So I downloaded a bunch of audiobooks to my iPhone. The first book I listened to was Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King. I have absolutely no idea why I chose this particular book, since I've never read anything by Stephen King and never particularly regretted that decision. But this was the book I chose, right, so let's do this. I got approximately FOUR HOURS into this thing-- four hours out of a total fourteen-- before I finally and mercifully figured out that I was listening to a collection of three short stories and not a fourteen hour novel. That was the best thing about the entire book, actually, the realization that I wasn't going to have to listen to ten more hours of some dude getting eaten alive by rats.

I was feeling pretty good cruising into Story #2, right, what with the rats and the gnawing and the dead woman rotting in the well all in my rearview, but it turns out my relief was shortlived. The second story (unlike the first story) was narrated by a female. A hauntingly familiar female. I sat in my car, both hands on the wheel, listening with my mouth open as this little lilting voice introduced her character-- a young, naive, successful author-- and I tried to get a handle on how I knew her.

"She's a singer," I thought, as she narrated her way through a fictional book signing event. "Or wait, no, she's an actress." She described leaving the event, taking an unfamiliar route, la-di-da.

It was one of those stupid trivia facts you just can't manage to put your finger on-- the kind of trivia you typically bet your mate a dollar over- or a gratuitous sex act, maybe- before reaching for any one of the five Internet machines in your immediate periphery to settle which one of you gets to take their pants off. 

But I was driving, obviously, and not about to scroll through IMDB on the highway, so I had to rely on my brain for data recollection. Worst case scenario. So I'm sitting there, my brain whirring and clicking its way through the dented hard drive, while our protagonist finds herself stranded along the side of the road. And as my brain begins to isolate the file I'm looking for, this poor woman is abducted and viciously sexually assualted by a truck driver. It was right around the time she found herself strangled half to death and naked in a ditch that I realized who this woman was: It was Jessica Hecht. Victoria from Sideways is narrating this nightmare of a story. Susan from fucking Friends is now running naked and bleeding down a dark country road.

I didn't even listen to the third story. It was probably a serial killer memoir voiced by Dakota Fanning.

I downloaded the A Song of Ice and Fire series and I've been listening to that pretty much nonstop since then. I hear a lot of people lamenting the fact that once they finish A Dance with Dragons there won't be another book in the series to read for a while, and I'm pretty sure I've found the solution. Stop reading. Let a theatric British guy read that shit to you instead. Each book is fifty hours long, you will NEVER EVER FINISH, TRUST ME.

I'm sitting here on the floor trying to force iTunes to sync music to my iPhone and perusing Google Reader in the meantime because seriously, let's face facts, iTunes is never going to come through for me, and I read that Mrs. Kennedy is going to post every weekday of 2012.

"Oh!" I thought to myself, iTunes whirring endlessly in the background like the Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser trying to figure out tea, "Now that's a good idea."

And it is a very, very good idea. I doff my cap to you, Eden. Don't touch it, though, I haven't washed my hair since Friday.

I do genuinely miss this, being here. And I've gotten some sweet comments and emails over the last month or so encouraging me to be here more. So while I can't commit to every weekday, let's give "every once in a while" a shot.

I started working again a few months ago, something I'm actually NOT going to talk about because seriously, fool me EIGHTY THOUSAND TIMES. But I can tell you that this job involves a four-hour commute several days a week. So maybe I should just record myself talking alone in the car for four hours and post THAT. If nothing else, it'll put an end to the sweet comments and emails.

So I'm ironing some Old Navy shorts I bought secondhand in 2003 and I don't know, something must be wrong with my spray starch because all of a sudden they look really threadbare and baggy and one of the pockets just fell off.

I'm guess I'm gonna have to get some new spray starch before I start pressing these long-sleeved thermal Anchor Blue bodysuits from my junior year of high school.

There wasn't much point. Only two channels on the whole stupid television were ever in English. One of them was HBO, which hey! Score! Except that every single time I turned it on, it was playing Funny People. Every city, every province, every hotel. Funny People. On a loop. It seemed an odd choice. Even odder, the Chinese government had edited it down to about forty-seven minutes. If you watch Funny People in China, you have no idea that Adam Sandler is sick or that Laura is married so you come away feeling strangely buoyant the first eleven or so times you watch it.

The other English-speaking channel was some sort of ongoing international news program that managed to be both hypnotizing and totally repellent. The format appeared to be simple-- four people seated behind a news desk discussing world events.

Which seems completely innocuous, right? I turned it on for background noise one morning while I was packing and I found myself concentrating harder and harder on the screen until I was sitting on the carpet, nose to nose with the lead anchor with my knees tucked up under my chin.

