The weather – which has been wavering between sunny and cloudy all week – took a sudden plunge for the worse this weekend. This was to be expected, of course, since Saturday was Picnic Day.

Picnic Day is the open house for UC Davis. Each year on Picnic Day, all the departments open their doors and drag out their very best finery for all the world to see. As the name would imply, the festivities often are scheduled to take place outside. And ever since I was in college and actively participating in Picnic Day, it’s been fairly common for the weather to be perfectly lovely up to the day 8before*, followed by clouds, chilly weather, and often rain on the day. Naturally the day after usually reverts right back to perfectly lovely. And this weekend was mostly no exception. The sun ran away by the end of the week and Saturday the skies opened up and poured buckets of water all over the Sacramento area.

Since we decided to forego going to Picnic Day this year, due to feeling a tad lazy, and also because of the weather, the rain didn’t bother us too much. It also provided a great source of amusement. This is because when I came home Friday, the backyard was full of narrow trenches for the irrigation system being put in. So after the deluge yesterday afternoon, by this morning the trenches were full of water. It’s our very own little canal system! If I’d been even slightly creative I would have whipped up a few paper boats and set them saiiling around the yard, while singing “O Solo Mio”.

I called my parents, and my dad answered the phone.

“Yes?”

“I’m watching scallions on my laptop! Dancing scallions singing about how the King likes Daniel more than them!”

There is a pause.

“They’re not scallions.”

“They’re not? Then what are they?”

“They’re leeks. They’re the leeks of Babylon.”

I think it’s becoming an obsession.

********

“It’s got 2.6 Ghz processor, and a CD-rewriteable combination DVD drive and 512 mb RAM and 64 mb video something or other that I’m not really sure what it is but Richard says it’s a good thing. And it has – how big a hard drive does it have? Oh yeah. 40 GB hard drive. Plus it’s got a 16 inch screen. It’s so cool!”

She peers at me quietly for a brief moment.

“Can you move your bangs for a moment?”

I stare at her blankly.

“Why?”

“Because I want to see the big N that is apparently engraved in your forehead.

********

“What is that one line?”

“Which line?”

“In the song. That one about the Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything.”

“Which line?”

“You know. The line near the end. When Larry is singing. ‘And I’ve never licked a spark plug and I’ve never sniffed a stink bug and I’ve never painted daisies on a big red rubber ball and I’ve never bathed in yougurt and I’ve dah dah dah dah something.”

“I don’t look good in leggings.”

“Leggings?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose that makes sense. After all, he is a cucumber.”

“And he’s never been to Boston in the fall.”

The bushes that line our driveway are wild with red leaves and white clusters of flowers, and the rose bushes that are growing over the arbor gate to the side of the house have exploded in tiny yellow and white blooms. Even our two tiny little trees in the front yard have flowers, and the bushes that line the front porch are showing a discreet sprinkling of color. The collection of random plants on the berm (on which sits Herman the toad and Gnigel the Gnome) are full of spring – sprigs of purple on the lavender bush and something else that had beautiful flowers a mix of white and yellow and blue. The poppies-that-want-to-take-over-the-world are joining the game a bit late this year, but I’ve seen a few pink flowers lurking amid the green over the last week. And while the vines have not yet decided to start budding, I know that very soon I’ll open my windows and doors to the smell of jasmine.

I planted a little thing of catnip and a little thing of oregano and put them in my kitchen window this weekend. So far they have been unaccosted but so far there are also no green shoots yet to tempt certain plant-nibbling cats. There are ferns and some kind of philodendron thing that I need to re-pot, but I am a bit hesitant to actually step foot into a nursery right now. Spring does strange things to even the most black-thumbed of gardeners, and if I am not careful I will walk out with more green things that I have no idea how to grow and will most likely just kill through sheer ignorance, instead of the handful of pots and bag of soil I really need.

The backyard is actually under way. When I got home tonight the gardener was in the yard marking out the areas where he’ll be laying sod. Turns out it was a good thing I managed to hook up with him as he’d not realized that the plans include extending the back porch another few feet. It’s a lot easier to move a few orange flags and some paint than it would be to move a big plot of sod.

