Progress. (Not depressing at all!)

I don’t have a whole lot to say, but I really want to get those last two entries bumped down — they’re like clinical depression in 1000 words or less. Yesterday and today I actually accomplished a few things, leaving me suitably flummoxed, speechless, and kind of sleepy. This entry might suck, but it’ll suck in a happy and productive way, which can only be an improvement. (As an aside, I just mistyped “suitably” not one, not three, but five times. Is there some sort of Quality Control for blog entries?)

(… “Spellcheck,” you say? Gotcha; I’ll look into it.)

I spent most of today filling out my tax return, which was boring. Then I filed my return, which was less boring, if only because my actual refund is going to be only $13 off what I estimated two weeks ago. Also, my state return is going to be a pleasant $200 more than anticipated, meaning that our post-moving rent fund for 2008 will be off to a healthy start. Although I’d rather saw off my own arm with one blade of some very dull pinking shears than go through this tax thing again, I feel good about it — the budget I have been obsessively reworking with various made-up-in-my-head estimates works out very comfortably, paying for the move, some back bills, and fun money with extra left over. This means that I can start scouting rental houses in earnest, as well as begin to keep a more serious eye on local sales. Hello, shopping, my old friend.

Yesterday was even nicer, although substantially less lucrative. We all went out to McDonald’s, where Connor made my heart swell with pride by preferring a grilled chicken sandwich and apple slices to his cheeseburger and fries. After Junkapalooza 2008 we swung by the store for artichokes (to appease my guilt over the aforementioned Junkapalooza) and a new book for Connor. I think getting out of the house did us a lot of good — for the rest of yesterday and all of today, Connor has been even more vigorously pleasant, and has been spotted eating all his lunch. Truly unprecedented behavior here, people. I feel like we just opened the windows to allow a fresh spring breeze into a musty old attic; I can’t wait for tax time to return our disposable income to its previous “not excessive, but at least kind of useful” level.

It would also be nice if I could manage to obtain a job before Doomsday, but the less said about that, the better. Suffice it to say that I am going to apply at the DMV next week. It’s bad, people. Very bad. I’m also going to take Anne’s advice and see if any of the offices around here outsource their typing because if there’s one thing I do well, it’s mindlessly bang away at a keyboard for hours. (As, I think, I have proven with this entry. Misfit In Any Space: Now with 98% less relevance!)

Things are inching along. I am still very anxious for spring, with its attenuating nice weather and accomplished move and lack of financial woes, but I think I can handle this last portion of winter.

ETA: If anyone would like to explain to my why my pictures are uploading/emailing completely fucked up, I would greatly appreciate it. I have all sorts of Connory goodness to share, but the pictures are uploading like this and this. They look fine on my computer, but then again I am a moron, and y’all know how it is: like user, like machine. Or something.

Nightmares.

I woke up this morning from a truly horrible dream, the latest and most horrifying in a stream of everyone-I-love-is-going-to-die dreams. In my dream, I’d gone out for the evening to see a movie. I don’t know where Michael was in all this, but for some reason I had to get a babysitter. The dream started with me coming home, saying hello to the sitter, and walking through my (strangely large) house looking for Connor. I couldn’t find him. I kept hearing his voice from somewhere far away, but when I called him to come out, he would reply with the most heart-wrenching “no, I can’t” I have ever heard. I finally asked the sitter where he was hiding and she broke down, explaining that “somehow” she had hit him with her enormous SUV and… The rest of the dream was some awful amalgamation of scenes wherein I was trying to locate my son’s body, sobbing and calling the hospital and running to friends’ houses. In one of these scenes, I walked back into the house and just collapsed facedown on the floor, crying so hard I thought I’d split in two, wishing I could find and punch the babysitter, aching to hold my child.

When you wake up at 5:30 with a sopping pillow and a searing, burning ache in your chest, you kind of assume it is not going to be a good day. I was up long before Connor and snuck into his room to make sure he was breathing, dropping my exhausted head onto his pillow and just inhaling the scent of his shampoo and sleepy sweat. Then I went to make the first of the two pots of coffee I ended up drinking before 10:00 this morning. That was, bar none, the worst dream I have ever had. I thought the dream I had last week, in which I was arranging Michael’s funeral to be held in my great-grandmother’s garden, was the worst dream ever. Let me assure you that while that one was bad, this one was infinitely worse.

