You asked for her, and here she is. Leah at 35 weeks. You can see by her scowl that she's really done with this whole pregnant thing.

This is her favorite pink shirt. One thing that will be hard in 4 weeks or so, when maternity wear is no longer needed, is that the pink shirt will no longer be around. With all things there are trade-offs.

Went to a job fair yesterday at American University-- oh, wait, I’m sorry: TheAmerican University. Maybe they’re part of The Ohio State University franchise.

Either way, as far as I could tell from most of the “interviews” I conducted, they might have added the gratuitous “the” because it would be another word that AU students could be reasonably assumed to know how to spell correctly. They were not an impressive bunch. A typical conversation went like this:

Student: So……uh……is this, like, training for teachers?

Us: No, we’re opening an elementary school. Are you interested in teaching?

Student: Hmmmmmm…..I guess that could be interesting.

Us: Right. So will you be certified?

Student: Certified, like, for what?

Other than being pretty well underprepared and inarticulate, the students seemed to not know how to dress for the event. About half had on suits or suit equivalents, and the other half ran the gamut from Styles Section-Tieless to Polo/Docksiders Chic to Neo-Gym Clothes. Apparently sloppy is the new gray. We had one person -- a graduate student, no less -- who sidled on over in those “big pants” that they kids are so fond of. Another seemed to be cutting through the room on his way back from track practice.

The bigger draws – who really wants to teach, anyway? – were the temporary staffing firm next to us and the CIA, which was giving out little foam stress-release squeezie things shaped like globes. A fitting metaphor for our military might, to be sure: Feeling bad? Join us, and we’ll go take it out on everyone else around the world. The CIA recruiters sort of made me jealous, because, you know, the CIA, but the temporary staffers just made me a little sad. All those 22-year olds in their shiny new suits (or torn jeans, but still, they were in metaphorical new suits) stuttering while handing over their resumes, all for a temp job as an accounting clerk. The staffing firm gave away pencils but nothing designed to relieve stress.

Though the fair ran from 1-5, around 3:00 it became clear to some employers that AU promised pretty slim pickin’s in the employable grown-up department, and so people started packing up to leave. No, just kidding! They abandoned their posts by signs for Enterprise Rent-a-Car and the like and wandered from booth to booth collecting pens, foam crap, and other assorted swag that seemed entirely unlikely to convince someone to work in your office. People seem to respond to, you know, interesting work and money, not necessarily in that order. I tried to tell someone from United Airlines (hiring only flight attendants and ground crew. You need a college degree for…what, exactly?) that she absolutely could not have a free Lighthouse Academies pen, but she thought I was kidding, traded me a pair of wings, and swooped off to get more loot. It is not likely that they will hire me to be a flight attendant.

As I scour the educational landscape for people who want to give us money to set up new schools, I wind up writing a lot of beg letters. I've noticed that a certain sentence always wants to creep into the closing, and I've decided to do my best to stamp it out. That sentence is, "If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at the number below," or some equally stupid variation.

If I didn't write this, I am sure the foundations of America would sit around saying, "Damn, I really want to send them $500,000, and all I need to know is how big the school is going to be, but, you know, I feel sort of funny calling the guy and asking. He's probably busy."

Look closely at your e-mails, my friends. You use this awful sentence, too. Together we can make it go away. Join me.

It's been a great week of driving around Indiana. Now I'm in Indianapolis, which to people in Boston is to Indiana as London is to England. You sort of confuse them and then, instead of feeling silly, you think, "Well, honestly, what's the difference?"

Indianapolis looks like a mall exploded and they called it a city. It's full of banks, chain restaurants disguised as real ones (a chain of brewpubs?) and Starbucks. Pleasant, like the mall.

