My mother used to give us safe-sex lectures at the dinner table, whether or not we had company over. One of my favorite high school memories is of the vaguely shocked looks my friends would get. Apparently their mothers never spoke of such things. More's the pity.

One evening, as we were all gathered around the teak dining table that is now mine, she told my step-brother and his girlfriend, “You know, you don't have to marry the first person you sleep with.”

I find it vaguely ironic that five years later, they did indeed get married.

My mother once, while we were in a car stopped at a red light, showed off to my friends and me that her pink and black underwear matched the pink and black dress she was wearing. I attribute my love of colorful lingerie to her. But I've never shown my favorite red bra with the mini-rhinestones to anyone but Fuzzy.

My mother is blunt, sarcastic, generous, gracious, funny, annoying, caring, intelligent, seemingly-omnipotient, stubborn, and vulnerable, all at once. The greatest insult I ever gave her was when I told her that I didn't feel at home in her house. That she eventually came to understand that since I had never lived there, I had no sense of connection to the place, is something that always amazed me.

My mother was not at my wedding. We eloped, and didn't tell anyone until after. (My wedding is a story in and of itself. The courthouse where Laura Ingalls Wilder's marriage would have been registered, a bunch of Fuzzy's mostly-Catholic friends, sarcastic commentary from all of us, and a Chinese-food dinner on a Friday during Lent.) When I told her, she refused to speak to me for weeks. Then she sent a check. And a few months later she threw a reception, where the leader of the local Humanist comunity did a committment ceremony. There was no stress, and very little expense. And the cake was chocolate.

My mother learned most of her favorite Christmas carols in second or third grade. I know this, not because she told me, but because when she sings them (off-key, but with great enthusiasm), she stands like a kid in a school concert. You can almost see the ghost of her inner child standing next to her, sporting knee-socks.

My mother was never a cookie-baking PTA kind of mom. She managed to stay involved in my life anyway. Mostly. She gave me, and every other woman in our family, the most amazing advice: Marriage should wait till you know who you are. Before you commit your life to anyone, you should live on your own for at least a year, travel if you want, and have at least one truly tragic love-affair. Wisdom for the ages, don't you think?

My mother is mystery novels, endless pots of strong coffee, cotton blouses, leather sandals, business finesse, and an endless supply of love, though she's lacking patience.

My mother has a distinct scent. It's not perfume, and it's not the Clinique make-up she used to wear (though that has it's own scent). It's something uniquely hers, and it means home.

The building I work in is several offices around a central atrium, with a flight of stairs to the second floor, where the layout is repeated. Since these are office suites, no company has a private bathroom.

My office is in the northwest corner of the 2nd floor. The men's room is in the southwest corner, and in the vestibule is the ladder leading to the roof. The women's room is in the southeast corner, which means I have to walk the length of the balcony to use the restroom. Some days, like today, that's the only fresh air I get. But really, it's good that we're that busy.

Attached to the wall, in the corner right next to the women's room door is some kind of electrical box. It's locked, and the top of it is about six feet off the ground. Recently, a pair of pigeons decided, for some reason known only to them, that this would make a great nesting spot. And so every time anyone goes into the women's room, they watch her.

A lot of the women in my building try to shoo them away. I don't. I think it's fascinating that they sit so calmly when people are walking by mere inches from their home.

It's weird. I'm not a fan of pigeons, but I find myself concerned about these birds. Today, their nest was empty part of the day, and I worried that someone had fouled it. And I feel sad when the wind blows, and pieces from their nest tumble to the ground.

I also find myself wondering why they chose this exposed metal box as a nesting site. It seems so…I don't know…incongruous.

I purchased Feria hair color a bit over a week ago, maybe slightly longer, intending to try going to something near my own color, for a change. I haven't seen more than an inch of my 'natural' hair color in years, but I vaguely recall it being dark brown. The roots are, anyway.

Feria's not my usual brand, but it was the only brand that had a brown that wasn't ash.

Tonight, intending to actually use the color, I prepped my bathroom, dressed in my hair color t-shirt (a Gateway tech support shirt), and pulled out the box. For a moment, I was confused. There was a bottle labelled 1 and a tube labelled Conditioner and another tube labelled 3. No squeeze bottle.

So, I don't have the receipt, and I'm missing a crucial element of the hair color and it's midnight, and who wants to go fight with Safeway at midnight?

