In the past nearly-four years I’ve had the same office, and the same desk. However, my company name has changed three times, each time growing larger.

The first two names knew that we existed. Our little satellite office was never slighted, forgotten, or otherwise missing from any mass communications sent out – not, of course, that they sent out much of that type of stuff, but the point is, they knew we were there.

The current company, and the one before that seem to keep forgetting about us. Oh, they remember the employees, but for whatever reason, our office is one of those that’s been quite easy to forget. It got to the point of amusement to see people’s confusion when I told them where I worked. “What? We have an office out *there*?”. Uh yes. You’ve had one for over a year now. We’re even listed on the website. Honest. Look, I’ll show you!

But still, we get forgotten. When they sent out the email about the company picnic last summer, they forgot to include us. Company-wide newsletters would be circulated to all but us. It’s become a joke, although so far it’s only been amusing, if not occasionally slightly annoying. Until now.

With the company previous to the one we are now, all of us consultants possessed heavy, but marvelously loaded laptops, complete with SQL Server installed on NT server, all manner of software necessary for us to do our jobs, Jazz drive, and dual network cards. To sweeten the deal, we were also given docking stations and monitors, for those rare moments when we got to work from our own office instead of haring off hither thither and yon to wherever our latest project took us.

When we were swallowed, we were promptly issued new laptops, which possessed minimal software, didn’t have servers, or even the ability to add them, and didn’t even contain the latest version of the particular software our piece of the company sells and works with. Oh yeah, and to make it even more useful, it came fully loaded with Lotus Notes, an email program that I am convinced was developed by someone while he or she was either insane or just really, really angry. Basically, in order to do our work, we still had to cart along the old laptop, but in order to get our email, we had to now bring along the new one. Can we say ‘inconvenient and annoying as hell’?

It’s been months now – nearly a year, in fact, and we still have those old laptops, and there’s a number of us who’ve been wondering when, or if, they’d ever want them back. Apparently they did. Weeks and weeks ago. But – oops!

Yes, as usual, they neglected to include our office in the mass email that went out letting everyone know how to turn in the old machine. The other laptops were collected, given brain wipes, and then auctioned off to any employee that wanted them. The inventory of all the old consulting equipment was then promptly deleted. Poof. No more laptops. Um. Well, almost.

Suddenly, those of us in the my little office have the upper hand. We’ve now all suddenly become the owners of a rather expensive piece of equipment that technically, no longer exists. Our own company doesn’t want to deal with them because they’re not sure how to handle something they don’t recognize as theirs. Our office admin did some checking around for us and verified that yes, as far as the company was concerned, the laptops were no more, and it would be best for all concerned if they were to quietly disappear.

Something tells me that as work of this leaks out, they might become a bit more vigilant about making sure that our office is included in future emails, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But in the meantime, you can bet that we’re all going to take advantage of this rather unexpected surprise. Laptops. Outdated, perhaps, but quite good still, and they’re free, and all because someone didn’t pay attention to their ‘cc’ list.

Next time they forget us, I’ll bet not a one of us will make a peep. Who knows what else they might neglect to collect from us next time. A few of us are eyeing some of the servers that are currently in ownership limbo at the same office – our older company never technically ‘owned’ them, and the new one doesn’t have them on their list, and, well, some of us have been thinking about web servers…..hmm….

You’ve been eyeing them for a while. You’ve seen the commercials and read the ads and even seen a few of them in acquaintances’ houses and you’ve been thinking about it for a while, but it has always seemed, well, so extravagant to spend all that money. But you’ve got all those cats and you’ve tried every type of litter there is – recycled newspaper that looked like rabbit pellets, scoopable litter that has a tendency to track *everywhere*, little silicon pearls that rolled all over the floor and felt oh-so-wonderful under the feet. And then one day you’re at the giant Pet Super Store and you see them on sale and you’ve got the money – it’s never been about the money, just the *concept* of the money – and you say what the hell and you buy it – the Super Deluxe Automatic Electric Self-Scooping Litter Pan.

