Things are good today on the packing front, due to some excellent work yesterday by me and Heather, but I've really had it with my job. I don't know if it's the heat (in California, this seems unlikely) or that no one really wants to be here during the summer and so those of us who are are all edgy and resentful, but these days a remarkably high percentage of the students and professors who come into my office act like sullen little punks with attitude issues and problems with authority. If I count as authority, that is. I think this job, especially lately, has really reaffirmed my lack of faith in mankind.
I found a job in Pittsburgh that I want to apply for, though. It's doing demographic and statistical analysis for a project analyzing the causes of crime (I think--definitely crime-related). I think it's a very long shot because it's been a while since I've done anything like that, but it would be really interesting and I'm sure I could do the work. The pay isn't bad, either, even considering that I'd doubtless be on the low end of their scale. We'll see. I know it's not a writing job, but I do love working with statistics, so it's the next best thing. Maybe the best, when you consider that it pays much better. So, in between all the packing, I'll be firing off a resume to them.
Today we had lunch with one of Robbie's advisors and his wife at their country club. They are really nice people and it was great to have a chance to visit with them before we leave, although we didn't get to stay as long as I'd've wanted because I had to get back to work to endure more abuse and write more snide emails to my friends. Priorities, you know... Meanwhile, while I rail against snotty students and faculty in my department who can't follow rules well enough to open a milk carton, Robbie is being put through the wringer by grad division, who want the margins, page numbering, and paper type on his thesis to be just so before they'll give him a doctorate. I'm convinced that both of us are being greatly wronged, of course.

You'll notice that I'm using a new commenting code. Hopefully, this one won't keep incorrect counts, discard comments willy-nilly, or make Robbie sound like a raving lunatic. Well, I guess that last one is kind of in his hands as well, but at least he won't be made to sound like one inadvertently. I know there are some spacing issues right now, and when I get a little free time I'll try to work that out, but I just spent a half-hour trying to get the code to work. That's a sacrifice of my workday that I'm completely willing to make for you, the reader, but there's a proposal that needs to get out and I don't think the professor would understand. She's not really a member of the happy blogging fellowship, I don't think.

Not only was there no new American Chopper last night, there was no American Chopper at all last night. I'm not really sure how I got so confused. Still, the uberloaf was tasty, and Heather and Matt did a really stand-up job helping us pack. Heather and I tore through packing most of the kitchen equipment, and Matt and Robbie took the trunk out to the car, which was a task I was dreading. We're going to ship it tomorrow, as I've managed to extract from the Mailboxes Etc. (sorry--"The UPS Store") staff that that's the most auspicious day to send it if I want a Friday delivery.
Work has been kind of strange lately. A bunch of the professors I've worked with in the past are now wholly baffled when I try to initiate the same processes our office has been using all along, and my boss has started re-explaining all the simple workplace tasks I've known how to do since my second week of the job. It's like everyone but me is suffering from some sort of collective amnesia, and they don't know how I got here or what my function is. I guess this will make our parting in a few weeks easier, though--by then they may not notice me at all.
I don't know if it's a demographic thing or what, or maybe it's just that I knew I would be leaving, but I never got too into the workplace culture here. Everyone is perfectly nice, and I think they'd say the same about me, but I'm not very chummy with anyone, which is not at all like the last place I worked. There was a lot that wasn't good about that place, but there were a group of us who were all about the same age and interested in similar things, and we got along really well. Actually, I think one of the reasons we got along so well was that the workplace culture was so dreadful, and we banded together. People here complain about university policies, but it's much less personal when there are 10,000 employees all in the same boat instead of 100. Also, since it's a state-run university and not a private company, the complaints mostly have to do with bureaucracy, and I think those tend to be better-natured complaints than if they were about perceived greed, like they were at my last office.
I woke up a bunch of times last night before Robbie came to bed, and then once when I thought he was still gone, and I reached over to his side of the bed to look at the alarm clock and hit him square in the face. He didn't really wake up, he just snuffled mournfully for a second, but I gave up on sleep at that point, and went downstairs and watched some Food Network and packed a bit. I was pretty efficient there for a little bit, but then I fell asleep and I could barely get up for work, so I'm not sure it's a good addition to my regular schedule.