I am NOT HAPPY.

But in spite of being displeased, I have to wonder, why would someone steal part of a hair coloring kit? I mean, it's not even the part that could be sniffed.

I've done this before, but political rants always make me feel the need to focus on the good in life. And I just wrote one at OD. So, here are seven things I'm thankful for tonight. Thanks to for the concept which I've blatantly ripped off.

1) I'm thankful that I have a roof over my head. I live in one of the most expensive regions in my country, in a city with a visible homeless population. Of those of us who have jobs, many are one paycheck away from being homeless. I'm lucky that I'm not.

2) I'm thankful for my mother. We don't always agree, and sometimes we have huge arguements, but she gave me a solid grounding in self worth and a feminist sensibility that I chose to embrace. And she just wrote my marketing campagin for me.

3) Sobe. Today I'm thankful for Sobe. Oh, I know, it's still a sugary fruit juice, but the flavors are lovely (I like the white kind, and the Dragonfruit kind) and the colors are pretty, and the lizard makes me smile.

4) My dogs. Small furry bundles of unconditional love. Yes, sometimes they do horrible things to my belongings, but still.

5) Fuzzy. He dragged me out of the house and hung my corkboard at my office. And I didn't even have to bribe him with Spiderman (which we've yet to see.)

6) The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood One of my favorite books because it portrays such realistic relationships between mothers and daughters. It's a great book to re-read, and I've started doing that this weekend. And there's a movie coming out in June.

7) Sleep. I never used to be a sleeper. In truth, until recently I thought sleep was a waste of time. This weekend, sleep has been better than chocolate, and I've had the most wonderful dreams.

So, as of the 1st, I was allowed to originate loans. Not just process.

And today, today I did!

My very first loan as a loan officer, which, yes, I have to process, but hey.
Ok, my commission is only gonna be about $600, but still…

This is a rant about restrooms.

When I was a little girl, my grandmother instilled in me the deep fear of public restroom. At the beach, we'd be among the hoardes of women holding the auto-locking doors open for each other. 25 women and girls peeing for a single dime. You can't beat that for cost effectiveness. And then she'd take out her 'beach soap.' It probably had a brand, but it was small, round, patterned with something I remember as a Celtic knot, though I'm probably just mixing memories, and looked very much like oversized licorice candy. In my head, it even smells like licorice, but again, I may be remembering incorrectly. The soap would be wrapped in tissue at the bottom of her purse and dragged out (amidst grumbled complaints about the state of the bathroom) whenever a public restroom didn't have acceptable soap dispensers.

In any case, beach bathrooms are never the cleanest in the world, whether or not they try to make you pay a dime to use them, but a lot of that is because, you know, they're at the beach, and people are tracking in seawater and sand all day. And now that I'm older, they don't bother me as much as they did when I was five, and dreaded the command, “Crawl under and open the door for us.” I mean, really, isn't it worth spending a dime to protect an impressionable five-year-old from such a fate?

Office bathrooms, though. And restaurant bathrooms. Those bother me. A lot.

Our offices are in a buliding of rented suites, two floors around a central, open-air, atrium. All the office doors open to the balcony of the atrium. Two of the corners are occupied by steps, the other two by the men's and women's restrooms, respectively. I can't speak for the men's room, though the guys I work with tell horror stories, but the women's room is disgusting.

Apparently, most of the women who work in this building are unfamiliar with that element of modern plumbing known as the 'lever'. You know, the one used to actually flush the contents of…well, you get the idea. Apparently, they think their mothers work with them, as well, because they don't clean up. Anything. And while we have a cleaning service, they don't do much more than replace toilet paper (if we're lucky), and empty trash. I've seen them with mops, but have yet to find any evidence that mops were used, and I think 'sanitized' is a concept they can never hope to comprehend.

What annoys me about this is that we are, presumably, all adults here. Not even college students (though I have to say that my dorm-floor restroom was pristine compared to this, and Daisy, our housekeeper, even noted which way we liked the toilet paper rolls to hang, and turned them all that way) could be this messy, this gross. And not even busy fast-food restaurants, where at least the bathrooms get tons of use, are this dirty.

And there really is no point to this.
It's just really annoying me today.

I suppose I should count myself lucky that this is all I have to rant about today.