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Very Very Good Thing

I talked this morning to someone about participating in a really exciting and interesting project that has me bouncing off of the walls. Hurrah!

We had a dumb argument on Saturday morning, we were both stressed out about money and extremely hungry and grumping at each other because of it. After a few minutes of feeling awful Todd stomped out (yup, he does know that it was dumb and didn’t accomplish anything) and came back about five minutes later and we talked everything out. We’ve both found out how helpful it is to just talk about how whatever’s happened has made us feel — and what we want to happen as a result of discussing whatever it is — after about ten minutes we’d resolved everything and agreed that food would be a Very Very Good Thing and made lunch together, then went out grocery shopping.

Friday night, we went to Sarah’s and watched the X-Files, it was really fun and it felt like she was much more herself. Saturday morning, we went with her and a real estate agent to look at more houses, had a great time. The first house was absolutely amazing. The family had lived there for ten years, and it looked like they’d collected TWENTY years worth of clutter — really, I swear this isn’t an exaggeration — there was stuff everywhere, with narrow pathways between stuff. The walls looked pretty sturdy and in good shape, but since we could only see the top 3 feet of them, they could have looked terrible and we’d never have known. Todd, Sarah, the real estate agent, and I were all stifling giggles the whole time — when we went up to the finished attic and found STILL MORE STUFF (I swear, you could have furnished a small house with just what was in the attic — we recommended that Sarah buy the house and offer to take anything they didn’t feel like moving with them, then hold a huge yard sale, that she could probably buy a whole new house with the proceeds) we couldn’t stop laughing. The truly amazing part was that they had three kids under six, and really, it looked like if you made just one pile of stuff fall, it would cause a chain reaction through the entire house, ending in an avalanche.

The next house we went to had a woman in her seventies with two small children having their Saturday morning routine. This house was spotless. I mean, this was literally the kind of house where you could have eaten off the floor and the floor would be cleaner than anyone else’s kitchen table. If that woman could see our house on its cleanest day she’d probably fall over at the absolute horror of it. Let’s see…oh, and then there were a couple of houses that weren’t any great shakes, then the strangest one of all. We walked in and the very first thing that caught our eyes were these shelves of Disney kids videos. I’ve seen less complete collections in video stores. It was evidently two daughters and a father living in the house and these kids had everything any kid could ever even dream of wanting — I mean, the poor dad had this teensy little room with hardly anything in it, probably because he’d bankrupted himself buying the PENTIUM COMPUTER for his kids *laughing*.

Oh, and there were really cute signs up on all of the bedroom doors saying, “Don’t come in here! You will be in troble!” and “The computer will explode if you enter!” In fact, there was even one on the dad’s door, come to think of it taped up at dad-height, not kid-height. Very weird…

Then on Saturday night we were coming back from grocery shopping, we were getting bags out of the car and our neato neighbor was hauling a christmas tree into his house and said hi, asked how we were and I asked how he and his family were doing, he asked if we wanted to come and meet the (now one month old!) baby and I said yes, definitely! So we put our groceries away and went over to their house and met the baby. I had no idea a human being could be so teensy. I mean, KARMA weighs more than that baby did. They started to put the baby into my arms and I was panicked because the first and last time I held a baby I was thirteen and it was a babysitting job, they all laughed at me (Todd even changed Sean’s diapers, so he wasn’t intimidated at all) and I sat down on the couch and then held the baby (I was really terrified of dropping him). It was amazing. This little teensy life that didn’t exist and now does. We had a great time talking for awhile and then went back home. Quite an experience, I must say.

Everybody’s Happy

Some Enchanted Evening