This is really Thursday - And who's that knocking at my door? 8

There is a wonderful opportunity knocking at your door, so why don't you answer it?

There was only one knock on my door today. It was the animal control guy (finally!) arriving to pick up the chipmunk that had been sitting in a cage in front of my house like a zoo exhibit.

This is kind of odd. When Husband took the cage outside on Wednesday evening, he set it in the yard just to the right of the sidewalk leading to the front porch. When Son and I got home from swim team practice later in the day, the cage was sitting RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SIDEWALK! How did it get there? Daughter swears she didn't move it and I can tell when she is lying. Did some freaky kid from out neighborhood just randomly move it from the yard to the step? And why? Or... was it a super-strong chipmunk who was trying to escape and move his cage millimeter by millimeter to get out of my yard?

Another opportunity arrived via the phone. When we got home from Son's swim meet this evening my friend Jeanine Matlow had left me a message that another friend, Tracy, and I should join her and her husband at a party for Ambassador Magazine. I was hot and sticky from sitting in the sun but managed to clean myself up and dress in the appropriate white clothing (theme of the party I guess. I just do what I'm told) and get ourselves over to The Reserve in Birmingham. At first we couldn't find Jeanine and Hubby and were a little out of our element as the place was filled with white-clad Beautiful People (who Tracy suspects were imported from the Hamptons.)

We eventually found them and ended up having a great time. We met a lot of fun people, including the mother of Charley's Ballpark Mustard founder Charley Marcuse. She took my picture and says I will eventually show up on the website in a slide show of people wearing mustard mustaches (a la Got Milk?)

At one point a tall, beautiful, young couple handed Jeanine's husband their cell phone and asked him to take their picture. He did. Then....I don't know what came over me but I ran over to the couple and said "Now take one with us!" Luckily they thought it was funny and Tracy jumped in on the other side (Jeanine, being the Celebrity Columnist she is, refuses to be photographed).

I gave the young woman my card and she promised to email me the pic. I didn't expect her to follow through, but she did. Proving that tall, gorgeous, Hamptons-imported people are nice too.

Scraping up a storm 6

Although your heart may not be in the work you must do today, you have the ability to concentrate on what must be done. Be careful, for you might commit so much energy to your chores that you ignore the more social aspects of getting along with others.

Spent the afternoon scraping the moss from between the stones of our brick paver patio. I guess you could say my heart wasn't really in it. It started out social, with all of us out there with some kind of tool, scraping away, but then Daughter saw that it was going to rain and wanted to fill up water balloons for her big birthday party tomorrow night, and Son just gave up and sat on a bench and watched. A sudden rainstorm impeded our progress, but it left as quickly as it arrived and Husband and I were back at it, having been ditched by our offspring. Husband put down new sand filler in the cracks and I have to admit that I had my doubts about how it would look - I'm pretty sure he didn't read the directions - but it ended up looking pretty good.

My back is killing me now. I'm pretty sure my physical therapist would not be thrilled that I spent the afternoon on my hands and knees scraping and then sweeping. I'm trying to be still, and hoping that I didn't damage it beyond the repair a night's rest can bring.

After dinner I began the process of creating a watermelon cake for daughter's luau party. We found this recipe last summer and it is too cute for words. You add cherry koolaid to a white cake mix, use chocolate chips for seeds (the recipe calls for raisins - um, no) and bake it in a bowl. Then you use green food coloring in the frosting and to create the watermelon pattern. With nearly 30 guests planned I am making two cakes and am hoping that it looks like someone cut a watermelon in half and laid them flat-side-down and not like two large, green breasts.