spring at my house

looks thusly, according to my mediocre but still powerful cameraphone:

and in the strange but true department, yesterday on facebook i found a friend who came to our wedding, 11 years ago, because she's a friend of dharma! really this was a friend of min's, and they lost touch after we moved from montana 10 years ago, but still, that was really damn trippy. and cool.

hoping to see my parents today, and hoping my dad's leg is doing better. this infection of his isn't letting go. bleh. think good thoughts, think..

green makes me happy

as evidenced by this shot:

which was taken oh, 100 feet from where i'm typing. while there are plenty more pictures coming eventually, suffice to say that to my right is the 2nd half of this duplex, to my left is our amazingly verdant garden, a fence, and then a good mile or so of park, including the moss, leaves and trees seen above.

and while it may not be easy for kermit to be green, it's very easy for oregon because hello rain! it snowed a bit saturday morning and has been raining ever since. good thing i like rain.

what i also love is the internet, finally coming to my house. as well as the phone and cable. all three of those (well, mostly the first two) make it so much easier to look for and get a job. yes, i don't have one yet, yes i'm a little stressed about it but also this last month and a half has been full of so many miracles, i also have plenty of faith. for now, that plus the work of searching means i feel alright.

and so yes, it's been a little over a month since i had substansive updates. which means yes, YOI (ye olde internet) will soon be the recipient of substansive updates! and by soon i mean:

fri oct 19 – Last day of work

thu oct 25 – Realize bank account is fucked

sat oct 27-mon oct 29 – Rescheduling the earth because bank account is still f'd. Also order 401k disbursement on saturday since I realize the bank account may not be unf'd by the 7th, as wamu is currently predicting, and without that there's no way we can make our trip. Stay #1 in Beverly Heritage Hotel (BevHo!) on the 29th, because we prepaid. Oops.

Mon oct 29-thu nov 1 – Surprise, lots of packing. Additional lunch with liz, additional doc visits.

Fri nov 2 – 401k check arrives. Find check cashing place since I don’t trust screwU to not fuck up m’s account with it (either via depositing or cashing it directly). Wait forever at check cashing place, get freaked when at first they can’t authenticate with charles schwab. Notice insta-credit card option while waiting, as well as 1 and 2 party check cashing. Check clears – call landlord, truck, etc and set new exit date of nov 6. Put scrilla in m’s account – the only unfrozen one between us.

Sat nov 3 – More packing, rescheduling.

Sun nov 4 – Pick up the truck at 11. What a monstrosity. Takes so long (2 main tries, with a 2nd round of 10-15 minutes of grueling, slightly-scraping tension) that the cops come by to say – get this off the street or we’ll be back. Do you think I planned to leave the ass of this thing hanging out?

Meantime there’s minor skirmishes among the troops, but in the end thankfully all calmed down and around 1215 or so, we went to work on a house that was not fully packed. We got a lot done, though – min, me, liz, and a guy from craigsliszt (CL) whose name I’ve forgotten already but he sorta looked like AJ from the backstreet boys. Never heard from my 2nd CL guy, lover of pizza, flaker of gigs.

Liz left about 3, AJ got sent home by 5 with an agreement to come back the next day. Yay! Lori and Aaron came over in the evening and helped a little. Really appreciated it, too, when Lori said she’d be over early (10am) to help with the monumental hordes of items still to be packed.

Mon nov 5 – We’re supposed to be gone – ptoo! - by 2pm today, because that’s when the cleaners come. Which as you might guess, means the house has to be empty by then. We’d arranged for AJ and a friend of his to be there by 11am, figuring what with getting up at 8am ourselves, and Lori there at 10, maybe we’ll be ok. Well, we got up at 8...

Min went out for bottled water and god knows what (but whats that we needed) about 1030. at 11, still not back and no sign of lori or AJ, I called M. Where are you? Has lori called? Holy shit there’s no way we’re getting this done. Should we call someone else?

A few minutes later AJ called – car trouble but he’s coming soon. I decide to call Adrian, moving guy (another one of my CL respondents). Says he can be there by 12. Min gets home a little after 11, says she talked to lori. Apparently lori needed a breathing treatment (self-distributed) and would be at our place in a while.

Back to packing. AJ shows up a few minutes later and after we talk, he starts repacking the truck so all can be squoze in. around 1215, with no Adrian or lori (who I’ve given up on), I call Adrian again. Coming? Yes.

Adrian arrives around 1230, and after a thorough assessment of the entire house and truck, helps AJ redistribute the truck even more. Lori arrives in a face mask (this house seriously collected dust; there was widespread sneezing) a few minutes later, much to my surprise.

Right about then I realize I need to eat, so we get everyone’s order. M goes for food, and I put lori to work I the bathroom because – thinking ahead – I made it very straightforward, what should be packed or not. At least so I thought. I’d have figured maybe an hour, 90 minutes to pack the bathroom? But clearly I underestimated that since lori ran about 3 hours, including vacuuming in a room with tile flooring. Later I figured out she was vacuuming dust off the window fan.

Meantime, M returns with food around 1pm, so we eat and I realize there is no way in hell we’re going to be done by 2. M calls the cleaners AND the landlords to push cleaning and walkthrough to later tomorrow. This gives us the rest of the day to pack/load, which we really did need. Aaron came over around 8pm, for an hour or so, to help and then take Lori (and donatables – yay, one less thing to worry about) home. We stayed till 10 or 11, then back again to the BevHo where we promptly collapsed.

