Well, that was a jam-packed thrill ride of a weekend. Let's see--Friday we went out for dinner with Heather and Matt. I'd had a craving for ribs, so we went to Chili's, and they were very good. I think everyone else at dinner was secretly envious, because they all had dignified meals, and I was covered in sauce.
Then Saturday, Heather and I descended commando-style (which is to say, overwhelmingly, not without underwear) on the post office and mailed 17 small boxes of books media mail. We were a little worried about annoying everyone else in line, but as it turned out, there was no line at all, at least when we started. By the end, there was a bit of a backup. By the way, mailing 17 small boxes media mail costs just over $100, which seems quite reasonable considering that that was pretty much all of our DVDs and videotapes and probably half of our books. It was a rollicking start to our Girls Weekend! Girls Weekend! Girls Weekend!, and we hit the road in high spirits.
After a wonderful lunch at Arby's in Santa Maria, we arrived in Pismo Beach and went to the outlets. Despite me being the one who's moving, I bought a lot more than Heather did, although to my credit, most of it was either small, replacing something I already had, or useful for the move. Then we went to our motel, and--actually, I fear mere words will not do this place justice. Suffice it to say that if I don't post here for a while, it's because I've succumbed to the flesh-eating bacteria that I'm sure was all over that place. It was so seedy and unpleasant, though, that it was funny, and I think it was perfect for our GW! GW! GW!, because although we are technically female, we are the only two women we know who would deign to sleep in this place, let alone laugh about it. For that matter, we decided that neither Robbie nor Matt would have slept there either.
The rest of the day was spent checking out Pismo Beach (it's basically California's answer to the Jersey Shore, in case you were wondering) and eating dinner at Red Lobster. I'm sure there are those who feel that eating at Red Lobster when you're staying in a town that has "Beach" in the name should be illegal, but not those of us participating in the GW! GW! GW!, so for us it was perfect. After dinner, I got Heather hooked on American Chopper, and then we fell asleep. The beds were surprisingly comfortable. Syphilitic, maybe, but comfortable.
Yesterday, we came back home, and then we all had dinner at Helen and Buebbles' place. Their unpacking is going well, and we seem to have cleaned them out of boxes, so we'll need to find a new source. Robbie got rid of the three-table set while I was gone, so that frees up a good four square feet of space. It's a start.
Today we had lunch with some of my old work friends and the son of one of them. I saw him about two months ago, and in the interim he's learned the names of several forms of transportation and the neat noises you can make if you stick your head in a bucket and yell "woo." He also calls men on skateboards "Daddy," which is rather odd because the man I believe to be his father doesn't skateboard. Can't explain that one. Tonight is round two of wine-tasting, and then I suspect I will stare at our packing boxes for a while and point and laugh, and possibly stick my head in a bucket and yell "woo."

Today has been delightfully quiet at work. It's only me and Mike, and we're the two quietest employees here, and the least inclined to come and stand in someone's doorway and babble on and on and on endlessly and then stop talking and just stare at you until you get really creeped out and... well, I digress. At any rate, I'm enjoying the peace.
This weekend Heather and I are going on a girls weekend! Girls weekend! Girls weekend! to Pismo Beach, where we will have all the clams we can eat (according to Warner Brothers) and outlet shop. I plan only to buy really tiny things, because of the move, so I think that may cramp my style a bit, but still it'll be a good time. There is also an IHOP, and our hotel has a pool, so I fully expect that we will cavort as we have never cavorted before.
Before we hit the road for the GW! GW! GW!, we're going to stop by the post office and drop off the 20 or so small boxes of books that I'm shipping media mail. I think the postal service and all of my fellow customers will thoroughly loathe me by the end of the transaction, especially since media mail is so dirt cheap that they will probably lose money off the sale. Although I suppose winning and losing are all the same if you're a postal employee.
Our potential dresser buyer decided against it. I had the feeling she would, but I was still hopeful.

