My addiction to The West Wing is such that on Wednesday night, when reception was particularly awful, I stood in one corner of the room holding my antenna aloft for the full hour it took to watch the season finale. I could only see my TV screen obliquely but that was OK, because it was in color as it would not have been if I'd set the antenna down.

I'm thinking about toting my first season DVDs with me when I go to Michigan to see %%diary-floodtide%%; the quality of Aaron Sorkin's writing is enough to make any sensitive person lock themselves in their bedroom for a few weeks asking the Muse why witty dialogue must be so lopsidedly distributed. If anything will convince flood that he's missing a golden age of American TV, it's the first season finale.

As it turns out I may drive up to the Midwest, rather than flying. If I can even afford to do that. I just found out that my grandmother on my father's side has cancerous lesions on her lung, spots on her liver, and an aortic embolism. The woman we all supposed would outlive those of us two generations down appears to be fading. My grandmother has spent the last ten years terrorizing us with paranoid delusions and a constant need for attention but lately has been shockingly loving. I don't take this as a good sign. If she were expecting longevity she'd still be yelling at us about how her neighbors are poisoning her tomatoes.

Consequently, when my parents move back to the US from Estonia, they'll probably set up HQ in or near Chicago, and drive over to Toledo as frequently as they can stand. I'm not sure if Grandma is talking to my Uncle Roger in South Bend, but she's talking to me, and despite her bad behavior she's my grandmother, and I can't help remembering the cynically funny person she was until a few years ago, I can't help remembering the care packages filled with sugarfree candy she sent me when I was diagnosed with diabetes (she is as good at making bad situations better as she is at salting wounds) and I can't help remembering how for so many years she made her grandchildren the centers of her life, probably to make up for the awful childhoods my uncle, father, and aunt had.

Lately I've been doing work on the side to try to make ends meet. I finished staining Rick the Other Pianist in Pasco County's patio on Wednesday; this Saturday I'm going to sand some drywall for my cousin. This is partly to alert you that seastreet isn't afraid to apply a little elbow grease. But mostly I'm just tired of working sixty-seventy hour weeks and raking in maybe three hundred, three fifty bucks for my trouble and not having a real vacation to look forward to for at least a decade and feeling like any intelligence- like any poetry- in my life has long since atrophied.