For starters, there was absolutely zero background distraction on this channel. No tickers, no scrolling feed, no station indicator, no weather map, no blue screen, no digitized dancing bears, no background props, no lettered signs of any type, no wall paint. It was like watching hostages debate one another in an abandoned warehouse on a hidden video feed.

Secondly, one of these people only communicated in Chinese. So when the other three people were discussing something in English? Dude Number Four would throw his two cents in there in Mandarin while everyone else sat back and listened, and then the other three would comment on what he just said in English. No translation of any of it, just moving right along. It was exactly like watching Hank Hill and Boomhauer have a conversation. Only, I suspect, more cerebral.

And I say "suspect" because (thirdly) I never had the slightest idea what these people were talking about. I think I have a fairly realistic grasp of how much I know versus how much I don't know (a little versus a lot), but over the years I've read enough about the world and attended enough college that I never expect to be utterly flabbergasted when I watch the news. I never expect to find myself perched on a hotel room floor in China with one eye squeezed shut, poking at the television screen with a shaky index finger and muttering bullshit under my cold, cold breath.

"Well, today marks the 3,529th Annual Festival of Anspi today in Bananastekistan and the parades are in full swing. From sunrise to sunset, the royal children will be gathering dragonflower vines and butternut roots to make their ceremonial capes, and the villagers have been hard at work for weeks building the ten-story llama lofts."

The other newscasters smile and nod. The Chinese guy shuffles some papers and interjects in Mandarin.

"Oh, absolutely!" someone answers, laughing. "I was in Bananastekistan two years ago for the festival and it was simply amazing. I still have my wooden pith helmet full of glitter and moss."

Then just as quickly as it started, it's over. Their smiles vanish in unison like ships lost at sea.

"The euro zone debt crisis reached a critical point yesterday as the Dow Jones Industrial Average once again fell short of wide expectations despite an overall rise in commodities trading."

But it's too late, I can't be cured by banality, I'm already curled up in a sweaty ball with my face all screwed up trying to figure out what the fuck I just heard.

Randy walked into the room then, back from his breakfast salad foraging, and he informs me that it's now 6:20am and I better get my luggage out to the bus if I have any hope of seeing it tomorrow morning in Kunming.

"Have you ever heard of Bananastekastan?" I ask him.

"What?" he answers, and I am at once smug and validated.

"Oh wait. You mean 'BananastekIStan'," he corrects, "of course I have. The llama lofts are supposed to be unbelievable."

I pretty much summed it up back in 2008, there's really not much more to say about it. Except maybe to add that I'm now legitimately prepared to wake up one morning three years from now to discover the lower third of our mattress severed and lying on the floor.

And that's fine, okay, I can deal with that. But today when I snatched the avocados back from the cashier like some kind of deranged pitted fruit worshipper, I had to make room in my purse because there was already a tub of salsa in it.

Just one of the reasons Lijiang was my favorite city. The itinerary calls it the "Shangri-la" of China. I don't know if that's true or just something they put on itineraries for Americans, but it was definitely Shangri-la-ish. To me, anyway, a person who's never been to Shagri-la and doesn't really know where it is and on second thought thinks it might be a topless resort in the Bahamas, actually, so nevermind.

It wasn't anything like a topless resort in the Bahamas.

I almost can't explain it. The whole town was a labyrinth of cobblestone streets lined with shops and restaurants; there was fast-running water everywhere, streams and waterfalls and fountains built into the cobblestone framework. Absolutely incredible.

Randy and I got hardcore lost walking around. We were warned by our regional guide that this was a real possibility, so I tried to remember landmarks and I made mental notes as to whether we turned right or left. But when every single building looks exactly the same, and when you can't read or distinguish any of the street signs, and when I can only tell my right from my left like sixty percent of the time... well. We walked around in circles for maybe an hour and a half trying to figure out how to get back to the hotel. After twenty minutes I tried to crumple onto a wooden bench and just give up-- like Open Water, only on land and with better acting-- but Randy pulled me up and made a left (or a right) and we made it back.

This is Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. It's 18,000 feet tall.

We actually took an aerial tram up the entire face of the mountain to the Yak Meadow. The itinerary is reminding me that Yak Meadow "commands a magnificent view of the glacier", but I don't remember a glacier; I remember oxygen tanks and the smell of fear, but no glaciers.

Eighteen thousand feet up is high. Eighteen thousand feet is so high that it doesn't really matter that you're standing on a wide, established land mass, you're still acutely aware that you're too high up in the world. Add to this awareness the restricted ability to breathe and you've essentially turned me into a land-hugging, slow-moving crab person.

