Monday, Monday

That title is my clever segue into saying that I listened to my first ever Mamas and the Papas album, entitled, "If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears." I don't usually like music on the first time through, but I liked most of what I heard here on Listen #1. Obviously, Cass Elliot was amazing, but as I discovered Denny Doherty could sing the birds right out of the trees. Good stuff!

Hey, remember Kraft Macaroni & Cheese? I used to like that stuff when the cheese flavoring was the orange powder, but then they changed it to orange goo and it got disgusting. But! I found organic mac & cheese at Whole Foods (yeah, I know that nothing containing orange powder can justifiably be termed "organic"), and it's pretty good. I don't remember the name of the stuff, but the box is adorned with the Rabbit of Approval. Naturally, after eating the food I cut out that section of the cardboard and taped it to my PC at work. What do you do with the Rabbit of Approval?

New favorite lyric:

"Don't get me mad, don't tell no lie
Don't get me sad, just get me high
Baby, what you're holding, half of that belongs to me
'Cause I'm a real straight shooter if you know what I mean"

Artist: The Mamas and the Papas (John Phillips)
Song: Straight Shooter
Album: If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears

Stuff I like

To balance the slate, here's is some stuff that makes me smile:

1. Oatmeal chocolate-chip cookies. Too few bakers put these delights together. Sadness.
2. Project Runway. There's judging, fighting and pettiness, and at the end you get to look at clothes. Nope, nothing wrong here.*
3. Bare feet on clean hardwood floors. Only a summer treat for me, unfortunately, as my feet are otherwise always, always too cold to go without socks.
4. Throwing parties. I like to organize. I like to have fun. When those two appreciations have a baby, a party is born. The greatest gift of all.
   
5. Ultimate Frisbee. If I say anything else I'll go on for three paragraphs.
6. Dan. See #6.
7. Sunny, cool autumn days. Perfect for walking or, heh, playing Ultimate.
8. Halloween. The one day when being something you're not is recommended, nay, required.

*This is a reference to a Stephen King book. Who can guess which one?

Stuff I hate

Enough house-talk! Here are some things that really tick me off:

1. Foot-shuffling. Pick up your feet when you walk, please.
2. Lack of turn signals. Signaling the moment you begin the turn is just as bad.
3. Food Nazis. They know the best way to eat, and they know that your way isn't it.
4. Interrupters. These people usually aren't listening to a word you say.
5. Loud talkers. Unlike Trix, inside voice/outside voice isn't just for kids.
   
6. Change on top of bills. If you give me the bills first, the coins slide out of my hand! Bills last! Bills last!

Feel free to comment with some annoyances of your own.

Tomorrow I'll post a few things that make me smile.

You can laugh now...

...because I have become a frequent Ikea customer. When you move into a house with narrow staircases, you welcome furniture you can assemble in the room in which that furniture will serve. I'm not going to start buying chairs or beds there, mind you, but for a dresser I'll cave. I just want to keep my clothes in a drawer and not in a box.

We won't have Internet access at home until this Saturday (at earliest), so if you need to get me urgently it's best to use the phone. Oh, and our house is great at blocking cell phone signals. Right now it's like living on Galactica; not networked, lacking half the necessary stuff and staffed by tired, frazzled people.

Look out for an email invite to the housewarming Saturday, August 16. If you don't get an invite I probably just forgot to add you to the email list...it's not that we don't want to see you. Unless you work for Comcast, in which case I left you off the list because you are a demon from hell.

Oh, and the Mambo guys? They hit the target. Three very different looks, all of them pleasing but not overly so. Nice.

New favorite lyric:

"Ikea, just some oak and some pine and a handful of Norsemen
Ikea, selling furniture for college kids and divorced men
Everyone has a home
But if you don't have a home you can buy one there."

Artist: Jonathan Coulton (Jonathan Coulton)
Song: Ikea
Album : Smoking Monkey

Mother!