Argh. I'm feeling a little stressed out today. I realized everything needs to be shipped by next Monday in order to get everything to Pittsburgh before my parents leave. Actually, I realized that I had to do it by August 4 sometime last week, but I didn't realize how close that was until this weekend. I'll get it all done, it's just a lot to deal with right now.
Other than that sobering realization, though, this weekend was lots of fun. Friday night we had dinner at Craig's, and then Saturday Heather and I dropped boxes off at the post office and had our hair cut. Then it was off to the luau. The pig ended up being not a huge success, because it never really cooked to completion in the pit and had to be put in the oven for a few hours, but other than that, it was a fun party. Then yesterday I packed all day, and went to Julie and Tobias' goodbye dinner at night. I was sad to say goodbye to them, but it was a good time nonetheless.
Today Robbie is making a meatloaf recipe that he keeps referring to as "The Uberloaf," there's a new episode of American Chopper, and I'm packing and packing and packing. I suspect that, due to the volume of packing in my future, that there will be a certain sameness to my blog entries for the next few weeks. Unless there's a really revolutionary episode of American Chopper tonight, that is.

My comments all went away! Augh! I'm going over to the Enetation website to try to see what's what.
Update: I went to the Enetation website and the most recently published news item says the following, in its entirety:
M.
Can't be good.

Blogger didn't recognize me when I logged in today at first, and now it's stuck me in the My First Blog format again. Cheeses me off, what.
I've been using up all of the random bath products I've accumulated over the last five years, and I'm almost done. As of yesterday, all I had left was some bath oil and a bath bomb from Lush. Last night when I got back from the gym, I decided to use the bath bomb, which was billed as being brandy-scented. I dropped it in the water, and as it was percolating I started to smell something quite different, a smell that reminded me of poorly articulated desire and late-night vomiting. Yes, that's right--it was a Goldschlager-scented bath bomb. What was Lush thinking? It's not that Goldschlager smells bad--objectively speaking, I suppose it smells pretty nice--but most people I know couldn't smell that without reliving moments in their life so painfully embarrassing that they'd want to sink under the bathwater and stay down there for an hour or two.
The whole reason I had to climb into the bath in the first place was that yesterday at the gym I used the elliptical cross-trainer for the first time. That thing is hard. It's a challenging workout, but what's more, it made me feel very precarious. Basically, it combines the way you feel you could fall off a treadmill with the way you feel you could fall off a StairMaster, with a little tilt-a-whirl action thrown in. The constant peril makes the time go by quickly, though.
Then this morning, to complete the terror-regret-pain trifecta that started with my gym visit, I went to the dentist. He cleaned my teeth himself, which is a first for me, and he lectured me on the importance of flossing, which is also a first. He's not a lecturing kind of dentist. He's Mormon, and the friend who recommended him to me said that she thought he got all his conversionary zeal out in other avenues and therefore had no desire to persuade people to take better care of their teeth. I don't know if it's that, but he's definitely the most mild-mannered dentist I've ever had. Even today's lecture had no moral overtones, the way many dentists' would. He just pointed out matter-of-factly that blood would stop gushing out of my gums during dental visits if I flossed daily, and I daresay he's right.
I'm going to miss my dentist. We've had some good times, like the time that half my face swelled up and I thought I was dying, but it turned out that I just had a tooth that had gone septic and taken over my facial plumbing system. Then there was my root canal. Actually, those were both more or less the same incident, just separated into two different office visits, but it's the only highlight I can recall. I won't miss his hygienists, though. They made up for his laidback dental attitude by being shrieking harpies. I was very relieved today to see that I'd be getting a cleaning from the man himself.
Tomorrow is my final visit to Jenny the hairdresser. I'm woefully behind on my British Royal Family gossip, so the conversation may lag a bit, but I think she's come to expect that from me. Then, with my new shiny teeth and beautiful coif, I'll be off to the luau.