I didn't feel well this morning, so I only went in to work for about three hours this afternoon. I think the three-hour day is the way to go--I was hardly bored at all. Except for maybe one day a month, I don't have more than three hours of work to do, so it would work out... At any rate, I realized that this is two Thursdays in a row that I've had a stomachache. I wonder if I'm going a little too nuts on Big Wednesdays. Maybe next week I'll shoot for a Moderately Sized Wednesday and see how that goes.
Right now I'm on the sofa watching the end of Murder She Wrote. Needless to say, Jessica Fletcher is bringing it all home, like the virtuoso she is. Now we just have to wait for someone to make a little joke, and the screen to freeze on everyone laughing uproariously, and then it'll be time for City Confidential. I'm sure that's going to be the next big cult show for twentysomethings, like Trading Spaces was for a while. It's so ridiculously overblown and dramatic, and it makes even dull cities like Akron seem like hotbeds of sin.
Oh, "Mark" and his housemate are buying the table set, and one of our friends is coming over to look at the dresser this evening sometime. The living room is even more of a disaster than it was yesterday, though, because I bought some boxes and packing materials today, and we also picked some up at Helen and Buebbles' yesterday. We went over there to drop off their wedding gift, and tried to help them pick a first-dance song for their reception. Helen was leaning towards a Harry Connick Jr. song, but Buebbles wasn't having any of it. For his part, Robbie was trying to encourage them to pick something by Frank Zappa.

Today was Big Wednesday, which is always a joyful day for me. All Big Wednesday technically is is some discounts on lunch specials at the UCen, but it's also the one day when we all buy lunch rather than packing it, and go to the UCen instead of the Arbor, and so the day has taken on a festive atmosphere. Or as festive an atmosphere as you can get when you're in a deadly dull job and all your friends are deep in thesis work. At times like these, eating synthetic Chinese food can really improve your outlook on the day. This Big Wednesday was especially big, though, because I ran into Karen, a woman I used to work with but haven't seen in at least a year. We're going to try to get together for lunch before we move.
The furniture sale is going great. "Mark" and his housemate never got back to us about the tables, but Robbie sent out a list of available furniture to the physics grads, and most of our little things got snapped up. We have some really great deals on bigger furniture, like our kitchen cabinet and some of our bookcases, so I'm a little surprised no one has been interested in those, but we've sold a lot of the other things. I think I'll send out a revised list to the grads in my department in a few days, to see if they want anything.
And that's it--packing and selling, with some Big Wednesday thrown in. Our apartment is a disaster area, as we've reached that critical point in moving where there is maximum disorder. Things are off the shelves and out of the cabinets and closets, and some things are actually in boxes, but mostly they are next to boxes (we have a ton of boxes now, which is great but takes up a lot of space), and there's a nice thick layer of bubble wrap and peanuts and packing paper spread over everything. And none of the furniture has been taken away yet, so, for example, in the living room there are our nice dishes on the floor, some in paper wrap, next to a stack of various-sized boxes, and then there's an end table (a very clean, oil-soaped table) next to that, completely not where it used to be, in the perfect spot for someone to fall over. Where the end table used to be, there is a crate full of more fancy dishes. It's a mess, but, like I said, I think this is the worst point and things will get better.

