Emma likes to sing. No, she LOVES to sing. She makes up songs about every topic you can imagine, and, truth is, she can probably imagine more than you. A lot of her everyday activities are accompanied with a tune. "I'm sitting on the potty ..." (Probably best for me to let you fill in the rest there. Her songs know no bounds.)

So today, at a special girls' lunch out to celebrate a good week at school, I wasn't paying much attention to what she was singing. It wasn't until she raised her voice on "old ballgame" that I realized it was a real song. I asked if she'd learned it at school, and she confirmed she had. With a quick glance around to ensure no other customers were seated nearby, I started singing with her. (I need to join in when I can, because she often implores me to sing on the made-up songs. And then gets mad that I don't know the words.)

About halfway through, she started interrupting. I finished off the verse before stopping to listen.

"What did you ask, Emma?"
"Why are they rude?"

A surreptious look verifies that no one is staring, pointing or otherwise being rude.

"Who, Emma?" I ask, as I play back the last 60 seconds and figure out her tangent. "Oh, honey, it's root, root, root for the home team. Not rude. It means 'cheer.'"

"Oh. She'd been thinking for a week it was a mean baseball team. But she's now excited about knowing a new word. I'm sure there will be a lot of rooting at our house this weekend.

The Oklahoman only cops to 13 days of rain in June, but I swear, there have been more than that. A lot more. We'd counted eight days when Abby visited at the beginning of the month (there's a chance some of that was in May, but still). And the experts say it's not enough to cover the drought from this spring, but I tell you, WE'VE HAD ENOUGH.

Our street floods after two minutes, because the yards are too waterlogged to take any more. Our flowerbeds are ponds. Every square inch of ground squishes. Lightweight trees are starting to lose branches from the water weight. I can't figure out what in the hell to wear or to put Emma in. It's summer! Or is it spring? Wait, that breeze feels like fall.

I think we've had one day without rain in the last two weeks. (See, that's 13 days right there.) And, of course, these are the two weeks we've got swim class. Nice. We've been lucky in that it's been mostly clear by late afternoon, so weather hasn't forced us to move inside. (A puking kid did cause that to happen, though.) The indoor pool isn't heated at all, and at least the outdoor one gets sun now and again. But when that sun only comes for an hour or two after a day's worth of rain, the water is damn chilly.

And I had rejoiced that with Em sans parents in class this year, I wouldn't have to shave from ankle to hip. But it's really fun to go early and swim with her beforehand, so I've been forced to tidy up my bikini line at 6:40 a.m. every morning. We won't mention the fact that my calves have a 5 o'clock shadow by 4.

I shouldn't complain about the weather too much, though, as it's a good 10 degrees cooler than usual. If we're willing to brave the muck, mosquitoes and puddles, it's quite pleasant out there. Still, it doesn't feel much like summer.

Case in point: The Fourth of July party was scheduled for today at Em's preschool. Ever hopeful, we packed her swimsuit and towel for promised sprinkler and bubble play. Didn't happen. I visited for an hour, even after it became clear they weren't going out, and the kids were stuck inside, watching a movie. (Why they don't have rainy-day activities for indoor recess, I don't know. I was pretty annoyed, even with Emma B. and Emma M. in my lap. It was only 15 minutes, but still.) The sun started breaking through the clouds just as we were leaving, and I spirited my Emma out of there before she realized there was a chance the all-day kids were going to have their promised fun.

I guess we've had our own little bit of sunshine, though, with Emma's preschool progress. She doesn't cry at home when it comes up anymore, though I can't say Adam and I are raring to start conversations on the subject. She got a little teary when Adam dropped her off Tuesday, but calmed quickly, and whined just a bit this morning. No tears at all, though. And I got to meet some of her friends today, which was sweet. One plopped right down beside me and introduced herself, explaining she was Emma's friend. Em told me that many of them weren't there today (I kept asking her to point them out), and we had a drive home full of speculation about where they were.