I'm not sure if the Super Eights and Motel Sixes across this great land are likely to assign better rooms to those with fancy titles (rooms without cigarette-burned bedspreads, let's say, or rooms where the air-conditioning actually works), but we'll soon find out, because Robbie got his doctorate today. Nobody was worried that he wouldn't, of course, but it's still something to get excited about. He did very well in his dissertation defense, although there were some humorous parts. My two favorites were, first, when his advisor asked him to explain the connection between UCSB and someone whose theories Robbie was discussing, and Robbie flailed for a bit until his advisor explained that someone at UCSB was married to the theoretician's daughter, and, second, when his advisor asked him the size of something and Robbie looked around all shifty-eyed before replying, "Very, very small?"
The kitchen cabinet has been toted away. I was pretty attached to it, because Heather and I assembled it together and it was also just a really nice piece of furniture, but I've been assured by someone in my office who knows the girl who bought it that she takes very good care of furniture, and once rehabilitated a sofa using two different kinds of upholstery cleaner. So I feel a little better now. And as predicted, the table and chairs person said yes, and the sofa bed person said no. She actually seemed pretty revolted by it. Someone else wants to see it on Saturday, but he seems a little high-maintenance, so I think he won't have the proper devil-may-care attitude to cope with the rip. He may, though. I've been wrong before.
OK, here's a late-breaking update: the person who saw the sofa on Sunday just emailed to say that he would prefer the cushions to be firmer, and he wonders, if he put a board under the cushions, if that would help. I didn't quite know what to say to that. I said I thought so, and I do, but I've never tried it. I suspect he has as much knowledge of the properties of boards as I do, although I'm flattered that he thinks otherwise.
Tonight begins a four-day stretch of eating out, or at least not at home. We have a dinner for someone who advanced to candidacy today tonight, then dinner at our friend Craig's tomorrow, maybe with Julie and Tobias, because he wants to say goodbye to all four of us. Then Saturday, our friend Matt is holding a goodbye luau for the four of us (and also a congratulatory luau for the three people who've recently gotten their Ph.D.s--although the whole luau idea is contingent on avoiding ruptured gas lines, flaming ground cover, and trichinosis in the pit-roasted pig), and Sunday is Julie and Tobias' Mexican goodbye party at Heather and Matt's. It's like living on the world's saddest cruise ship.
By the way, a Mexican goodbye party is a regular goodbye party with Mexican food. It's not like a Chinese fire drill, or Turkish delight, or a Singapore Sling.

I should mention that I'm adding a new blog link to the sidebar. It belongs to my friend Ted. From what I've read, it's a man's man's blog. Later this week, I'll be adding another blog link, that of one of the greatest minds of our time. She wants to remain anonymous, which is a shame, because this way when she becomes incredibly famous, an event that I think is inevitable, you won't be able to say you knew her when. Still, you should read it.

You are all grateful to me today, and here's why--I have dodged the panty-exchange bullet. I got an email from an old work friend, all hepped up on the idea of mailing underpants across the country in a chain-mail fashion (that is, chain-mail like letters, not chain-mail like metal panties, although I suppose I don't know for sure), and I politely declined her offer to participate. I did it not only for me--although I certainly did it for me--but also for all of you, who would surely have been the next links on the chain if I'd gotten roped into it. Well, maybe not Robbie and Adam. Or maybe Robbie and Adam; I don't know that it was gender-specific, come to think about it.
I notice that when I speak of panty exchanges, a certain violent metaphor creeps in. Bullets, chain-mail, ropes... I guess I'm just really opposed to the idea.
Heather has agreed to do a guest spot on my blog while I'm on my cross-country spree next month, so you all will be in for a treat then. If you're lucky, maybe she'll tell you all her joke about the nun--oh, er, I mean, maybe she'll tell you her joke about the revolving door. Not giving away any punchlines here.
Someone else came to look at the kitchen cabinet last night. She was rapturous over it. It was a very gratifying experience. She's not sure it'll fit in her kitchen, but if it does, I'm sure she'll take it. Tonight, someone is looking at the sofa bed, and someone else is looking at the table and chairs. I'm not too optimistic about this sofa bed customer, but the table and chairs one seems promising.
Although the sofa bed is pretty unappealing, I felt better about the price I'm asking for it last night, when I saw a sign in my complex for a sofa/loveseat combo for $900. That's right. On the sign, it said that the price was originally $1750 and they were fairly new, but I don't know what starving grad student in our complex they think would possibly buy it at that price, since that's more than a month's rent for us. They also advertised that the sofa has "a soft, svelte-like texture."

