We had seventy-four trick-or-treaters tonight, and Tizzed, not one of them was dressed as the Burger King. I feel so deceived. Still, though, our trick-or-treaters were delightful and extremely polite.

Before our Halloween festivities, I made and hemmed all the curtains and hung some pictures in the guest room. Then I decided that the pictures looked all wrong and took them down again, so that part of the day's accomplishments was admittedly a bit of a wash. I'll try again tomorrow. The curtains look outstanding, though, and once the pictures are hung and the chair cushions are done I think the house will actually be done.

And finally, we've discovered that we have a ladybug infestation, and the cat has decided (correctly, I think, from their smell) that they aren't tasty and so won't dispose of them for us, so I think we have to remedy it ourselves. We found some cracks where they seem to be coming in, so we plugged them up tonight and hopefully that'll help. Evidently they are harmless, but they're still revolting in large quantities.

Oh hey, what's that giant sucking sound? Why, it's all of you, who didn't enter my carefully crafted contest. None of you win any prizes.

Never matter, though, because I have to tell you something very important: weather-sealing windows with film and a hairdryer is the most fun thing ever. Seriously. Who else out there has done this? We went over to my parents' last night to help them weatherproof my great-aunts' house, and I wasn't expecting great things, but it's like making a giant Shrinky Dink. I highly recommend it to anyone who's looking to cut their heating bill this winter in a way that's also totally rocking.

Um, what else? I learned how to use my drill yesterday and didn't destroy anything, and now we have a place to hang towels in our downstairs bathroom. (We still have nowhere to hang towels in our upstairs bathroom, but that's today's project.) I also finished reupholstering some dining room chairs. By the way, I think I've added some new photos to the house album since I last told you all, so you should check them out if you want.

Well, I was going to tell you all about my day, but then I decided it would be more fun to just show you a series of photos from it, and let you write your own narrative about my day--best one wins a prize. I'm not sure if I'm giving points for accuracy, but I certainly am for creativity. Make me proud...

Wow. Um, evidently it's snowing. It's not snowing on our street right now (it might be sort of icy-raining, but whatever's coming down is still clear rather than white), but I just looked at the weather online and they're saying right now the Pittsburgh area is experiencing "heavy snow" and there are delays at schools in the mountainous areas. So I suppose winter is here. Is it too late to plant bulbs now?

Oh, and I wanted to point out that the new Fed chairman was the chair of my department when I was in college. I think he may have signed my course card in a hallway once on the way to a meeting, thereby providing me with a full semester's worth of curricular advising Princeton-economics-department-style. (I should point out here that this was not a university-wide deficiency and that Robbie's mind was delicately coddled, like an egg, by the several Nobel-Prize-winning physics faculty members assigned to care for him via long chats, gifts of random departmental prizes, massages after especially taxing lab work, and so forth.) Clearly I should have saved this course card and sold it on Ebay to a rabid Fed groupie, but I probably had to turn it in to the registrar, and anyhow I may be thinking of a different guy.

In other news, yesterday my drill arrived. I didn't actually get a chance to play with it yet, but I'm going to try to at least read the manual sometime today. And today the Commodore goes to the vet, who doubtless will confirm that he's the most magnificent cat she's ever seen.

Well, the Commodore is settling in nicely, except for last night when I was drifting peacefully off to sleep and heard a rustling springing noise and opened my eyes to see a furry object hurtling towards my face, legs fully extended, full of vigor. I daresay I've never had such empathy for Big T as I did at that moment. But other than that, everything's going swell.

In other news, yesterday we got new cell phones, so I spent a pleasant hour this morning programming my phone and setting up ringtones. I find that while in most cases my understanding of technology stopped in 1997 and, say, text messages leave me totally cold, I'm very excited by the whole ringtone phenomenon. I got a package of five downloads this morning and have already chosen five songs, which some may say is silly because only four people ever call me, but whatever. At any rate, Heather is set up again with "Inspector Gadget" and my brothers-in-law with "Final Countdown," and so order in my universe has been maintained. (I should point out for clarity that in terms of cell phone ringtone use I consider my brothers-in-law to be one person, so that was not an exhaustive list of callers right there.)