They have dug the trenches for the gutter drain pipes (they’ll now drain into huge tubes that go under the yard out to the street instead of making puddles by the house). Some time over the next week we’ll see a lot more trenches, as they lay in all the pipes for irrigation. And then shortly after that we’ll have two patches of actual lawn in our backyard. Granted they will be surrounded by much larger patches of bare dirt and/or weeds, but at least it’s a start.

I really should get those new pots and soil before they get started, now that I think about it. It will be a lot easier to reign in my spring-induced impulses when the backyard is still just weeds and random holes, than to wait until it is suddenly ready for bushes and trees and other things.

My older sister called last night, and we talked for a while. She let me unload on her, and she sympathized. I know I’m not the only one who’s felt this isolated, but still, sometime it’s nice to have that validation in person. I also know that, logically, the ability to find new friends remains throughout life. It’s just that sometimes, especially when I am feeling so low, I feel as if it all just passed me by. Your emails and comments are very much appreciated and I thank all of you who sent them. I needed the gentle reminders that things are never as bleak as they might seem.

In the background, near the end of the conversation, I could hear my youngest nephew singing. He loves the Veggie Tales videos, so he was singing, “Oh Where is My Hairbrush”. Except that he substitutes “baby” for “hairbrush” since he has a little doll (whose name is Baby) that he carries around with him pretty much everywhere. In fact he gets a little upset if he can’t find it. Are all his female relatives taking pictures and recording this little quirk of his faithfully for the future? You bet we are! Call it potential blackmail material for when he’s a teenager and mouthing off at his mother, or desperate to impress a girlfriend.

The sun came out today and the weather was so nice I decided to go for a walk during lunch. There is a little office park across the street from where I work and it has an area that is ringed by bike paths and includes little cement benches and lots of trees. I walked around the perimeter, startling more than a few squirrels. Some of them fussed at me while the rest simply froze on their trees and tried very hard to pretend I didn’t exist.

This evening, while chopping up vegetables for soup, my mom called from the hospital where she works.

“There’s a new church in Vacaville,” she told me. “We need to go and worship there. All the nurses agree.”

At first I thought she was joking, but then when she told me the name of the new ‘church’, I promptly agreed. After all, no self-respecting ice cream addict would *ever* forgo a chance to pray at the alter of Coldstone Creamery.

********

This weekend I was awoken early one morning by an odd sound. At first I thought that perhaps someone was simply dragging their garbage can back in from the curb, but when it came again, a little while later, I finally got out of bed to investigate.

There is a black and white dog of indeterminate shepherd mix that lives a few houses down from us. I see him walking with his people occasionally, and every once in a long while he gets out of his yard and goes wandering around looking for something exciting to do.

When I looked out my window I saw him, standing splay-legged in the neighbor’s driveway with the source of the noise. Somehow, this dog had found himself a large white bucket, and the noise would come when he would pounce on the bucket, causing it to roll across the cement. As it rolled he would wag his tail excitedly and cock his head to one side to watch its progress, and then once it stopped moving, he would promptly repeat the process.

I thought briefly of going outside to return him to his yard. But then I decided against it. It’s a quiet little dead-end street where I live so there is no worry about traffic for him. He has always returned himself to his yard when he is done playing before. And perhaps most importantly of all, it was obvious even from my second story window that he was enjoying himself immensely. I didn’t have the heart to go outside and spoil the fun.

When things are happy and light and good, I don’t mind the lack of friends so much. After all, there are Richard’s friends, and there is my family, and there are acquaintances I have through work or church. When things are happy and I’m perfectly content with life, those all seem adequate. Yes it would be nice to have a best friend again, but most of the time I can fool myself into believing that this isn’t such a big deal.

It’s the rest of the time it really gets to me. Times like now when I would give almost anything to have someone I could call, just to meet for coffee and talk. Someone to whom I could vent and maybe even cry a little. Someone who would understand that I just needed someone to listen without jumping to conclusions; without judging.

