So the holes in my yard aren’t caused by skunks. We’ve been spraying for grubs, sprinkling hot pepper and keeping motion detector lights on, and while I haven’t seen any more skunks skulking around, the holes didn’t cease.

Then last week, when I was planting some tulip bulbs in the name of M. Tiny, I found a most interesting discovery: peanut shells. Lots of them. Empty peanut shells dug into the dirt, around the flowers, lying on the lawn. My first thought was, “Wow. That’s a weird thing to use as mulch.” But I also found a seashell buried in there, so I didn’t question it.

Then we saw the squirrels running through our backyard, carrying peanuts in their mouths. Did they bury them last summer and now they’re harvesting, or is someone in our neighborhood leaving out a pile of peanuts that they’re carrying here because the floor show (Cal Goes Crazy, coming to a window near you), is just that good?

When I asked stee where the squirrels could be getting the peanuts, his answer cracked me up.

“Dodger Stadium?”

As I planted the final batch of bulbs last week, my right eye was itching and watering. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore, and went to ask stee if there was something in my eye.

I walked up the stairs, hands covered in dirt, and asked, “Hey, is my eye okay?”

Stee’s eyes widened and he stood up, still holding his laptop. “Oh, my God! Did you get stung in the eye?”

My eye had swollen almost shut. I held my head under running water for what felt like forever and called my Blue Cross nurse. She asked what I was doing before my eye swelled, and determined that I probably got fertilizer in my eye.

It wasn’t just swollen, though. It was kind of lumpy. “Like cauliflower,” I told her.

She got real quiet and then said, “Honey? I don’t want to alarm you? But I want you to go to the emergency room, okay? Your eye shouldn’t be lumpy. You call Poison Control right now, okay?”

So I did, and Poison Control told me that fertilizers, even organic like I was using, have ammonia in them and that’s what could cause my eye to swell, if I rubbed a bit on my sensitive eye parts. He told me to keep rinsing my eye under water for at least another ten minutes, and then go to a doctor if the swelling didn’t go down in about an hour. He also suggested I take a Benadryl, as the swelling appeared to be an allergic reaction to the chemicals on my skin.

I called my eye doctor, who said I could come in at any time. So about two hours later I walked into my eye doctor’s office. He’s a really great doctor. Anyway, he told me I had done everything correctly (See? He knows I like to get graded at all times), put some drops in my eye, and told me that everything was fine. “Most people only splash water on their eyes for a few minutes and then three days later they come in because they can’t stand the pain anymore and we have to cut out whatever foreign object is in their eye. You did the textbook answer for what to do if you get something in your eye. Run your eye under water for as long as you can stand it, and then do it some more. Good job.”

The Blue Cross nurse called a few hours later. “Baby? Are you alive? I was so worried about you. Tell me what they said. What was it?” And while I’m touched she cared so much, shouldn’t the 24-hour on-call nurse be a little more confident that I wasn’t going to die?

And then all of my friends took great delight in telling me I got shit in my eye. Friends I hadn’t even talked to in years happened to call right then because why not, and still found time to call me a shithead.

I’ll tell you what happens when you look at yourself in the mirror and your right eye is all swollen up like that: “Oh, no! This is what I’ll look like when I walk down the aisle!”

We almost got hit by a car yesterday. Stee immediately said, “That would have sucked for the wedding, huh? Me in a huge leg cast, hobbling around?”

“You’ve got plenty of time to make any changes,” the owner of the rehearsal dinner location said to us last night. “So much time.”

“Huh,” we both said at the same time. “Yeah, right.”

But on the giant to-do list that is the days leading up to New Year’s Eve, I did manage to finish one biggie: I turned in the first draft of the new manuscript. “I cannot believe you have written three books,” Dan said, as did Chris, upon hearing I was waiting for notes from my agent and editor. I can’t believe it either.

Today’s schedule:

* practice pitch for this afternoon (done. the cats totally want to buy this movie. will write for puke!)
* go for run (done: 5 miles! (Which is mostly because I got lost. Still learning the new neighborhood.))
* donate bag of clothes that are too big (thanks, five miles!)
* buy shoes for wedding (This has become harder than I thought it would be. But I went ahead and made the alteration appointment because I have to. I wish I liked shopping for shoes more. I have stupid feet that hate shoes, so no matter what shoes I find, they’re going to hurt on my wedding night. They just are.)
* Pitch
* Rehearsal with Liz
* Dinner/ Gilmore Girls with Dan (write recaplet)
* Make programs for Thursday’s show
* Laundry

And tomorrow’s even busier. I’d post that to-do list, but uh, this is really only interesting to me.