Why can't you buy a car in which the seats can cool you in the summer and heat your backside in the winter? It would seem that there are many parts of the country, including the one in which I live, that experience both very cold winter days (single digits) and hot, sticky summers. Why should your rear not be climate controlled the way the rest of you is? I cannot imagine that in this age of extreme miniaturization that automotive engineers could not fit both sets of equipment in the seat bottom (and also in the seat back). Is there no market for this feature? I would pay extra for the Creature Comfort Package, which would include the dual seat coolers and heaters (which would *not* dial themselves down to a lower, more energy efficient setting after only a few minutes use, as mine do today), the foot massaging accelerator and brake pedals, and the cup holder that will keep your frapuccino icy and your caramel mochachino steamy. Surely others would as well.

I have a mysterious spot on my lower lip. It has grown worse over the past few days, now appearing as a swollen red bump that looks like a careless smear of lip gloss. It has not responded to antibiotics and feels as if it contains a tiny alien with a fever. It hurts and makes me wonder if the checker at the grocery store stammered when she looked at me because of the hideous grotesqueness of the monstrous, elephantine growth on my mouth.

Books: Good Grief by Lolly Winston. I really dislike reading first books that are so good. There are no other novels to read back through, nothing to do but wait and hope the author isn't hit by a bus or taken with the notion of personally saving the rain forests. I can only hope that if someday I sink into as deep a depression as the widowed heroine of this story, Sophie Stanton, does that I too will drive to work in my bathrobe, arranging plants across the entrance to my cubicle, not understanding why anyone would find this unusual behavior. And that I too would end up owning and running a small bakery in a Pacific northwest town home to a year-round Shakespeare festival. There are worse ways to end up.