I am lonely. And right now, it’s worse than it’s been in a long time. At least when I was on the road, I had that as the excuse – not being home means it’s hard to cultivate friendships. But the truth of the matter is, even now that I *am* home, I still have nothing. And at times like these, when I feel as if I have been wound so tight I will soon snap, the loneliness is so big and huge and overwhelming that it physically hurts inside. It builds up inside me until I reach the point where it is all I can do not to burst into tears. And sometimes even all I can do isn’t enough, and I end up crying anyway.

Today was one of those days. It’s been a hard week for me. There’s the underlying stress of being at a new job where the position isn’t clearly defined and so it is even more critical than usual that I perform well. There is the fact that Richard has been sick – extremely sick – and I can do nothing but worry about him since he is far away. There is the fact that because of all of this stress, I am more sensitive than usual to comments made to me by those who are close to me. Something said that might perhaps have been meant in jest instead stings as if it is criticism, and lingers long after the words were spoken so that I turn them over and over in my head and analyze what they mean. This week especially, I have felt as if I have been walking on a very narrow tightrope with everyone around me – family, in-laws, and coworkers. With all of them, the line between what can be discussed and what cannot be uttered for fear of reprisal has gotten smaller and smaller What I cannot say becomes more important than what I can say, and what I cannot say instead builds up inside me and makes it all that much harder.

I went out with my older sister this afternoon, shopping for shoes since she called and invited me. I went because I thought perhaps it would do me good to get out of the house and doing something frivolous. I cried a little, in the car on the way to the mall, but I managed to get it together by the time I met her. It worked for a little while – long enough for us to find shoes and a few tops to buy, and wander through the children’s department for my nephews. Near the end, however, she commented that I looked tired, and rather than collapse in a blubbering heap in the middle of a department store, I simply grabbed the excuse and agreed that yes, I was simply tired. I managed to make it to my car before the tears came again, and I cried on and off the entire way home.

I know that this latest bout of stress and sadness will pass and I will be back to my usual happy self soon enough. But the loneliness doesn’t go away. No matter how hard I try to pretend that it doesn’t matter, it’s always there. I have never been the social butterfly type. I am awkward in new situations; uncomfortable with forced to make small talk with strangers. And I know that I have spent too much time in jobs that were too far from home, or involved too much travel for me to be able to do whatever it is I was supposed to do so I would have friends at my age.

What scares me, especially right now when I’m scraped raw and need a friend more than ever, is that this will never change. This is all there is now. I’m past the age where friendships happen. This is it. And this hurts.

I feel a bit awkward here. But then I suppose that is simply normal for the first few days at a new job. And it is with grim amusement that I have to consider just how often I’ve dealt with those first few awkward days in the past year or two. I am hoping that this job-hopping will have finally stopped for me, at least for a while. I know that no job can ever last forever. If nothing else, my experiences with the Big and Little Fish, and all the companies before and after them, have taught me that. But still, it would be nice to be somewhere a bit longer. Perhaps even more than a year?

I gave myself the weekend to relax and get back into just being home. I even stretched it out through Monday, due to the fact that I am still a bit sick from this latest bout with the Winter Thing. But I’ve got a long list of things to accomplish, now that I’m home. It ranges from such lovely items as “scrub the baseboards and floor around the shower stall” to “finish those stupid curtains already!” And really, there is no excuse for me to not get at least some of these things done.

To this end I decided that I would set a timer, if necessary (since I do recognize my penchant for procrastination, especially when it comes to decidedly un-fun things like house cleaning). And every night I am home (nights that don’t include time-sucking activities like choir practice and craft night) I have to turn on the timer for just an hour, and get some of those things done. If nothing else, it will give me a sense of accomplishment, and serve to underscore the fact that I’m finally, permanently, home.

The cats are settling down, albeit slowly. Rebecca is still clingy, but it’s not nearly as bad. She still follows me avidly from room to room, but I am no longer required to hold her constantly. Additionally, Sebastian – while he does tend to want to stay closer to me than normal (which inevitably leads to him camping out under my computer chair) is finally quieting down and no longer feels compelled to yell his fuzzy little head off the second he realizes that he can no longer see me. It’s been one of those oh-so-charming (ha!) habits of his that have made our brief weekends even less relaxing when we were constantly on the road.