Gary, where I spent Monday, is another story. It is no mall. Gary is probably the poorest city in Indiana - it certainly has the worst schools - and the main drag has really very few banks at all. Ok, none. Instead, it has pawn shops, check cashing places, blood-giving places, and evangelical churches. The funny thing about the places to sell blood is that they have official-sounding names, like BioPharm Plasma and MediPlas Pharm Center. For a second I thought they were some kind of biotech things until I remembered that the only jobs you can get in Gary are pawn shop guy, check-casher, Taco Bell chef, cop, pastor, and, if course, blood merchant. The other thing that Gary has a lot of are restaurants - little mom and pop places - that brag about having shrimp. Three or four a block: Fried Shrimp Here. Tip Top Fresh Shrimp. Shrimp, Fish, Seafood. (I love that one.) It is well known that our poorest cities have too few supermarkets and pharmacies and too many pawnshops and check cashing huts. Urban planners, take note: perhaps shrimp is the real problem.

Worst open house ever.

You could tell that 182 Church Street held something special by the lack of parking out front. A small white Colonial on a quiet street in a neighborhood of Boston, its Open House this past weekend had drawn at least 40 cars and maybe 100 people. That’s what you get when you put your house on the market for $75,000 under the value of most houses in the neighborhood.

I parked 6 blocks away and walked back. It was 1:05, the thing had started at 1:00, and people were already coming out, looking dazed. “I haven’t been inside,” said Marilyn, our realtor, “but I hear it’s rough.” She had already told us that it was underpriced but needed some cleaning. I imagined peeling paint, cracked Formica, various things in need of stripping, regrouting, and reckless check-writing. What I didn’t imagine, though, was the stench of cat urine.

That’s what hit us first when we walked in the front door to see a nice fireplace which was being used to store piles of old newspaper. To the left there was a torn pleather couch and some cheap bookshelves which had inexplicably been bolted into the plaster ceiling. That same ceiling had the scars of a few exploded radiators. Houses that heat with steam and don’t have automatic boiler re-fillers (a gadget common on newer boilers but prone to breaking while you’re on vacation, so the heat stops working or, like in this case, the boiler fills with water and shoots it out of the radiators) need someone to keep going down the basement and checking out the fill level of the boilers, and if you can’t get your goddamn cat to pee in a box, then you won’t be maintaining the boiler, either.

Next to the couch was an urn full of cigarette butts, the kind of ashtray popular in old barbershops. The smell was strong, but not strong enough to take on the cat urine. We headed for the kitchen. In the kitchen, we saw bits of newish maple cabinets and a granite counter. I say bits because most of the space was taken up with piles and piles of dishes from meals long since abandoned. Some of them were soup, and the pile of pots in the sink reminded me of what Bill Friedman used to call “Mount Dish” at our house at 57 Keene Street. Bacon grease was congealing on the stove. The floor was covered in leaves and dirt.

Upstairs, we saw that food storage was not limited to the kitchen counter, as each bedroom had evidence of something that had been accompanied by ketchup. The detritus on each floor gave lie to the ages of the people living there. One room had a few carcasses of computers and old Russian movies. Another had Green Day posters and beer bottles, and a third had soda cans and video game cartridges. My mother (the other half of “us” here; Leah was smart enough to be getting a massage while we subjected ourselves to this) insisted that we were witnessing the scene of child abuse. Each room came complete with an unmade bed that bore the impression of someone’s recently being woken up and scared off, piles of reeking laundry, and pieces of trash.

The attic held another bedroom (“cozy bedroom suite on 3rd floor!”) that, by now, was unremarkable. It held another delightful mélange of cigarettes, Russian DVDs, computer parts, and dirty plates. And cat litter.

We ducked outside and stood by the curb, enjoying the fresh air and cleansing sunlight. “You could lowball,” said Marilyn. I thought about what the look on Leah’s face would be when I got to the phrase, “…like cat urine.”

“Maybe,” I said. We stood for a few more minutes and watch people go in and then quickly run out, including a pregnant woman who lasted no longer than 45 seconds. We drove home. The house had never looked so good.

Last week we went for yet another ultrasound. You might think that all these tests can get a little scary. Or that impending parenthood freaks us out. Well, sometimes, sure. But they're nothing compared to the terror brought on by being given new-fangled 3-D ultrasounds. The lower left corner is what the doctor tells us is a face with a teeny hand covering it. We are skeptical.