As of 5 pm this evening, I have been officially unemployed for two whole days (although technically if you count the weekend, it’s really four). Initially I was supposed to start the new job yesterday, but considering that the person I’m to work with had vacation planned, we all thought it might be best if I waited til Wednesday when she was back.

This means, in other words, that along with my two weeks of paid freedom (from when I gave the Big Fish my notice and than ran screaming from the project to which I’d been assigned), I got to tack on a few more days of sloth. Whee!

So what, you may be asking, did I do with this, my last day of freedom?

I cleaned, that’s what! And not the boring ordinary sort of cleaning – oh, no. The smudges on the bathroom mirrors get to wait for another day. No, today I decided to tackle a whole list of all those obscure little chores that have been on my ‘someday when I have nothing else to do and I’m so bored I could either do these or watch my navel collect fuzz’.

I started the day by diving into the linen closet which was once (the day after I unpacked the towels) a picture of perfect neatness, until Zuchinni, Rosemary, and Allegra got involved. Luckily Allegra has since adopted several miscellaneous boxes as her nap spots of choice, Rosemary would now rather burrow under any blanket then waste her time in messy piles of towels, and Zuchinni has made enough progress in this whole socialization process that he no longer feels compelled to cower, shivering in terror, amid the sheets and towels.

Flushed with the excitement of producing shelves of neatly folded linens from cat hair-infested chaos, I whirled through the downstairs putting things away. When I hit the kitchen I even managed to clear off nearly an entire counter of miscellaneous stuff that’s been accumulating there for months, not the least of which was the box of things I brought home from my office when I cleared the heck out of there. I then prepared to tackle the guest room, and the stack of remaining wedding presents we still haven’t figured out permanent homes for, but my enthusiasm was waning, and it was then that I remembered that, alas, my last evening as a lazy bum was to be spent not lounging in front of the computer playing one last rousing game of Civilization II (the only computer game I’ve ever gotten addicted to), but instead slumped in an uncomfortable chair at a monthly board meeting for the SPCA. This meant that since I wasn’t out of town or scrambling around planning a wedding, and since my notebook had actually been returned to me (finally!), I no longer had any excuse for why I don’t have the minutes done. So the last few hours have been spent frantically typing several months worth of extremely important SPCA business (ha!) into amazingly well-organized and lovely documents worthy of…well, worthy of stashing somewhere and never reading, I’m sure, but leave me my delusions of grandeur, would you?

While taking a break in typing I dutifully called the company-to-be-nicknamed-later and verified that yes, I really do still have the new job, and yes, they are expecting to see me tomorrow. This is wonderful news, considering that four days of unemployment (voluntary or otherwise) is really all I am willing to experience right now.

A note to all you manufacturers of cleaning supplies out there (because, you know, I’m sure tons of them are just reading my journal on a daily basis. Um. But anyway).

If you want to encourage men to do the cleaning, you might want to consider marketing the stuff to their taste. Camouflage rubber gloves, for example, or toilet cleanser named ‘Raging Bull’ or ‘Mad Dog’. Toss in a few commercials with a couple WWF goons giving great manly grunts and flexing their muscles as they attack the evil bathtub ring, and we just might be able to even out that whole household chore discrepancy thing, hmm? After all, look at what marketing does for sports cars and beer – and how many guys fall for those? We’re missing a virtually untapped market here, folks! Time to get snappy.

Okay, so the ‘manly’ names idea for cleaning solutions came from Richard (who is a truly marvelous husband because he does all the vacuuming. Hands off, ladies, he’s all mine). But the rest – all my little fantasy.

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Inspired by the growing number of houses on our street that are sporting cobwebs, ghosts, pumpkins, and other signs of October’s best-known candy-fest, Richard and I finally broke down and rummaged through the closet in the guest room to find all of our Halloween decorations.

It’s a pitifully small collection, considering we’re dealing with the combined wealth of two recently single people. Among other things, we have: two large black plastic cauldrons, a silly puffy spider windsock, one of those ‘flat’ witches that’s supposed to look like she ran into a tree (or your door, or something else), a shadow-activated chattering skull, and more fake spider webs than should be humanely allowed. There is also, of course, a costume for the stone goose – a sparkly blue magician’s cap and pointed hat. I’m thinking what all of this means is that we have a wonderful excuse to hit the after-Halloween sales to see what cool stuff might be perfect for our house for next year.