Richard is off in Riverside and I won’t see him again for three weeks except for a very brief weekend stop-over which will probably only be long enough for him to do his laundry. The fact that he is not home is even worse considering that he is extremely sick – so much so that after a conversation with the advice nurse (wherein I spoke to the nurse and typed back and forth to Richard via instant messenger because he couldn’t get through) he ended up going to the emergency room last night. By himself. Because he is a plane flight away and there was simply no way for me to get down there to go with him. Asthma. Ain’t it grand. Sigh.

I may have to change my name. I am now an entire Research Department. They keep referring to me as that, in jest. “Oh, the Research Department is heading home for the day. The Research Department is having issues with network connections.” Heh.

The office is in one of those old buildings where everything seems laid out as if someone sort of randomly tossed rooms together in no particular order. Consequently it has a marvelously quirky atmosphere to it. This is only enhanced by the fact that one side is lined with picture windows that overlook the river.

I have a desk that cries out for plants. In fact it cries out for mounds of papers and other work-related clutter but I figure that will come with time. The plants, however, will have to be brought soon, if only because they are slowly being nibbled to death by the cats in the garden window over my kitchen sink.

It was a good day, as far as first days at new jobs go. A great majority of the day was spent wrestling with my computer, since first of all we couldn’t seem to make the monitor talk to the computer (or vice versa), and both I and another man spent a large amount of time crawling back and forth underneath desks trying to stare at the back-end of a tower in a dimly-lit area, trying to figure out what we weren’t plugging in correctly. And then once we finally made the monitor and the computer shake hands and be friends again, we got to play “How much does Windows XP suck?” by trying to figure out just why it was that my computer didn’t want to connect to the network. My user login still isn’t configuring correctly and I need that to happen before I can install the software I’ll need in order to do actual work. But I left this afternoon feeling pretty optimistic anyway. After all, I am my very own Department. I have a database to design and create, somehow (a rather daunting task which, I am fairly certain, will involve me, at some point, sitting on the floor yet again shuffling papers around trying to lay out schematics and entity-relationship diagrams. Woo!). And if nothing else, there wasn’t a mollusk, or a barnacle, in sight.

Back when we moved into the house, I arranged for a maintenance visit for a number of our appliances. We had someone come out and make sure the refrigerator had been set up correctly (a concern, since they let the door swing open when carrying it in and we then ended up cleaning leaves and other interesting items out of the fridge for days afterwards). We also had someone come in to check out the washing machine and dryer – make sure they were leveled correctly, and that the water hookups were correctly installed. At that time, the maintenance guy recommended that we yank out the little doohickey in the middle of the washing machine where the fabric softener goes, and run it through the dishwasher since it had been building up a rather impressive layer of sludge.

That was nearly two years ago. Today I finally got around to yanking out the doohickey. This is because after being gone for several weeks and eating out every single meal, the vegetable drawer in the fridge had become some sort of ghastly science experiment and there were black slimy things in there I was just not willing to scrub off with my bare hands. So I plopped that in the bottom rack of the dishwasher and then suddenly remembered that I needed to wash the fabric softener dohicky, so Richard helpfully removed that, I set the dishwasher to ‘Heavy’ and away they went on their merry journey from sludge-encrusted to sparkly clean.

Once done, I popped the doohickey back into the washing machine and then ran a load of laundry. Luckily it was a very small load. I say ‘luckily’ because apparently I forgot to push down the little locking ring. So when the load had completed, I opened the lid to discover that the small load of laundry was now liberally coated with -well – slime.

Richard attacked the washing machine drum with a great wad of paper towels and managed to remove all the obvious gunk. I grabbed the fabric softener doohickey and set to it with a sponge and lots of hot water, and thoroughly grossed myself out by dislodging great quantities of nasty slimy goo that kept coming out as if it was never going to stop.

Per my mom’s suggestion (after we bemoaned the possibly ruined washing machine), after church we ran the machine empty, with only a large quantity of bleach inside. Once done, I opened the lid and heaved a sigh of relief. No sign of nasty sludge anymore. Phew.

When we got home this weekend, we found the next three movies from our NetFlix queue in the mail that had accumulated (as if by magic!) on our breakfast nook table. One of these movies was the Veggie Tales movie about Jonah and the whale.

