21 October 2003

It's raining. The sound of rain on the leaves in the backyard is subtle, a crinkling; I have to leave the office window open to hear it, but that's all right. The wind is blowing from the other direction, and not very hard. Last night it was windy, and I had trees to listen to the noise of the wind in. The birches are bare. The oaks have gone to red now. Mark has asked if there will still be leaves to rake when he gets home. I think so. We have lots of trees.

It's not the most romantic thing anyone has ever said, but without Mark, the laundry comes out wrong. I have half loads, or I have to go longer before I do a load at all. Timprov does his own laundry. Mark and I have a laundry routine together. And now it's all messed up. On second thought, I think anyone who can't find romance in domesticity is not trying hard enough.

I missed my first California thing yesterday. Well...not really a thing, I guess, and I've missed people in California before this. But Alex my postal guy wasn't really a friend per se. It's not that I miss his lame jokes. It's that I could go in and rattle off what I needed, and even though his English was not so great, he already knew half of my order, so he could focus on the other half. I went into the post office yesterday, and the guy behind the counter listened to me until I was done, and then he said, "Slow down, honey. I'm not a waitress. I can't remember all that." Sigh. Well, he'll get used to it, or someone else around there will; or I'll realize that we're 2-5 minutes from the post office, instead of 15-25, and that I don't really have to be quite that efficient.

I'm still working on the habit of going downstairs and getting myself water. The idea that I don't work on house stuff before noon has been a good one for the time being, until the house stuff is more "in place," so that's a habit that I think will work. (People with day jobs have time set aside for work. Right now, I need to, too.) But I do need to remember to go get myself water. It's addictive stuff, water. I never used to drink it at all except at restaurants, and then I got used to grabbing myself a glass of water, and now I miss it. Now I need to do it all the time. Stupid addictive water. It doesn't even make my contacts less dry on airplanes, it just makes me have to use airplane bathrooms more often, and I keep drinking it anyway. Silly silly.

I'm also not any better as a snacker in the house than I was in the apartment. If anything, I'm worse. You remember how it went in the apartment: I would get hungry enough to get a headache. I would spot raisins (one of the few snack foods directly visible from my computer). "Ah ha!" my brain would cry. "Raisins!" I would then eat a handful of raisins and put the raisins back in their drawer in the tea caddy. Now...now I get hungry, and I do not see the raisins. I do not see anything: the office is currently snack-free. So I do not eat anything. Headache continues. Bad idea. The obvious solution here is snacks in the office. I bought a Toblerone when I was giddy with the cheapness of groceries last week. The Toblerone could join me here in the office. Somehow, I haven't gotten around to it. I'm aware that this is not the final configuration of the office. It doesn't feature my grandpa's old desk, because the U-Haul was too jam-packed for that, so I'm still using my little desk that has room for monitor, speakers, mouse pad, and water glass. I do need to organize some stuff, though, and it can get reorganized when we figure out when and how to get the desk here.

The person who lived here before got catalogs from the Pottery Barn. The first of them arrived yesterday (along with forwarded mail from our last address! Yay!). I tried not to sneer at it. I failed. $200 for a floor pillow. Come on, people. A floor pillow. Two hundred dollars. There were some nice things in this catalog, some things I would like in my house, but I just couldn't get past it: floor pillow. Two hundred. Dollars. And they had a set of teen rooms themed "pretty in punk." They were pale pink or pale blue. Now, who's with me: is the Pottery Barn in pale pink or blue not anathema to punk? Is this not the very opposite of anything punk could be said to mean? Pottery Barn pastels. Punk. Ummmmm...no. But there were four little pillows with a p, a u, an n, and a k on them! No. I am not exactly the punk police, but no.

Maybe they were using my mom's version of punk, which is short for pumpkin. That's the only explanation I have for you.

I'm really loving Paladin of Souls so far, and I wish I felt like I had more time for reading it. Definitely recommended, to this point. The thing is, for awhile I really couldn't see why I wanted to keep reading it so much. It seemed like not much had happened. But Bujold was very good with Things Looming. You can feel them looming. And now they've started. Oh, it'll be good.

We got our test bookshelf up. It is indeed a bookshelf I want, so rah for that. Back to Target for the remaining three. Or four. I'm going to measure to see what we can fit in the library. Anyway, then the bookshelves will be up, and then we can start shelving the books, and then the house will look that much more livable. And be that much more livable.

And last night as I was going to bed, I jotted notes in my journal on how to finish this chapter of the Not The Moose Book. Not grand revelations. Simple, practical notes. The kind of notes I make when I'm writing a book. Which means I'm kind of getting back into the swing of writing this book. Which is really, truly good.

For some reason, my theme song today is "Inch By Inch." You know, "Inch by inch and row by row, gonna make this garden grow. Gonna mulch it deep and low, gonna make it fertile ground...." Simple little folk tune. I probably should have learned it in grade school or Brownies, but I don't remember knowing it before Matt and Jess introduced me to Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger's "Precious Friend" album. Anyway, it seems appropriate somehow. Inch by inch....