3 September 2003

(It's my grands' anniversary! Yay for them!)

Either I had a marvelous dream, or we had our first Bay Area thunderstorm early this morning. Four claps of thunder, I heard. I don't even care if it was a dream. It was lovely.

I have been asked whether our house is nr lk. Hee. You know it is. We're nr two lks, actually, although at least one of them is more like a pond, and there are turtles that migrate through our yard from lk to lk. (We ended up with 2FP as well, but we were going to have at least one -- it's Minnesota.) Also, Wendy has correctly surmised that the existence of a three-season porch also means that we will have seasons numbering at least three. (As a point of fact, we will have four seasons. Ooooh.) Oh, hey, I might not have mentioned that in the journal: we get a three-season porch. Glassed in, lots of sliding doors. I'm going to put the Christmas tree out there, because I think it'll look lovely, and also we can appreciate it without tripping over it.

I've been cropping pictures, and they'll go here when I'm done. Goodness knows when that'll be. Mark didn't take the car today, so I'm going to try to get some errands done: the grocery store, the pharmacy, Trader Joe's, the office supply store, Hallmark, the post office, the bank, the library, the bridal store, the store what sells boxes...I think that's it. But it's certainly enough. I also have to wait to hear from the mortgage lady this morning to get some things figured out for sure before I can leave, so I may use that time to post pictures. Various friends and relations have been really, really good about not bugging me for pictures, and I hate to try their patience.

One thing I want you all to know: I may be slower answering e-mail than my usual, but I will still like getting it, over the next month and a half or two months. Please don't stop writing to me just because you think I'm busy. Sometimes distractions are a good thing.

Let me see, what else...oh! Peridot Books has published the reprint of The Handmade's Tale, so there's something else to entertain you. Go, read, enjoy.

I read Scientific American yesterday but didn't get much further along in Timescape; too many other things demanding attention, I guess, and it's not grabbing me enough this time around to make me want to set aside other things to read it. Ah well; I'll get through it quickly enough and then have library books and one borrowed from David still and new books and all. Always plenty to read.

I didn't finish "Silent Teraphim" while I was gone. I underestimated how much house hunting would eat not only my time but my brain, and for once I decided not to push myself until I was exhausted and ready to cry all the time. (I got to that point anyway, but much later in the week, and it didn't last as long as it could have.) So I still have that to do. Needless to say, I also didn't finish the edits on Reprogramming. All of that was ideal case scenario -- if we fell in love with a house the first day we looked, I'd have the rest of the week to lounge and loaf around Minneapolis, to sit at a coffee place and gaze out the window thinking brilliant thoughts about fiction and life and home. Didn't happen. I'll save up my brilliant insights for later, I guess.

Heard from Pam just now, and we're waiting on one more piece of information. Uff da mai, this is nerve-wracking; even knowing that we've got what we need and can do this, it makes me jumpy. My dad says my mom has the same reaction to this sort of transaction. (This sort = large.) We'll be fine. But still, I have a fear of Things Coming Up. Things do that, you know.

We really are getting a good house, though. Some of the other houses we saw were...um...they most certainly were. We saw one where they'd added rooms to connect the garage to the house in an old 1920s house in Nokomis. It had such features as a door that slid up and down a story on pulleys in the kitchen and an accidental steam room. We saw one where a family had added on a huge family room, with basement below and second story bedrooms above, rendering their old living room useless (it became only a walkway between other rooms) and chopping up space into tiny, unusable chunks. If we'd been wanting to host some kind of retreat or training session where people would be staying no more than a week, this would have been the house for it, because the choppy little alcoves would be tolerable to stay in for about that long. That's not what we do, though.

We saw one house where the owner had chosen not one but two fussy flowered patterns of moss green carpeting for the public areas. The master bedroom carpet and all the master bathroom features were a deep, bright rose. (It reminds me of the story my aunt Kath tells about when they got into a purple velvet hotel when Marmar was 3, and Marmar, eyes like saucers, said, "Oh, Mommy, this is the most beautiful room in the world!" Maybe some 3-year-olds would have that reaction to the pink of the master suite, but I doubt that very many people over that age would do the same.

We saw a massive wooden bathtub and a Smurf-blue bidet.

We saw...oh, the horrors we saw were much more horrific in July. The wonders were a bit more wonderful, too; July houses were more of a mixed bag. I'm not certain that in the final analysis they would have been any better for us than the house we're in the process of getting. But they were a bit more extreme, as a group.

I really hope not to make this Mrissa's House Journal, but on the other hand, if I ramble and let my mind wander, this is often what comes out. I started a story unrelated to that entirely last night, one that might be useful for an October anthology deadline but might not; I am of the philosophy that We Shall See.

Often I'm reluctant to share big news in the journal unless and until it's absolutely for sure down to the signatures. I thought about not sharing the housing news until we had absolutely cleared every hurdle. But this time it seemed like something to talk about, and if something horrible was to happen, I'd want all the sympathy I could get here.

I made a satay with beans from Bobbie's garden last night. We have three of her tomatoes, one of which I'm eating for lunch. (With lunch, that is; as a part of my lunch. For those of you who get concerned that a tomato will comprise the entirety of my lunch.) I'm not entirely sure how the gardening will go in this new house. I've gardened before, but only in an extremely limited Mom-does-all-the-work sense, when I was 8. I don't so much care about flowers as long as things look decent, but I want yumminess. I want fresh mint in my mojitos and fresh tomatoes in my salad. If we can't do that ourselves, we'll just have to get one of those stakes in the organic farm dealies, or practically live at the farmer's markets or something.

Future future future. I need to focus on now. Now I will be eating bread and tomato brought from home. Now I will be making a detailed errand list and running errands. Now I am really hungry all of a sudden, and I need to remember to think about now sometimes so that I notice these things. Bread. Tomatoes. The present. Now.