Today's blog entry will feature one unpaid endorsement and one unpaid unendorsement.
First, to get it over with, the unendorsement. I was completely revolted to look at CNN this afternoon and see, over the announcement that Saddam Hussein's sons had been killed, a little graphic with their two U.S. Army playing cards (an idea the repugnance of which I'm not even going to get into here) and the word "TRUMPED."
Now, I'm as moderate as moderate can be, personally, morally, and, usually, politically. I'm more moderate than Robbie, and I daresay I'm more moderate than my parents. I listened to a lot of the arguments for the war, and although in the end I'd have to say I came down on the "con" side, a lot of the "pro" arguments made sense to me. Anyone who looked at the evidence and said, "Well, look, this is an unappealing situation, but I really think invading Iraq is necessary--it's unfortunate, but there it is," is A-OK with me.
But you get into the "Yaaaaaaaaaaay, we killed some people" aspects of it, and you lose me. I know that death is a very inevitable part of war, and I can handle that--anyone who expected this war to be bloodless on either side had to have been pretty naive. It's going to happen. You could convince me pretty easily that strategically, Saddam's sons needed to be captured or killed. OK. But that doesn't make it anything to get happy over. I realize that they were very morally dubious people who rejoiced in torturing and murdering people, but, you know, that's my point. CNN isn't claiming any sort of moral high ground when they run headlines like that. So, I emailed CNN and told them I was through with their website and their network. I don't tend to be a mad crazed letter writer--I leave that to my great-aunts--but I felt pretty strongly about this.
So, that's my unendorsement for the day. Now on to my endorsement, which is a considerably lighter topic. If you ever need to ship boxes across the country, use FedEx Ground. They're cheaper than UPS and the post office, they are prompt and trackable and courteous to any relatives you may have on the receiving end of your packages, and if you open an account with them, which is free, you can print shipping labels from the privacy of your office and then just drop off the boxes at a FedEx, without having to do any other paperwork. No fuss, no muss. It honestly baffles me that no one seems to know about this. The one drawback is that they won't ship anything over 70 pounds, but unless you're trying to give your recipient a hernia, this shouldn't be a problem.

This weekend was massively productive. Saturday was the yard sale, and we got rid of two of the three junky computers that I was sure we'd have to take to the recycling center, so that was a relief. The guy who bought them is a Linux user, so he'll just gut them and make them into something useful. I'm glad--I'd feel a little guilty if I sold them to someone who thought Windows 3.1 was still a viable computing alternative. (Oh, and Evie--one of the computers I sold was the laptop that we both had. I'm sure you got rid of yours years ago, but I've been toting mine around for the past six years, not opening it once. It still had the little "Dormnet-ready" sticker and everything.)
After the yard sale, we went wine-tasting to the Kahn and Andrew Murray vineyards in Los Olivos. I really liked the Kahn wines (not a surprise, because I'd tasted several of them last Monday), but their facility was awfully small and hot. The opposite was true for Andrew Murray--it was spacious and air-conditioned, but definitely not my type of wine. It was still a good time, though, all around, and Robbie and I bought two bottles of Kahn wines. Then we went back to Julie and Tobias' and had some (belated) birthday cake for Tobias, and that was Saturday, more or less.
Yesterday, Robbie and I were massively productive around the apartment. We stocked up on packing supplies; packed pretty much all of Robbie's clothes, several shelves of books, all our games and photos and tchotchkes, and some kitchen equipment; made piles of things to go to the thrift shop and the clothing donation box; weighed and measured all our FedEx boxes; inserted labels into our already packed boxes; and sealed up all the boxes that we could. I feel like we're in good shape for the time being. I'm sure that feeling will pass, however.
I also got our new phone number. I'm very excited, because the entire 10-digit number involves only four unique digits, and they are clustered on the phone in a pleasing fashion. Such is the level of service that I like to provide to my friends and family.

