Guess it’s time – life has been very distracting lately. I have actually been writing in my journal, although I sort of cheat by writing about each day several days at one time in hindsight. No, wait. You cannot cheat when you write in a journal. All rules are out the door, even ones that you set, because you are the only referee. That also means that you can use tape and write boring stuff and stuff that has no meaning or value to anyone but you and paste over and draw over stuff and attach new pages and pockets and sew stuff in and use acidic non-archival stuff that will disintegrate in a few years and photos that you hate and draw mustaches on them and self-portraits of yourself making faces in the mirror and stuff like that. You can begin every sentence with “and” or “but” and use partial and run-on sentences and end every sentence with a preposition and split infinitives and use cliches until the cows come home. I love my journal.
So. The mama drama is not over, but not overwhelmingly stressful now. She finally got her epidural injection and it wasn’t as bad as she dreaded and that helped a lot. I need to check on her this afternoon to see how she feels. A few days ago she was feeling a little better so of course she went out and overdid it and was back to feeling puny again. Part of it was that I gave her a cold. Not a terrible one, but one that drains you for a few days.
The ductwork went in as scheduled and I immediately called the mortgage agent to schedule the appraisal and get the loan process going again. We had a major heat wave with temps in the mid-high 90s and it got up to 88 degrees inside the house. Fortunately I am somewhat acclimated to it because Mama’s AC was out and my car’s AC quit, but I was having frequent hot flashes and so I was miserable. The past few days have been better because it cooled down a little and the hot flashes went away.
The appraiser did not show up until a week later this past Wednesday and then he did not turn in the report right away as he promised, and it turns out that my mortgage agent was nine months pregnant and I didn’t know and I couldn’t get her to return my calls. I was way pissed. On Friday another agent took up my case and she is advancing me enough money on a personal loan to get the deposit to the HVAC company on Monday morning so that I can at least get the AC/furnace installation on the schedule. Which, at the earliest, will be June 13. I am also irritated at the HVAC manager for not working with me on the deposit situation – I did, after all, just pay them in full in cash for the ductwork, which is why I didn’t have a deposit for the rest of the work.
I came home to Sandy emptying out the “computer room” which is also a major junk hoarding room and he put down new carpet (a remnant, because it is a small L-shaped room). It looks very good and he is making a real effort to get rid of a lot of the junk in here. Hence the art work in the previous page started happening. Guido immediately decided to anoint the new carpet and Sandy chased him all over the house until he hid under the bed in “my” bedroom and apparently finished his work there. Ah, the joy of cats. Once we get everything moved out of there I’ll clean the floor and we’ll put down carpet in there too.
We went downtown on First Friday and had such a good time roaming around. The crowd at Elements was good, again, and downtown Greensboro just gets better and better. Then yesterday I got my hair chopped off and went to Lowe’s to buy a Dremel for the class I’m taking at Focus on Book Arts in a few weeks. I went ahead and bought a flex shaft attachment because the latest tendinitis update is that my forearms hurt pretty much all the time, but especially when I hold things with any weight. I’ve been trying real hard not to complain, and despite this I’m about as happy as I’ve been in a long time.
We went to a cook-out last night with some of the Ph.D students and their friends and it was so nice to be included. We don’t socialize much any more and sometimes I really miss it. When we came home we were looking at icanhascheezburgerafterdark.com (warning, almost every post has the f-word and is definitely NSFW) and I started laughing so hard that I lost control over it and I laughed until I cried and then I couldn’t stop laughing even at things that weren’t funny and my sinuses opened up and my stomach muscles started cramping and I knew that I had to stop laughing because it hurt to laugh so hard and yet it felt so good to totally lose control laughing. I haven’t done that in years. My stomach muscles still ache today but it was completely worth it.
slowly she turned 