So. I made coffee, checked email, read TMZ (shut up, I needed a distraction), and drank coffee. Then I decided to make Connor a treat for breakfast, so I busted out some leftover sugar cookie dough, dyed it red, and baked heart-shaped sugar cookies for my two-year-old’s breakfast. Kids of the world, take notice: All the sugar, fat, and lack of nutrients in the world is yours for the asking when your mother has a nightmare about your untimely death. I brushed my hair and threw on some sweats while the cookies were baking, went out into the (freezing, ungodly) cold for a cigarette, and waited anxiously for Connor to wake up.

And waited. Aaaaand waited. Of course, this was the morning he picked to sleep until 9:00. By the time he woke up, I had finished a pot and a half of coffee, eaten two cookies, and managed to mostly calm myself down. I changed his diaper, fed him, and then — completely out of patience — pulled him into my lap for the longest hug I have ever given anyone. The worst part of that dream was just not being able to hold him, knowing I’d never, ever feel his sturdy little self against my chest. The hug went a long way toward restoring my sanity, thankfully, so now he is playing in his room and I am planning our day.

Thanks to my mom, we have a little money to spend. I’m thinking McDonald’s, so that Connor can play in the enclosed and heated playground and I can listen to him laugh and panic a little every time he jumps too high or tries to go down a slide headfirst. I have a little bit of Mommy guilt over this — cookies for breakfast and McDonald’s for lunch, what will the Mom Police say! On the other hand, a day of bad nutrition is totally worth it to get out of the house and have a bright, happy day with my wonderful son. We might even go to Wal-Mart and pick out new books. This day started out so, so terribly; I just want to spend the rest of it as happy and close to my son as possible. And I’m sure that, in a year or two, I’ll feel safe enough to go out without him again. All will be well.

Man, these last two entries have been depressing, huh? I’ll try to do better tomorrow — maybe once we have all the fun in the world this afternoon, I will be in a better frame of mind. After all, we’re getting out of the house today! I cannot contain my excitement.

It’s hard to be an adult sometimes. It’s hard to be a person sometimes. There are rough lessons that everyone on the planet has to learn, but they’re always personal. Loss, change, grief, there isn’t really any universality for this stuff. We all go through it, but we all go through it so differently — at different times, in different places, under different circumstances, and always with different hearts.

My great-grandmother is very sick. I’ve known it for a long time, really; her care was handed over to my great-aunt and my grandmother years ago. I have about a million false starts saved up, but every time I try to write about this… I don’t know. I just don’t know. Everything I say disintegrates.

We all have hard lessons to learn, right? I don’t know what my lesson is here. My great-grandmother, my Grammy, is the person who taught me my first round of lessons. Big ones, little ones, it didn’t matter. She taught me how to keep a garden, that it’s important to wear proper foundation garments, and that writing would take me everywhere. She wrote me a letter when I was seven and confusing my stories with reality — the first line was, “Oh, what a tangled web we weave…” I’d never heard that particular aphorism before, and her letter helped it make sense: Don’t lie, because eventually your sin will find you out, and you will feel like an ass.

She taught me other things too: Take care with your thoughts, because they become actions. If you’re going to eat, learn how to cook and eat things that are good. Brush your teeth twice a day and make sure you get to the dentist every six months. I’ve never had a cavity or eaten a Pop-Tart; both are because of her. I don’t own any hot pants but I do own three half-slips because of her. She taught me to change the bed linens every week and tried to teach me to wash the dishes after every meal.

She played games with me when I couldn’t sleep. I’d spend the night at her house and find her in her red rocker in the living room at three in the morning. She’d get me a glass of milk and a pillow, and I’d lie on the floor playing this poetry game she made up — she’d quote a couple of lines of a nursery rhyme, then I’d have ten seconds to come up with another that began with the word hers ended on. She’d snap out, “Adverb!” and I’d have three seconds to say, “Brightly!” She’d give me words to spell, sometimes paging through her ancient dictionary to find the best ones, the ones she knew I’d sink my teeth right into. She would do this as long as it took until I could sleep.

When we washed dishes together, she helped me make up a story about how each dish was a star that we had to polish for its nightly appearance. She didn’t tell me, “I know washing dishes is boring, but it’s not supposed to be fun.” She told me, “I know washing dishes is boring but it doesn’t have to be,” and that is a lesson I have carried with me forever.