Last night I had a dream that Robbie and I were taking a drive in Santa Barbara to appreciate it before we move, and suddenly, out of nowhere, we were forced off the road by an out-of-control moving van. Our car rolled onto its side and we had to climb out through the driver's-side window. The moving van continued to careen out of control until it finally struck the center divider, flipped over several times, and was crushed into a tangled, smoky mess.
Since my dreams usually contain more subtle symbolism than that, I figure my subconscious has launched into active parody of the rest of me and the quivering mass of packing anxiety I've become. I think it wants to go back to thinking about dwarves and Canadian cities and people I knew in the third grade, you know, the real meat of subconscious dream production, but I've been such a one-note thinker for so long that it's starting to rebel. "You want to worry about moving? You want an anxious moving dream?" it's saying. "Fine. But don't expect me to put any work into it. I'm outta here."
Robbie got home last night. The whole ride home he was saying how glad he was to be back, and then he got into the apartment and I notice he stopped saying that... As we were falling asleep he said he thinks we need to clean up and organize first of all, without even thinking about putting things in boxes, because as it is now it's impossible to tell what's what, or even to move around the apartment. I was relieved to hear that. First of all, I think he's right, but more importantly, I think this week I've been worried because I felt like I had to figure everything out myself, and it was a huge relief to have someone else say what we needed to do.
Oh, we got an ominous ransom-type note from the post office, with the to: and from: labels and the postage label of the missing box of books included, asking us to describe the contents so that they can initiate a search and hopefully return the box to us. Fat chance. I know they were books, but I've packed something like 30 boxes of books so I have no idea what specific books were in this one. I'm pretty sure the box is just a lost cause; if the to: and from: and postage labels all got detached, I think the whole top of the box must have come off. Either the top was neatly sheared off by a Chinese throwing star or similar device, leaving the rest of the box and its contents unharmed, or the whole box fell apart, in which case that's pretty much it. Oh well. One nice thing about not knowing what's inside is that I might just never miss those books. Anyhow, the moral is: always put an address label inside the box (the post office suggests it, and I think it would help in this case if the box is partly intact), and always write down at least one specific item that's in each box. I think "various books, possibly some French or English history" is not going to be sufficient for the post office to find my stuff.

You'll notice that Blogger does ads at the top of this page, and as I understand it, it's pretty sophisticated--they scan the text of your blog and then match it to keywords for the ads, so the advertising is all targeted to your subject matter. When I looked just now, both ads were for sofa beds. This can't be a good sign, for my blog or my life.
Speaking of sofa beds (and further increasing the likelihood that an ad for one will appear on this site), I think last night's customer may be a winner. She was unperturbed, stoic even, in the face of the ten-inch rip in the sofa's middle cushion. She said she'd hang something over it. That's the kind of can-do spirit that this sofa needs. I haven't heard back yet from the kitchen cabinet girl, though. She was dressed all pretty, and while I think the kitchen cabinet itself was of a quality that she would accept, the general fetidity of my apartment may have frightened her. It really has taken on the atmosphere of a drug den, although without the drugs--random stuff scattered everywhere, dishes piled in the sink and on the stove, television always on, random people (well, OK, Heather and Matt) always on the sofa, people knocking on the door periodically during the evening. Fortunately, Robbie will be back from his trip to our nation's capital this evening, and he'll be able to snap me out of my devil-may-care bachelorette lifestyle.
I just had a random memory come up while I was typing the phrase "our nation's capital," and that was of a guy in my high school class named Dave Craig. My friend had a crush on him, and sometimes we referred to him as "our nation's capital," and sometimes as "the CD that plays backwards." Then we would giggle madly for hours at our cleverness. It was that odd kind of crush that people get in high school--my friend liked Dave for a week or so, then decided on her own that he'd never date her, then started to have a sort of mean crush on him, where he was still the person, nominally, that she liked, but she wanted to do cruel things to him like call him up at odd hours and laugh loudly and hang up. He only really got in the loop during the harassment stage, which I'm sure was completely baffling to him, since he'd never actually rejected her, never having been given the opportunity. That stage lasted for two years or so. Back then this friend said she was going to be some sort of international businesswoman, but last I heard she was a bartender in San Francisco. We wouldn't have known it in high school, but I think this is actually the perfect job for her.
I gave notice on our apartment yesterday. It was a real festival of bureaucracy. Since we're moving out on the 16th of August, I showed up on the 16th of July to fill out the notice-giving forms in triplicate, but the office people pointed out that 30 days from the 16th of August is actually the 18th of July. I didn't see the problem, since I was two days early, but evidently their interpretation of the 30-day-notice rule is that it must be exactly 30 days before the move-out date, no more, no less. I strongly, strongly suspected, and still suspect, that they were wrong about this, but they were extremely amiable and said they'd just keep my completed form until Friday, at which point they would put it into the computer and perform whatever other voodoo incantations they feel UCSB needs in order to process a move-out form and I'd be all set. So I figured that they could just knock themselves out with that, since it wouldn't affect me, and went along my merry way.

