Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Where Was I...?

It’s not my fault.

I swear, it’s not! I was totally gonna post two weeks ago to tell you about any number of things (there are actually numbers of things. As in more than one thing. I think maybe even more than TWO! It’s entirely possible that I could legitimately use the words ‘a few’ to quantify the things I planned to write about!) but I ran out of time before the annual Mother’s Day at the Coast (also called “Hey, let’s hang out and eat for a solid two days and oh look, water!”). But no problem, I’d just write one of my number of things when I got back on Sunday.

But then instead of spending the whole weekend at the coast and coming home on Sunday my house broke. It sprung a leak. One of those leaks that results in water coming to live in your carpeting which, as I understand it, is a bad thing.

Here’s the other crazy part, by the way: this is the SECOND time this house has flooded since I’ve lived here. Most people go their whole lives without ever having to walk across a room to the dulcet tones of “Squelch. Squish. Other sounds of water inside the floor-stuff” and yet I’ve done it now twice! Oh yes, there’s no doubt about it: I’m special. (I’m just now realizing I should probably have included that in my online dating profiles: “has magical ability to fill homes with an over-abundance of water.” Drat.)

Last time it was much worse and it was an insurance claim and I spent a couple of weeks living on concrete flooring with all of my belongings either boxed up by strangers or up on these little foam blocks. The foam blocks were actually really cool – I kept as many of them as I could and still use them for stuff. For about 6 of those days I felt like I was living inside the jet engine of a 747 preparing for take-off – there were fans, fans, fans running all the time. ALL. THE. TIME.

This time around it was only about 1/2 as bad – we kept the laminate flooring and the carpet, just replacing one pad and drying it all out for a week. Baseboards were removed and dime-sized holes punched in the sheetrock to make sure the air could circulate behind there and dry out the wall because hey, did you know that sheetrock is basically made out of paper? PAPER. All of our homes are essentially 2X4s covered up with thick paper and paint. Go ahead and try not to think of that tonight while you’re going to sleep. One solid sneeze and I’m pretty sure the whole thing comes down.

Where was I? Oh right, not my fault.

So I spent all of last week living at my parent’s house while mine was filled with a dozen mini-tornadoes. (I’ll admit that it was pretty amusing to drive past the place and see the front curtains in a constant state of mini-twister.) My parents do have a computer, but frankly it was three days of falling down sleepy every time I stopped moving for more than five minutes (I would so suck as a shark) followed by another three days of catching up on my life and then I had to move everything all back IN—

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I had to box up about 75% of my entire house, along with all the furniture, and store it in my carport. And I had to do all of the packing and schlepping and storing in about 6 hours. And that I’m awesome, because I did it in 5 hours. And then I spent a week saying “I need to get my {whatever} – oh, that’s right. It’s somewhere in my carport. Somewhere.” Followed by a healthy shaking of my fist to the skies. Good times.

Now where was I? NOT MY FAULT! RIGHT!

So now I’m back in and the boxes are about 2/3rd unpacked and somethings are actually improved by the whole exercise – why does anyone need two copies of Orson Scott Card’s Children of the Mind (the least accessible of all the Ender books if you ask me) or the second of the Griffin and Sabine trilogy? Hmmm? Why? Exactly. Still it’s taken me this long to get over the non-stop tired and finally be reflective contemplative narrative tell-you-guys-stuff-ive enough to get this out on the interwebs. Now that you’re caught up there will be a whole bunch of catch-up posts about the few (see? I told you I could l legitimately use it!) things I was going to post before. Think of it like the “Next on Unlikely In Love…” flash-forward thing.

Oh, one other thing: I saw the new Star Trek movie and LOVE, LOVE, LOVED IT! And I promise I won’t tell you anything from the whole movie if you guys all promise NOT to tell me anything about the last few episodes of Lost because I’m VERY, VERY BEHIND.

Even though it's totally NOT my fault.

No comments: