medium crazy

Oh, where to begin. As I’ve told (complained) to several of you already, I’m in the midst of a collision of events that all ended up happening all at once. They’re not bad things, they’ve just been time consuming and keep distracting me from each other.

One of these is that I got that new job. Congratulations flowers from M:

He’s pretty nice to me. I officially start next week, but I’ve been busy at work wrapping up projects for my current job and starting some training and new projects for the new job.

Incidentally, my  job also relocated. To Rhode Island. The Ocean State, apparently, though that seems a little generous to me since it is not high on the list of states I associate with visits to the ocean. But I may just be a little bitter because my lovely ten minute commute to work is now an hour long, and I’ve suddenly become one of those cranky commuter drones who spends a good portion of the day wishing I could stretch my legs. I know many people commute an hour to work each day, and I always felt sorry for those people. The days are too short to spend two hours in the car. I may be extra cranky because there was such freaky rain today, so freaky that I thought I would take a different route home and made the huge mistake of trusting the GPS, and she brought me home on a route that will henceforth be known as The Wrong Way.

Oh also, just as I arrived at work this morning, I went over a speedbump and something apparently broke on the underside of my car and began dragging along the road, making banshee sounds and causing me to curse the Ocean State and everything in it. There was some inexplicable piece of metal that had apparently come dislodged from under my car. After work I rigged up a contraption using a sneaker and its shoelace to hold the piece of metal off of the road and headed to a nearby Rhode Island auto shop. The auto guy took a good look at my piece of metal and pulled it right out, informing me that it was SOMEONE ELSE’S CAR ANTENNA that had apparently gotten lodged under my car somehow and stuck.

I’m complaining, I know. On a positive note, our new office is beautiful and has a lot of lovely windows and a nice ambience, as far as cubicle ambience goes. And yet, as I said to M. over dinner, “I can’t believe I have to go back to Rhode Island again tomorrow.”

This weekend I went up to NH to visit with my family and do some furniture and other shopping for the new house, the new house being the third very time consuming thing going on right now. I spent my Saturday night doing this:

Looking at doorknobs!! That’s right kids, welcome to life when you’re thirty.

One of the delightful things about visiting NH is this:

Don’t Maddie’s eyes look kind of sad and wise? It’s funny, because this dog is not at all sad, nor wise. She is a dog who has a single-minded obsession with socks and who chewed up a piece of plastic on Sunday morning and then promptly threw it up, and why? WHY NOT, says Maddie. Why not. And those long fluffy front legs of hers are for her to embrace you with as she attempts to lick your face off. I don’t know if it’s possible for a human being to ever love you as ardently as this dog will.

On Sunday morning I visited Amy and Tim and their tiny little adorable new son Cian (pronounced Kee-an, love the name). They looked extraordinarily tired and extremely happy.

And now I have to get ready for bed. I have to go to another STATE tomorrow, people.*

* I will stop complaining about this at some point.

I’ve had some busy days followed by a day of emotional messiness and I apologize to everyone who I owe an email or some other kind of response to. I need to catch up. I’ll spare you the details, but will mention that days like yesterday make me appreciate having married someone who is infinitely kind, understanding and patient.

I got the promotion I had applied for at work. It was both exciting and disappointing, fiscally speaking. I don’t write about work, so I’ll save those details too. But I am going to be moving into a new role in a couple of weeks and this is a positive thing for me career-wise that I’ve been working towards for the past few years. So that is a satisfying accomplishment.

M. and I signed our purchase and sales agreement on our new home; did I tell you that already? Over the weekend I went to Home Depot and gathered roughly thousands of paint swatch sample thingys. I took so many that I half expected some orange-aproned person to come over and slap my wrist and tell me that you can’t just TAKE all that stuff. But you can! And I did. It’s paint swatch thingy mania at our place right now.

On Saturday I co-hosted a baby shower for my sister-in-law. There is going to be another baby in our family, the niece/nephew kind, the kind that you can gush over but have no real responsibiliy for, aka the really fun kind of baby. They are not finding out the sex of the baby nor are they revealing the baby’s name. In other words, I’m DYING. Major baby suspense here.

We had cute balloons.

Cute favors.

An extensive beverage selection.

And most importantly, an adorable cake.

I feel obligated to explain that we refer to the baby as “Poppy” because in the early weeks we learned that the baby was, at that point, about the size of a poppy seed. Nicknames are big in M.’s family.

So, I think the baby shower was a success and I really enjoyed it. Sunday was “free day” which as everyone knows is the day for things like sleeping, going to the gym, and spending a lot of money at Target. We also watched 500 Days of Summer, which had its cute moments but tried a bit too hard to be hip and charming and was probably aimed at a slightly younger demographic than mine. But it wasn’t terrible. Up arrives tomorrow. I’m quite certain that one isn’t for my demographic either.

Some things from the past few days:

First and foremost, my friend Amy had a baby boy on Saturday morning, her first baby. She texted us the news and a picture, but I am kind of dying for details. DETAILS PLEASE AMY!!! I am always really curious about labor, maybe because it’s totally incomprehensible to me. I’m so happy for her and Tim and this baby is very lucky to have these parents. Congratulations guys!

