After 10 days of sickness, I can’t stand it any more. I need to get out and find a life that has nothing to do with kleenex, Sudafed, Advil and chicken soup. Today the headache is finally gone, and I don’t feel quite so totally exhausted.

So today I met Linda for lunch at the new PF Chang’s out on Cornell & 185th, more or less. It was Linda’s birthday. Well, actually her birthday was several weeks ago, but what with one thing or another her birthday lunch kept getting postponed.

I love PF Chang’s. I’ve never had any dish there that wasn’t wonderful.

Linda ordered coffee, and I ordered tea (they have a tasty gunpowder oolong), while our waiter prepared our special made-to-order sauce. I asked for spicy, since I wanted to clear my head out. Lunch started with the lettuce wraps, which are wrap-your-own burrito thingies using lettuce as the wrap and with a spiced chicken filling. I added some of our special sauce to bring the spice level up (Linda is not as big a fan of heat as I am). The sauce was perfect.

PF Chang’s serves family style. Linda ordered moo goo gai pan, and I ordered crispy honey shrimp. I was pleased that we were offered a choice of brown or white rice. I went with brown. It was sticky and yummy. The moo goo was tasty, if uninspired. A dollop of the special sauce helped. The shrimp was fried in a crispy coating, and tasted slightly of honey. It was perfect, in my opinion. I threw a tiny bit of special sauce on it, too, but it didn’t really need it.

Since it was Linda’s birthday, a dessert was complimentary. We shared an order of banana spring rolls, a confection made with wrapped, fried bananas surrounding a scoop of coconut-pineapple ice cream, all drizzled with vanilla and caramel sauces. I would really like to know where they obtain that ice cream!

PF Chang’s for birthday lunch:
gabbing for two hours with Linda:
coming back to life: priceless

The last debate between Kerry and Bush — not a decisive win for either. But what color is Bush’s sky?

I got really tired of Bush repeating that the cure for everything — the economy, jobs, taxes, anything — was education and the No Child Left Behind Act. I wanted him to have to answer these questions:

* When all of these well-educated kids graduate from high school / college, where in the hell are they going to find jobs? Do you expect them to move to India?

* If I lose my job to outsourcing, while I appreciate the thought that I may get a pittance to help me retrain, how the hell, as a single mom, am I supposed to feed my family in the meantime?

* What exactly are the “jobs of the 21st century?” I have what I was told 10 years ago was a “job of the 21st century.” I’m watching all of my friends and colleagues losing their jobs to outsourcing.

* Do you have the remotest clue that an $60k+ professional position and a minimum-wage burger-flipping job are not synonymous? Do you know how many workers at Walmart qualify for government aid?

At least Kerry seems to live somewhere on the same planet that I do.

OK… I admit it. I don’t loath children, but I’m not necessarily a fan, either. I don’t treat them harshly, or anything. And lord knows I love my own to death. But I don’t look for excuses to borrow a few. When the other women pass the babies around, I usually prefer to enjoy them from a distance. And, yes, I do think kids are cute and there are times when I enjoy them a great deal.

But not in the middle of what is, for all intents and purposes, an adult party.

OK. It wasn’t really an adults-only party, and it was at Hometown Buffet, where there are plenty of kids. But when I arrived at the party, the only choices were to sit at a different table or take the only available seat next to birthday-boy’s niece. She is a precocious child of 10 who started in telling me the most gross doings of every single kid in her school and ended up regaling me with demonstrations of how she can look just like a squirrel, and a bunny rabbit, and a dog, and a… well, you get the idea. She was the only child there besides birthday-boy’s grand daughter, about 6 months old, who was good as gold and never made a peep. (you know, I’d love to hold her, but I have this cold… )

Birthday-boy has been my friend for ages and I don’t see him or his family that often. I sat at the end of one side of the table, and Niece From Hell sat between birthday-boy and I. So I was a captive audience. Any time I turned towards birthday-boy to talk to him, what I heard instead was and I can look just like a horsie, too! Watch! And do you know what Jimmy ate? I’ll show you what it looked like! All delivered in a rapid-fire staccato that killed any other possible conversation. The only way I could turn her off was to focus my attention on the person across the table from me, who I’ve also known for a long time and who has one of the most annoying voices I’ve ever heard — rather like fingernails on a chalk board.

