. Drive to pick up older daughter from a tiny cafe deep in the heart of the Main Line. Arrive to find that I have become the designated driver for two additional friends. I do not have a good sense of direction in the daylight. Now I'm being asked to safely return home two kids whose houses are down steep, winding, narrow, dark lanes with which I am not familiar and whose directions consist of "I think you, uh, turn left, no, did I, uh, say left? I meant right. Uh. Uh. Turn left before you, uh, get to the school. No, the, uh, other school." Deposit friends to their homes and wish I had a compass in the car to get back to the main road.
10. Drive older daughter and her friend back to his house.
11. Drive home.
12. Collapse.
13. Feel compelled to write this.

I chronicle this only for myself, so that when the children have both left the house and it's quiet on a Friday night and there's no one to ferry hither and yon, that I will remember what it's like to want nothing more than a cup of tea and a warm quilt, but instead spend the evening blearily driving from point to point to point. And when I have nothing more than that cup of tea and warm quilt, I will yearn, just a little, for the days and nights of carrying teenagers and their friends from place to place.

I got an email today from my favorite hotel in the world, in which they included a brief list of events that are occurring in their area, presumably to whet my interest in spending a few overpriced nights in their abode. One is the 4th Annual Cowboy Poetry and Music Festival in Monterey. Ok. That's definitely going to draw me across the country to Big Sur.

Dreams: I remember a strong urge to say "There is little worse than tepid squid." I don't know if this meant that I disdain lukewarm calamari, or that I can't stand those damn squid who just won't make up their minds between Dean and Clark.