Oh and shit! I can’t believe I forgot this! Around 2pm we realized that M had lost her wallet. We deduced she had it whilst going for lunch – wallet was attached to her keys – but then at some point after leaving the car upon arrival home (across the street, really, since the truck left no parking at home), the wallet vanished.

Needless to say, what was left of the house was upturned, the streets were searched, over and over because apart from any $ she had (about $500, mostly in traveler’s checks, so at least we were able to recoup that) and her license, medicare cards and keys, that wallet also held our only functioning credit card since – as you may recall – my bank accounts were still fucking frozen.

As you might imagine, the prospect of making this ginormous trip with no credit card was more than a little daunting. But wait! I remembered seeing the insta-credit card at El Casho Checko place, plus the fact that we could still get $ from her (unfrozen) account. Either the bank would let her get it directly (we hoped, using what limited info we had to prove her identity), or – again, thanks to my eagle eyes – she could write me a check, that I’d cash at El Casho Checko, and then we’d get the insta-card. Problem solved.

So off we went to our – thank god – prepaid hotel room (a deal which the falcon of priceline truth hath approved) and crashed. Well, not before going to walmart, because we accidentally packed my dresser before I had a chance to get half of my trip clothes out. Oops.

salutations from the land of the bleary!

i've been getting up an hour earlier each workday, for maybe 3 weeks now. there are a couple of reasons for this but receiving immediate benefit is my employer, who has seen fit to keep me insanely busy, and of course, starbucks. i really don't understand why i'm still so sleepy when i'm making sure that caffiene has been properly installed but here i am, yawning at noon just the same. or perhaps i'm yawning at this unix script poking across my screen.

ah well. i hope you all have enjoyed some festivus of late, and a bit more this weekend. we are considering going to grace cathedral on NYE, there's a free concert there. min loves to rave about how beautiful it is, and perhaps i will finally see it on sunday!

as to what else has transpired in the last few weeks: other than the usuals and working like a bandit, i was graced with a minibreak to the coast. we rented a house because we wanted a full kitchen for a full christmas dinner! rather i wanted the full dinner since i was the main one eating, but min ate a little. =) plus the requisite apple cranberry sparkliness, mmmm. oh and for christmas i got some emily goods, starbucks AND toffee crack GC(!), an exercise mat (so sweet!), short exercise dvd i look forward to trying, cute notebooks and i forget what else, i'll have to doublecheck when i get home. but, all good stuff.

anyway the rental house -- i researched all over the bloody coast of california for a good deal, and after much calling and cajoling for pictures (first, second choices not available, but we have alternates. ok fine, send us pictures!) we finally ended up here. it wasn't until we drove up to it that we found out it was for sale and now that i'm back where the internet roams free, i'm a little surprised to find that they're including the furniture. some of it was quite nice, but otoh, some stained and broken.

oh..i get it now. the owners have abandoned it. see, this explains the bugs.

yeah, bugs. granted, it was mostly potato bugs, but when you have to:

• check the floor before getting out of bed
  
• get rid of at least 3 every time you cross a room
  
• brush them off of you because THEY DROPPED FROM THE SKY (ceiling)

it doesn't leave you feeling very relaxed. no, you probably even dream about bugs, or mysteriously harmful goo, dripping from the sky. not that i would know.

that aside, it was a gorgeous house. wonderful views, plenty of room and only a few minutes from one of my favorite restaurants ever, which unfortunately was not *quite* as good as normal but still very excellent. we ate lunch there on tuesday and planned to find a xmas gift for our neighbor penny, but across the street is gallery bookshop and as i probably should have predicted, it sucked up most of our afternoon and of course, a good deal of scrilla. that store has the best per-square-foot selection of books of most any bookstore i've ever been in, and i've been in a LOT.

by the time we escaped, it was probably only 430, but most of the other shops we wanted to hit were closed and several appeared closed for the week. tuesday night there was a nasty storm - wind howling, things clattering outside, lights flickering, the whole shebang. wednesday we figure we'll hop up to fort bragg, maybe more stores will be open there.

and maybe they would've been, who knows. however the storm played havoc with several trees across the region (would you like to wear this tree as a hat? how about doubling the thickness of your fence?). as a result, power was out in most of fort bragg. great. luckily we found that out *after* we had lunch, at smart-enough-to-have-a-generator silver's. wow that website is from 1997. anyway, we’d planned to dine at the next-door Chapter & Moon…but no one was there. and there were oh, 50 cars at Silver's, so we decided to go with the safer bet. we were *so* not disappointed, especially with the clam chowder.

incidentally i am a clam chowder snob. this is because i grew up on the best chowder in the friggin free world and everything else pales in comparison. god just seeing that building, on the website, makes me feel homesick. and ack! it burned up! i hope they can rebuild! :( anyway i am VERY happy to report that silver's chowder? almost as good as dory cove's! and much closer so i bet we'll go more often. yum.

after lunch we found all the closed shops (boo), then just enjoyed the afternoon, driving along the coast and drinking in the ocean air, before heading home. still no pics (probably get around to uploading this weekend) but all in all, a nice little getaway. and i really needed to get away, so, yay. =)