You drive home, telling yourself alternately that this is the stupidest idea in the world and the cats will never use it, and then switching to dreamy thoughts of how nice it will be to never have to scoop a litter box again – never have to crouch over the pans, bleary eyed each morning, inhaling clay dust or sifting through pellets.

You get home and bring the box inside, along with the hefty sack of litter you bought special just for the occasion. The cats swarm you but that’s normal when you come home because they all wants pets and scritches and oh, you brought them a nice box to sit on.

You remove the Grouchy Tortie from the box and you drag your purchases down the hall, and because you’re so used to living alone you talk with the cats as you go, telling them that you have bought them a wonderful new present and that they had darn well better use it because it was expensive.

You deposit box and sack in the middle of the floor. ThreeBrainCelled WonderBoy and SqueakyPurred NoseLicker sit and stare pointedly into the food bowl because you have committed the grave sin of letting the level of kibble sink below the edge of the bowl. Invisible Cat peers around the corner, spots the box, which, he is sure, contains a device created solely for the purposes of torturing him (although to him, everything appears that way, including newspapers, cereal bowls, and paper bags) and disappears into the linen closet.

You open the box, rescuing the styrofoam inserts from SqueakyPurred NoseLicker. TrillCat and CuteEvilPuffball take turns chewing a hole in the bottom of the new sack of litter. You drag out the new litter box, and read through the manual, not because you couldn’t figure out how to put it all together by yourself, but because the fact that it says it’s only to be used by cats makes you giggle because then naturally you start to think about other things that could use it and…well…anyway, you assemble it and stuff all the stray wrapping bits back into the box, first removing CuteEvilPuffball and you fill it with litter and then you plug it in and sit back and marvel as it rakes itself clean and smooth.

The cats eye the new litter box warily. You tell them that you paid a lot of money. You point out to GrouchyTortie that she in particular should like it since she’s been the biggest stickler for keeping those pots scooped before. You tell SqueakyPurred NoseLicker that the ramp is not edible. You break down and pour more kibble into the food bowls if only to keep her from gnawing on the sides of the box.

The cats all make a show of using the old litter boxes, right at that moment, and ignoring the new one.

You reluctantly leave the room and go off to do other things around the house like maybe tackling that stack of dirty dishes in the sink, but you listen intently for that sound because they *will* use it, they will, you’re sure of it, because if they don’t you’re out that much money.

And then the sound of the box raking itself starts up and you tear down the hall and peer around the doorway and watch in fascination as it cleans itself without you doing *anything* and you excitedly tell your friends on Instant Messenger that it is just SO COOL and you are SO PSYCHED, and you’re so thrilled with the new heights to which your life is soaring that you even write a journal entry about it and then, you finally come to the inevitable conclusion that this is it, you’ve hit the big time, and the dream has finally happened – you have reached that level of luxury where you never have to scoop the litter box again, and you sit back and you think to yourself “Ah, this is the life.”

Friday night I flew up to Portland. I’d been looking forward to the trip, antsy all day, watching the clock as the hands slowly crept toward 4 pm when I could leave to go stand in the cattle line for Southwest and still get a decent seat because too many business trips have taught me why being near the front of the plane is better, much better. I showed the picture of my niece to anyone who would look, and when it was time I was practically running out the door.

As the plane came in to land I looked out the window – rolling hills, all green. Oregon has it all over the Sacramento Valley for scenery. I drove from the airport to Richard’s hotel in a ‘glad I rented because I’d never in a million years actually think about *buying* this’ car. We walked to dinner through a small section of Portland full of trendy shops, holding hands and laughing, talking, catching up. We ate at an upscale Italian restaurant, not thinking about needing reservations til we arrived, but luckily they had seats at the bar, and it turned out that was the best place to sit anyway, because we got to watch the cooks.