There's a Buddhist temple on top of the mountain but I'm not sure what it's called. I almost think I asked somebody while we were there and they couldn't translate it into English, but I don't know, I might have made that up in the midst of all my fence grabbing and air gulping.

Randy and me. Him with his magical coat of many systems and me with my life-sustaining camera bag.

Randy dipped in for this photograph and then ran off to do what you're obviously supposed to do in Yak Meadow: pet a yak.

I don't know, man, I feel like I learned my lesson the hard way about petting random animals in foreign countries, but Randy could not be deterred.

I don't think he actually pet a yak. I think the closer he got, the bigger and smellier and dirtier the yak became, so I think Randy decided to cut his losses and downgrade his mission.

To eating a yak. Here's Randy negotiating with the yak snack salesperson while our national guide, Ming, begs him to reconsider.

"You will not like it," she grimaced. "And I don't know how the yak was cooked...". Meaning if the yak was cooked, I assume, and at what temperature, and on what day. Many, many things can go wrong with the yak snacks in China on top of an 18,000 foot mountain in a lean to.

"It's chewy," was Randy's initial assessment. Ming just covered her face with her hands. I tasted a tiny piece of the yak. It was chewy. And spicy. And disconcertingly lukewarm. I can say with some confidence that I'm not a fan. 

Sorry, yak.

As I was attempting to crush pigs and stomp out mooncakes, I realized that I never finished detailing our unbelievable trip to China. I'm so glad I had the presence of mind to write down a few things during the trip; the staggering amount of province-to-province travel combined with the unfamiliar and gorgeous novelty of everything we were seeing-- compounded by no shit THREE WEEKS of crippling jet lag-- turned the entire trip into one big confused, stunning blur.

So I've got my notebook and a copy of our itinerary and a bunch of photos and I'm going to see what I can do.

Pandas! We'll start with pandas. We visited the Giant Panda Breeding Research Center in Chengdu.

We flew to Chengdu on a midnight flight and then took a bus another hour plus to the hotel. I was trying to fight off a cold by this point, and if you know me at all you know that when I'm fighting off a cold, I do so defensively rather than offensively; by this I mean that I curl up in a limp "c" shape someplace obvious like underneath your dinner table or in your lap, and then I whisper that I'm fine when you're inevitably forced into asking if I'm okay.

So the morning of the pandas-- the morning after the flight-- we had a wakeup call at like 6:00. By this point in the trip Randy had developed this truly hilarious breakfast routine where he'd scour the always extensive and impressively global buffet and create some kind of green salad for his meal. Our lunches and dinners were always very traditional Chinese fare (read: no salad) and Randy's a salad guy. The Chinese recognize that Americans enjoy salad, but they don't seem to have figured out exactly what it is or when we eat it; having said that, there was always something vaguely and endearingly "saladish" available on the breakfast buffet, and Randy turned it into a kind of game. Every morning you could count on him to swipe all the green garnishes and some kind of poached pork being served alongside kumquats, and there was always a sweet pink dip or two that was Thousand Islandish, so there.  

This particular morning I remember Randy being tickled because there was cheese being offered in some form. I was, if memory serves, doing my best to buck up and not bring down the team. Which totally means I was just this side of tears and probably asking random people to feel my forehead while I took obnoxiously tiny sips of juice.

Randy kept asking me jovially over his plate of kale and cheddar cubes if I was going to hold a baby panda. Because that's the deal: you go to the panda reserve and then you get suckered into paying like $250 to hold a baby panda. It's totally optional, obviously, but it's a moderately hard suggestive sell (we'd been hearing about it for like four days at this point). Randy was all for it, he thought I should definitely hold a baby panda.

"When are you going to get this chance again?" he asked, scooping up some pink dip with a cantaloupe leaf.

"I don't know," I sniffed, "I wouldn't want to get the panda sick."

"Yeah," he agreed, spearing something with his chopstick that looked like a grape, only with more legs. "You wouldn't want the panda to catch your inability to travel." 

In response I took the smallest sip of juice I've ever taken as an adult.

The panda reserve was wonderful. Incredible, truly, a once in a lifetime experience for sure. There was a light rain the day we were there, so we got to walk through this perfect, misty, insulated forest with all of these crazy majestic roly-poly creatures crashing innocently through the greenery around us.  The pandas are left to their own black and white devices in an exceptionally authentic environment, and they roll and play and fall out of trees completely oblivious to their audience of shutter-clicking humans. The reserve showcases the baby panda nursery behind big panes of one-way glass, and you're welcome to walk by and coo at the teeny tiny little babies with their teeny tiny little panda hands and you can just see them dreaming about all the trees they're going to fall out of one day.