So…I spent the past two days in a book haze, one of those amazing moments when you’re so neck deep in a book that all you want to do is read it. You are half checked out of reality. These moments are frustrating because you have a job and can’t actually read all day. But it is also wonderful to be so engrossed in a great read. The book was loaned to me by dp (THANK YOU DP) and is Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. This was a big deal in like, 2006, but I am not typically on the cutting edge of new book releases. It’s the kind of book you can’t say too much about other than “Read it, and you’re welcome,” but I can describe my experience of reading it. I did not realize that it was a mystery. The first hundred pages or so are on the slower side, but still enjoyable because she is one of those writers with sentences to savor, and the character of the father is one of the most pleasurably developed characters I can remember encountering.  Then the plot gets moving, and then a hundred pages later, you realize that was so not even the real plot, HERE is the plot, and then it becomes a true pageturner, that plays out in a crazy but yet totally satisfying way because the book was so well constructed that it actually all makes sense. Oh and the kicker, she was 27 when she wrote this totally brilliant and fun novel. Which normally makes me feel like a failure because I’m 30 and all I’ve written is this stupid blog. But in this case it doesn’t even, because she is much smarter than I ever will be.  

The downside of all of this is that I stayed up until 1 a.m. reading for the past two nights, and then I woke up at 4 a.m. this morning and couldn’t fall back to sleep. I blame the book. When you’re that engrossed in something right before bed, it messes with your mind, especially if you mind, like mine, is easily messed with. It was worth it, but still — very tired today.

So. Yesterday I left work early to attend to a pest inspection. I am very happy and grateful to be buying a home, but I don’t think my happiness and gratitude necessarily prevent me from saying that this process is annoying and I don’t like it. The good news is that there is a yellow jacket nest in the attic. In some situations you might consider that bad news, but relative to finding a WOOD-BORING INSECT nest, this is lovely news. (I’ve heard the term “wood-boring” way too many times over the past two weeks.) There also might be a bat or two up there, which you would think would bother me more than it actually does. Right now I live in an old house that has something in the attic that may be squirrels but often sounds like wild boars, so I’m kind of used to it.

We’re inching closer to home ownership, but now we’re at the paperwork part and the part where we’re writing a lot of checks. Soon we’ll write a check with a number on it with more digits than any check I have ever written or received. M. has been wonderfully handling most of the mortgage-y side of things which is very appreciated.

And, moving backwards in time…New Year’s Eve. We got together with friends of ours from college for some good food, conversation, and of course Taboo. I think we were all kind of exhausted at midnight, but hey, that’s what happens when you’re thirty. I had to delay my healthy eating resolution because we all met up the next afternoon for a fabulous Indian buffet. I always forget how much I LOVE Indian food. I never forget that I inevitably end up with varying degrees of stomachache, but it was worth it. I left the group to go and pick up our radon test — yes, this is my life these days.

On Saturday I drove to CT to spend the day with Cara and her boys. I have to reenact a conversation with 3 year old Lucas. Cara made us delicious hot cocoa and Lucas got pouty because he wanted to continue playing. Picture blonde hair, blue eyes, an angel face, screwed up into a pout and whining.

Lucas: I don’t want hot cocoa.

Cara: Ok, you don’t have to have it.

Lucas then decides he wants it, takes a sip. Breaks into a big smile.

Lucas: Mama, I LOVE hot cocoa!!

Sips again.

Lucas: Mama, I LOVE marshmallows!!

This continues between each sip. Then he inexplicably breaks into, “Drink your hot cocoa, folks!”

Wow it’s really hard to capture the cuteness. Just think about a three year old calling you ”folks” and that should do it.

Sunday was my FREE day of the long weekend, so naturally I wrote a mile long to do list. It was actually a very productive day. I packed up all our Christmas decor, though I did turn on The Other Boleyn Girl while doing so and accidentally ended up watching the whole thing. I should have known I would get sucked into history’s best soap opera. It was also official resolution kickoff day. I did a major cleanout of our food pantry, combining and organizing things and getting rid of anything old. One of our joint resolutions is to be better about our food purchases. We have a bad habit of buying things and not using them up, or being overly ambitious with the amount of produce we plan to use and then tossing a bunch of it. Every week M. comes home with two bananas which he aspires to use in making healthy smoothies, and every week I toss the two bananas. I told him that he wants to be a guy who consumes bananas and doesn’t want to accept that he is not that guy. I’m unable to help out, as I do not care for bananas. So, I KNOW, you don’t have to tell me it’s wasteful and bad. We know. That’s why we made a resolution.

Of course I have my cliched healthy eating resolution. The thing is, I’m a pretty healthy eater in general because I’m a fairly health conscious person. But I also have a palate that could be pretty happy eating mac and cheese and cookies every day, so it has to be a conscious thing for me, and in recent months I’ve been pretty casual and unfocused about food. So, I’m just trying to refocus.

Another resolution for me is to make reading a priority this year, and specifically to stop going to the library and focus on the library in my own house. I have a LOT of great books and have read maybe half of them. I tend to neglect the ones in my collection because I get distracted by ones from the library, and then I feel like I have to read those urgently because they have a DUE DATE. So, I’m exploring the home library this year.

And finally, I resolved to stop pleasure shopping. Last year, as a renter splitting the bills with M., I was able to shop it up without much guilt or consequence. Not that I’m an extravagant shopper — I do not buy full price things ever. So if you’re an uppity brand that never goes on sale, I do not own you. BUT, I did do a lot more shopping last year, particularly of the cosmetical variety. This year we’ll have a mortgage and if anything is left over, I want to use it to furnish our house.

How long is this post? Long.