Andrea! You go, girl! (re the tribal dancing) That's terrific -- and a great way to improve muscle tone, too. My hostess is, or has been anyway, a tribal dancer, and I've been meaning to ask her to start teaching me.

I'm getting by. Beginning to tire of sleeping on a neighbor's couch, but soon, we should be able to boot the current tenant our of her "cottage" (a shed with a loft, really, but cottage sounds over so much more homely) so that Martin and I can have our own four walls and a door to close.

Weight loss plateaus are tiresome, too, but I think I'm sinking beneath one at last so will hope to lose a bit more before the onset of the Ancient Butter Festival this year.

The packers-up, cleaners, and throwers-out sent by the insurance comany are dealing with my things while I am at work. That is almost as hard as the fire, because they just don't understand that there are some things -- like the dining room table that was my mother's and her mother's before her -- that you can't just go out and replace at a department store. And oh, all the carefully collected CDs -- probably perfectly good CDs -- that they will throw out, just because they were in a room that the adjustor "totalled" -- and that I can never replace! It's heartbreaking. But whatever comes back at the end of the process will be like Christmas, I suppose. It's a great lesson in letting go.

Claire