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Can someone please tell me what the heck is going on with the weather? We were moving quite nicely into beautiful fall weather – where we actually had to close the windows at night or it would get a bit too chilly. Then suddenly somebody had to go mucking with the outdoor thermostat and we’re right back into summer.

When the winds kick in, as they often do in our area of the valley, it makes the heat bearable, but where there’s only the barest hint of a breeze, we’re forced back inside, to turn the air conditioning on and mutter under our breath about the indecency of Mother Nature to not be able to make up her mind.

I made the daily trek to Starbucks for breakfast this morning (which we really shouldn’t be doing every day, but since the one in town *finally* started to carry the stuff I like, I just can’t help myself). I was helped by a rather awkward teenage boy – probably mid-high-school age, and fairly new to the job if I was guessing correctly. I handed him my check card, and as he checked my ID he paused and looked from the card to me. And then came something I most certainly wasn’t expecting.

“Are you Josh’s mom?” he asked. Further comments indicated that the Josh in question actually was old enough to *work* there at the shop.

I ought to point out right about now that I look young for my age (I’m 32). Never in my entire life has anyone *ever* guessed that I’m as old as I am – they’re usually off by at least 3 or 4 years. Currently I am usually mistaken for someone in their late twenties, and I’ve certainly never before been mistaken for someone who is old enough to be the mother of a teenage boy.

I suppose I ought to have been insulted, but it was so unexpected that all I could do shake my head and try not to laugh. It was the last name that made him ask, he said, since it was the same, but even so!

I remember the shock of being called ‘Ma’am’ when first working at the department store, and how bizarre it was when customers would ask me how old my children were (I was barely 18 at the time, but I guess they figured that if I worked in the children’s department, that meant I had ’em. Go figure). And I’m still trying to get the hang of having a title that now has a ‘Mrs.’ in front of it instead of a ‘Miss’, but the thing is, these are all part of working jobs that are slightly more grownup than flipping burgers, or getting married.

But I’m not sure I’m ready to have people think I could be the mother of teenagers. I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready for that (grin).

There are times when I am convinced that certain aspects of sewing were created by someone with a lot of time on their hands and a rather nasty grudge against any person who happens to have semi-decent eyesight. Counted cross stitch (my favorite type of thread-related artwork) falls into this category if you’re going to take on the more complicated and therefore more gorgeous pieces. And today I got to learn another one.

Smocking. English smocking, to be exact (not to be confused with American smocking. I had no idea there were multiple types of this stuff in the first place).

For years my mom has wanted to learn smocking. At one point she insisted that none of us were allowed to produce grandchildren until she’d learned how. My two sisters, however, ignored that request. The arrival of both nephews wasn’t too much cause for concern, as smocking is not normally a thing done on the outfits of little boys, but when the niece was born, well, things were suddenly Not Right With the World.

All of which leads up to my mom and I sitting in a little room this morning with four other women of varying degrees of age and skill, learning how to smock.

Uh. For those of you who are still hopelessly lost as to what I’m talking about, go into your local children’s clothing store and look for the really adorable little girl dresses where the top piece has a pinafore or a bodice covered with pleated material, all sewn together (to keep said teeny tiny pleats in place) with itsy bitsy little stitches of thread.

The stitching itself is deceptively easy (I am just not even going to touch the whole pleating process) as it is simply several variations of your basic ordinary backstitch. I’m proud to say I picked it up rather quickly (being already used to making multitudes of miniscule little stitches from my years of cross stitching). But since you’ve got to stitch every single one of those no-longer-quite-so-adorable teeny tiny pleats with every row of smocking you produce, well…I refer you back to my statement about this being the product of a grudge. Either that or some demented woman’s idea of a sick joke that no one ever quite got.

My little niece is going to get two adorably smocked dresses for Christmas, and then I have a sneaky feeling that the chances of her getting anything else hand-smocked from either her aunt or her grandmother are fairly slim.

That is unless either my mom or myself decides that a permanent state of cross-eyed squinting is something we’re really in the mood for. Wince.

