I celebrated President’s Day like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln would’ve wanted me to. I read a book and went to a movie.

I cannot say that The Thirteenth Tale is a great book, but it certainly has a great story. I would say it’s kind of like Possession and My Dream of You along with some description-laden paragraphs that occasionally you have to skim because OHMYGOD YOU’RE ABOUT TO FIND OUT SOMETHING HUGE. If you start reading and find yourself rolling your eyes around page 16, I recommend plodding through, because it gets much better. Britishy and literary and ghosty, if you’re in the mood for that (which apparently I was; I started it Sunday night and finished Monday as I was cooking dinner.)

On the movie front, I know I should’ve gone to see Letters from Iwo Jima or Pan’s Labrynth, considering it is a miracle that they are playing here at all, but I could not resist the pull of Hugh Grant, calling to me from across the sea, wanting me to support him through his recent breakup. So I went to see Music and Lyrics, and it was delightful, and everyone was pretty and smart, and I will totally buy the soundtrack to hear Hugh Grant singing “PoP! Goes My Heart” again and again.

Also, today is Vendela’s birthday, which requires me to tell you a story about her, so here goes:

Once upon a time Mrs. Floon was dogsitting, and the dog brought a dead rat inside her house. Mrs. Floon called me, panicky, to DO SOMETHING, only we had gone out the night before and I apparently was still drunk because when I answered the phone I had the receiver turned upside down and had to tell her, “I can’t hear you. My phone’s fucked up.” When I cleared that hurdle I told Mrs. Floon that I could not pick up the rat for her, but would come over for moral support. I went to her house, screamed a little as I dropped a box over the rat (the giant, dead, wet-from-having-a-dog-lick-it rat) so we wouldn’t have to look at it, and then we sat in the next room considering what to do next. We called Vendela, who was like, whatever y’all, and who came over and acted like she picked up gigantic spit-covered dead rats with her wad-of-paper-towels-protected hand every day. And then, after the rat and its spitty fur and its contaminated paper towels were out of the house, Vendela started to freak out. She was not prepared for how heavy the rat would be.

In other words, Vendela is my hero, my rat-removing hero! Happy birthday!