Heather came over last night and we packed some things. I'd figured that this would be a clever way to double the packing effort, but our efficiency really took a hit from the amount of time we spent huddled up sobbing like motherless children. Eventually I decided that if I was going to be miserable, I might as well be packing and miserable, so I went back to putting things in boxes. Due to Heather's stellar packing abilities, all of my clothes fit into my trunk, with room left over for some sweaters that I'd left out of the pile figuring there wouldn't be space. Also, someone came over to look at the kitchen cabinet. She seemed not to like it, then seemed to like it, but she never got back to me today, which can't be a good sign. Someone's coming tonight to look at the sofa bed, which should be, well, interesting.
This morning I learned an important life lesson about cereal, which is that the expiration date really does matter, especially if it's about 14 months in the past, even if you haven't opened the box. Who knew? I figured it was all hermetically sealed in that plastic bag. That's a mistake I'm not likely to make twice, however.
Tonight Heather and Matt are coming over for dinner, and maybe a little light packing fun. I have to get cracking on my freelancing for the week, too. I'm not sure what I was thinking when I extended my contract through the week before we move, but here I am. Hopefully this will pay off in some freelancing after I move, otherwise I'm going to feel like this was wasted effort.

Last night was good fun all around. Wine-tasting was very good--one of the founders of the Kahn Winery came to speak, and his wines were excellent and he was hilarious. I haven't laughed so hard in a long time. He said they mainly sell their wines in New York and New Jersey, so if any of you east coasters ever see a Kahn wine on a menu, you should give it a try. They weren't onerously expensive, either.
So, after wine tasting, Heather and I conferred with each other and agreed that the Kahn guy was pretty good-looking. We were feeling giggly about that, and so we turned into full-blown schoolgirls when we got to Dargan's about half an hour later to celebrate Tobias' birthday and saw, sitting at the bar, none other than the Kahn guy himself. He seemed to be accompanied by a lady friend, so we gave him some space, and just giggled from afar.
The furniture sale has turned into a bit of a monster. I've gotten four or five requests for pretty much all the pieces of furniture, and since very few people are willing to be definite, I've been keeping lists of who requested what when and am just going in that order. I'm hoping that it'll resolve itself quickly. What doesn't get sold this week is going to a yard sale at Julie and Tobias' on Saturday. I'm not sure exactly how I thought I'd have time to go through all our things and figure out what was yard-sale worthy by then, but I figure it'll work out. It'll be good to get all of those things out of the way, certainly.
By the way, speaking of stuff--I have no intention of turning this blog into one of those blogs where you, the readers, buy me things off a wish list, and then I send you pictures of myself in various states of undress, but if any of you ever want to get me anything, you know, just for kicks, I would really like this. I would also not say no to the set of Homestar Runner figurines, but I don't yearn for them the way I do for the shirt.
Have I mentioned what a lovely time I had with Adam when I was in Rhode Island? And what a delightfully complete lending library he has, with very liberal return policies?

Since I don't have much to do right now (doesn't it seem like there's something fishy about a job that you can leave for a week and a half and doesn't fall completely into a shambles while you're gone? But no, I had very little to do today), I thought I'd post some late-breaking updates.
First and foremost, Heather passed, of course, so from now on she should be referred to as DocWall. We had a rollicking lunch, and then I dragged myself back to the office, where I sent out email to the department trying to sell my things. I got a fantastic response. One of the other staff people has a sister-in-law who just moved into town and needs to furnish her apartment, so she snapped up most of the big things--dresser, futon mattress, and bookcases--within maybe five minutes of my sending the email. Someone (actually, the same guy who took the three tables) asked for the ironing board, and, amazingly enough, someone else is interested in the sofa bed. It seems too good to be true. I thought we'd have to take a match to that one, Sara Gaughan-style.
Unfortunately, it seems that something has befallen one of our boxes of books. I wrote down that I mailed 17 boxes, but only 16 showed up at my parents' house. I'm hoping that one of the boxes just never made it out of our spare room (I counted them at home, not at the post office), but I'm concerned. There's no way to track them, so there's not a whole lot I can do if the box isn't in our apartment, other than hope that it shows up at my parents' house soon. Fortunately, it's entirely plausible that it's still in the spare room and I just never noticed, because that place is a sty, with boxes up to the ceiling.
Oh, and I got another email from McSweeneys. The humor anthology will be coming out next spring, and they are currently looking for a title, and will pay $100 for the winning submission. I've been wracking my brain, but I haven't come up with anything. No word yet on payment. Well, we'll get paid, but no word on the amount. I'm optimistic, from the fact that they're paying $100 for a title, that the regular payments will also be in the three-digit range, but I really have no idea.