Bedtimes are back to usual and today she complained that it was the last scheduled day at the pool -- "I want more swim class!" Far cry from her sobs of last week about leaving us for the water.

And we can hit the park now and then, which we wouldn't be keen on if it were a normal summer. Every cloud has a silver lining, blah, blah.

About this time every day of late, I've been wandering down to the vending machines. Recently, I've been justifying it this way: Emma's got swim class at 6:10, so we can't have dinner until much later than usual. I need a snack (and a Vanilla Coke) to tide me over. Honestly, though, I'm just addicted. I don't drink the entire 20-ounce coke in one sitting, I'm proud to say, but the other half does wait for me in the smarmy fridge across the hall. And if I get a Twix, sometimes I'm able to save half of it ... but often only until 4:50, when I frantically stuff it into my mouth and then drink oodles of water, so Emma won't catch it on my breath. That kid, I tell you, can sniff out one bite of something sweet from across the room. God forbid I have dessert after she's gone to bed, because 30 minutes later she's calling for me to restart her CD and asking, "Did you have ice cream? I smell ice cream."

But I'm digressing from my real point, my junk-food habit. We don't keep much at home, so as much as I rag on Adam for eating small bites of leftover casseroles all day long (or stealing one tiny square out of the brownie pan at a time), I make up for it in the office. I stopped keeping candy on my desk, because I'd eat 15 minitature Reese's Cups before anyone braved the basement to see me and steal one.

So I hit the vending machine. And today, when I'm really hungry, it hit back -- insolently spitting out my dollar bill and demanding exact change, which I don't have. I'd dug through my wallet for the perfect bill before walking down the hall, one that hadn't a wrinkle or tear. And still, no love.

Maybe I wasn't the only one to notice how snug this skirt has gotten.

The damn thing won't taunt me, though. I'll just drink the entire V-Coke, instead.

We're reading Little House in the Big Woods to Emma, and she's really enjoying it. I'm sure I've read Little House on the Prairie at some point, and I remembered dialogue, so I'm surprised at how much of this one is straight description. She's eating it up, though, and we're constantly in conversation about how they didn't have grocery stores, why they used lanterns for light, poor Laura with her corncob doll and so on.

In the car en route to Dallas this weekend, we started the chapter on Christmas. I'm about a third of the way through their pre-holiday preparations when Emma pipes up with, "I guess they're not Jewish, then."

Funny kid.

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Also on this trip, we watched Disney's version of James and the Giant Peach. The animation is nifty and so on, but BOY is the movie disappointing after reading the book. I wish we hadn't wasted our time.

On the other hand, Stuart Little (which we haven't read) was quite charming.

I walked into the den Sunday and smelled smoke. "Adam, come quick!" He rushes in, and I tell him something's on fire somewhere. It's not in the kitchen or outside, and Adam quickly ID's the source -- our desktop computer.

Yay.

We've needed a new machine for quite some time, so, despite the fact that I wasn't able to coerce Adam into a Mac (he needs a PC for work), it's good that we've ordered a new one. What won't be good is if our IT friend can't rescue the data that was on the old machine. He and Adam are guessing the power supply went bad, which should mean the hard drive is OK. It's got all the full-sized digital pics of Emma on it, and we've pretty much stopped taking photos with the film camera. We've got many of them up on her site, but not all, and the ones there are compressed. We'd just said we needed to start ordering a batch at a time from Snapfish, since her non-Web albums stopped about a year ago.

All our financial info was in Quicken, also on the machine. Adam backed it up fairly recently, but it would still be a bitch to start over.

My non-Blogger E-Scout files are there, too, so no updating Emma's favorites or my book lists (other than in the sidebar) for a while. Argh.

If it is indeed the power supply, we may have that fixed and set the machine up just for Emma's use. I'm not sure we'll even do that, as we've had the whole thing rebuilt a couple of times and it may not be worthing putting any more money into. But for now, we're down to just the laptop at home, which means, gasp, both of us can't be online at once. Life's hard.