We had our first wine-tasting class for the summer last night. I think this quarter will be fun, but not as much fun as last fall. The instructor talked smack about two-buck Chuck, for one thing, although he did say he'd never tasted it. That seems to me to be a bad sign. Also, although the class was listed as meeting for six weeks, it's actually going to be only four or five weeks, so I feel a little ripped off. It's worse for Heather and Robbie, though--they each have to miss two classes, so if it's only four classes long they'll end up paying $30 a class.
When I got back from wine-tasting, I had an email from a student in my department that had been sent out to all the students and staff, saying that he and his housemate were looking to buy living room furniture. I thought that was extremely felicitous, and wrote back offering to sell our end tables and coffee table, a matching set, for $25. The tables are in pretty good shape, not banged up at all, but they were a little dusty. The student's name was pretty clearly male--let's call him Mark--and, without giving it any explicit thought, I had a running assumption in the back of my mind that he and the housemate would be happy enough with our tables, as long as they thought the price was low enough. Was $25 low enough? I figured it was, but I decided I would go lower if necessary.
Then Mark called to set up a time to come look at the tables, but Mark had a very high-pitched, feminine voice. That struck me as odd, but I figured, huh, he must be a she, and it must be a family name or something. I sat on the sofa for a few minutes after I got off the phone, and then, once again without giving it any explicit thought, I thought, hey, maybe I should dust those tables off after all, before she gets here. They really were pretty filthy. I got out the Murphys Oil Soap and went to work, and the set of tables looked pretty good after a while.
About ten minutes later, Mark and the housemate showed up, and they were in fact both male, but I'm fairly sure that they were both gay. I showed them the tables, and the price seemed right, and the tables were certainly clean. However, as I was showing them, once again without giving the matter explicit thought, the tables suddenly seemed to me to be awfully matchy-matchy, and, frankly, kind of bourgeois. They weren't remotely interesting, design-wise, and wasn't owning three matching tables a little much? They seemed friendly enough, but were these men secretly laughing at my tables?
Fortunately, Mark and his housemate seemed pretty interested. They had another table they want to see today, but I think I may have made a sale. It cracked me up afterwards, though. I figure, I should feel bad about making so many assumptions about people's furniture-buying habits based on their gender and sexual preference. But then, after all, these assumptions made me feel three different ways of inadequate about my furniture sale last night, and I suppose that's punishment enough. And they really are very nice tables.

Last night we went to Borders just before closing time, and there was a little girl in the checkout line in front of us with her mother. The little girl, who was maybe seven or eight, was buying a magazine with her own money, and she was counting it all out herself--slowly. Very slowly. She was making little stacks with the money, and losing count, and emptying out her change purse to see if she had enough, and the line was getting longer, and longer, and longer. She checked all over herself for change, and counted and recounted. She wasn't embarrassed, and she wasn't in a hurry, and nobody was hooshing her along. Finally, after the line had grown to maybe ten or twelve frustrated people, she discovered she really didn't have enough. Her mother, who clearly thought this was the darlingest thing ever, whipped out a hundred-dollar bill and told the cashier to take the remaining $1.17 out of that.
Once we got out to the parking lot, Robbie and I had the same reaction--only in Santa Barbara. Only ever in Santa Barbara do people think their children are that precious and other people's time is that worthless. And only ever in Santa Barbara would the entire situation finally be resolved with the production of a hundred-dollar bill. (And, as Robbie astutely pointed out, only ever in Santa Barbara would the little girl be buying a Cosmo.)
This is starting to make me nervous, though, because what do we blame things on when we move? Neither of us like it very much here, and I think we have good reasons for that, but blaming any sort of frustrating social, political, or climatic condition that we find ourselves in on Santa Barbara has become a way of life for us. What do I do if things go wrong in Pittsburgh? I mean, obviously, the odds that I won't live through the next two years in blissful nirvanic contentment are low--this is Pittsburgh, after all, and I've told everyone that it's the best place to live for nearly a decade now of me not living there--but what if? What if people are occasionally rude? What if someone takes my parking spot? What if some numbskull drives through the ATM backwards, or doesn't turn their headlights on in the rain? What if we are not, in fact, greeted at the city gates by a choir of angels handing out pierogies and I.C. Lights? What then?
I was ready for culture shock when I moved out to California, and I got it a little. I was prepared for everything to be novel, though, and it was, so things were pretty much the way I'd expected. The worst culture shock I ever had, though, was two years ago, when I moved about ten miles, out from the suburbs and into downtown. I was completely disoriented, because I'd thought nothing would change, but everything had changed just a little. I went to a different grocery store and a different gas station and ate at different restaurants and took a different route home from work, and I felt just a little off all the time, sort of like a mild mental carsickness. I think the same thing may happen this time--I mean, I know we're moving a long way, but I feel like I should know exactly what it's like when I get there, and I really won't. We'll be living in a completely different neighborhood, and (thankfully) I won't be in high school, which is what I was doing the last time I lived there, and I really don't know what to expect. Which is nice, except if I expect everything to be predictable. Oh well. At least Robbie will still be able to complain that it's not as good as Rhode Island, which will be a useful scapegoat for him--maybe I'll just start blaming any shortcomings on things going downhill since my youth...