Today marks the official last day of my employment with the Big Fish. Considering that Richard and I already went out and had our celebratory dinner the night I was released from my last project, and that I’ve already turned in all my stuff, today seems a bit anticlimactic. There’s a part of me that feels I should be doing *something* to celebrate the occasion, like maybe firing up the little mini-Weber grill to burn the last of my business cards. But then, perhaps, in some way, it’s better to just let the day slip into oblivion with nothing more than a whispered ‘farewell’.

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During my nearly two years of employment by the Big Fish, I never really bothered to pay attention to the stock price. There never seemed to be any point, since I’ve tried to view the stock market as a long range playground only, and usually manage to avoid worrying about the ups and downs by reminding myself that history has shown it always goes up.

However, ever since I gave my two week notice, I’ve been following that stock ticker like a hawk. I check that sucker several times a day, and every time it inches up another few cents, I give a silent but hearty ‘wahoo!’ The reason, of course, is entirely selfish.

Over the past five years with the Big Fish, Little Fish, and all the even smaller incarnations of this company, I’ve been slowly accumulating a healthy pile of stock options. When the Big Fish swallowed the Little Fish I exercised some of them (although I’m still not quite sure why. I guess it just seemed like the best thing to do at the time, with the Little Fish’s stock soaring higher than we’d ever seen it before in anticipation of the buy-out), but the majority have been quietly gathering dust.

Now, however, I’ve got three months from today in which to exercise these options before I lose them for good. Not all are vested of course, but the amount that is available to me is enough that I’m not so willing to let it just slip away. So call me selfish, but it sure would be nice if, in the next three months, that stock price would inch its way up to at least slightly higher than the price my most ‘expensive’ batch is worth.

We sort of assumed that the first time was a fluke, because one doesn’t expect to find dead frogs in one’s garage every day, after all. There is the little matter of the continually growing number of cricket corpses that keep showing up in there, true, but there had been, so far, only one frog. This morning, however, I found another – this one much larger than the first.

I’m starting to feel a little guilty about this. I like frogs. I think these frogs are actually kind of cute. Okay, so these might really be toads – I honestly don’t know (or care, for that matter), but whatever they are, they’re fun to watch, hopping across the sidewalk with fat little squelching noises when we go walking at night. And because of this, I’m not particularly happy to discover that our garage has turned into the local amphibian death trap.

This does, of course, sort of blow our whole Church of the Dead Frog thing out of the water. One suicidal frog was worthy of worship, but now that there’s two…well, it just doesn’t seem right anymore.

I made a resolution at the beginning of this year to lose weight. I’ll admit it’s something I’ve done every year for a fairly long time now – this promise to myself to lose weight – but this year I figured for sure I’d do it because of the wedding. After all, having a wedding looming over your head mid-way through the coming year is a powerful incentive to try to look a bit nicer for those wedding pictures. However, after two months of going it alone and meeting with miserable (ice cream and pizza related) failure, I turned to Richard and made him a deal. Crafty gal that I am, I suggested that we join Weight Watchers together and when *both* of us had lost a certain amount of weight each, we would get something (computer related, of course) we’ve been really wanting for a while. I did this because I finally recognized that I’m completely incapable of doing this on my own, and after all, they say that misery loves company. But anyway, luckily, he agreed, since we both have just about the same amount of weight to lose, and he was starting to ponder that whole ‘wedding picture’ dilemma himself. And the cool thing is that he has just as hard a time at it as I do. There is nothing more horrid than going into a weight-losing pact with someone who can simply melt away the pounds by drinking one less glass of soda per day, especially when you happen to have the metabolism of someone just recently coming off a year-long fast.

This diet hasn’t been easy, not by a long shot. In fact, I shouldn’t say this is a diet, because it isn’t – it’s a life-long eating regime. It doesn’t matter what you want to call it though – whatever it is, I still will hate it. There are days when I just don’t want to care about the number of points in a serving of food, or when I don’t want to have to drag out the measuring cups in order to eat my breakfast cereal, or when I wish that there was some miraculous way I could still suck down half a garlic-sauce-and-roasted-chicken pizza with Richard one night and toss it back with root beer floats and not think a thing about it anymore.

