Fabulous Miss S.

Jews can have Christmas lists too ya know.

Now this is just cool. Courtesy of Zoot, who is also very cool, and posts cool blog things. Maybe she'll make a shirt on cafepress that says _I heart zoot_, cause, I'd probably buy it.

Other things I want for Hannamus:

1. Weed. Fine. I know, it is called the Wii ... and it looks like this. I just think it has a funny name. But it is the CURE to my stress!

2. ROOMBA!  Do I really need to explain this one?

3. Cat toys ... well, more like a kitty-village

4. Bubba. 

a funny thing happened the other day

good night moon.

good night room.

good night place that i call home.

good night to the balcony facing rockville pike, the fumes and metro noises

good night to the crazy lady two doors down who fights with her 40 year old son very loudly.

good night abdul at the front desk and wendy at night. thanks for your help and you kind words

good night bad cable selection, one toilet home, good night room with no telephone jack

.... after a ONE HOUR drive home (normally takes 20 minutes) because of a damn car crash on GA ave., my already fried nerves were just about completely burned to the core. I was like a lit cigarrette sitting on a piece of plastic, slowly melting through.

I packed a few things for my temporary a'la country living housesitting endeavor this weekend and then proceeded to have a massive panic attack that included the inability to breath, speak, a few dry-heaves and many many tears and screams in Marc's general direction.  Thank GOD for a tiny little pill and two STIFF gin and tonics and maybe even a cigarette, that did not burn through anything plastic.  For I am now sane and breathing relatively normally again.

I thought I was all upset about the amount of boxes still to be packed and the little things sitting out, like, my fifteen bottles of perfume, the thirteen remotes we have for three televisions and the plastic silverware that is being run thru the dishwasher yet again. And OHMYGOD how are we going to pack all that shit goddammit?!.

Then, I remembered, this is my last night here.  My last night in the home where I spent a year with my dear Grandma before she died, the place where she did die. And I started to remember all the fun times I had with her in those last months.  No one else was here much ... but me, and her.  I got to thinking about how I was really in charge back then.  I didn't realize it much then, but I dutifully scheudled her day and prepared her meals and really looked after her. I kvetched at her to take a shower, helped her dress and put on one of her beaded necklaces that she wore everywhere.  We had fun for awhile, then we didn't do much, but we sat together and watched a lot of bad television.

  Living here has given me then chance to be in the space that was hers and ours. But, this is my last night here, with us.  I moved in there while ending a bad, very stale relationship, and soon, VERY soon, found Marc. He was across the street waiting for me.  They day I moved in here, I told my Dad that my future husband was across the street.  He asked if I'd been drinking. 

I don't care much about the boxes because this weekend, I will use my Dad's truck and load half of them in one trip.  No biggie, right?  But, I'm still leaving this place behind. I'm trying to burn the images of each room into a freeze frame in my brain. But, I guess that isn't really necessary. I still have her with me and the memories of me not trusting that she washed her hands before dinner, so I'd make her lick her hands to prove to me that she washed them.  She got a real kick out of that too.  It's funny what you remember sometimes. 

I was sad today because two of the very few people I hold near and dear to me have both said very mean things to me in the last two days.  I don't know if they are true, if they even meant them seriously, but I do know that they do NOT know what I'm going through, as they haven't asked, and hell, even I didn't know until a few hours ago.  But, I can't think about them now,  but, I'm not a selfish* person and I'm not a braty spoiled white girl either. I'm a damn lucky person who has a fabulous family and a lot on her mind.  P.S. I did manage to help my volunteer 87-year old this weekend while I should have been packing.

*Perhaps if I had been selfish, you ASSHOLE, I would have stayed home, left her without her low-sodium cheese and lactaid milk, I'd have a few more boxes packed and some sanity. 

I have to go say goodnight to my rooms now.

Rural suburbs? Here we come!!!!!

Seeing my new spacious walk-in closets through the stack of boxes

Around 4 o'clock on Sunday I decided to take a break from packing.  A break from removing all five hundred and three pairs of shoes from their neat, plastic Container Store boxes and dumping them haphazardly into a large messy, cold cardboard box.

I took a break to eat some chips. The heaving reality is that moving sucks a rats ass.  You work so hard that you produce obivious-to-yourself-BO by 11 o’clock in the morning and proceed to do nothing about it for many, many hours. Not even a spritz of perfume, of which you have tons.  Moving makes you sit in your empty kitchen nursing Utz Sweet BBQ Chips and Diet Dr. Pepper at 4:15 in the afternoon, as you huddle over your laptop furiously typeing your thoughts.

Thus, plunging you directly -do-NOT-collect-$200 into the jailed insanity of I'm-too-fat-for-my-work-clothes-stressaganza-of-the-month.

Sitting in my kitchen, on an empty mini-ice chest, staring at the bare counters along with my temporary best friends, Utz and Diet Dr. Pepper, I got to thinking about how much crap I own.

You know those weird games where you are asked truth-divulging questions that are supposed to change the way you think and view the world, things like, if your home was on fire, what three things would your grab on your way out the door?  In this room alone, I'd have to take the Diet Dr.Pepper,blender, Sapphire Gin, Elton John CD that is keeping me mildly sane at this moment. See, some things are more easily replaceable than others, no?

But seriously, today alone, I've trashed about thirty-seven thousand pictures of my Uncle's now-dead dog.  I saved the ones of relatives taken at  Skyline Drive in 1936 and one of my Great Grandmother's Halloween dress in 1916. Really. They had cameras back then! I do have some sense of sentimentality and practicality. 

It isn't easy deciding whether or not to toss the jeans I wore once goddammit this summer that are a size 8 with cute little embroidery flower dealies up and down the leg.  I left the gin on the counter in hopes that I won't even have to worry about moving that bottle, lo, it will disappear down my throat in the next three nights I sure.

If the smoke alarm went off right now, I'd have to curse the Gods of Moving for allowing me to pack the world neatly with foam and newspaper between each plate, and have it be for naught.

But really, I'd grab Marc's hand, give him a wink (okay, a scream), and head over to our new home without a glance backwards, because, life moves forward, faster than you realize sometimes, and just as fast and unintentionally as I outgrew the skinny jeans, we've outgrown this apartment.

The new house better have rockin' drawer space.

Moving is slow painful torture

I have sent Marc out with no less than twelve bags of trash today. But somehow, each time I turn around, there is more crap to be wrapped and packed.

I am exhausted.

Watching a Jew assemble a Christmas Tree

I had to work today, the Friday after Thanksgiving. 

The rest of the world is home, decorating their homes, baking cookies, watching movies, packing for their upcoming moves, exercising the seven pounds of turkey off their thighs and otherwise relaxing.

Me? I am at work. 

Being one of three women in an office of fifteen who 1) stuck around after lunch time, and 2) cares, I had the pleasure of setting up the office Christmas Tree.

Now, you tell a Jew to take a fake-tree out of a dusty cardboard box and make it look like something Jesus would appreciate, you might get this:

But with a little help from the team, and after at least two hours of sitting on the floor putting hooks into balls and not stabbing your fingers into bloody pulps, you *might* get this: