Cause I know you're waiting with baited breath

The landlords are in Greece still, they'll be back next month. I had a great plan though, I was going to do laundry tonight because I usually run into the landlord's son when I do laundry early in the week. The only catch was our house is far to messy for him to come in still (yes, I am lazy okay?!). So, since we knew I'd see him in the laundry room and bring him up the back way, we worked on cleaning off the table and putting the dry good groceries we had still sitting there away. We figured we could just clean the kitchen and then when I "happened" to run into the landlord's son and bring him up the back way to our apt through the kitchen and into my bedroom he might not notice how messy the house was.

My boy did dishes and I swept up the most recent plaster remnants. I was in the process of making my bed when the doorbell rang. My boy answered the front door and who should be there but the landlord's son. I am sure there's a sermon in this somewhere, unfortunately, I am not a pastor, so all I get out of it is the irony that we spent so much time cleaning the back of the house, I didn't have time to clean up my suitcase or the knick knacks we brought back from Alaska which were strewn around the living room, nor the tarp waiting to be cleaned sitting in the front hallway, all of which the landlord's son had to step over on the way into the bedroom.

Accessories Whore

So it turned out my car just wanted an update on three of her belts. Apparently thin belts aren't in this year and so she just had to have all three replaced!!

She's back up and running again and my boy has promised her if she's good she can have a tuneup and her ac replenished in August (and possibly her shocks replaced).

A friend of mine asked me if we kept track of how much money we pour into this car. I said "no, of course not." Clearly she doesn't understand that we're no longer into the car for economic/convenience reasons (if we ever were). While I have fallen out of love with her, my boy is now firmly in the grips of a doomed love affair with a car that will only disappoint. There's a whole group of them involved in a similar love affair though, and so together they write each other tips and tricks and they each manage to keep their cars on the road one more year.

In fairness to our car, though I complain about it rather frequently, she has performed above average according to the newsletters, her odometer gear did not give out at 60,000 miles like most and so far her thermometer has held out, and who knows when the last time her shocks were replaced (I've owned her for 8 or 9 years and I've never done it). So while she is expensive to fix, under my boys loving care, she's held out a little longer -- and if he gets his way, will continue to do so (though I am eyeing Subarus with back seats so we can actually take passengers/cargo). . .

When it Rains. . .

So the sky continues to fall. More pieces hit the floor this morning. My boy says that it doesn't look like much more should come down since there's only a small bubble of plaster still. We haven't heard back from the two emails we sent to our landlords and my boy isn't sure the landlords are home (we're chickens and haven't gotten the nerve to knock on their door). Rent is due this week, so being passive, we'll include a note with our checks.

In other news we were on the way to pick up our CSA today when our car started making a horrible screeching noise. there was no place to pull off and finally we had to pull into one of the mansion driveways off Centre street. My boy looked under the hood even though, I was screeching, turn off the car first, you don't know what could explode out when you open the hood of that thing with it on!!!!! I also had gotten out of the car and run to the back assuming that even though the sound appeared to be coming from the front, perhaps the exhaust system had fallen off and was scraping and that's why it stopped and started.

Turns out it was some belt that broke which was causing all the noise. We didn't want to stay in the rich people's front yard though so we drove the car back toward the Arnold Arboretum where we knew there was parking. The car showed that it was hot (I thought, big deal, so am I, it's 80 some degrees out and your ac doesn't work!!), but it made it to the spot and AAA sent a tow truck quickly and since our mechanic is in Halifax, PA, we had the car taken to pep boys where they say that they should be able to look at it today.

We're lucky we have good friends. We called three people and the first agreed to pick up my boy at pep boys, and the other two asked if we needed rides (we were calling for them to pick up our csa). So all has ended fairly well, though as soon as we got home from pep boys my boy put on his pjs and went to take a nap so he could start the day over again. . .

The Sky is Falling!

When I came home tonight there was a significant crack in my ceiling. I wrote the landlords an email saying I didn't think it was critical because I saw no water on the floor and the ceiling wasn't stained, but there was a big crack that wasn't there this morning.

Fast forward 6 hours later and there's still no water dripping but my crack became a large swath of ceiling (plaster? some other covering for the ceiling, I really don't know) hanging down. Still no water really and the ceiling under the plaster still doesn't look wet. . .

This means that we'll have to bite the bullet and TALK to our landlords. I get weirdly shy around them and don't want to do it at all. Worse, they'll have to come into my apartment. While it is not the utter disaster that it usually is, our apartment is still not terribly neat (we haven't unpacked from our trip and there's just general clutter piled around). While this may all be fine with normal landlords, our landlords are not normal. They are insanely neat. I have never been in a basement that's cleaner than their basement. The floor has absolutely no grit, grime or other usual items found in a completely unfinished basement. I dread having our landlords come in here and judge our home (and by dread, I mean that I fear that they'll take one look around and evict us based on the level of messiness-- this may not be all bad, I hear my former apartment may have two rooms opening up :)).

So yeah, that's what I have to look forward to tomorrow (cause I am certainly not waking them up at midnight with this information). Also, we have to cook tomorrow at Chelsea, this means that we either have to tell the landlords at 7am on a Saturday morning or we have to wait till 2 or 3 tomorrow. Either way it's a Saturday, what can they do really? For some reason, neither options sounds great -- perhaps because it's midnight and I am working myself up into a tizzy?

Family

Tonight when I was through watching an episode of The Waltons, I turned on TvLand and The Cosby Show was on. The former is my boy's top choice for tv family he would want to grow up in, the latter is my top choice. Do you think it says something about us that he chooses a big family growing up in rural Virginia during the depression and I choose a family headed by a doctor and a lawyer in the heart of Brooklyn? If you could choose any tv family to live in, which would it be (and why)?

