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. . .

Double Sigh

We went to a train show yesterday, I went to ensure my boy didn't buy another train!! We have an entire closet full to the brim with no more space.

Unfortunately, I have fallen madly and deeply in love with a set. I accidentally found it on ebay last night when looking up for something else and I have thought of little else today. I emailed to ask my boy if he thought it was a good deal and he didn't respond. First thing I saw him tonight I asked him and he said it sounded like a good deal, but he wasn't sure. He checked his train program (we got it because I kid you not he has an insane amount of trains) and it says that the train is worth $149 in new condition not the $199 that the ebay seller is selling it for (not to mention the $40 they're charging for shipping). So that's that right? It's $100 more than it's worth and I'm supposedly working on saving money etc. But I am just so sad. Cause this train is amazing, it's got an elephant car with a little guy sweeping out the car and a car with a lion chasing a lion tamer around the top of the car and a car with a bobbing clown head sticking up out of the top and a caboose that's lit. Doesn't it sound lovely, just truly great? Also, the lion tamer car is going on ebay for $40 alone. Maybe I should go buy the set. . .

Sigh

Two people have told me that the link for craigslist no longer works. I assume that someone else got this great deal. I tried to convince my boy that we should get it, but he thought I was crazy.

Today we were supposed to do spring cleaning in our current abode. I finally got up at 8:30 am. My boy made breakfast and I went back to bed till 10. I got up again still tired (we need a coffee maker, or some diet coke!!) but determined to do something. We went through all the stacks of mail and random papers in our house. My boy finished the dishes and I folded two loads of laundry while my boy hung random pictures that have been sitting around the house for the last 8 months (you know, may as well hang them since clearly we're not moving!!). The sad thing is, our house is still a disaster. God forbid someone stop by and need to use the bathroom, we'll have to lie and say we don't have one we just dig a hole. . . Cause there's no way anyone else should be subjected to our bathroom. Also, every room in the house needs to be swept or vacuumed. And there's just. so. much. clutter. . . . . I could go on, but why, bother. It's enough to say, the house is still a disaster despite a concerted effort to the contrary.

The silver lining is that we took a lovely walk to the square to get bread for lunch and we picked up a nice cheese from the cheese shop for lunch and dinner. We just finished dinner. We cooked our farm fresh chicken using this recipe: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/dining/11appe.html I was a little disappointed the bread on the edges of the pan just burned and those under the chicken were soggy on top and impossible to chew on the bottom. I will say that I did exactly what the directions said not to and used a dark thin roasting pan (hey, some of us haven't gotten gifts off a registry and we have to make due with what we could afford on our grad school salary -- yes, I bought the pan 7 yrs ago geez I am old). As sides for the chicken we had balsamic mushrooms adapted from a weight watchers recipe, and a salad made with apples, sharp cheddar and toasted walnuts. I put lemon juice on it to keep the apples looking pretty and balsamic dressing on my portion.

We're going to clean up dinner and then I plan on falling asleep watching the incredibles. Time was I would be sad I was staying home on a saturday night thinking of bed at 7:35 but apparently I've matured :).

If I were a mother and this blog my child, I think dfys would have been called

So yes, I've neglected my blog. If you write a blog that I know about, I haven't neglected it though. I was so thoroughly caught up a couple of weeks ago I had to add more blogs to my reading list (thanks rebekah).

There are tons of things I should tell you about like how I got the most gorgeous piece of luggage from my boy for our two year anniversary. I mean really beautiful. The ticketing agent in Las Vegas said so without any prompting (the one in Boston needed to be prompted and it was really only half hearted but whatever). I haven't told you about the luggage though because I planned on taking a picture (the ones online aren't terribly great) but then it got scuffed on our trip and I haven't had a chance to clean it back up to it's shining glory. Here's a link to a lesser picture and with the specs so you can see how it SPINS it can go in a full 360 circle and even though the edges are hard and therefore good at protecting my items, it's expandable. I love this piece of luggage so much I think I need a back up exactly like it for when they stop producing it (sort of like my whisk).

As you've probably gleaned from that above paragraph, I also didn't tell you about a trip to vegas. . . and, you know, how my birthday party turned out, or even which party I decided on (deep fried, as my boy said, "I did not start dating a woman who was elegant, I am dating a woman who loves all things deep fried and kitchy").

You're probably thinking based on the date and or the email I've sent asking for support for the walk for hunger that I am writing this apologetic post briefly updating you to beg for money for the homeless and to tell you my walk website is here: http://www.projectbread.org/goto/getbitter You'd be wrong (well sort of, I mean I did tell you where the website was, but this isn't my groveling for money for "the homeless" post).

This is my, I am homeless (well homeowner-less) and don't you think you'd like to pay for this house to be moved: http://boston.craigslist.org/bmw/gms/1085072114.html and find me a lot closer to boston than Concord to move it to (which would, of course, add to the cost of moving it)? I would totally invite you over for dinner every week as a thank you (and look at the pretty dining room, it's totally worth it).

Sigh. I have been thinking of the house since I looked at the pictures on a whim. My boss is convinced I should buy it. Clearly she has no idea how little savings I have. But it is a lovely deal and the Jew in me is all a flutter at the possibility :).