As of last night, our ’70s-lounge-y lamp from Target is broken.

My handy husband did everything he could – he checked the bulbs, then um, checked the bulbs again. Nothing wrong with the bulbs, so we can’t think of much else to do. It seems such a waste, since the lamp is only a couple of years old. But as you can see, my computer screen is now the brightest thing in my corner workstation, which is no condition for knitting.

While we think about what to do with the lamp, we’ve started appreciating the alternative lighting we have in our bedroom. Not really enough to knit by, but pleasant nonetheless:

This is Marcel Dzama’s Sad Ghost lamp. I got it for John for Christmas a year and a half ago. He is so sad, you have to love him.

And this one was a gift to me from John’s sister several years ago. This cat is apparently called Kamkam, but I haven’t found much about it on the web, though I think I’ve seen other products at Toy Tokyo.

In any case, I wish our so-stylish Target lamp had lasted as long as our silly novelty lamps!

Owasso, Oklahoma, is my hometown, which I’m visiting right now. It’s a refreshing change of pace from the city – open skies and strip malls and a church on every corner – which I can appreciate so much more now that I’m no longer living there.

The view from my parents’ backyard.

When I’m home, I always make some time to peruse the Owasso Reporter. In addition to the pageant queens and local parades and the occasional sex offender story, in recent years the paper has also included all the police calls and arrests from the week. They are generally a riot and make Owasso seem like the the oddball suburban town that it never really was.

Browsing the past week’s calls, many of them struck me as more poetic than droll, so I thought it might be interesting to rearrange some selected calls from the week into an imagined day in the life of my hometown. You could almost build a very atmospheric movie or novel out of these slices of humanity. (Street addresses have been omitted.)

10:54 a.m. – Check person. Elderly man all dressed in white staggering. Out with subject. Arrest.

2:21 a.m. – Disturbance loud noise/music. Loud music. Handled, officer advised they pinky swore to keep it down.

To my great joy, I just discovered that the crime blotter is now published online for me to enjoy from anywhere in the world. What a wonderful gift from the town that made me what I am today.

I didn’t mean to write a “worst of” series of Whole Foods purchases, but I feel obligated to warn against this mistake before others make it:

I’m not a picky eater, especially not when it comes to salads. I can be pretty forgiving, because really, what is it? Usually fresh greens and other, more colorful vegetables, with something tangy drizzled on top. Even the worst salad – iceberg lettuce, say, and too much ranch dressing – is completely fine with me. So when a dressing makes a salad inedible, it’s a real shame.

The above pictured dressing is so bad, we had to throw out the better part of an otherwise yummy tofu salad. The flavor had nothing to do with shitake (which I love) or sesame (which I also love), but instead was like something made from a powder for diabetics or astronauts. It tasted like the dressing McDonald’s would come up with if it were folly enough to try to make a sodium-free, sucrose-free, fat-free, “organic” dressing substitute. But McDonald’s is much smarter than that. (And this dressing wasn’t fat free, amazingly enough.)

So that’s one less bottle of dressing you’ll have to choose among next time you’re at Whole Foods. But shouldn’t we be making our own dressings ourselves? It seems like one of those things that’s easy to do, but I never get around to remembering how for long enough to actually make it….