Most places don’t consider presentation of the food anymore. Or perhaps I should say most places we eat – considering that when we’re both in the same town, we often work til late and our choices of eating establishments are limited to those places open 24 hours, I may not have much to compare to, but each plate was a work of art. They drizzled raspberry sauce in patterns on plates and garnished servings of gelato with fresh blossoms. They tucked cloves of roasted garlic amid the vegetables and sauted the food with a flourish. Despite where we were seated – or maybe because of it – it was an incredibly romantic dinner too. We sat on high stools, eating our food, leaning toward each other, talking, touching shoulders, holding hands. When we had stuffed ourselves with as much as we could of the dinners, we savored bittersweet chocolate mousse with strips of biscotti that crumbled with each bite

The walk back to the hotel was much longer than the walk there – or perhaps it was simply that we were much slower, overfull from the dinner, enjoying the nighttime, the fresh air, the sights of a city foreign to both of us, and it didn’t help that we were laughing til sides hurt and we were weak from it.

We drove to my sister’s place in Washington, getting up early since the drive was several hours long. As we wove through trees and lush green, we both vocalized the regret that we’ve locked ourselves into the Sacramento Valley. Location isn’t everything I know – we’ve both got family we’re extremely close to and that’s far more important then beautiful surroundings, but oh, it’s lovely up there this time of year, and maybe someday.

The weekend passed too quickly. Fiona was on her best behavior, cooing and grinning easily. My younger sister and I caught up on family gossip while making cookies overloaded with chocolate chips and pecans. We reminisced, subsiding into laughter that made speech nearly impossible several times, while our patient SO’s waited for us to regain control and explain just why it was that a re-telling of how my mother used to give us directions to the school had us crying with laughter. She and her husband proudly gave us a tour of the new house and land and Richard and I pondered over how we would get their huge back deck onto the airplane with us. I teasingly begged my brother-in-law not to hack down all the ivy because next July he could rip off all he wanted and send it down to California for the wedding. I held Fiona as much as I could, delighting in how much she’s grown and changed since I last saw her – she can sit up now; she’s got two teeth and more on the way – and saddened by the fact that there will be even more changes I’ll only witness via email until I can see her again.

My parents got T-shirts while at the Scottish games. His read ‘Orthodox Druid’ and hers read ‘Reformed Druid’. They drew lots of attention when they wore them at the Renaissance Faire yesterday. One man pointed out that perhaps this meant that they got Arbor Day off from work. We joked about mom wearing it to the hospital when she went in later that day, but figured perhaps the patients might not have quite enough of a sense of humor to appreciate their chaplain wearing something like that. I dunno – seeing that would make me laugh, and they say laughter is the best medicine. Richard and I, lacking Druid shirts, wore our peasant garb instead. I can only go about half a day in a bodice before I’m scrambling to remove it. I don’t know quite *how* the women used to do it back then – I can never seem to breathe deep enough when it’s on!

The purpose of going to the Faire was to do some research for the wedding. My mom brought her camera and anytime we’d see an outfit that looked like what I was envisioning for the wedding, she’d corner the poor person and get them to pose for a picture.

The Faire is always a fun even to attend, although since they moved from their home down in Black Point, the size has lessened, and some of the familiar booths and such are no longer there. At least it was a lovely weekend to attend – we’re going through an unusual cold snap (it actually rained last week!) that’s been a welcome change from the more normal sweltering August heat.

It was a productive trip, I think. My mom and I got some good ideas, and some names and numbers for people who might be able to help us find some of what we’ll be looking for. I think my mom’s having fun – basically with this theme, I’ve given her a research project, and she dove right in. Ironic that I didn’t think my mom would go for the theme….and yet she’s the one who suggested it to *me*. In other words, in case you haven’t figured it out by now, the wedding will have a Renaissance theme. Me and my bridesmaids in Elizabethian gowns, and the men in appropriate garb as well. That includes tights. I sense blackmail opportunities from the wedding photos. Oh yes.