I'm back, I'm back. I can no longer remember how to do my job, so I've decided to blog instead.
Rhode Island was lots of fun. Let's see--I got told that I was only the second Jew ever to join Robbie's family, which was curious because I was brought up Methodist and am currently a lapsed Unitarian; I went on two boat rides; I nearly fainted on the Sam Adams brewery tour; I ate a lot; I watched some digital cable; I read a book about the transcontinental railroad; and I watched several movies, including Adaptation (very good), Terminator 3 (better than I expected), and the first half of The Pianist (depressing). Oh, and Robbie and I went geocaching, which I highly recommend if you like puzzles and treasure hunts and have access to a GPS. Oh, and to follow up on my earlier post--this year the appliance was the new boat, and the style of cuisine was food you can take on a new boat. It was all boat, all week, all the time. It's a nice boat.
Now I'm back, and all there is to do now is pack, and pack, and pack. Well, not quite all--today Heather is defending her thesis. I unfortunately have to miss the actual defense so that I can make a pretense of working, but we're going out to lunch afterwards, and then after wine-tasting we're all going to dinner. I gave her her graduation present yesterday, so that she could wear it for the defense if she wanted. It's a bracelet made out of compressed, dyed, run-through-several-arduous-processes stalks of heather. They end up looking like normal, flat beads--you wouldn't guess what they're made out of. It's really pretty, and I thought the symbolism was nice too. Today is also Tobias' birthday. And it's Bastille Day, but not being in Princeton, I don't plan to celebrate.

Well, I know I said I wouldn't be posting, but here I am. This is an extremely slow Internet connection, though, so this will be a short post.
The wedding was very nice, although the ceremony was unbelievably hot. When we woke up on Saturday, Robbie's dad told us that there were heat advisories for two places in the country--Princeton, where we were, and Brooklyn, where we were going. The church wasn't air-conditioned, and it was crowded, and the temperature was easily over 100 degrees, and the ceremony was an hour and twenty minutes long, so by the end we were all ready to leave. Robbie's mom gave me and Julie fans, and I think without them we would have passed out cold. Well, not cold, I suppose.
The reception was lovely, and cooler, thankfully. The bartenders were giving ridiculously full pours, I think to keep the lines short, and I was fairly dehydrated to start with, so parts of the reception are a little blurry, but there were good appetizers and we took a Princeton picture, and then there was some dancing, and then we ate cake and left. Helen and Chris seemed very happy, although again, that could be the wine talking. But I don't think so.
I've figured out what my favorite part of weddings is (and no, it isn't the full pours)... it's seeing the bride and groom, not with each other, but with their new in-laws. Especially if you've known both members of the couple before they started dating, and especially if you knew their families beforehand too, it seems like a sort of alchemy, the way they suddenly have new family. And for the most part, they act like it, too, hugging and kissing all the cousins and cracking jokes with their new parents-in-law and the whole bit. It's kind of amazing, how earnest and happy the families always are. Heather and I talked a while ago about how it's hard not to fall in love with a bride and groom on their wedding day, and I think this is part of why, the way all these people who didn't even know them the last time you checked now visibly want the best for them.
So, that was the wedding part of the trip. If I get a chance tomorrow, I'll update you about life in Rhode Island, although if you have easy access to the short stories of John Cheever, you could just read those instead.