This movie was placed on our queue after much prodding and insisting from my parents and a number of other people, who have not only been insisting that we watch both the movie and the shorter shows, but who have also been regaling us with songs from the Veggie Tales show (like the one my Dad recently played me, called “You are his Cheeseburger.”). The reasoning for watching it this weekend was simply because it was next up on our NetFlix queue. We also got another two episodes of The Prisoner. While this makes Richard extremely happy, I have to admit that I have failed to grasp the magnificence that is The Prisoner. Alas. Or something. Thankfully Richard doesn’t mind that I find the show fairly tedious, and is perfectly happy to watch the remaining 16 episodes on his own. Because yes, we *do* have the whole series sitting in our NetFlix queue right now. Lucky us!

Anyway, the whole point of that rather rambley paragraph above was to note that this weekend we finally watched the Veggie Tales movie. Or rather, I should say that we giggled our way through the movie, and then spent the rest of the weekend singing “Jonah was a prophet. Ooh, ooh! But he really didn’t get it. Ooh, Ooh!” to each other at random intervals. Plus we both fell in adoration with the goofy little caterpiller and when we’re not singing about Jonah, we’re declaring that digestion runs deep in our family in our best caterpiller accents.

After letting on that we’ve finally at least seen the movie, my parents pointed out a few highlights of the DVD we’d missed – namely a tour of the Big Ideas studio, which produces the show, and a few other things. So naturally, since we’d yet to stuff the DVD into its little NetFlix return envelope, we popped it back into the player again and went poking around to find these nifty additional bits.

Unfortunately, our copy doesn’t include the tour and such. But we did, on a whim, turn on the commentary for the movie, done by Larry the cucumber and Mr. Lunt (which popular opinion amongst our acquaintances designates as a lemon). Normally I would run screaming from any commentary about a movie, especially when done by someone who was actually involved (because frankly, I could care less what they were thinking at a particular scene), but in this case, it was worth it. The two ‘vegetables’ chattering back and forth to each other had us laughing out loud. It got old after while, but the first ten minutes or so was worth it.

I shouldn’t have to even tell you that afterwards I promptly went to NetFlix and added every single Veggie Tales DVD I could find to our queue. This is not just because the whole concept of animated, armless vegetables amuses us greatly. This is also for self-preservation. If I’m going to be hounded by my own family members singing such things as “Barbara Manatee, You’re the One for Me,” and “Where is My Hairbrush?” at me every time I turn around, the least I can do is to return the favor.

I woke up this morning to the uncomfortable realization that my throat was sore. There was a short period of denial, which quickly ended the second I downed an entire glass of water and discovered that it wasn’t that I was just extraordinarily thirsty.

As the day wore on, it got worse. My head stuffed up, my nose decided to run constantly, and my throat felt swollen from being so sore. At one point I rifled through my purse and found one remaining dosage of Tylenol Cold medicine, which I promptly swallowed in the hopes that it might push this thin away. While it did manage to calm the nose and the throat a bit, I think it was a night-version, because I spent the next several hours feeling as if my head and my mouth were no longer connected. Spacey doesn’t even begin to describe it. Heh. Luckily it wore off and I found my brain again, but with clarity of thought came the return of the Winter Thing in full force.

Somehow, this time, it doesn’t seem as bad. Even though I’m facing the fact that I’m most likely going to start this new job on Monday while sick, this doesn’t bother me as much as it probably should. The sheer fact that it is a new job; that I do not have to board a plane to fly to Riverside like every one of my Benthic Creatures (ex) coworkers; makes being sick yet again seem a little less an issue in the grand scheme of things.

If I could, I would take most of my coworkers with me. Most of them are people I’d be happy to work with on a more permanent basis. Some of them are people I could have easily become good friends with, were the politics of work and the difficulties of distance not in the way.

I turned in my laptop on Wednesday. Some time next week I’ll clean out my car of all the remaining paraphernalia, and some time next week (sooner rather than later) I’ll file my very last expense report.

If I look past the anger and frustration over retractions and misunderstandings and great, gaping communication holes, I can be glad of the experience. Driving home this evening for the very last time, I know that I am gladder still that the experience has finally ended.