And now a more contemplative note…..

As we were perusing a selection of dragon puppets at one of the vendor tables at the Scottish games on Sunday, Richard pulled out his inhaler and medications. Seeing the inhaler, an older woman approached him, and before I knew it, they were in a friendly discussion about prescription drugs, why it was that adrenaline shots were better than the treatments offered now, etc. There is, she and Richard pointed out as I blinked in surprise, an entire subculture around asthma that I was unaware of. Her husband grinned at me and asked me if I’d taken Richard to the hospital yet. He’d taken his wife, he noted rather matter-of-factly, nearly once a month during their first few years of marriage. It was rather an odd question – something I hadn’t even thought about. I know Richard has asthma – I know he’s on a series of medications and will be for the rest of his life, and I’m used to his schedule. I even cleared out my purse so there’d be room in it for his meds when we go out. And it’s not like I don’t realize that asthma can be really severe. It’s just that I’ve never seen him ‘sick’ from it. I guess it’s something I’m going to learn to live with and deal with. In a way, the husband’s attitude helped tremendously. In a sense, his words indicated that well, it happens, but you deal with it, you go to the hospital, and you move on. It’s just a part of Richard’s life. He’s used to it – it’s no big deal to him. It’s just up to me to reach that same point.

They look like a telephone pole, except slightly thinner on one end, and they’re not exactly the first thing I’d think of for tossing through the air. But today we watched a handful of grown men dressed in an oddly amusing combination of T-shirt and kilt, heft those telephone poles into the air and flip them over. Amid the crowd of caber throwing athletes were women, one in particular who tossed it with such ease that it seemed she was only flipping a toothpick, not a pole several times as tall as herself and even more times as heavy.

The Scottish games in Pleasanton is the largest of its kind in the country. Naturally we had to go, since we were in the area anyway. Saturday, Richard and I drove down to have lunch with his family, and then we headed off to check out a fabulous little store in Campbell that sells gargoyles! Shelves and shelves of them! Richard and I wandered around, oohing at all the stone figurines inside. We (very reluctantly) limited ourselves to one each – he chose a guardian statuette, and I was drawn to a candle holder. Not necessarily a gargoyle, but the ring of seven stone cats couldn’t stay there. It needed to come home with me.

We were down in the area because we were going to go see a play that night, Godspell, which was being put on by a little theatre company his parents run. I’d never seen the play before, so I didn’t know quite what to expect, but I was quite pleasantly surprised. It was very enjoyable, and quite funny. My parents drove down that evening to attend the play as well, so afterwards both families gathered for desserts at Richard’s parents’ house before we all headed off to our hotel. Today we spent at the games.

When we arrived Saturday afternoon, his mom greeted us with a catalog and a gleeful discussion of these oh-so-lovely outdoor lights she’d found for us and our new house. They were statutes of angels, holding lamps, meant to be placed in the yard. Life-sized, no less. And ours for slightly over $1000. Uh. Not! They were hideous, and so not-us that I was practically crying I was laughing so hard. Of course, later on, we flipped through the catalog, and amid the items that fell under the category of ‘why on earth would anyone want to put *that* in their house/lawn/wherever”, we found – yes, I’m sure you’re surprised by now – more gargoyles. And I did make a point of pointing out those same oh-so-lovely statues to my mom when they came down later. She had just about the same reaction I did…

Then, at lunch, his dad suggested that we could call my parents Mumsy and Daddums. I’m not sure exactly what prompted the suggestion, but I replied that if we did that, we should call *his* parents Mamsy and PapPap. The look of sheer horror on his mom’s face was worth it as the rest of us subsided into laughter.