It is so hot. So very very hot. It's been a couple of years now since I've experienced the bliss that is New Jersey in July, and I think I've gone soft, because I used to find the whole experience character-building and now it makes me want to weep. Robbie and his father were moving rocks this afternoon, and I was, uh, supervising, and I went to scratch my back and there was sweat actually running down it, in rivulets, and I hadn't done anything more strenuous than walk back and forth from the backyard to the driveway two or three times. And most of that walk was in the shade. Then when I got back into the air conditioning, my teeth felt like they were going to fall out, and my brain started to hurt from the heat-based swelling and shrinking.
Tonight Julie and Tobias are coming on the train from Penn Station. If I thought about them, the delightfully fussy southern Californian and the German, trying to navigate through Manhattan all day and night on a holiday with millions of other people in sweltering heat, I'd get nervous, so I'm trying not to. This afternoon, they're reenacting the immigrant experience by standing on Ellis Island with thousands of sweaty, miserable, non-English speaking people who all thought they'd be having more fun than they are, and then they're going to see the fireworks, and I hope to God they don't get mugged or miss a train or even get the slightest bit warm, because I, as a former resident of this time zone, will feel horribly guilty. Oh, and also, it would be rotten for them if they got mugged or missed a train or got even the slightest bit warm. That too.
Tomorrow is the wedding. In addition to being happy for the bride and the groom, I expect the wedding to be unique among weddings I've attended (for example, there will be no dinner seating, as the bride's father feels the sit-down dinner represents the decline of Western civilization), so I hope to come back with good stories. Then on Sunday we're off to Rhode Island.

Today has been way too busy at work, but I guess it's to be expected, considering that I'm leaving tomorrow for a week and a half. Things seem to be getting under control, though. My boss has been out for the past week, and although I've appreciated the peace, it's gotten inconvenient not to have him around. The ideal would be if he were around, and therefore able to approve expenses, but were also tragically mute.
This is an interesting thing about bosses. I liked my last boss a lot on a personal level. She was very friendly, and easy to talk to, and had a good sense of humor and was well-read. I could have imagined being friends with her in a different setting. But when it came down to actually managing people--eep. My coworkers and I wandered around our office feeling confused and alienated and ridiculously underappreciated. My current boss is great, on a strictly boss level. He knows the answers to most questions, and never blames me for things that go wrong, and is quick to give me credit. Really, my only complaint is that he comes and stands in my doorway four or five times a day and has nothing to say and just kind of hangs out there all mumbly like he's waiting for his bus to come through the hall. Well, that and the whole faux-hipster wearing-shirts-my-grandpa-would-have-thrown-out look that was big five years ago, but that's an aesthetic complaint and thus not really fair. At any rate, if I could somehow blend the two bosses, I'd be in clover. (Or in big trouble, I suppose, depending on what half I got.)
But this time next week, after a happy weekend at Helen and Buebbles' wedding, I will be in a land of no bosses (actually, this is untrue, since I will be in Rhode Island, a land of many bosses who would encase you in concrete as soon as look at you), drinking margaritas, playing backgammon, and riding around in a big car with my in-laws. For the past few years, I've been developing a Mad Libs-based theory about my parents-in-law, and that is that you could name a chrome appliance, a national style of cooking, and an obscure food product and they will have a new one of each that they're crazy about each time I see them. It could be a new washer, southwestern food, and olives stuffed with jalapenos; it could be a new trash can, Indian food, and aioli. You just don't know. I expect I'll pass several happy hours on the plane trying to guess what it's going to be this time. They've just been to Italy, so the possibilities are daunting.

I'm wearing my new pair of shoes today--I bought them at the outlets on Saturday. They are undeniably mom shoes. Not ugly, not even unattractive, but they're mom shoes. They're beige suede loafer/slide things, but with rubber soles, and a little elasticky rim that holds the shoe in place around the heel. I like them--I think I look like the repressed yet secretly fun kind of mom, the kind who tells you to play quietly while she drinks her Bloody Mary and thinks about running off to Europe. They give off an aura of quiet desperation, and when you can make that kind of statement in a shoe, how can you pass that up? What's more, they're incredibly comfortable. I suspect comfort over fashion is the kind of thing that starts at your feet and creeps up with age.
Robbie has finished writing his thesis, so, you know, he'll have a lot more free time now, or, uh, something. I read it last night, and it's pretty good, although I think it would benefit greatly from changing all mentions of "the sign problem" to "the Greek vice." He seems to feel this would be unprofessional, however.
Today after work I'm going to meet with my old boss, who I've been freelancing for for the past few months. So far, I've been able to do all my work without entering my old building, even though it's maybe two minutes away from my apartment, but that's about to change. Fortunately, they remodeled the place after I left, so technically I think I can still get by on my vow never to set foot in my old workspace again, since it's moved about ten feet to the right. And one of my old work friends stole some boxes from the company warehouse for me to pack books in (it's a publishing company), so that's a powerful incentive to go.