I'm back... The faux-camping was great. Our cabin was very civilized, with a comfy bed and a whirlpool bath and all, but outside there was a creek and a picnic table by the fire pit, and as long as I was outside, it felt like real camping. We did one long hike up a series of hills that had ocean and mountain views (from a few of the taller hills we could see UCSB's Storke Tower, which was slightly depressing), and then two short walks, one past some very bored llamas and one down to the ocean. We also took four whirlpool baths and are very pruny as a result, and we ate better than I ever have on any previous camping trip. We basically had a hike-bath-eat rotation for most of the trip.
The big news for me today, though, is that I got an email from McSweeneys asking if they could use a list I sent them a year or two ago in an anthology of the best humor that's been in their magazine or online. I'm thrilled. I'm getting paid, although not much, but mostly I'm just excited that I'm going to be in an anthology with who knows who. Especially if it includes selections from the print magazine, which actually pays for submissions, there could be some pretty cool people in there. I'll post something when I know more about when it'll be published, or any more details.
Other than that, we've just been shopping for wedding presents (I finally got a gift for Toffie's wedding, which I was in last September, so I'm looking forward to waking up tomorrow without that guilt hanging over me) and packing in some of the boxes we nabbed from Helen and Buebbles. So, that's the news from here this weekend. Oh, the one remaining tidbit is that I just got off the phone with my parents, and after some polite chitchat about the McSweeneys thing and the likely weather for our cross-country trip, my dad revealed that he'd like to go to Burning Man. Not necessarily on this trip, mind you, but someday. My mother won't drive through Nevada on I-15 without ten gallons of water and emergency flares, though, so I don't see this working out for them.

The rest of my birthday was great. I had a stomachache all afternoon, probably started by my eating cheesecake at 9:30 in the morning, and probably compounded by my eating a $1.50 Costco hot dog with lots of onions for lunch, but after a strong dose of smelly French cheeses left over from the graduation party (they're really, really ripe by now) and an hour or two of careful inertia on the sofa, I was ready to take on the sushi. I got great presents too. Robbie got me a set of 48 lectures on "England from the Tudors to the Stuarts," which we're going to play on our drive across the country, alternating with downtown jazz or whatever else he wants to listen to (actually, since I've already said I'll object to nothing he chooses as long as I get to listen to my lectures, I think he might play a lot of Phish. But hey, a deal's a deal). Heather and Matt got me the Anything Goes cast recording, a book called It's My F---ing Birthday , and these little Post-It-type flags that you can stick to the edge of a page and write comments on. I think they're actually meant to stick in printed books, but Heather suggested I use them for my manuscript, and I think that's a great idea because I can see what comments I have left to deal with without having to flip through and search. They also come in a variety of colors, so I can use pink for continuity errors, say, and blue for line edits, and green for places where the book goes so totally off the rails that I have no idea how to fix it and just want to crawl under my bed for a while.
Actually, I like that idea. I like the idea of making little stick-on tabs for writers to use during edits, like these, but preprinted with things like "This section is better than you thought it was when you woke up in the middle of the night last night and stared at the ceiling for a while," and "What the--no, seriously, what the hell? What the hell? I'm embarrassed to be occupying the same cerebrum as you," and maybe "It's not too late to consider law school." I think the market would be small but loyal.
Anyhow, I'll be toting my new book from Heather and Matt along with me this weekend when we go faux-camping. We're going to a campground with cabins that have fire pits outside, but are fully equipped with hot tubs and wet bars and Frette linens. It's the kind of thing that could only exist in California, and since we're leaving California in less than two months, I wanted to give it a try (and give Robbie a graduation present and anniversary present). I'm supposed to commune with nature and breathe in the fresh pine air and whatnot, but I plan to alternate between sitting in the hot tub and sitting on the front porch with my book. Maybe we'll take a hike, as I hear there are llamas. I'll be back with an update on Sunday.