I don’t even know where I’m going with this. Every time I try to address the immediate issues — Alzheimer’s, bad falls, body failing — I get mired in all this other stuff. False starts. There is so much to remember and I just feel like I have to. She can’t anymore. She is the sharpest woman, just the smartest and strongest woman I’ve ever met in my life, and she can’t even remember where she is most of the time. She was always the most capable person in my life, able to pay the bills and keep the garden and run her home and build sandboxes and can her own tomatoes, and now she’s in a nursing home. On the dementia unit.

When I was ten, I was dead set on having a cool backpack. Sometimes when you’re poor and a kid, you get fixated on really strange things. Like it won’t matter that your clothes are from last year’s sale rack at Wal-Mart if you just have a really cool bag for your books. Grammy took me all over town to find the right thing, and I finally settled on a Winnie the Pooh something-or-other. I didn’t even like Pooh, but all the other girls did, so you know how it was. Gram asked me over and over if I wouldn’t like something else, something sturdier, something a little less babyish, but I insisted on that stupid bag. When we got to checkout, the girl at the counter started pulling the wads of paper from the bag’s outer pockets and came up with two stashed bottles of nailpolish. I hadn’t put them there, but the look my grandmother gave me… I couldn’t bear it. I could not stand her disappointment, I could not stand the fact that she quietly paid for the bag even though she thought I’d done that. I get that same feeling every time I screw up; my first thought is, Oh, God, what would Gram think?

And it makes me a better person. I’ve never been steered wrong by my grandmother. I’ve never been let down by her. This woman who loved me, this tower of strength is going to leave me very soon. She’s already halfway gone, really, and I just wish I knew for sure that she wanted to go. The Grammy I know, though, wouldn’t want to go. This is just so fucking hard, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to take away from it — is it even appropriate to be looking for a lesson in something so awful? She’s 94 years old, my hero, and declining in a truly awful way; is it right for me to be looking for any kind of lining to this cloud?

I don’t know, I don’t know. I hate the saccharine in the voices of my family when they speak of or to Gram. I hate that she’s in a home in Colorado, receiving wonderful care, but also where I can’t get to her. Go for a visit. Help with the garden. Something. I hate knowing that she doesn’t notice, doesn’t need. There’s just nothing I can do, and I’m going to miss her so godawfully. Some lesson.

It’s barely even Monday…

… and I have already resorted to some truly pathetic activities in order to stave off the cabin fever of 24/7 apartment-inhabiting. I really, no joke, need to get a goddamn life. I can prove it by detailing my boring non-activities in list format for you, if you’d like. (Or if you wouldn’t like. I’m not picky.)

Exhibit A: I spent an hour and a half melting various candles to make those rose petal-like wax dealies with my fingertips. This in itself is probably not so bad, but the fact that I spend another 45 minutes working out a “system” for creating “optimal rose petal dealies” is a little disturbing. I did get to walk around and work out the kinks caused by 7-9 hours a day at my desk, though, because I kept having to go get more ice for my Very Cold Water. You see, excruciatingly cold water instantly hardens the petal things, making them more durable and therefore more easy to arrange into an entire waxen desktop rose garden.

Waxen Desktop Rose Garden is totally the name of my fourth book, by the way. Look for it in twenty years at a Barnes & Noble near you!

Exhibit B: I ran a brush through my hair for about ten minutes because in the original detangling process I noticed that the brush felt really good against my scalp. Tactile sensation! How novel! Then I remembered that 100-strokes-per-day thing girls used to do and went on a research mission to find out if it had any actual, proven benefits. None of the results were in favor of the hundred-stroke method, so I finally put the brush down. Then I spent five more minutes trying to figure out how to get that tingly head-massage feeling without, you know, actually touching my hair.

Exhibit C: I read somewhere between 25 and 40 Buffy the Vampire Slayer recaps, even though I have seen all the episodes a billion times over and, in fact, have even read the recaps before. Then, of course, I had to do some desk-chair yoga to stretch my poor atrophied muscles after spending seven hours in one position. I discovered that lolling my head about as if drunk is quite pleasant, attempting to pull my heels to my ribcage while seated is less so, and stretching my arms so high above me that my shoulders crack is both pleasant and kind of painful.

Exhibit D: I began this entry and then spaced out for half an hour, worried that my entries are repetitive and predictable, trying to come up with a Sara Formula. I think it goes something like this: Whine about how bored you are, compile a “list” of entry elements that would work much better as a narrative, make some sort of thinly-veiled reference to how boring and/or embarrassing you are, have no idea how to wrap entry elements up neatly, end on jarringly inconclusive note. What do y’all think? Pretty spot on, huh? (Oh, I forgot part of the formula: Address audience as if it is composed of multitudes when, in fact, it is composed of two people, one of whom is your mother.) I seriously worried this whole idea like a bulldog on a pants leg for thirty minutes, trying to come up a take on it that was not completely depressing. I fail blogging.

