Which is maybe not a long-term strategy but is certainly fun at the time

We had a lovely Thanksgiving. It was a really good visit.We also drank our faces off. Or anyway, one of us did.Which never hurts.Well, up to a certain point.

Fine, but don't blame me if you wake up pecked to death

Someone told us there had been a deer on K Street the other day.

I turned to Nick. "Do deer bite?"

"What?"

"Do they bite? Like, would they bite you?"

"They don't like people. They'd run away. I think you're safe from the deer."

"But a rabid deer? It could bite you, right?"

"Goddammit, Lis, are we back to rabies again?"

The truth is, we'd never left. He'd just had a brief respite.

I don't know if you heard that NPR story a few weeks ago about the woman who got attacked by a rabid, 30-pound raccoon? (Which I would link to except that I can never, ever seem to find the NPR program I want when I go looking.)

Anyway, she fought and fought and finally called her husband and son with her cell phone. They had to beat it something like 45 times with a tire iron before it died. Because rabies affects your central nervous system, the animal had much more adrenaline and strength than it otherwise would.

Aaagh!

And I was thinking, Betty is just a little tiny thing and she spends a lot of time in the back yard. There's no way she could fight off a rabid raccoon. I immediately Googled. If you start looking, rabies is everywhere.

And then, then, when I wasn't even looking! There was that story about the woman in Arizona who ran a mile back to her car with a rabid fox clinging to her arm. She chucked it in the trunk and drove to the hospital, and then it jumped out and bit an animal control officer. They both had to get rabies shots.

I don't know how much you know about rabies, but once you start exhibiting symptoms, it's almost always fatal.

Plus, apparently you can get bitten by a rabid bat in your sleep and not even know it. So if you wake up and there's a bat in your room, you should assume there's the possibility of rabies.

Things like this terrify me. Even though I never see bats. But that's the thing. You might not even see it coming. And then suddenly you can't swallow and you're disoriented and then you're dead. See how easily it could happen?

I realize that I have a tendency to fixate. And that I come up with implausible scenarios. But, like eating the whole pint of ice cream, I can't seem to stop myself. Nick's patience has been worn thin.

"What about a bird? Birds could get rabies, right?"

These questions come out of the blue. Or as we're falling asleep.

He always takes a deep breath. "It would have to be bitten by something. Birds can fly, remember?"

"Right. But what if the bird ate a piece of a dead animal that had rabies? Or came into contact with the saliva. It's possible, right?"

"Yes, fine, yes, it's possible."

"And then the bird could swoop down and peck at you. . ."

"Can we stop with the rabies?"

True love and blogtypes

I love things like horoscopes and personality tests and such.

This has been on my fridge for several years. It's my favorite horoscope of all time. Even though it didn't turn out to be accurate for that particular day, I clipped it out and hung on to it.

I know it's a little blurry, but if you click on it, it gets ginormous. Which maybe sounds idiotic. Because big blurry is better than small blurry? Maybe sometime around last call. In college.

Anyway.

So that said, I was delighted when my friend Jessica sent me a link to Typalyzer. This is like a Myers-Briggs for your blog.

So I typed in LG. And voila!

ESFP - The Performers

The entertaining and friendly type. They are especially attuned to pleasure and beauty and like to fill their surroundings with soft fabrics, bright colors and sweet smells. They live in the present moment and don´t like to plan ahead - they are always in risk of exhausting themselves.

They enjoy work that makes them able to help other people in a concrete and visible way. They tend to avoid conflicts and rarely initiate confrontation - qualities that can make it hard for them in management positions.

It also tells you what parts of your brain are working when you write.

And I read it and was all, yes to this, no to that...sort of accurate, sort of not. Much like a horoscope. I like it!

For those of you who read Live It Love It, she wrote about this very thing on Friday. And, she's a Performer as well. Which, um, came as a huge surprise to me. Ha.

But then I thought, is everyone drawn to blogging, or at least personal blogging, similar? And since blogging is our very public face, wouldn't most of us be analyzed as performers?