Ladies and gentlemen, the Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry:



The Commodore's great speed and his fondness for the dangly wrist strap of the camera make him an elusive photography target, so this is the best we could do. So far, his main talents include successfully using the litter box, for which I praised him probably more than I praised Robbie when he got his doctorate, identifying safety hazards in our home by trying to eat them, and standing on the brightness key of my keyboard. He's only four months old, which means that he's a kitten and therefore obviously not as good-looking as he will someday be, but he has a delightful personality and a tremendous amount of potential. And, I believe, a wood screw. Excuse me.

The painting is done. Perhaps it will convey to you how tired I am of painting to report that I have no sense of accomplishment here at the end of painting eight rooms, a staircase, and a hallway, or perhaps I'll have to tell you that last night when he was looking at the hallway I painted yesterday afternoon, Robbie quite correctly pointed out that I'd missed a stripe on one of the doors, and I immediately burst into tears. At any rate, I've developed a twitchy PTSD-like aversion to the smell of latex paint, which makes me a little sad because I used to really like the smell of latex paint, as I associated it with a week in May of my senior year of high school when our house was being repainted and my parents both went out of town and I was totally on my own and smoked one of my lifetime total of three cigarettes on our deck with my friend Jonna, that being the sort of kicking party I was capable of back then, and it was totally awesome. (The other two, just for historical interest, were, first, behind a dumpster at the mall after the PSATs with my friend Margo, who smoked, and I am not making this up, Virginia Slims, and, second, at a party in Frick Park after my friend Nina's high school graduation, which I didn't really want but was pretty psyched to be able to buy since my eighteenth birthday had been a couple of days earlier.)

Well. I'm not totally sure how I got onto that topic, but to return to the present day, I'm sitting on our new sofa and boy, is it fantastic. The sofa showed up two hours early, which would have thrilled me except that when the guys got here at noon I was trying to finish painting the trim in the hall, so my hands were covered in paint, and I'd taken off my sweater after leaning against one of the freshly painted doors while wearing it, so I was just wearing my pajama top and was not fit to be seen by anyone, and I'd been planning to make space for the sofa in the living room after painting but hadn't yet, and everything fell into total chaos. But now the sofa's here and it's great. I mean, as sofas go it's really pretty average, but we've been sitting on a wood-frame loveseat for three months, so the comparative luxury is overwhelming.

And now I'm enjoying my morning coffee and listening to "Here I Go Again," which I cannot listen to without thinking of Heather processing in Dr. J's wedding. It's a fine way to start the day.

Today is sofa day, today is sofa day. I'm very excited.

Last night we went to the pet store to get cat supplies in anticipation of adopting a cat this weekend, and they had cats there to adopt from a local shelter, so we looked at them for a while. They weren't doing adoptions last night for undisclosed reasons, which is too bad, because a couple of them I really liked and would have liked to see outside their cages. I did actually find myself liking one of the kittens, which naturally horrified me, but I justified this in my mind because the tags on his cage clearly indicated that there used to be two kittens in there and also that this one had been in the shelter for a couple of months, and so I felt bad for him. Still, though, I don't want a kitten. Well, maybe a little. I hear they're easier to train to use a scratching post, which might possibly make up for the fact that I find them ugly, and anyhow they do grow.

So, today's agenda, in addition to sitting, lounging, and possibly napping, includes painting the trim in the upstairs hall, which shouldn't be too awful, and finishing some actual paying work I started in on yesterday. And tonight is upholstery class, in which I may finish some seats for the dining room chairs. We didn't have class last week for undisclosed reasons--Pittsburgh is just full of undisclosed reasons--and I've missed hearing Megan curse loudly and scandalize our fellow upholsterers, so I'm pretty excited.