Da na na na na na, they say it's my birthday, da na na na na na, na na... This time 26 years ago, I was lying in the nursery of Magee Womens Hospital with my hands over my eyes, which my family thought was flat-out brilliant because I was blocking my eyes from the bright lights, but which Evie pointed out once was probably just me flailing about trying to suck my thumb and failing miserably. (I think Evie is responsible for most of the healthy adjustments in self-image that I made during my freshman year of college.)
The moving last night went well. As it turned out, they packed up both Helen's and Buebbles' things before we got there, so we were really only there for the unloading into the new place. Their apartment is very nice. It's spacious (living room and separate dining nook spacious, beds don't dominate the bedrooms spacious, cavernous living room spacious), very clean, and smells like new paint. The view is not so great right now, since they just tore down the house next door and there's a big field of dirt, but the neighborhood is very nice and there are a lot of things to walk to. And, again, the apartment is huge. I kept walking around muttering to Robbie, "So, our new apartment, is it this big? Are the bedrooms this big? What about the living room?" He said it was hard to tell.
So the moving was fun, though I got a little depressed thinking of us moving into our new apartment in August without any of our friends there. I'm not looking forward to the actual process of carrying things in to our new place, since it took us quite a while last night with eight people and we'll only be two (plus my parents, but they're in their late fifties, which isn't so important if you're moving into, say, a ground-floor apartment, but becomes more of a factor if you're on the third floor), but it was more when we were all eating pizza and puttering around having fun that I got depressed. I suppose there's no way to order ready-made grow-a-friends for when we get there, though.
I seriously considered calling in sick this morning, because it's my birthday and work is very slow right now, but when I got to work there was a sign on my door and a card and there's a strawberry cheesecake. I hadn't told anyone that my birthday was today, but they have a way of figuring these things out. I was very flattered about the fuss, and excited about the cheesecake, but mostly I was relieved that I didn't call in sick after all, because everyone would have known exactly why. Anyhow, Robbie is going to stop by my office on his way to work, any minute now, and we'll all have a slice of cheesecake.

It's still giving me the weird Basic page, at home too. I don't like it.
Yesterday was our anniversary. I had a hard time getting too excited about it ahead of time because we had a busy weekend, but we ended up having a great time after all. We ate a variety of smelly cheeses left over from Saturday's graduation party, and wrapped some chicken in phyllo dough and ate that (yes, we did have that idea before we drank any champagne, although the same cannot be said about the execution of the idea), and Robbie got me a book called Being Good, which is about morality and ideals of morality among women in early America. It would not be a good anniversary present for anyone but me, which makes it the perfect anniversary present for me, if you see what I mean. I love it. I'm going to try to save it for the cross-country drive in August, but I don't know that I will.
Tonight we're going to help Helen and Buebbles move into their new apartment. They've been living separately up until now, so some people are moving Buebbles to the new place right now, then we're joining them for the late shift to move Helen's things. Buebbles is a fantastic mover--two summers ago he helped carry our ridiculously heavy and unwieldy sofa bed up three flights of stairs, out of our basement apartment and into our new third-floor apartment, in one day--so I feel I owe it to him to lift a lot tonight. If it's needed, that is. I'm not planning on randomly hoisting his things.
Then tomorrow is my birthday. I'll be 26. For the past few years I've decided ahead of time that I didn't want to make a fuss over it, and then changed my mind. I didn't change it this year until this afternoon, so I missed out on some people being able to come, but we're going to go out for sushi.

I had a private blog for a little while, just to try out blogging, then I created this public one just now and the Blogger screen that keeps popping up is Blogger Basic LoFi, which looks like My First Blog. (And obviously, since this is My Second Blog, I'm offended.) The font is really large. It says it's for non-robust browsers, or something along those lines, but if I go to my old blog on this browser, it still has the old, complicated, enjoyable screen.
Interesting, no? Well, you have to start somewhere.