Anyway, back to the kilt-wearing people tossing trees, and the rest of the festivities at the Scottish games. Bagpipes are a rather unique instrument in that they only have one volume – and that is loud. My dad and I think that bagpipes would be fun to play but my mom, sensing the disaster of having one or more family members attempting to play what essentially sounds like someone is torturing the poor contraption, inside her house, declared years ago that bagpipes were an outside toy.

We had the opportunity to hear bagpipes. A lot of bagpipes. There were the bagpipe and drum competitions. There were lone bagpipers playing. And then for the closing ceremonies, over five hundred of them gathered in the stadium. That’s more bagpipes than I’ve ever seen in one place. Don’t get me wrong, I do like bagpipe music (in small quantities), but more than 500 of them in such a small area pushed the saturation level to the extreme. The amusing thing was – even with that many bagpipes, the volume was *still* the same. What other instrument can boast that?

As we wandered around the games, we saw a huge banner proclaiming ‘British Food Here!’ as if this was something exciting. That says more about Scottish food than anything else, considering that British food is not well known for much except its blandness. A Scottish friend of my father’s once joked that most of the typical ‘scottish’ dishes were the result of a dare. Somehow, considering haggis, I can almost believe that.

One would have to wonder if that is how their traditional sports came about too. One day a couple of brawny men were sitting around, and one bet the other he couldn’t flip that tree over through the air, and the next thing you know…. Hey, it was impressive. Amazingly so. I’m not knocking the games. It just makes one wonder exactly *how* they came up with this sort of thing in the first place, ya know?

Having finally been driven to the brink of insanity for too long by the sound of the dripping faucet (okay, so it’s been more like a steady stream than a drip lately), I determined to dive into the murky world of do-it-yourself plumbing again. But this time no mere showerhead stood to be changed. Oh no! This time it was an entire faucet!

One thing about having some situation where the only time one would want the landlord to come over is in a dire emergency like, say, it’s raining in my hall, is that I have learned to be rather self-sufficient when it comes to home repairs. I figure it’s probably a good thing – everyone should know their way around a tool box, and it’s actually a good way to make yourself proud of yourself when you can fix something all by yourself. Naturally, now that Richard has moved in, I didn’t want him to miss a single moment of that self-pride stuff, so I suggested we replace the faucet this weekend. In between moving him and his 7,329 books into the house.

Okay. I’m exaggerating. (There’s only 7,238). On the plus side, I’ve got *tons* of new reading material to distract me from doing more menial tasks like scouring hard water stains from the sink, but wow does that man have books!

But anyway. Back to the plumbing. A faucet. In order to replace one, we had to go get it. Off to the hardware store, where we pondered the shelves until we found one that most closely approximated the existing faucet. Then I cornered their plumbing expert for advice, which involved him opening the box and suggesting that perhaps we really didn’t want to do the *full* replacement, which would have included some rather large pipe sections and detaching the whole sink from the pipes below. Gee. For some odd reason, Richard and I decided rather hastily that he was right, and we really could leave *that* bit of fun for another day. Armed with faucet, a pair of tiny rubber connectors, and a jar of putty (plumber’s putty to be precise. Not to be confused with whatever other types of putty there are…it was fun and squishy and sort of like clay, and quite useful for more than just creating a water-tight seal underneath a newly installed faucet. It’s got just the right stickiness to tug a stopper from a drain, were you to put the wrong drain stopper in and have a moment’s panic because it wedged itself in there and you cannot get it out…but where was I?) we headed back to the house to wreak havoc….um…I mean, replace the faucet.

The very helpful plumbing person at the hardware store had given us dire warnings about the hoses underneath, making it sound as if they might break if we merely gave them a hard glare, and if *those* broke, then we’d have to replace the valves…and frankly, after deciding to avoid the scary pipe sections of the faucet, the thought of replacing valves was even more daunting, so I climbed into the cupboard under the sink, wrench in hand, and rather gingerly loosened the screws while Richard, in an attempt to be helpful (uh. Not!), regaled me with a blow-by-blow account of how the cats were coming up and sniffing me because I was doing Something Weird.

