Monday, July 31, 2006

Saturday night we were wild and crazy kids, staying up til 4 AM. What were we doing, you may ask? Cleaning the house, that's what. We had an open house planned for Sunday, and it was my chance to use every ounce of my OCD for the powers of good. Of course, one never knows what to expect with these things. At about 2:30 am, J said to me "please don't cry if no one shows up". I assured him I would try not to.

On Sunday the house looked so good, it almost made me not want to sell it. And, thankfully, people did show up, so I was able to save my tears for sappy Today show segments that I should not watch while I have PMS. Only 2 couples looked at the house, but apparently one couple expressed a lot of interest (and their son wanted to know if the guinea pigs were part of the deal). So keep your fingers crossed for us!

Friday, July 21, 2006

In honor of the fact that we have not yet killed each other (and hopefully this will remain the case at the time of our 1-year anniversary), J and I have decided to go back to Belize this fall. As of this morning, the tickets have been purchased!! :)

This time, we're going to stay on Caye Caulker, a laid-back, bohemian strip of sand right off the barrier reef. Six days of chilling and scuba diving, sounds about right to me. (OK, we might visit this place, too...just to switch it up).

Sorry, J hadn't had enough coffee yet this morning to be giddy about this with me, so I'm sharing my overflow of excitement with you, Internet.

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

My doorbell rang at 9:30 this morning, and I wasn't expecting anyone. I was still in my nightgown. I grabbed my robe (which, for summer, is short and satiny) and frantically ran about the house, trying to decide what to do. But then the bell rang again and, against my better judgement, I answered the door. Right away, I knew it was THEM: the Jehovah's Witnesses here to try to save my poor heathen soul.

In an effort to get rid of them, I tried to explain that I was working and that I'd be happy to take their literature, and, GOODBYE, NOW! They asked if it would be alright if they came back another time to see how I'd enjoyed my complimentary copies of the Watchtower and Awake!. I said, well, OK, but not during my business hours, which I explained were between 9 and 6. (Sorry, J, I know I should have said no but this is what happens when you are not here to help me with these things).

Now that my panic has died down and I can look at what transpired in retrospect, I wonder what those 2 nice ladies must have thought about a woman in a short silky robe with disheveled hair (and not much interest in the Lord) trying to explain that she works out of her home and that these are her business hours and that she really needed to get back to work...

Friday, July 14, 2006

tequila, inducer of apocalyptic dreams

Last night after 2 margaritas, I had a very vivid and detailed dream.

First there was a very short pre-dream, in which my friends Chrissy and Dave had gone to a movie and text-messaged me the ending: "The punks did it!"

Then, the big dream began. It started out with a cryptic premonitory note from my mother, warning us to fill up the car with gas and prepare to evacuate. While it was not exactly spelled out, I interpreted this to have something to do with upcoming potentially apocalyptic world events that would require mass fleeing and chaos. Next thing I knew, I was in the driveway of Heather and Jon Armstrong (of dooce and blurbomat, respectively), where Heather was completely freaking out, muttering about sea monsters and other things. In the meantime, there *was* mass chaos in the streets, and school buses lined the neighborhood, and everyone was being told to put their children on the buses. I had a strange feeling that something was not quite right, that maybe this was just a covert alien plot to abduct all of earth's children. But Heather was convinced that the earth was under attack of some kind and that putting the children on the buses was the right thing to do.

Fast forward to a sort of post-war scene, devoid of most people (at this point Heather was hiding in her attic in an almost catatonic state and Jon was creeping around the yard trying to avoid being seen), and full of overturned cars and other debris. Suddenly, a mass of youths came spilling out into the streets, cheering and causing a ruckus. I realized, "the punks did it!" It had been their plot all along to rid the world of mainstreamers by taking away their children, and they had succeeded by convincing everyone that the earth was under some kind of horrible attack.

(A side note: while I identified the youths as "punks" in the dream, and they did *act* like punks, they were clearly attired as goths.)

I need to stop drinking tequila before bedtime.

Monday, July 10, 2006

house-hunting heartbreak

So, as of today, our house is *officially* up for sale. We spent the weekend refinishing our deck (turns out the wood hadn't actually turned grey, it was just covered in a thick coat of mildew!), but still have a ton of organizing to do before I will actually feel comfortable having a showing. Tonight we tackle the nightmare of laundry and crap that is our bedroom.

Yesterday our realtor took us out to look at 2 houses we'd seen listed online. We absolutely fell in love with one of them, a huge colonial on over 2 acres with a big pond in the backyard. And it was a steal, price-wise. We spent the afternoon saying things like "we could put in a patio" and "I could build us a little dock there on the pond for our kayaks". Our realtor was supposed to call the agent and get "the scoop" on the house last night. We haven't heard from him yet. Last night I went online to look at the listing again, and lo and behold the house was listed as "Pending" sale. J says not to get too upset, that anything could happen, but I'm pretty sure we won't be getting that house. :( To cope with the not-quite-loss (can't really lose what wasn't yours to begin with!) I simply went back online and looked for more listings. Screw you, Buttermilk Lane, we can do better!

Monday, July 03, 2006

dream report

The other night I dreamt about falling. Two consecutive/connected dreams in which I fell from great heights, to be exact.

In the first part of the dream, I fell from or off of a very very tall building. Actually, it was the Sears Tower, but because the imagery as I fell in the dream was so vivid, I can tell you for sure that despite the great height of the Sears Tower, it was more like falling from an airplane. It was a LONG fall, and I wasn't terribly frightened. As the ground features became more visible, I started to look for a soft landing pad (as if I could somehow steer myself towards a dumpster or a truck full of feathers?), but suddenly a gust of wind blew me towards a body of water. I landed in the water and because it turned out to be something like a pond in the middle of an urban park, I walked right out of it unharmed.

Then, a while later, I was in the Sears Tower elevator with SV when something went terribly awry. There was a rumble or something, and then suddenly we knew that the building was falling straight over. Gravity shifted abruptly so that I was sort of stuck to the ceiling (formerly the side of the elevator). SV was wearing a hat and I grabbed for it while trying to brace myself in some sort of crash position. The next thing that happened was that the dream shifted into movie mode...my voice was narrating, saying things about how I had died. So that was strange, because in some way I did die in the fall yet not really because there was my voice narrating as if it were fiction. And then the dreaming continued with me in it somehow.

Isn't there an urban legend or something that says if you fall and die in your dream you've died in real life? Well, this isn't the first time I've fallen and died in a dream, and I'm still here to tell you about it, aren't I? Unless of course my brain is somewhere in a vat and none of this is real...think about that one, why don't ya?