on my real player... Ida Will You Find Me   on the page... Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged But I can only stay up long enough to finish one or two pages a night-- which at this rate means it's going to take me longer to read this than it did to read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.   atop my head... a mass of tangled, wind-blown curls   in my mug... coffee Bless Kanani and Doug for leaving the coffee pot on before leaving this morning.   stop, drop, and crawl... Laine called on Wednesday in need of a plan of action if her stalker happened to show up on her doorstep while she was working out on her treadmill next to her open window. We came up with a strategy involving a few closed shudders and a mantra that's not just for kindergarten fire drills anymore.   product loyalty... Cover Girl finally makes a lip cover that stays on through breakfast, lunch, dinner, a shower, two glasses of wine, and a night's sleep. Miraculous.   endless possibilities... To Madison, the ocean is a pretty big place. But no match for her imagination.   spring sprung... I'm such a fan of the long seasons that Washington DC has to offer... months and months of spring that offer beach walks and tempting days with the sun streaming through the windows. Now I just need some tulip and daffodil bulbs for my flower box.   best unexpected consequence... Laine wrote to tell me that the best unexpected consequence from reading the last whirlygirl entry was, "turning around in an empty office in Atlanta to find a paperback Webster's dictionary sitting on top of an empty cabinet. Despite not having 'noumenal' in its pages, being urged to look it up from whirlygirl was worth it for the musty smell of childhood that came rushing back when I opened its pages. It smelled just like the green paperback dictionary I used since 7th grade and that I still have, though its cover is long gone and it's missing a few pages."   late night alliances... Lots of my fellow late-night allies wrote to tell me that they loved the entry about not being able to wake up early. Deb: "You must get the same phone calls we do, 'You're STILL sleeping?' This comes from people who actually can get to bed by a reasonable hour. I always tell them I'm going to call them right before I go to sleep and see if they are still UP."   countdown... 13 days-- but who is counting?