The bathrooms are done and the sofa is coming tomorrow. I'm starting to see the light at the end of this tunnel, and boy, is it exciting. I think my next major project will be finding and eliminating the weird smell on the first floor, which somehow seems to be coming from the living room. I'm not sure what in the living room could be weird-smell-producing, so I'm hoping it's just the accumulated miasma of paint fumes.

Anyhow. Last night, for reasons too complex to really get into here, I was looking for handwriting samples of mine to send to Dr. J, and so I started reading my old French journals, which I kept as a class project (fine, it was totally optional and I got no credit for it whatsoever--socially speaking that year was possibly not a high point, although boy, was I smart as a whip) my senior year of high school. On the up side, I did write extremely well, linguistically speaking, but they were so mortifyingly embarrassing to read that I rejected all but a handful of pages to scan in and send to her. (And she speaks no French, so you know they must have been bad.) The thing that kind of alarmed me, though, was that at the end of the year my French teacher wrote a little note about graduation and so forth and she said in high school she and her friends would always ask themselves what they'd be doing in four years, and it occurred to me that it has actually been three four-year periods since I was keeping a French journal. I'd believe one, maybe, but three seems far too many (although that does make the cringe-inducing moments far more palatable). Maybe I'll incorporate this concept into my extra verses of "Sunrise, Sunset."

And finally, here is a dialogue excerpt from a dream I had early this morning:

Me, having just collapsed in a doctor's waiting room: Mom! Get a doctor!
My mother: Oh, for heaven's sake. Get off the floor.
Me, summoning the last ounce of my strength to stand up again: Fine, I'll get the damn doctor myself.
Fellow waiting patient: Oh, this is healthy.

I will also point out here, to give this dream some color, that when I did drag myself into the actual office to seek attention, I found that my doctor was dressed exactly like Blossom, minus the whimsical hat.

And now we premiere an undoubtedly short-lived blog feature called Two-Question Tuesday. Today's questions are:

1. What is Encyclopedia Brown's real first name? No fair answering if you read today's New York Times article.
2. Encyclopedia Brown or Cam Jansen? Discuss.

Oh, so very very tired. The downstairs bathroom is done, though, and looks swell, and I ordered my drill. This house is going to be so full of holes in a week, I can't even tell you--every blessed item we own is going to be wall-mounted. It'll be easier for us to vacuum then, I suppose.

Tonight we finally used the gift certificate our real estate agent gave us to Pottery Barn and bought hooks and toilet paper holders for the bathrooms. We'd left extra time in the excursion so we could get in a fight about which ones we wanted, but they ended up being extremely easy to pick (not to mention, totally classy-looking) and so we got to go to the Apple store down the street and look at the Nano. I know it's not the most cost-effective choice for music storage, iPod-wise, but they are so pretty (especially the black ones) and light and so I think I'm going to ask for one for Christmas anyhow. I doubt I need to have more than a thousand songs.

Tomorrow I'm painting the last room, oh happy day, and then I'm going out to Ikea to pay for our sofa (as that is Ikea's completely incomprehensible system--we couldn't pay for it when we ordered it, we have to pay when it comes in, even though we're having it delivered), which is the last major item we need to receive. I'm anticipating euphoria such as the world has never known by tomorrow evening.

Oh! And happy birthday to Evie, who is once again older than me.

It's been a very productive weekend. Friday I took my mother's cat to the vet (he weighs under five pounds, incidentally, which I didn't know was actually possible for a cat that was still sustaining life) and then got the kitchen ready to paint, and then Robbie and I went to a potluck at his labmate's apartment. I got to meet some new people, which is a rare occurrence, and I'm pleased to report that Robbie and I placed first and second in a game of "Wise and Otherwise." I found a bunch of old answer cards in the bottom of our box, too, and that was a real walk down memory lane, although unfortunately I did not find the one where Heather points out that the French have one hundred types of cheese, one for almost every third day of the year. I suspect she may have destroyed it.

