I ended up treating Leap Day as makeover day, prompted partly by a corporate dinner and partly because I'm seeing my mom next week. (I think all of my current tubes of lipstick came from her.) So: a way overdue haircut, a somewhat overdue pair of glasses, and my first sit-down visit to a makeup counter -- not the full treatment, because I ended up not having time, but enough for the very kind and competent saleswoman (twenty years with Estee Lauder) to show me how to deal properly with foundation, powder, and eyeliner, none of which I've used regularly since high school. I do have some cell-phone snapshots (mainly to help myself remember what I can look like when I bother), a few of which I'll post when the network's cooperating again.

It's currently mild enough that the dog, the man, and I are all outside -- the man's working on a car, I'm crunching through some copyediting, and the dog is nosing around in her usual way. On my walk to and from the library this afternoon, I encountered

a yard with signs for both Clinton and Obama

a hula-hoop-athon in front of I Dream of Weenie (our neighborhood hot dog stand)

some bunches of phlox in bloom

a man suddenly shouting from his porch, "Are you the poet?" Which flummoxed me at first, but it turns out his partner attends First UU and has visited my webpage. We ended up having a conversation about, among other things, forgetting about poems after we've written them, job prospects (he's 60 and about to graduate with his BA in English), and some of his experiences as a crisis hotline operator.

a block or two later, I smiled at an acquaintance and she said, "I see you all the time on TV!" "Bzuh?" "You announce stuff on Channel 8!" "Uh, no..."

A friend just surprised me with a card featuring her painting of a bouquet of sunflowers and some silken packets of peach tea. They look and smell glorious.

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Today's subject line is from Henry F. Lyte's "Ere the Night Fall". Lyte also wrote "Abide with Me," which is one of my favorite hymns... which admittedly predisposes me to adore the final scene of "Gridlock" ( = the second clip excerpted here). It's such a beautifully calibrated blend of acting, staging, script and sound.

(...And the side-pleasures related to that have included perusing a skillful transcript and noodling around various corners of BBC Writersroom, particularly Danny Stack's blog and Sarah Phelps's description of her process: "So there's a lot of swearing, there's a lot of smoking and there's a lot of drinking tea. And feeling sorry for myself as well.")