And then I tested a few blogs - Jessica's, for one - and found I we aren't all Performers. Although I still bet the majority of us are.

But this made me realize that much like those Cosmo "Do men think you're a feisty fireball or a ho-hum hockey mom? Find out how hot you are in bed!" kinds of quizzes, I really do approach this kind of thing far too sincerely.

And for this reason, I'm not up for Tarot cards or palm reading. It freaks me out to have someone read my personalized future. What if they're right? The general, read-as-much-as-you-want-into-it approach suits me just fine.

Alone! All alone!

It's Saturday night and I'm unreasonably excited to be home alone.

I took a hothothot shower and put on fleece. I'm scooping peppers into homemade guacamole, and when I get to the bottom of the bowl, I'm going to get the last bits with my fingers. I might even lick the sides. And I have an enormous bowl of popcorn - popped in a pan with lots of oil.

I love popcorn for dinner. I love not having to have a sensible meal.

Nick, he is out on a man-date with a foreign service guy we met on the plane on our way home from Turkey. I was invited to join, and he's an interesting character, but the truth is, I'm over-peopled.

I think what it comes down to is that I'm a very social introvert. I have been out practically every night for the last two weeks. And today I hit a wall.

I love people. I love seeing my friends. There were weeks leading up to the wedding where I didn't have time to be social. And I've been making up for it with a vengeance.

But when I spend too long with no alone time, I get peopled out. I start to lose it.

I got to a point where I was just so tired. Cranky. I absolutely couldn't bear the thought of going out and talking to anyone. And I must add, with some guilt, I was so looking forward to a few hours entirely alone. Alone alone. No Nick. Nobody.

I was practically shoving Nick out the door tonight as he was lingering, kissing me goodbye. "You'll be late! Bye! Have fun!"

He asked how I knew he and our new friend wouldn't be on the town flirting with women and going wild without me.

"Honey, I trust you."

God love the man who can ask you that while wearing an outfit that includes his favorite black felt clogs.

He'll be home by ten.

6-12

Yesterday Nick forwarded me a birth announcement - baby born at 7:20 that morning - which had been written like a press release. Careful, proper, emotionless.

Presumably, it was sent to a blind copied distribution list. She sent it from her Yahoo email. To her husband's work email. And their joint email account. So all first and last names were on there.

Which I Googled. But that comes later.

The attached picture was of a very thin, attractive, subtly made-up, perfectly-plucked eybrowed blonde woman, lying in a hospital bed, holding a swaddled baby, her handsome, smiling husband at her side.

Nick's email said, "From 6-12. Who would ever send an email like this to their former boyfriends/girlfriends?"

He dated her a couple years before we met. She had an actual name until they broke up.

He liked the fact that she was pretty and smart, if a bit narrow and St. John suit-wearing, Junior League loving, and Republican. Like all of us looking for a life partner and dating and dating, he figured, nobody's perfect.

So at six weeks, she handed him an engagement ring. Or rather, the setting. And said, "This is my grandmother's setting. My parents got engaged at six weeks, and they've been happily married for 35 years. And I expect at least two karats."

And my beloved, whose crazy-dar isn't all that finely tuned, took the ring and put it in his top drawer along with his cuff links and such. You know, instead of running screaming the other direction.

They dated along, going to Junior League-y, Republican-y functions and such. For six more weeks.

At week 12, she turned up at his house and demanded her ring back. It had been long enough. If he didn't know at that point, he wasn't ever going to know. Goodbye.

6-12.

I'd never seen a picture of her. She's pretty. And she works fast - I've never seen a picture of someone immediately post-birth with their hair done and their makeup on. Her husband, according to Google, went to a good law school, worked at a prestigious firm, and is now in the Republican administration. (For like, 15 more minutes.)

After digging in their details, I started wondering why Nick got this message. They didn't stay in touch; they aren't friends.

Did she send this to everyone in her Yahoo address book? Or accidentally include him on her list? Hard to believe someone that carefully put together would be that careless. Could it really be just to show him what he missed out on?

So I decided that Nick should send her a picture of my vagina. He can just pretend she's on his distribution list.