Driving by

1)Grandma is out of ICU and into rehab where she seems to be doing better. When one has a sense of humor, one can handle anything.

2)Moving sucks.

3)I am completely and utterly overwhelmed at work. I need everybody to leave the office for a week so I can finish everything with no distractions. Instead, I keep taking all this time off to move.

4)Moving sucks.

5)I talked to a friend from back home today that I miss terribly but always feel awkward calling because my level of work overwhelm is minute in comparison to that of the person on the other end of the line, and I feel like an interruption. Also, I feel guilty, because the situation is kind of my fault. Had to cut the phone call short because people in my current life were beaning me with projectiles trying to get me to get off the phone. Felt like I wanted to share the conversation or the essence or the implications with someone, just to articulate the impact the familiar voice had on my week, but nobody would understand (they never do; you would have had to been one of us to get it, and the longer I'm here and not there the less I am "one of us" and it's kind of wistful, surreal, and sad).

6)My husband totaled his car.

7)He's fine. But our bank account not so much. We'd bought new furniture on credit and closed on a house with a huge (for us) down payment the week before. Now we're trying to buy him a beater with the $2700 the insurance company gave us and I'm wishing I hadn't spent all that money on those Christmas presents.

8)Moving sucks. I have to leave right now because we are still (still!) after two weeks trying to get everything out of the apartment and clean so the crooked bastard landlords don't try to screw us over and charge us money for the brokedown palace with the mold and the leaky roofs and the broken doors and the scary neighbors. And in the meantime my new house is full of boxes and I can't unpack them until we are completely out of the apartment, keys turned over, utilities OFF, hopefully next week.

9)I'm still feeling a little like a fish out of water. I have a lot of interesting friends here and overall feel less isolated (the fact that I don't have to knit alone in public 90% of the time with people treating me like a circus freak or ask me if I'm 90 years old at heart is HUGE), but I still feel a degree of pressure to be suburban and "normal" in a way that is unnerving and foreign to me, and I know that there are a few rare, once-in-a-lifetime connections that I've left behind geographically, and others that were always geographically challenging that I'm letting slide because I have no time to sit down and write an e-mail. Honestly if people knew how much I think about them during the day when it takes me weeks to make a two-minute phone call or months to write a letter they would be shocked.

10)I don't know when I'm ever going to knit again. This perhaps sucks worst of all.

... Off to work on the Neverending Cleaning Project,
Moi