When you care enough to send the very best, but don’t have spare change for a greeting card, send an Apple iCard. They’ll never forget it.

The Red Portfolio, the beloved blog of my best gal pal, Molly Gordon, celebrated its first birthday last week.

Read it daily (if you know what’s good for you): http://theredportfolio.blogspot.com/

Happy birthday, Molly’s blog. (Love the gold shoes, by the way.)

My Macworld San Francisco friend, Scott Rose, has a one-man show opening in Chicago. If you’re in the Windy City, go see this show!

“Computer Geek: One Nerd’s Search For His Soulmate”

Opening night: Thursday, April 13 at 8 p.m.

Improv Olympic
3541 N. Clark St.
Chicago, IL 60657
(773) 880-0199

Admission: $14

• For full details about the show: http://www.computergeekshow.com

• To view a new movie trailer for the show: http://www.scottrose.tv/videos.php?vid=4

Here’s a photo of Scott and me taken at Macworld San Francisco a few years ago.

Do you know a family in the Omaha metro area who needs a home computer? The Cox Connects Kids program, which I manage at Cox Communications, is in need of applicants.

Here are more details: http://www.cox.com/omaha/CCK.asp

Scrabble fans get help with Z’s and Q’s

THE LEXINGTON (KY.) HERALD-LEADER

You wouldn’t think a bunch of Scrabble players would be so drug dependent, but it’s a fact. The drug of choice is qat, an alternative spelling of khat, a plant found in Africa and Arabia whose leaf is chewed as a stimulant.

The reason qat is so popular with word freaks is that of the handful of allowable words on a Scrabble board that take a Q but no U, qat is the easiest one to play. In fact, among the 2,000 or so dues-paying members of the National Scrabble Association, qat is possibly the most frequently played word in Scrabble tournaments. Tournament players largely consider the Q a liability, and they tend to play it immediately or trade it in.

But players might be able to largely kick their qat habit, thanks to qi.

Qi – pronounced chee – is defined in the “Official Scrabble Players Dictionary” as “the vital force that in Chinese thought is inherent in all things.” In tai chi and some other forms of meditation, qi is harnessed by relaxed, controlled breathing.

Qi is among 3,325 new words in the new “OSPD.”

Another potent new word will be za, slang for pizza. Never before have two-letter words with either the Q or the Z – the two highest-value tiles, at 10 points apiece – been acceptable.

Besides qi and za, three other two-letter words – fe, ki and oi – soon will be acceptable. There will be 41 new three-letter words, among them def, vid, duh and app, and 126 four-letter words, including blog, zine, goth and perv.

QTY PRICE TITLE Expected Ship Date
————————————————————————
1 $11.99 Quarterlife Crisis: The Unique Challenges of Life in Your Twenties
ISBN:1585421065 Mar 20, 2006
————————————————————————
$11.99 Net Product
$1.12 Tax
$3.99 Shipping
————————————————————————
$17.10 Total Shipment Price
————————————————————————

I don’t need any prize to determine whether Bush is a good leader.

He’s as bad as the food served at Olive Garden.

I just returned from a visit to Roger, my tax man. Roger is a retired Tax God who now works out of his home, wearing sweater vests and velcro shoes. His basement office walls are adorned with family photos. This one photo of Roger, where he’s wearing some sort of military uniform, appears to be 30 or 40 years old. And I’m reminded how much I love seeing the photo every spring.

And I’m reminded how completely clueless I am about the income tax system in this country. I should win an Oscar for my portrayal as an informed, tax-paying citizen after a night like tonight. If I asked Roger about every aspect of filing my taxes that I don’t understand, we’d be there all night.

So I nod my head a lot when he’s explaining things to me, using his slim yellow highlighter to indicate the important details of my tax return.

Roger is the gentlest of souls, so his approach allows me to hide my ignorance for the hour I’m there. He doesn’t press me on specifics.

But, more likely, Roger knows how dumb I am and he’s too nice to say anything.

So I suck on a peppermint from the candy dish on his desk and just smile until the 60 minutes have passed.

Some teen girls, in the early ’90s, may have documented their heartbreak and frustration in the privacy of pastel-colored journals, written with pink ink, where the letter “i” was dotted with a tiny, bubbly heart.

But not me.

I discovered the emotional outlet that journalism — specifically, the Personal Column — provided.

So I made the mistake of exposing my soul in one of the final issues of Paw Prints, my high school newspaper. I thought I was rather hot shit at the time and felt I would make my plea public.

The following is that very work, published in the spring of 1997.

I hope you laugh about it now as much as I did when I discovered it this weekend, tucked away in a file folder.

{And for those of you who write for a living, you may find it humorous that this column contains only four paragraphs. Something tells me that I could’ve broken up the text just a bit more.}

The line about me not swearing has become, quite obviously, complete bullshit. I didn’t swear until I started working at The Gateway in college. That naive Catholic girl who loved to write discovered, from her peers, a new vocabulary of four-letter words that couldn’t often be duplicated when telling, say, a dirty joke.

I haven’t been running in over a week, so decided today would be the day I go to Y and do some running and lift some weights.

But the Y doesn’t open ’til noon on Sundays, so come 11:30 a.m., I was still in my PJs at my PowerBook.

But then my good friend, Gail, emailed me, asking to spend the afternoon at her posh health club. (They serve alcohol, for gosh’s sakes.)

So Gail and I spent time on the treadmills and stationary bikes. Then, she suggested we end our workout with a trip to the sauna.

Now, I’ve never stepped foot inside a sauna. My only knowledge of what they are is from that episode of “Seinfeld” where Elaine “fell” into a woman to see if her boobs were real — or not.

So I’m dressed in my running shorts and sports bra, ready to unwind. (Let me clarify, however: I don’t do any sports — unless recreational alcohol consumption counts — so, I really don’t own a sports bra. You could call it a running bra or, perhaps, even a training bra.)

At any rate, Stupid Wendy wore her glasses into the sauna, thinking she’d be able to see.

Wrong!

And I brought in my bottle of water, thinking it would stay cool enough to drink.

Wrong again!

But being immersed in the steam and the silence was pure bliss. And my skin! How soft it was after I got out of the sauna.

I gotta see if my Y has a sauna. I just might be addicted to this.