Then Saturday we painted the kitchen (after moving the refrigerator, a process that went vastly better than I'd anticipated) and then went geocaching, where I found the two caches that eluded me and Adam on Monday (actually, Robbie found one of them). We had a lot of fun, but I'm running out of caches to look for in the park by our house, so I think I need to widen my horizons and venture more than a mile from home next time. Then we put on a second coat of paint and started the trim and gazed for a while at the loveliness that is our kitchen, and ate Chinese food. I'll be putting up pictures of the kitchen shortly, maybe after I do the bathrooms, which should be early this week.

Today I probably did things, but I'm not sure what. Well, I finished the kitchen trim and taped the downstairs bathroom, and set up the kitchen somewhat. Oh, and I ordered some bedding online. It wasn't all that exciting of a day, frankly. I'd like to promise you better from tomorrow, but I'm painting a bathroom, so I can't be too hopeful.

Our porch furniture came! It's really lovely and well worth the wait. It didn't even require assembly, which confused and disoriented me until I realized that it was not actually from Ikea. I'm introducing a new term to the lexicon called Sedgewick Distortion, which is what happens to your perspective on life when half the things you own are gifts from your in-laws and thus really nice and the other half aren't and thus aren't, and thus you find yourself setting up an outdoor patio set that's worth more than your car. (In fairness, though, it probably wasn't before I ran the car into our neighbors' house.)

What else? Yesterday I tried out the stairmaster and although even a little bit of a workout made me feel greatly invigorated for the rest of the day, my goodness am I out of aerobic shape. I'd justified being really incredibly lazy workout-wise after we moved and the gym stopped being two doors away by thinking that I was at least working around the house these days, and it's true that, say, my lifting-boxes endurance or hauling-carpets endurance has gone way up, but that appears to be completely nontransferable to traditional gym equipment, so this arrived just in time. Plus, we have it set up upstairs in the room with the big computer monitor and so I can watch "Arrested Development" while I work out, which is definitely not a huge mistake.

And today I'm talking to the lovely Dr. J in half an hour. This has to have been an empowering week for female physicists in Germany, considering, so I'm eager to hear if she's been celebrating the new chancellor, possibly by cutting men's ties and shoelaces. After that, I'm going with my mother to take her cat to the vet. We all remember how well that went last time, so I'm anticipating lots of fun today too.

Oh, so tired am I. We just got back from a lovely dinner with Megan and I'm not sure why, because nothing I did today was especially strenuous, but I'm about ready to fall over. And I have nothing really to report about my day anyhow, except that Robbie found us a functioning (though not especially swank) StairMaster in someone else's trash. I told you all that bulk day was the best day of the month.

And now to bed I go.

The stair fronts look so excellent, I can hardly tell you. They're blindingly white and pristine. I could stare at them all day, and frankly, I may. Next is the kitchen, then the bathrooms, and then I am never, ever going to paint anything ever again, not even my toenails. (Except that I forgot to list the halls in there. But after that I won't, I mean it.) Who out there knew that semigloss paint needs to be sanded before it's painted over? (Fine, other than Dr. J?) I certainly didn't, and now I see more sanding in my future than I'd really been looking for.

In other news, our porch furniture is arriving Thursday. I can't anticipate that we're going to get much use out of it until next spring, although I see the weather forecast says it'll be seventy degrees out then, so maybe I'm wrong. Thursday is also bulk day, the most wonderful day of the month, so the carpets that are currently rolled up on the front porch will be gone and the whole effect will be much classier. I may even throw out the dead plants.