Speaking of, it turns out that when you hold the baby panda (which isn't a baby so much as a teenager), you do it in a hospital gown and hat and slippers in a completely sterile room, so it falls somewhat short of your dream of cuddling with a panda on your daybed. Someone does snap a commemorative photo of you and your panda, but how cool can that be? You're still wearing a bunch of protective biohazard shit designed to keep you from rubbing off on the panda. It's like paying a hooker who then demands you wear eleven condoms. Insulting, is where I'm going.

Only not really because pandas aren't hookers and I got a little off track there and maybe a little offensive and I apologize. 

I didn't hold a baby panda. I couldn't justify the cash. Plus once I found out it was pretty much Level Five of the Andromeda Strain quarantine in there, I did genuinely worry I might inadvertently kill a baby panda with my dread disease of overtired plus premenstrual.

"Oh, it's going to be a huge party," he always starts.

I indulgently mutter assurances that I know it will be, that he will no doubt rage against the dawn, him and a flock of craigslist outcall entertainers and a vodka slip-n-slide and possibly a bounce house full of pineapple Jell-O, all while scanning the pages of the latest Coastal Living.

"You don't even know, Erin," he says. "You don't even know." And then he frisbee tosses last month's Travel and Leisure within four inches of the dog who flexes his nostrils toward it slightly and, deciding it's not a pillow, sighs.

Randy knows I know he's not going to have two hundred people over and outsource a bunch of naked whitetrash werewolves to get spray glitter all over my furniture. Randy knows I know he's going to work fourteen hours instead of the usual twelve, and then he's going to fall asleep in his purple chair with a rum cocktail and "The Secrets of Blood Jungle 3: Everybody Back to the Cave" on the SyFy channel. It will probably still be light outside.

After almost eleven years, I no longer have the energy nor the indulgence necessary to assume my role as the horrified wife in Randy's little performance. I mean, how many times can I pretend to admonish him for his plan to dig a pit in the front yard to fill with snakes and canola oil? Like three hundred times and then I'm out, man, I give up, build it. Go. Here's a shovel. 

And then he gets all sad.

"You're no fun, Erin," he says. Sad. "I remember when you were fun."

Really? Because I totally don't.

To his credit, Randy has recently figured out a way to get a satisfying reaction out of me. He has taken on the dog as an improv partner. And because Jake has no idea what's going on and also because he never got that call back from The Second City, he's in.

Randy saw my upcoming BlogHer trip to San Diego as an opportunity for acting duo greatness.

"Just four more days, Jake," Randy would say, scratching the dog's tail nub, "Four more days till she leaves and then it's raw bacon for EVERYbody."

And I couldn't help it, I couldn't. Because even though I knew what he was doing? I've totally straight up seen Randy feed Jake raw bacon. Like, that shit happened.

"Randy," I said, putting down my magazine. "Seriously."

"Raw bacon and grapes and avacado..."

"Okay, grapes are like REALLY poisonous for dogs."

"... grapes and raisins and grape juice..." he cooed.

"You need to STOP TALKING TO THE DOG."

"... DIPPED IN CHOCOLATE!" he finished. Triumphant. The Jake licked his knee and exited Stage Right. 

Ultimately, none of those things happened.

Ultimately, the septic tank instead decided to take a fairly critical dive on Friday, resulting in three poop-filled bathtubs and about 1,500 pounds of solid waste being pumped out of the side yard.

I recieved this news from the safety of my California hotel room, where the bathroom didn't smell like low tide and not all of the towels were in various phases of gross unusability.

"I didn't get to the office until three," he told me over the phone. "How's that for timing?"

I raised my arms over my head in the sign of the touchdown.

"Well, at least you've got your party tonight to cheer you up," I told him.

"I don't really feel like it anymore," he pouted.

"Aw, come on," I encouraged, "someone has to motorboat all those strippers."

"Eh," he sighed. "Maybe I can get them to mop."

Aw, look. Our first banana pepper. I watched and waited and waited and watched until finally the big day came; I cut the pepper off the plant with a flourish- me, the Mayor of Peppertown- carried it inside in my sweaty cupped hands, and presented it to Randy:

"Dinner," I announced, donning both my chef's hat and my gardening clogs, "is served."

Check it out! The first cherry tomatoes! I ran in to show Randy.

"Lookit!"

"What are those?"

"They're tomatoes!"

"They're too small to be tomatoes."

"They're cherry tomatoes."

"They're too big to be cherry tomatoes."

"Taste one!"

"Gross, no, I hate tomatoes."

Oh, that's right, you hate tomatoes. Awesome! I love tomatoes, more for me!