But there have been some good points. Having people notice that I’ve lost weight is always a small thrill. Watching the numbers creep slowly down on the scale is marvelous. Looking in the mirror and noticing that I might actually have a waist after all is even better.

Picture, if you will, a dining room, sans table (it’s a new house – we’re still working on that furniture thing), with wood-laminate floors. In the middle of this room sits a medium-sized cardboard box, full of shredded newspaper that was once around a wedding present. This box, sitting there for weeks, has mostly been ignored, until last night.

Last night the box somehow managed to tip over upside down, spilling paper out. And this evening, the sound of crinkling slowly began to fill the air.

Richard and I investigated. It was clear that there would most likely be shredded paper all over the dining room floor fairly soon, and the possibility of it spreading outside that room was rather high. When we walked in, all crinkling stopped, and the current two culprits did their best to act innocent. Sebastian sat amid one pile, looking for all the world like some oddly fuzzy bird in its nest. In the larger pile Azrael lurked, sitting still at first, but then unable to resist rolling over on his side, eyes wide and paws stretched out over his head in Full Cute Mode. Even Zuchinni crept out later to pat gently at the paper, before the rattle of a ball being batted in another room by another cat startled him and he skittered frantically out of sight.

I did try to get pictures of the mess in progress, laying on my belly on the kitchen floor for a long time so that I was at eye level with the mess producers, digital camera pressed to my face. But each time I’d begin to depress the button to capture their latest escapades, the cat being photographed would stop immediately and adopt his or her most mundane expression and pose.

So you’ll just have to make do with imagining – a floor the color of deep honey, littered with piles and curls of delicate newspaper shreds.

And a few random cats thrown in, burrowing through it, or curled in the middle of it, eyes closed in perfect feline contemplation, whiskers and ears turned full forward in contentment, purring.

It is an extraordinarily lovely day today. The sun is shining and there is just enough of a breeze to stir the tops of the two young trees in our front yard. We woke slowly this morning to warm purring cats and the promise of loveliness peeking around the corners of the curtains in the windows.

We drove off to feed my parents’ cat – a gray shorthair with fur softer than any other cat I’ve touched – and then further down the road to find a Starbucks who might possibly carry cinnamon-chip scones (the new Starbucks in town doesn’t. Sniffle). We ate breakfast and cruised past the Toyota dealer to see if they had any of the new Prius’, but they weren’t open. And we came home and went directly to the front porch, where we sat on the glider swing for a while, sipping our coffee before wandering down to the yard itself to inspect the progress of the star jasmine, the asparagus ferns, the hedges by the porch.

A bold little bird – blue-gray with a long tail so possibly a jay of some sort – inspected the taller of our two little trees and then flitted off to find branches that wouldn’t bend quite so much under his weight. Inside, the cats are in all their favorite spots – either sprawled on the bed refusing to move and allow us to straighten the covers, or perched in windows, whiskers perked forward, noses working busily as they take in the marvelous smells of outdoors through the screens.

There is a quiet peace outside today, marked by the distinct lack of farm equipment noise from the fields that are directly beyond the end of our street. It seems as if nothing could quite mar the scene, here in our little neighborhood in our little sleepy sheep-farming town in northern California.

But then I have lately learned not to trust such peaceful days. Lately I have learned to stop and listen to the airplanes as they fly overhead, waiting to see if they might be coming in too low. I have learned to open the newspaper slowly and reluctantly skim the headlines.

It seemed so easy this morning to forget that anything bad could ever happen, and that war has begun.

I am grateful that my father has already retired from his service to the country, and I am even more selfishly grateful that my husband and my brothers-in-law are, for various reasons, exempt from military duty.

And I am grateful to whomever the Shrub hired as his speech writer, for this:

The United States of America is a friend to the Afghan people, and we are the friends of almost a billion worldwide who practice the Islamic faith.

The United States of America is an enemy of those who aid terrorists and of the barbaric criminals who profane a great religion by committing murder in its name.”

I only hope that others can make that distinction as well.