And another fine weekend with Adam enters the history books. Let's see--Friday we picked him up and went out for burgers, and then Saturday we went to lunch at the taco restaurant and then went down to the regional history center, which I highly recommend, especially the display case with the 1985 Places Rated Almanac. Then we had Japanese food with my parents (Adam and I split sushi for two served on a very adorable little sushi-serving-bridge) and went out for drinks with Heather and Matt, who were also in town for the weekend (and who, I failed to mention earlier, came over on Saturday morning and helped me unwrap some of the vast stores of silverware that my mother gave me that I finally have a space for), and Megan and Chet.

Then yesterday I went geocaching before anyone else got up, and then made waffles, as per Adam's special request, and then Adam went running and Robbie went biking and I, unsuccessfully, went geocaching again. Then we went out for an authentic British Isles dinner on the South Side, which was very good and probably more authentic than any British Isles dinner we actually had in the actual British Isles. Is that actually all we did yesterday? I think it may have been. Oh, when we got home we watched How To Get Ahead In Advertising, which I recommend.

Then today Adam and I had our very special In-Law Bonding Day while Robbie went to work. I dropped him off at the record store while I got his birthday present, and then we had lunch with Robbie, and then I took Adam downtown so I could pick up batting for my dining room chairs. I'd been dreading this errand all week, but it was surprisingly easy and I got to watch Adam lift a roll of batting one-handed, which was obviously really awesome. Then we tried to go to Henry Clay Frick's mansion, but it was closed on Mondays, so we walked around Frick Park for a while, and then we watched an episode of "The Singing Detective," and then, with an hour left before I had to drive Adam to the airport, I decided to take Adam geocaching in the park, which went remarkably poorly and ended with us covered in bits of leaves and running up a very steep and bramble-covered hill to try to get back home in time, having found no caches. I think a lot of young women out there should be awfully grateful to me for lowering the sister-in-law bar to this extent.

This week: painting. Who's excited?

I've written a little song to commemorate today's anniversary day, which I will now share with you. It's no "Ode to Chi," but I think I'm only capable of that sort of genius once in a lifetime.

Happy date-iversary to meeeeeee,
Happy date-iversary also to Robbie,
I think technically it might be tomoooooooorrow,
But this is the day that sticks in my mind.

Happy date-iversary to meeeeeee,
Happy date-iversary also to Robbie,
I remember when EV came in on October 8 talking about her random hoooooookup,
And I was all, "How interesting! By the way..."

Adam's coming to visit this weekend, rounding out the trifecta of romantic holidays that the three of us have spent together this year, so I'm not sure when I'll be blogging. I will point out to anyone who might be interested in my geocaching habits that if the weather holds out I'm planning to visit my first cache this afternoon, just in case there's anything they'd like to do as a result of this information. And happy birthday to Chi.

(An update: due to the rain and my needing to spend the day corralling our exploding house-of-stuff, there was no geocaching. I've given you a little shout-out instead, which shouldn't take you too long to discover if you haven't yet.)

Sorry, I couldn't get into Blogger last night.

The furniture is moved and more or less set up in the dining room and only one piece got scratched in transit. Unfortunately, that was the only piece that had made it through the last half-century of my family with no damage, and I'd put it in the front of the U-Haul with me on purpose to keep it safe, so I'm a little annoyed about that. I'm going to see what the wood crayons can do, though. I was having some problems setting it all up in the dining room because of the location of the chandelier (which is perfectly centered in the room, but I think might work better if it weren't) but Dr. J offered to move the chandelier when she's here in November. I didn't even know you could do that.

Last night I was really exhausted--I'm not sure why, since moving the furniture was work but not that much work, but I think it might have something to do with waking up at 5:30 yesterday--but today I slept in, relatively speaking, and I'm full of pep. Which is good, because Adam's coming this weekend, and I'd had the bright idea that all of these things would be done before his arrival and they will be, but just barely, which means that right now all the debris of household jobs just done is still lying around, and we haven't picked up after ourselves on a regular basis since before Brett came two weeks ago.

Oh, and my GPS comes today--it's already on the truck, according to UPS. I'm extremely excited.