Using a wrench while giggling helplessly and trying to avoid breaking hoses is not quite as easy as it sounds. Thus, I determined that it was Richard’s turn to Play With Plumbing. Out I crawled, and in he wriggled, while I assisted by handing him wrenches, bolts, and trying my best to make him laugh (payback, you see).

We had a brief moment of panic when the handles under the sink didn’t turn off the water supply, but that only meant we got to go figure out just where the main water connections were for the house. And when I went out to turn the water back on, I was half-expecting to come back inside to bellows of “Turn it off!” as we discovered a leak or something in our newly installed faucet.

But there was no yell. We did it. A perfectly installed faucet. No leaks or drips. It’s all shiny silver and water tight.

The ironic thing about this whole ordeal is that if I didn’t have more cats than the lease states, I’d probably be perfectly happy to just call the landlord and have him come over anytime something like this needs doing. But because I’m ultra-paranoid about having him in the house when I’m not here (that whole pesky lease-violating thing), what’s resulted is that I’ve had to learn to fend for myself. Plumbing isn’t really all that scary when you’ve played with it for a bit. Most of that Fix-it type stuff isn’t.

Hmm. I *knew* if I tried really hard, one of these days I’d find a great reason for why having all these cats is a *good* thing….

We started the process of moving Richard in today – a friend came over and he helped us fill two cars with some furniture and all his clothes. I started the process earlier, simply because I had to clear out a closet and move some bookshelves to make room for his things.

Moving the shelves meant removing all the books, dragging the shelves down the hall (a complicated process which included stopping every few steps to remove one of three cats who decided that riding in the shelves was a really cool new game, and they didn’t care that it made it that much heavier for me to lug), and then reshelving the books. It’s been a good way for me to do some sorting – I’ve got a full box of books to go to the local thrift store – but it was also an unexpected trip down memory lane when I started to put things back and found my old college dorm yearbooks.

I spent two years in Titus Hall at UCDavis – two incredibly amazing years. I was a shy, quiet bookworm of a kid back in high school (oh, quit snickering. Ask anyone who knew me then – I’m not making this up). During my freshman year, the girl across the hall – a short and exuberant girl by the name of Rowena – decided that she wasn’t going to let me be shy, so she dragged me along to parties and gatherings. By the end of the first quarter, our end of the hall was one of the social hang-out, despite the gloomy presence of my first roommate – a girl who was seriously lacking in self-esteem. She eventually moved out, a new girl moved in (the one who would become my best friend and roommate for the next nine years, and who will be my Maid of Honor next summer), and things just kept getting better.

But back to the yearbooks. One of the girls in the room next to mine and I decided that the floor needed a ‘yearbook’, so we wandered the halls with cameras during the last few months. Neither of us possessed much skill in photography, but we figured that by sheer volume of pictures taken, we would end up with enough good ones to make do, and when we added in all the pictures we begged out of the other residents, we ended up with a great selection. We put it together on the floor of my dorm room, staying up til early morning to type up captions on my typewriter (Most of us didn’t have computers in the dorms back then. Sheesh, now I feel old) and then scotch tape everything in place. Then we carted the whole mess down to the local copy place and copied and assembled the whole thing there. It was an amazing amount of fun, and while the pictures (since they were copies) didn’t come out so well, everyone seemed to love it.

Year two some outfit on campus decided that dorm yearbooks might be a good thing to look into, so they sent out information saying that if someone gave them the stuff, they’d put it together. My new roommate and I got together and took on the task (we were the designated Social Committee, so it naturally fell into our laps anyway). The picture quality in this one was much better simply because they were done by someone who actually knew what they were doing, but it is still a ‘homemade’ book.