The best laid plans

My boy and I have gotten really round this year. We HAVE to start eating better and actually exercising. I mean really, we do. Our plan was to walk either to or from the train (almost 2 miles I think) every day this week, thing is, it's supposed to rain the rest of the week :(.

So taking control where we can, tonight we went to Costco to start the week of eating out better. I got some mushrooms, and apples and my boy got bell peppers, but we've got an insane load of veggies coming in on Sunday and so we didn't want to buy many Costco size veggies and have no space in the fridge so we moved on in our shopping. We got some whole wheat bread (1 pt on weight watchers, and, as my dad says, utterly tasteless but too cheap to pass up) we got some nice bread for the soup kitchen on Saturday and at this point, my boy picked up chocolate chip cookies. I said "NO! We're eating healthy remember?!" He put the cookies down and we moved on with our shopping.

At the end, when we were unloading the cart, what do I find in there but the cookies!? It's like shopping with a two year old (only the two year old may have better lies). He told me, "I have to get cookies I bought whole milk (a whole other dispute we have) this week from the dairy and I need to use it up." I said "why can't you use it up with fig newtons, they're far less fat?" He then explained to me the intricacies of cookies that you dip and those you don't Turns out, Fig Newtons aren't dipping cookies. Needless to say, somehow with that logic, he won.

Tonight for his bednight snack he had a number of cookies (far more than I thought he should have). After he went to bed, I got hungry and decided to have an apple. Thing is, in the kitchen I got distracted and I was 3/4 through a cookie before I remembered what I was really in there for (geesh, I don't even have ambien to blame). Can I just tell you though, DAMN Costco knows how to make a chocolate chip cookie (the fact that our house is still 80 degrees probably helps since the chocolate was all melty and perfect). It was so good, it's hard for the guilt to really set in, course I wish the self-control would step up. . . .

Remember Me?

I had a friend who was dismissive of my blog way back when I actually blogged. He thought that blogs were self-important drivel or something like that. He was on facebook though, and I had no interest in facebook since I thought it was just drivel. People updated all the time to tell all of their "friends" that they were eating a can of spaghetti Os or whatever (of course, now there is twitter which contains every thought that crosses anyone's mind --remember back when we were glad people couldn't read our minds and know every selfish, spiteful or stupid thought we had?). I had said at the time that the blog was a way for me to communicate with all my friends spread across the country and I didn't have to worry about fake friends etc because only people I really considered friends new about my blog.

With how well I've been at updating my blog, and how well facebook has been about getting EVERY PERSON ON THE PLANET hooked, I think I've just managed to lose touch with everyone. I am convinced this blog post will just go out into the great nothingness and unless someone has subscribed via google reader and forgotten to take this "dead" subscription off, no one will know I am still alive :).

It makes me kind of sad that I miss out on pictures of friends babies etc. cause they just post them to their facebook page and I have still refused to get a facebook page. I read over fifty blogs a week though, I just cannot handle one more internet related obsession. Besides, my boy has a facebook page and I hate seeing numerous quizzes and pokes and whatever other random stupidness ends up on his page.

There was no real point to all of that discussion about facebook pages etc. It was just something I was thinking about when I thought about a blog post (the fact that no one reads this blog anymore :)).

The post I had in mind wasn't brilliant, really just selfish drivel, so there you go, Ben was right. I was just thinking about how homesickness increases exponentially with how close to home you are. I was really dismissive in college of all the girls in the dorms who would cry about being away from home when they lived less than two hours away -- just drive home for heaven's sake. I always figured living 10 hours (a two hour drive and an eight hour plane ride) away if things got bad enough I could always go home. The thing is, 10 plus years since that freshman year, every visit home makes me wish I could just stay there -- and that's saying a lot since I didn't manage to get along with my sister for more than 15 minutes at a time this trip and we were only in the same city for about two days.

Walking through our neighborhood the last night, I kept imagining buying a house there in that neighborhood my father refers to as south, south mountain view (read, that as an anti-gentrification project). The street I grew up on was the street my dad grew up on, and the same is true for about five other homes on that same block. Children buy the parent's home and raise a family there in the heart of the "big city" in a much bigger state boasting of its frontier feel (see, you get the amenities of a city and you can easily visit the great outdoors, isn't that convenient?!).

I don't know if it's because every flight out of Anchorage seems to be late at night and that makes one even more prone to emotional outbursts. But it seems like every time I leave I have to fight back tears. I think I may have posted this on my blog before, but one of the sweetest things my boy ever said to me was about a week after a trip to Alaska. We were in the grocery store and he said, "I've been thinking about it [by it I think he meant my crying jag where I said I didn't want to leave Alaska], and at first I thought you'd miss all your friends here in Boston if we moved, but I realized that most of them could afford to come visit us in Alaska. So if you want to move, we can." Of course, at the time it had been a week back in Boston, with good friends, a church and a home I don't want to have to pack up so I was fine with living in Boston again.

This trip when I was getting weepy again, I asked my boy if he gets homesick every time we visit his family. Turns out he does. So is that how all of you (my loyal readers) feel too? Is it homesickness you think, or simply fighting against the "you can't go home" feeling?

My friend Emily posted on her blog this week about the emotional turmoil there was when her mother sold the closest thing Emily had to a family home growing up (her family was military, so there wasn't a lot of staying in one place). She talked about how her father used to say, houses are just buildings, it's the people who make a home. Regardless of what's pulling me, today, I just want to be home. . .