Turn to left… And then Susie threw up right in the crayons. And I can be a puppy dog! Turn straight ahead… screeeeeeeeeeeeeccccchhhhh And what have you been up to? screeeeeeeccccchhhh

It was not the most enjoyable party I’ve ever been to. It was better after Niece From Hell left. Maybe it was just my cold that made me feel so curmudgeonly. Or maybe I’m just getting old.

Nah… that can’t be it…

“Superman” actor Christopher Reeve, who turned personal tragedy into a public crusade and from his wheelchair became the nation’s most recognizable spokesman for spinal cord research, has died. He was 52.

Reeve went into cardiac arrest Saturday while at his Pound Ridge home, then fell into a coma and died Sunday at a hospital surrounded by his family, his publicist said. He was 52.

Fairwell, Christopher. Rest in peace.

It’s time for the annual Quilting Arts Magazine calendar contest. The theme this year is, “What’s Your Utopia?” If I decide to enter, I’ll have to come up with some utopia that’s really off the wall. We all agreed here at work that last year my entry, despite having lots of interesting embellishments including my own Irish lace, was discounted because it fell into the “family history/crazy quilts” category with probably 1,000,000,000 other entries.

In thinking about the theme this year, my first thought was about a really cool dream I had when I was a kid. I dreamed that I was an eagle. I launched myself from a cliff face and soared out over hills and fields and desert. The dream was so realistic that I could feel the muscles in my wings pull against the wind. I remember being surprised I was human when I woke up.

But that would be a hard one to do in a 14″ square without it ending up being thrown in with the “nature as utopia” theme with 1,000,000,000,000 other entries. I’d have to use some incredibly cool and unusual embellishments to make that one fly.

Day # 4 was another play-it-by-ear day. Since we hadn’t been over to Disneyland (the Magic Kingdom part) yet, that was what we aimed for.

I let #1 Son sleep in again, while I drank coffee, read the paper, and finished the Faye Kellerman novel I’d picked up a few days before. And #1 Son slept, and slept, and slept. I finally woke him up and said, let’s go!

It’s something of a tradition in our family that we ride Pirates Of The Caribbean just before lunch, and then eat at The Blue Bayou. We barely made it for the last seating for lunch. But we did make it, so the tradition holds.

We rode Pirates, The Haunted House, The Jungle Cruise, Indiana Jones, Star Tours, and Honey, I Shrunk The Audience. Lines were short here, too. Our longest wait — 15 minutes — was for Indiana Jones, but it’s well worth waiting for. Much to my disappointment, The Tiki Room, which is one of my favorites, was closed. (All the birds sing tunes and the flowers croon in the TikiTiki TikiTiki Ti-Ki Room.)

We grabbed a cold drink and checked the map to see what we wanted to do next. And then realized that there wasn’t anything else either of us was just dying to see. We were even done souvenir shopping. We were both ready to go home.

Mom’s take on Disneyland: Because this is, after all, Disneyland. But minus one because of the number of attractions that were closed. Even the Castle was wrapped up in plastic.

We rode the Monorail back to Downtown Disney, where I hit the bookstore for reading material. It was still early and neither of us was hungry. There’s a movie theater in Downtown Disney, so we decided to see Collateral with Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx.
Mom’s take on Collateral: Lots of fun. Chills. Thrills. A bit too graphically violent. But definitely tense.

After the movie we still weren’t hungry, but #1 Son wanted a last slice of Key Lime Pie. We wandered over to House Of Blues to feed his jones. And then we headed back to the room. To tell the truth, we were both ready to come home.

At the room we found a nice surprise! We had “made” a punk teddy bear (actually, a bunny) at Build A Bear Workshop in Downtown Disney. Our turn-down-service person had posed it on #1 Son’s bed. That was a fun treat.

The next morning, we needed to be outside at 6:15 AM to catch the shuttle to the airport. (Blech, what a terrible time!) I asked for a wake-up call, and this time we actually got it! (Does it have to be Mickey calling? Yeah. I guess it does. This is Disney.) I’d se the alarm, too, just in case.

It was too early for room-service breakfast. But we drank coffee and packed. I’ve already blogged about the bullet-belt fiasco at the airport.

I was glad to be home. The fur-kids were glad to see me, too. All of them had lost weight at the Cat B&B. It’s not a big deal for Phoebe and Moo Cow, but it’s a little bit of a worry for Kidd. He’s made up for lost time since we’ve been back, though.

And that was how I spent my summer vacation!