Exhibit E: Eh, whatever. I can’t even remember, so just make up something boring and assume I spent too much time doing it.

It’s not like things are this bad every day. I mean, for one, most days Connor is here and I spend a lot more time reading stories and making lunches. (He’s in Amarillo seeing a Little Einsteins show. I really didn’t want to have to admit that. Damn. Hey, Internet, I let my toddler go out of town for the two-year-old equivalent of a concert! Heeeeeee’s spoiled! And, in case you were wondering, he is with responsible adults. I’d never let him drive that far all by himself. I am closing these parentheses now, because I’ve completely forgotten where this paragraph was going.) Um. So. I think we need a new paragraph.

Where was I? Weekend atypical, Connor out of town, stuff boring… oh! Actually, I think that was about it. I am bored, so I do boring things and become more bored, thus disproving the “fight fire with fire” aphorism. Rest assured that I am here to keep you all updated on these things — I think this website so far has shown its true value as a PSA conduit, and I hope you appreciate what I do for you.

This is me, reporting from the trenches and also begging for amusement from the comments section. Please tell me what you do with cabin fever — first one to say “piled-up housework” wins a punch in the ear!

A change will do me good. Probably.

We have been having really nice weather this weekend. Okay, it’s not “nice” by mid-summer standards, but it’s at least different. The past two days have been the warmest we’ve had in months, warm enough that opening the windows leads to a delightful “fresh air” sensation rather than a dreadful “freezing ice needles penetrating tender flesh” sensation.

Weather talk never ends up the way I want it to.

Anyway, this weekend has strengthened my resolve to find a house with yard for the move next month. By the end of February the weather will be almost nice almost all the time, and I am pretty determined to build Connor a sandbox. Also maybe a swingset. I am all giddy with thoughts of outdoor play, days spent not cooped up in the house but instead romping aesthetically about a yard blooming with perfect spring flowers while my appealing and chipper child laughs his way down a slide. (Am also giddy with the headrush that accompanies run-on sentences of that magnitude. Whew.)

I’m really pleased with the entire idea of the move, now that I’ve had time to wrap my head around it. It will be nice to get rid of all the extraneous, cluttersome crap that accumulates if one stays in the same place (with a toddler and a packrat husband) for too long. It will be really nice to finally live in a house — a real house, with solid walls upon which things can be hung, real window frames above which pretty curtains can be… er, also hung, and actual closet space in which our clothes can be (you guessed it) hung. I guess hanging things really gets my motor revving, and now I think I have sufficiently embarrassed myself for one day.

If you have to move, I highly suggest planning the move around spring. Something about slightly warmer temperatures and the occasional breeze makes the whole thing kind of delightful. It’s like nature’s little gift to me, a do-over for January’s waning productivity.

Nature: Um, duh. Ever heard of “spring cleaning”? I created this season just to make you lazy slobs my bitch.
Me: For Christ’s sake, shut up and start packing.

I do think, though, that when one begins anthropomorphizing the force that is nature, it might be time to stop typing. Actually, I can’t even remember why I started typing today. Something about the weather and, um, sandboxes? Needles, flowers, new house, closets? Hurry up, spring. I obviously need to get my ass in gear.

Not exactly an update.

Replying to a comment on a previous entry made me realize that maybe I should use this forum to announce/bitch about a few things — namely, my sudden, almost-total lack of connectivity.

Two days ago Gmail started fucking me over. I’m still receiving email (hi guys), but I can’t respond. I type out beautiful, life-changing replies (…), click send… and my computer bluescreens. I think this is related to general Vista bluescreen issues which should be fixed by a Windriver patch, but I’m having a hard time finding the patch or motivating myself to install it.

(In an amusing ironic twist, my computer screen just blacked out and then came back on, notifying me that “The display driver stopped working and has recovered.” Thanks, Mr. Gates! I hope you rot in hell for making an operating system that is simultaneously awesome, helpful, cool, and COMPLETELY BUGFUCK CRAZY.)