Bookshelves: filled.
Many boxes: broken down.
Dining room: emptied.
Dining room furniture: awaiting pickup tomorrow.

Everything is going according to my fiendishly clever plan, and I couldn't be more pleased. And what's more, in anticipation of the house-fixing ending soon I applied for another freelance position today, and I got their editing test this afternoon and found it to be really delightful. You can tell a lot about a company by the errors they ask you to find, I think, and I liked this one. I think these widely advertised positions tend to be really competitive, so we'll see if I actually get it, but it was nice to be looking at least. And I did some fiction-writing work today. And my GPS shipped, and should be here on Thursday (you'd think that somehow tracking a GPS would be extremely easy, but all I know is that it's somewhere in Kentucky). A fine day it was, all around.

And now I'm going to bed, so as to conserve my energy for the heavy lifting tomorrow. I took all the drawers and doors off the furniture (and I remembered to take the silverware out of the secret silverware drawer), but I still think the sideboard will be a bit of a lifting test.

I'm declaring Chi only a partial winner (although still obviously my best friend ever) in the guess-what-this-Friday-is contest. The specific answer I was looking for is that it's the ten-year anniversary of our first date, broadly speaking, and I've been mulling this over for a while now trying to figure out whether this feels right or like more or less time has passed. I have the handy mnemonic of this day coming within a week after the O.J. Simpson verdict, and as I said to Dr. J last week, you can fit my entire independent life handily into the O.J. Simpson trial, since the murders were immediately after I graduated from high school (not that I'm not independent in many senses now, but "independent" in the sense that during that period I could've knocked off for a few days to go to Graceland or something and anyone who would have noticed would have assumed I'd left with someone else).

So, that was ten years ago, and today is German reunification anniversary day (I keep track of the German holidays now, since on them my blog traffic goes down considerably), and evidently that was fifteen years ago, and then just now when I was looking for a different CD I came across a CD I made on September 27, 2000 and I put it on, and it's blowing my mind right now that these events are all evenly spaced calendar-wise, because they so clearly aren't in my mind. From German reunification to when I started dating Robbie was several decades, I'm fairly sure, and it's still basically 2000, which I guess makes 1995 to 2000 the correct pace of time for me. (Interestingly, I'm also fairly sure that about half of my life, intensity-wise, happened in 1999 and 2000, but that's an entry for another time, or maybe never ever.)

So I think we can conclude from this that ten years ago feels exactly like ten years ago, and everything else is wrong. Also possibly that I'm still high on polyurethane fumes. Watch for another aged and ruminating entry in December, when AJ turns eighteen and I informally plan to audioblog singing "Who Knows Where The Time Goes?" or, better yet, "The Circle Game." (Or maybe "Sunrise, Sunset," with special verses written for the occasion.)

Before we moved into this house we made fun of the people who lived here before us because they bought every single fixture and piece of furniture they owned at Ikea, but I have to report to you all that we're coming perilously close to that ourselves. Yesterday we got new bookshelves there for the guest room (yes, stay with us and not only will you have a rip-roaring good time, but the great works of literature will be yours to peruse), a desk, and a desk chair that I'm already unreasonably attached to. I think we may also have successfully ordered a sofa, the fourth time being the charm and all, but we'll see how that pans out.

Other than that, it's been a weekend full of home improvement. I finished up the extra bedroom and the stairs (although they have to cure until Wednesday) and I'm extremely pleased with both of them, although in fairness, I'm also high as a kite on polyurethane fumes. Between the stairs and the bookshelves, I applied polyurethane four times today, which in retrospect may have been why today's daily sudoku puzzles proved to be completely beyond my abilities.

And finally, there are new house pictures up, although just a few. The last ten or so in the "House" album, found conveniently on the sidebar, have the stairs, the extra bedroom, and the dining room (although I should specify that the dining room photo that's captioned like the paint is finished isn't actually a photo of the finished paint job, just what we thought was the finished paint job until we noticed the myriad flaws).