Livid.
Fucking livid.
Jay made a reservation for a UHaul THREE WEEKS AGO.
They’re experiencing delays in trucks coming back in, and can’t tell us tonight what time we can get a truck tomorrow – it could be three in the afternoon!
I have a nasty cold, I just want to sleep, everything is either packed or just trashed around, and I’m angry – how the hell do you make reservations for a DAY and not honor them until possibly late in the afternoon?
Beyond pissed off.

So we have a house.
And we bought a Jeep.
And now we’re off to hold up a Home Depot. Please – like I could afford to buy paint after a day like this?
I am so effin exhausted.
*heh*
Good luck, Mac, who’s doing this same exact process tomorrow morning. And insane congrats to my twin, Ericalynn, who got engaged! *mwah!*

10:30am – Final walkthrough of house that within hours will hopefully be ours.
11:00am – Let the copious amounts of paper-signing begin!
2:00pm – Watch out Bed, Bath & Beyond, Home Depot & Hannafords, here comes our American Express!
(Psst – send us a little message, down in the left corner. It’ll go to my cellphone, so I can check it when my hand gets tired of signing. )

Jay, who wouldn’t let my cats near him when we first moved in together, is now delicately feeding Walker his medicine in fingertipfuls of whipped cream.
I, who can proudly recite all the lyrics to “Ice Ice Baby” and had vaguely heard of this Bob Dylan guy in college, just sang all the words to “All Along the Watchtower.”
All three kitties, who do nothing more than hiss at each other, are sitting in the same room, waiting to be fed.
When did this happen?

Jack Johnson. Gin & tonic. Mounds and mounds of boxes. A few twitchy kitties who aren’t sure exactly what’s going on. An American Express that’s seen more action in the last four hours than – I don’t have enough brainpower to identify the hussy *ahem* sexually liberated woman of the day.
Speaking of non-hussyness, I’ve been the proud owner of erika AT crack-whore.net for a while now. Need your own raunchy forwarding address? Check out datapimp. You too can have yourname@WhereTheFuckAreMyPants.com. Not your thing? How about yourname@CrazyAssPimp.com? Somehow that just screams Wendy. Go get one. They’re just so much fun.
Fifteen more hours, eight of which I hope to be sleeping peacefully without a single dream, toss or turn.

Shit official lost.
And I now have less than an hour to grade all these papers. So much for coming in early.

So about a week ago, Max asked me if I was losing my shit yet. I asked her why, and she replied, Buying a house is HUGE! But I wasn’t really losing my shit. I was just sitting and waiting and getting tired of waiting – though I definitely thought that as someone buying a house, I should be losing my shit.
Well, now I’m losing my shit. I’m so freaked that we’re going to go to closing tomorrow, and we will have missed a huge piece and we’re going to have to go out and run around and not have it go smoothly and pretty-like.
A bit of a control freak, yes. I like to know everything’s in order. I don’t like being caught unprepared. And this is a house. I mean, what does one wear to a closing, anyway? Do we bring our own pens? I’m definitely the type that will come armed with WAY too much stuff. Are our driver’s licenses enough proof of who we are? Do we need passports, birth certificates too? Do we need to bring everything we brought to apply for the mortgage?
You know the funny thing? It really doesn’t matter what answer you give me. The only way I’ll have peace of mind is if I bring it ALL with us. How horrible is that?
Lalalalalaaaa. Cooontrol freak.

When I was growing up – maybe 10 or so – my mom went back to school for her MA in Education. She was already working full-time, so there were a lot of nights she was out at class (which meant a lot of nights that Dad ordered us pizza for dinner ). I remember her sitting at the kitchen table, typing out papers (on a typewriter!). I also remember her glowing about a favorite professor of hers.
Now, I’m not a professor. I’m not teaching graduate classes – but I do have an afternoon class of all adult learners. It kinda hit me tonight when I ended class an hour or so early – I had visions of them going home and saying to their family, “The teacher let us out early.”
Whoa. I’m the teacher.
Another funny thing – they had a paper due today. Often, I do a lot of revision work in class on papers just about to be turned in. Today, we did topic sentences & paragraph structure, and I wanted them to go through their paper and determine whether or not they had clear topic sentences, one idea per paragraph, etc, etc. They freaked on me! Here was this teacher asking them to mark up this paper they had worked so hard on, all clean and freshly printed! How absolutely mad I must be! They completely refused to do the exercise. It’s funny – my younger classes are completely fine with it, but this is a class of 30-40-50 year old women who haven’t been in a class pretty much since they graduated high school. I went through my whole spiel of writing as a process, and it still wasn’t flying. So much for breaking down that teacher-student power dichotomy.
And oh yeah – roughly 42 hours til we sign the papers for the house. AUGH! The best thing? I realized that tomorrow is the last time I’ll need to make this damned commute. The sucky thing? We still have soooo much to pack, and I’ve got 20 papers to grade & a kazillion things to do for class tomorrow.
Must breathe. AUGH!!

I ran into one of my girls on her way to a doctor’s appointment this morning; she said she had to write a paper about the most influential people in her life, and she wrote about me, her mom and her best friend.
Excuse me while I sit in the corner and cry a little. Most days I’m okay with leaving the center — then one of the girls pulls something like this, or says something that makes me think twice. Bah! Awesome sweet girls making me feel the love – what’s that about? Meanies!
Still, some cool things on the horizon. Did I mention that we have an 11am closing on Thursday? And once we’re settled in the house, I’m going to start poking around at local PhD programs, and hopefully get applications in the mail in January. I’ve got that Intro to Small Business class starting in January, and possibly a lead on a position managing a little coffeehouse right over the NH border.
It’s all about truckin’ on forward, isn’t it?

I feel like I’m thirteen again – if I finish all my homework, I can read my fun book.
I have to come up with something for class tomorrow, and I’m itching to find out what Harry, Ron & Hermoine have been up to since I last opened The Goblet of Fire (yesterday afternoon, before the three-hour marathon nap).
Btw, it’s been a good few months at least since I last mentioned that I want to be Karen when I grow up.
I completely live in a fantasy world, don’t I?