Then, yesterday, my phone shut down. “No service.” My brother and his dad, whose phone plan I share, have not paid the bill in eons. I have repeatedly offered money to cover my portion of the expenses, they have repeatedly told me it’s unnecessary for me to pay anything, and now I have no phone. I get to quit the one job I’ve managed to land in the past three months, because it’s fairly phone-intensive and I… have no phone.

Finally, I discovered this morning that my paper mail has been going to “someone else.” Who? “We’re not sure.” Well, thank you for that, U.S. Postal Service. (And also thank you Kip, for the Harvard magazines — robot flies! Autism! Debtor’s nation! It’s like paradise by my bathtub!)

In sum, I am pretty much incommunicado except via bandwidth. If you care, drop me a line here or IM me (MSN angie_wilson_AThotmailDOTcom, AIM opalfire). This is the week of suck.

Bewitched, but mostly bothered and bewildered.

Michael:  I think I’ll get Connor ready for bed.

Me:  Okay.  Fair warning, I think he pooped.

Michael: I know.  That’s why I have this diaper ready.

Me: [lifts Connor, sniffs his butt]

Michael:  [horrified stare]

Me:  Um, what?

Michael:  I told you I knew his diaper was dirty.  You didn’t have to… do that.

Me:  Oh.  Oh, crap.  It’s just HABIT NOW.  This is what you’ve BROUGHT ME TO.

Michael:  You were just like, ”[Mimics Connor-lifting, deep whiffing.]  Ahhhh, toddler poo!”

Me:  I don’t even know who I am anymore.

Excuse-a-palooza.

I know, I know, it’s Wednesday. I’ve skipped updating for two days. I have some good reasons, though! My excuses, let me show you them:

1) I have been watching Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I blew this show off when I first heard about it, because I thought the movies sucked and just assumed the show would be equally craptastic. A word to the wise: It is not. In fact, the show is awesome, and FOX earns my undying love for making it available all hassle-free and good-quality online.

2) I’ve also been reading the recaps and visiting the forums, of course. What, you don’t get all obsessive about the shows you watch?

3) Okay, and I’ve maybe been looking up things like Turing tests and the halting problem. The posters on the forums made me start thinking about the Termiverse (… shut up) as more of an exercise in AI and time-travel theory than I had before (you know, when I was busy dismissing the whole thing as a series of shitty movies). While I have a fair handle on various theories of time-travel, I know next to nothing about AI and its possibilities, so… I have a lot of reading to do.

4) And then I got going on theories of human intelligence and found myself reading everything I could find about heuristics as a sort of spin-off the the whole “halting problem” thing. At this point, y’all, I have even managed to lose myself.

5) So, of course, the thing to do was go play with A.L.I.C.E. and see if I could apply some of this stuff. I couldn’t — or at least mostly couldn’t — but I did decide that she passes her Turing test better than ELIZA or the SmarterChild AIMbot.

In conclusion, I have nothing to write about, a whole bunch of geeky links, and one good show recommendation. Some days, it would be better were I to just turn the damn computer off.

Bless me, Father, for you do not deal with this shit all day.

So. I have a confession to make. We all know how much I love embarrassing myself all over the interwebz, but this one’s bad. I don’t really know how to start, actually. I guess I should just get it out there:

I threw a full sippy-cup at my son last night.

(….)

Okay, now that everyone who wants to flame me has done so, let me explain more fully: I did not intend to throw the sippy at Connor, or even within his field of vision. I was angry at him, yes, but I also knew that he was just being a two-year-old and needed to be talked down. What happened was this: I asked him if he wanted a sippy, he said yes. I made the sippy, he said no. I put the sippy in the fridge, he started crying about “I WANT THAT, Mommy! I need that sippy!” I got the sippy out, he cried some more about “I don’t WANT A SIPPY!” This went on for at least five minutes, maybe even six.

Look, that’s a lot longer than it sounds, okay?

Anyway, this whole incident followed an entire day of back-and-forth whining. I want lunch, NOOOO I DON’T WANT LUNCH, wait where is my lunch? I want to watch All Dogs, no I want to watch Cars, hey stop it I need to watch Einsteins! I could not do anything, all day, that would satisfy this kid, and honestly, can we talk about whining for a minute? I hate whining. HATE IT. It drives me apeshit. I tried to deal with this in a pleasant manner, but by the end of the day I just could not do it anymore.