Moving is exactly as annoying as I remembered. Dan said that our apartment is now this ever-hungry beast to which we feed empty boxes and bubble wrap without end. And we started packing a month ago! Plus I might be getting a summer cold. Throw in a little waterboarding and tomorrow will be my best day ever.

Mambo is moving us, which means come tomorrow morning we get to see if the movers are too cute (meaning they distract you from your work), sufficiently cute-ish (meaning you can work but with a smile), or just scruffy (always a possibility). You've really gotta hit that target for an optimal move-to-distraction ratio.

New favorite lyric:

OK, I wanted to post the lyrics to "Get An Ugly Girl to Marry You", but I deferred to good taste. That song (by Harry Belafonte and the Coasters) is rabidly sexist but awfully catchy, putting me between the Scylla of political correctness and the Charybdis of I-like-to-sing-this.

And so it begins...

Settlement went off without a hitch, and now we own property. We signed 20 different pieces of paper, which was surprising as we expected to sign more. Not that I'm anxious to sign stuff, but, you know. Our lawyer was there with us, and I felt like one of those mob guys testifying before Congress. Every time a paper was handed to us, we passed it to the attorney and waited for his OK. Then we raced all over, buying this, giving away that, and got a fabulous area rug at Ikea. Their furniture is crap, but their accessories are occasionally worth it, and so it proved today.

Then we went to the new place and cleaned. The previous owners were good decorators but indifferent housekeepers, so there was alot to be done. And still is. By 6:30 we were just too tired so we packed it in.

Look out for invites to the housewarming, which will most likely be August 16. That's pretty soon, yes, but it will force us to get things in order right away.

Tragedy!

I broke my sunglasses last night.

Now, you're saying to yourself, "Umm...that's not really very tragic." Well, listen up, buster. I am fairly light-sensitive, so shades are a near-necessity. I am also extremely picky about sunglasses. Finally, given how often I lose/break sunglasses, I refuse to spend more than $20. A deadly trifecta, indeed! Anyway, I went out at lunch today to find some new ones, and because I didn't have much time I had to settle for this giant, senior-citizen pair I found at Daffy's. So now I look ready for retirement, dammit.

Today's the final walk-through on the house on which Dan and I plan to spend loads of cash. Since just about everything in this process has been as difficult as possible, I fully expect to find locusts in the closets, chalk-lines on the floors, and a Hellmouth in the basement. I can just see us as settlement, "If there had been a chaos demon there last month I am sure the inspector would have noticed it."

I can't think of a durned thing, so no favorite lyric today.

Head spinning...send backup...

I knew house-buying was expensive and complicated, but it's worse than I imagined. You have to do ten million things: sign agreements, get insurance (title and homeowners'), turn on/off utilities, forward mail, pack, and collect enough paper to choke Godzilla. The kicker is that you have to do it all at once. Couple that with the shopping we're doing for necessary (and less-necessary items) and we are quite run ragged.

Still, it's pretty exciting. I am looking forward to a gas stove with four burners that have settings other than off and death. To windows that don't admit every fly in Center City. To a washer that holds more than three socks and a headband* at a time. Oh, and of course to writing off the money we spend monthly on our abode. Ha-cha!

Hey, there is now a second Web site with crazy women who think of me as a chauvinistic homophobe! Some hysterical Hillary Clinton supporters have gotten together to bitch about Barack Obama and convince themselves that John McCain is A-OK on liberal issues. They are doing their best to perpetuate the stereotype of the emotion-governed, irrational woman.

New favorite lyric:

"Alot of folks just shook their heads
Convinced that I'd lost mine
They said, 'Living in a goddamn truck
Is just a waste of time
And to spend your life behind the wheel
Ain't as great as it might seem'
I just thanked them all and left one night
In the Kenworth of my dreams"

Artist: Richard Shindell (Richard Shindell)
Song: Kenworth of My Dreams
Album: Sparrows Point