I’ve been toying with the idea of upgrading my computer for a while. Um. Well. Alright, it’s been mostly since I got Richard *his* computer, because since then I’ve been having ‘fancier toy’ envy, but really, it had crossed my mind at least a few times prior to the wedding that maybe it was time to give my poor little machine a little boost. After the move, something got bumped just enough that now when I tell the computer to shut down, it thinks I really meant to just reboot it, and so if I want the darn thing to turn off I have to wait through the shutdown process and then hit the ‘off’ button manually at the exact moment the screen turns black. If I wait too long, it starts the boot process and then next time I turn it on it gives me that frantic little ‘This computer shut down unexpectedly oh-my-god-something-went-wrong I have to do a full system check RIGHT NOW or there will be dire consequences’ message. And then it refuses to believe me when I tell it I really don’t feel the need to do the full system check RIGHT NOW, and keeps demanding I do so for a few more times until it finally gives up in a loud huffy sulk and goes back about the normal rebooting business, with the occasional odd grinding noise thrown in, in a futile attempt to make me feel guilty.

So this afternoon we happened to be in the area of a CompUSA, and Richard said ‘hey, while we’re here, wanna go in and get your new hard drive and memory chip?’, and I told him he didn’t need to twist my arm twice, so off we went in search of ways to spend a lot of money. This ended up with us leaving without buying anything (the first trip, that is) because we discovered that if I brought my computer in to the store, the nice little nerds at CompUSA would do all the upgrading type things for free, plus it would end up being cheaper than us doing it ourselves. This may sound odd, but it all has to do with the fact that my little computer currently has Windows 95 on it (I am *so* behind the times, I know), but who knows where the install CD disappeared to, so we could either do the brain wipe and reinstall ourselves and have to purchase a brand new CD (I’m movin’ on up to Windows 98, baby! Hold me back!), or they would simply reinstall 95 for me, and do the 98 upgrade (which we would still have to buy). So I signed my name to an agreement wherein I left them my computer (my baby!), and they agreed to do all this stuff and clean it too, and we handed over a credit card that’s doing a fair bit of whimpering now, and we were all set. In three or four days I’ll get my computer back, all fresh and new and sporting 200% more memory, and 40 GB more of wide-open space to fill with….well….I’m sure I’ll find *something* to fill it with.

All this meant, of course, that I had to spend a few frantic hours at home hastily plowing through any and all folders on the old hard drive, stuffing things into zip files to store on another computer on our local network so I wouldn’t lose all my important stuff (you know, stuff like all my oh-so-humorous away messages for Instant Messenger, or the database of vet records for the cats). The three or so years I’ve had this thing and all my worldly (data) possessions don’t even amount to 100 MB of file space, unzipped. I think my fanatical cleanliness (on the *computer*. Quit snickering, people who know me. I never claimed this extended outside the computer) was possibly a good thing. I don’t like leaving stuff around to clutter my folders. I’m even fanatical about uninstalling programs I don’t use.

To take my mind off the fact that I had just handed over my computer and anything I may have forgotten to back up would now be gone forever (well, okay, so it’s not as bad as all that because the lovely nerds at CompUSA also agreed to make a folder on the new hard drive with all the data from my old hard drive – isn’t that nice of them – but it *sounds* so much better to say that I’d lose everything. Leave me with my delusion, darn it!), I suggested that perhaps while we were there we ought to consider replacing our scanner. When we moved (note – moving does bad things to computer-related equipment…or at least computer-related equipment that belongs to me), something in the scanner got jostled too, so that henceforth everything we tried to scan came out with really lovely wide yellow vertical stripes. A lovely fashion statement it might have been, but not exactly what one has in mind when one is trying to scan in one’s wedding photos, for example. So we perused the selection of scanners and tried to figure out which one was better and eventually decided on another Astra (the decision wasn’t quite by using the ‘Eeny Miny Mo’ method, but it was close) and then off we went back home, where Richard spent the next several hours gleefully playing with the new scanner toy.

We also got a new memory chip for his old laptop too, but he’s humoring my paranoia (he humors me a lot. He’s so cool that way!) in that he agreed to postpone upgrading that laptop until my computer returns and I can get all my backed up stuff off that particular laptop before he mucks with its innards. And for now I get to use one of his computers to check my email and post journal entries and thoroughly confuse myself each and every time I try to find something and forget that it isn’t on this computer – sniffle, whine.

And I also get to pine for my own lovely little computer, and eagerly await its return.