So. After the Great Sippy Whine of 2008, I snatched the sippy from the floor and stalked into my bedroom. I closed the door whirled about angrily, and heaved the sippy in frustration… right toward my wide-eyed toddler, who was standing in place of the door I really thought I had shut tightly. It did not come anywhere near hitting him, but only because I hadn’t been trying to hit the door. (Ironically, I’d been aiming for the floor in front of the door so that Connor wouldn’t hear the thud. Um, too little and also too late.) He was splattered with a few drops of milk, and I. Felt. Horrible.

I still feel horrible, actually. I scooped him up for a hug and apologized right away, making sure to emphasize that Mommy was not trying to hit him, and that actually Mommy shouldn’t have thrown the sippy in the first place. I promised him that I would never do anything to hurt him, that I had thought the door was shut, that although Mommy may on occasion lose her temper she would never try to hurt him. And I didn’t know what else to do.

After he was tucked into bed, I talked to Michael about it. I realized that we have probably just been presenting him with too many options, overloading his tiny decision-making capabilities with too much responsibility. We decided — through calm, rational, adult discussion — that we would stop asking Connor to choose so many things every day. We recognized that it is our job as parents to say, “Here is what you’re having for lunch, and now it is nap time, and you may choose your dessert but not your entire daily schedule,” and we committed to being more firm. This is all a wonderful solution to the indecision and the whining and the mini-meltdowns every time we present him with a choice, but it doesn’t address the fact that when my kid was misbehaving because of something I had done, I lost my shit. And it doesn’t address the overweaning guilt for having done so.

Which is where you come in! Please tell me, guys — have you done this? Have you done something like it? It seems that the internet is full of toddler parents who are just so perfect and intuitive and serene, but I have it on good authority that the majority of you are quite a lot like me. I would like to contend for the title of Worst Mother Ever, because I think it’s the only way I will be able to put this into perspective. Tell me your shameful stories; help a mommy out, okay?

Moving 101: The beginning of the end.

I woke up this morning from two odd dreams. (Yes, I woke up twice. I decided 5:00 AM was unproductive, so I postponed it.)

Dream the first: I am moving into a new apartment. Connor and Michael seem to play no part in this, but I do have something like thirty cats. The new place doesn’t allow pets and I have to walk right past the landlords every time I take a load of stuff in. I deal with this by cramming five cats under my ’80s-style sweatshirt and hoping the landlords don’t notice the lumps. Once finished with my final trip, I find that the cats from previous trips have shat everywhere, shed everywhere, and shredded everything. The landlords knock on my door, which I suddenly realize is made out of clear glass, as I frantically try to eliminate the mess in under 30 seconds.

Dream the second: I decide to make cookies (in my new apartment, which is now clean and painted a ’70s-style shade of avocado). I pull some batter out of, oh, I don’t know, thin air and check my recipe: “Cut dough into zombie shapes. Wash with egg. Ovenize.” I cut the (plain, bread-looking) dough as instructed, wash it, and put it into the overhead cupboards. When I take it out, it has baked up into what lookes like regular, non-zombie scones. A bite reveals that these scones are full of orange peel, cranberries, and sweet cream. I find this all, even the horrible ’70s avocado color, quite pleasant.

I know what the first dream is about — it’s a no brainer. We’ve decided to move when we receive our tax refund. I am worried that we won’t be able to find a place that accepts pets. We don’t plan on taking all of the cats with us, because not all of them are actually ours; still, I am afraid that there is not an affordable two-bedroom house with yard in town that will allow us a (perfectly reasonable) number of cats.

I hate this apartment, but I am angry at the way this decision to move came about. Our landlord has raised our rent and our pet fees four times in the last eight months. A few days ago, he exceeded the amount we are willing to pay for such a shoddy apartment. This place, while not my favorite, made sense for us when it was very cheap and allowed pets without too much bother. It does not make sense, however, for us to remain in such a craptacular little apartment when we could find a decent house (with yard, without being able to hear the neighbors’ every move, without annoying drunk guy from the block who comes by every night looking for booze and crank) for substantially less.

We’ve wanted to move for a while. (Well, ever since we moved in, really.) We did not want to be forced into it before we were ready, and we really didn’t want to have to use our tax return for moving — we had other plans for that money, and now most of them have to be scrapped. Moving makes me stress out, a lot: will we get our deposit back? Will we be able to find a new place that fits our needs? Will we get everything done in time? Will we break something crucial in transfer? Will the new place ever feel like home? Will the new landlords suddenly turn out to be assholes?

I can’t control any of that. I can, however, make sure we rent no place with even a hint of avocado in its color scheme. And I can make some damn good zombie scones.