My first plan of action was to maximize my personal tomato consumption by hanging up bird netting. I didn't see the need to be exact with the netting, assuming as we all do that birds are dumb, panicky creatures who won't want to get anywhere near a spider web of net. This philosophy held until I personally witnessed a bird not only maneuver himself underneath the net, but also ninja-step out from under it again. He saluted then, picked a tomato seed out of his beak, and flew off.

There are so many layers of bird netting draped across the tomato plants now that the tomatoes are almost completely unobtainable. In order to harvest, I need a pair of scissors and some tongs. As an added bonus, I can never find the holes I cut so every day I just cut new holes. The birds just roll their tiny little eyes at me and call me idiot behind my back.

Every morning before Randy leaves for work, he points to yesterday's tomato stash on the counter and goes, "You better eat some tomatoes today." And every day I DO, okay, I DO eat some tomatoes, but then there are MORE tomatoes-- they just keep coming, my god, they're relentless-- and Randy comes home, throws his keys on the table and points: "You better get busy," he says. "Eat the one that looks like a foot."

Over the last couple of weeks, the tomato plants took a turn; all the lower leaves died and crumpled away, and all the top growth sort of stagnated in an anemic, yellowish way. Three out of the five plants have collapsed in on themselves because their cages aren't tall enough and the weight of the fruit has them buckled hard over the wire edges. As those limbs became more and more taut and everything became a little more brittle, I secretly hoped this might be the end of tomato growing season. But I walked out there today and do you know what I saw?

NEW GROWTH.

Oh yeah! New shoots, new sprigs, fresh green stems and buds and shit, all waving at me enthusiastically from underneath six layers of shredded net.

Even the old hobbled growth keeps spitting out fruit. There's this one plant, a Lemon Boy, it's completely gnarled up; one branch tried to bust out with like twenty giant tomatoes and the whole thing just ended up facedown in the dirt. The tension on that branch is unbelievable; I feel like if I cut that one branch off, the rest of the plant would sproing back upright like a catapult. But every time I get near it with some hedge clippers (and some scissors and some tongs), it's busy making more damn fruit. I can practically hear it grunting down there, like, "Hey, no, I'm okay down here, can you still reach me even though I'm almost literally growing underground now? Yeah, no, I think I can grind out a few more for you... hhnnnnnnnnnnggggg!" And then it invariably pops out another black-cracked tomato I have to partially unbury to pick, and it's almost always shaped like a foot.

I took this picture six weeks ago to document how CRAZY and INSANE the cucumber plants were; I mean just LOOK at them, all VINING NEATLY ON THE TRELLIS and everything.

I mean, one morning I reached underneath there and this cucumber bonked me on the head! I didn't even see it! Can you even believe the insanity?

This morning I woke up around four-thirty with a cucumber vine wrapped around my left wrist. I trudged outside in the dark where six cucumbers took turns patting me down with their nubs, like silent green TSA agents with no hands.

The cucumber vines are everywhere. They've negotiated the net and are in consorting with the tomatoes, they've strangled the basil, they've completely suffocated the mint, don't even get me started on what they did to the onions. And here's the other thing? Cucumber plants are the goddamn electric eels of the garden; the vines are completely covered in these terrible tiny spikes-- as are the leaves, to a lesser degree-- so forget about touching them. The cucumbers themselves are boobytrapped with sporadic thorns, too, all of which makes finding and harvesting them a fucking treat. Early on I found myself gingerly picking through the tangled mass of leaves and spikes, but now I'm just pissed-- you're only CUCUMBERS, FOR GOD'S SAKE, GET OVER YOURSELVES-- and I just sort of kick through everything and sigh heavily whenever I find an actual cucumber I'm forced to pick. I don't even look under the trellis anymore, fuck that, God only knows what's going on under there. And I only get near any of it in the evenings because the rest of the time this whole Venus flytrap setup is conveniently covered in bees.

Two weeks ago I planted four different varieties of native melons. The directions everywhere instructed me that I had room for two plants so I planted sixteen. Half of those died immediately, leaving eight melon plants.

See? Okay. Here's where we are now:

In another two weeks it's going to be The goddamned Ruins in there, man; just severed limbs and phantom cell phones, all day long.

You know what's an awesome idea, by the way? Trellising melons. Because you know what melons are good at? Defying fucking gravity.

I think next season I'll grow pumpkins, but only if I can somehow grow them up a single piece of kite string, and only if I can set it up right over my bed so there's always a giant pumpkin dangling from a string above my face when I sleep.

And it goes without saying that this particular variety of giant string-climbing pumpkin should be electrified.