The Big House is officially under contract. Three months, a bit of staging, a lot of closet cleaning and there she goes. The folks from Seattle want to close on May 23, which gives us four weeks to find a new house. Oh sure, we’ve already gone and seen 98% of what’s on the market in the neighborhood we want to land in, but nothing we’ve *loved* so far. Well, except that house with the pool. We don’t need a pool. Not in Atlanta during a drought, not really. Not us. Too high maintenance.

So this weekend we’ll look until our eyes begin to bleed and the acid in our bellies eats a hole through our abdomens you can put a Plexiglas window in later to watch us in the act of digesting our liquefied meals because we’ve been grinding our jaws in our sleep and have no teef left.

The Mc? He’s well. Happy about the sale price and training for his first traithalon next weekend. He ordered a Mini that’s on a boat somewhere on its way to us him. He’s ready to be intown, me thinks.

That’s hardly enough right? What with the looking at land in North Carolina every twenty minutes and trying to agree on/finalize the cabin plan?

Nah.

So how about if we move our offices across town while we’re at it? I mean really, what’s a little more upheaval when you’ve got that other little stuff going on along with a cold and the threat of a root canal? Oh, yeah, and when you’re rockin seven games of Scrabulous at once, three knitting projects that never end, trying to find a grandmother in Scotland to fulfill an obscure request for a friend (my favorite), rekindling old friendships and forging new ones, immersing yourself in photography in hopes it will some day rescue you and in general being a good recycling water conserving herb growing person with an uncle recovering from a stroke in Omaha and an Auntie in Wales recovering from a ruptured appendix and an Auntie in SF you really need to visit PERIOD after her scare with cancer last year and that other painful thing this year that I can’t do a damn thing about.

In the end, I sit. I sit on the porch right now this very minute and ignore the overly dramatic expressions of the kitties in the window as I’ve just refilled the birdfeeder but neglected their poor “Mom I’m staaaaaarrrrving look at me I’m disappearingggggggggg” faces. Allow me to change my physical direction to avoid the silent guilt trip and instead enjoy the wee breeze and the bugs and the birds singing and the shade and the not warm enough to want to peel my skin off but not cool enough for long sleeves temperatures. There’s the train in the distance and a rustle in the bushes twenty feet below that gives away the whereabouts of scavengers of bugs and woodland snacks.

Yeah. Life is good….but I still miss having time to write.

I hope you miss me, too. Cuz sometimes, I wonder. Are you still there?

Last week Friday during my day off work and day on running errands, I found myself in a familiar haunt: my old neighborhood bookstore. It’s one of my happy places, where I can spend hours pouring over shelves of disjointed genres, entertaining and tickling different parts of my thoughts/memories/imagination that have been neglected.

Drifting up and down the aisles pressed against the wall of the store allocated for books on spirituality and religion, I passed a young man engrossed in a book. Slouched down in his temporary sanctuary of a chair that struggles not to be too inviting.

I made mental notes about him, many of which have long since been crumpled up and thrown away. There’s still a faint scribble about his body language blasting an all points bulletin that he was both smart enough to chill there and probably too cool to be there.

He seemed to be positioning the book he was reading in such a way that no one would see.

It was “Making it on Broadway”, and wonder if he’ll try.

I hope he does, but with those mental notes now in a landfill or on a barge off the Jersey shore or the trash vortex, I don’t suppose I’ll ever know.

A few of the many great lines from the Anne Lamott book I referenced in a previous post, do with them what you will:

“Being enough was going to have to be an inside job.”

“The world can’t give us peace. We can find it only in our hearts.”
“I hate that.” I said
“I know. but the good news is that by the same token, the world can’t take it away.”

“Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save. They just stand there shining”

And perhaps the one most perfectly suited to my particular brand of juxtaposed defect and sensitivity:

“You don’t always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it, too.”

Mmmmm hmmm.

I’ve got the day off so I’m who knows where doing who knows what.

Happy Friday, babies.

Kissy boo!

My brother (the Irish twin) and I were previously scheduled for some good old fashioned bonding time on the strangely shaped canvas of southern Utah next month, but between kids and hockey tournaments and the like our dates got messed up.

Instead, as I was told this morning, he’s coming to me in the ATL.

Can I get a w00t, or is it too early for that?

I don’t know what got into me the other night in the store. I was headed for a new jar of Carmex and I came across a vast array of lip products and their clever packaging. I picked up the Blistex based on…I don’t know what. A vague recollection of a commercial? The nifty box with the promises to hydrate and penetrate right there in English with all its glorious innuendo? The super efficient / ultra smooth rolling tip it promised to hold inside? Whatever, it it was, my choice was a mistake.

This stuff is stinky.

Blistex Lip Infusion is concocted with - I can’t quite place it, maybe it’s a hint of coconut? Maybe it’s a dash of anti-freeze. What I do know is it rolls on in too great a quantity to be of any use, makes a [stinky] mess of my lips for a few minutes then disappears. It leaves me wanting and unprotected, and with a great looming shadow of guilt for having cheated on my old, reliable, perfect Carmex.

My jackass barista - the new one - the one who can’t remember what I order despite the fact that I’m in there _every_fracking_morning, didn’t put the lid on my bev tight enough this morning so as I walked to my car it ass-ploded in my hand, leaving me with a glove of foam. Thanks for that, bootie scratchier.

On the bright side, nothing worse could possibly go wrong all day…so I’ve got that goin’ for me…which is nice.