hello. in the past ten days i have had two encounters with bears. that may be as many as i have had in the past ten years. i also danced with some hippies in the streets, drove nearly a thousand miles, made some new friends, and politely informed a pita pit worker that the pita she was rolling resembled an african refugee and that she should redo it. all in all, relatively good week. right?

ok well maybe that was not the whole week. for the most part i have been sitting on my ass doing nothing. i have watched the entire fourth season of weeds, third season of dexter, and i am halfway through the first season of 30 rock. god i love netflix on demand. its amazing. also i have been socializing with my lovely grandmother, gigi. i'm sure i've talked about gigi before, but just to refresh everyone's memory, i'll give you the quick and dirty 411 on gigi. shes 75, acts 93, only drinks chardonnay, and only if said chardonnay is under 6 bucks and only after 6:00. however, if she does not have a little class of cheap, chilled, chard in her hand at 6:02 she will yell that shes late for cocktails and boogie on over to the fridge. she watches the stock market like its a match to the death between a sabre tooth tiger and a stegosaurus (sabre tooth has the teeth, stego has the spikey tail- tough call on who'd win), and of course she could never miss tennis match or golf tourney- she just likes yelling at the balls. how do i know all these fun facts- why i lived with her of course, and now gigi is in spokane visiting my family.

since gig (pronounced geeg, not to rhyme with fig) and i are generally outsiders in my house, have no friends in spokane, and nearly get lost going to the mailbox we have been at home for days doing nothing. fun. not. anyways, yesterday my mom decided to take us up to this area called green bluff where you can go pick apples and peaches and veggies and stuff from all these farms. well as soon as we get up there gigi became determined to not only get the most fruit, but to get the biggest and tastiest fruit. her tendency to act older than she is quickly disappeared and she was spry as a bird, nimbly plucking peaches from the trees and not hesitating to take a bite when she thought necessary. you gotta sample the product, right? so as gigi stood by, both arms straight out to her sides to avoid dripping peach juice down her front, sortof like a toddler does when they are peeing in their pants, my mother and i continued gathering fruit. gigi liked to get her input in whenever she could- "charlie grab that one!" gigi its 8 feet in the air "i dont care you're tall grab it!" alright gig.... and so it continued. by the time we got to the third farm gigi was over picking in the field and had started considering the 5 finger discount approach to fresh produce. "OOHHH char look at that tomato- wouldnt you just love that with some nice mozz and balsamic, hey snatch that right up, will ya? just stick it in your pocket they'll never know." yet again i was forced to refuse the requests of my kleptomania-cal grandmother. i will not be an enabler in her quest to be the stingiest person on earth. lord knows she does a good enough job herself. after a brief encounter with some freakishly large zucchini (too big to steal) and, in her words "a wonderful" porta potty, we packed up the car and headed for home. another eventful day done.