One of the sections in the book was where we’d all listed our goals – what each of us saw for ourselves in our future. For the second year, I had listed as my goals to go to graduate school in Nutrition, to travel, to earn a lot of money, and then live in a big house with lots of cats. And it occurred to me that out of all the others in that book, I might just be one of the only ones who’d achieved everything I set out to do (okay, so the ‘big house’ is still to be built, but the contract with the builder was signed Friday night, and by next spring, it will be reality). The few friends from that era that I still am in contact with have changed directions probably just as often as I have, and so their goals are no longer in synch with their reality. I’m not sure if I deliberately made mine vague, or if I had more in mind at the time, but it’s kind of nice to know that I succeeded anyway.

As I flipped through the books, peering at pictures (and luckily I’d had the foresight to go through mine and write names next to faces), I was struck, not by how much I remembered, but by how much more I’d forgotten. The names were familiar, but it was hard to recall who the people were. Each book had a list of quotes submitted by each resident for that year, I think in the hopes that they might trigger some memory later on. Um. Sure. I read through my list and couldn’t remember what half of them meant. But oh, what I do remember:

Christmas in the dorms (and by the way, mistletoe smells *nasty* when you have a huge laundry basket of it sitting in your dorm room overnight). Late nights with ice cream. Poodle perms. Mud volleyball. Dancing in the rain. Caffeine addictions. Singing around the piano. The rat getting loose in our room. The water fight in the men’s bathroom. Inner-tube water polo. Pranks. Friends. So many friends.

Okay, I admit it. I lied. It wasn’t intentional. You’ll have to believe I did my best. I said I wasn’t going to watch again but I couldn’t help myself. Despite my best efforts, it got the better of me. I wanted to know. I *had* to know. I was sucked back in, but at least I know I wasn’t alone.

I watched Survivor. Yes, twice more. Last week and then tonight. I actually left work at a decent hour just to get home in time to watch it. I was hoping for Rich to be voted off the island. I even yelled at Kelly when she chose Sue over Rich in the beginning. I thought perhaps the rest of them would clue in on how he’d used them from the beginning, but it didn’t happen. He won. I broke down to watch this stupid little show – I became one of the mindless masses, and the weasel actually won!

I’ll give him credit for consistancy though – I can’t fault him for that. He’s never tried to hide what a pompous arrogant jerk he was. He was just that and nothing more. But still, I was rooting for any of the others. Oh, I’m glad Sue didn’t get it – her pouty sore-loser attitude toward Kelly at the end only underscored why it was good that she was booted. And it would have been nice to see Rudy get it, just because I liked his attitude. He just didn’t seem to care. He was just coasting. I’ve got furniture to rearrange and closets to consolidate and shelves to move to prepare for Richard moving in, and this TV show dragged me down into its clutches and held me in procrastination mode, morbidly fascinated despite myself.

At least now it’s over. Even though I think the wrong person won, at least it’s done and I can go back to my normal life without getting sucked into the vortex of TV-land anytime soon. And if I can avoid getting anywhere near a TV for the Survivor II, so much the better.

As an ending, you’ll have to humor me as I go into an entirely unrelated gushy auntie mode. I received this picture in my email on Monday. I’m going up to see her in a few weeks. Go ahead. Tell me she isn’t just the cutest thing. I dare you. (but if my email doesn’t work, be patient. Pacbell did something funky with the servers and aliases are bouncy lately)

Ever since I purchased the stone dragon and named her ‘Rhyme’, she has needed the obvious mate. Richard and I agreed that we would find him together, no matter how long it took. I did find the identical dragon when I was at DragonCon in Atlanta a while back, but I remembered the deal – find him together – and left him there. We figured the most likely place to find him was at another festival like the Scottish Games event where I found the first one.

This weekend, we were wandering around Old Sacramento. Searching for Reason was the furthest thing from our minds, but then I suppose that’s often the way it goes, so of course we found him. He was high on a shelf, flanked by a rather grumpy looking gargoyle who also ended up having to come home with us, but there he was. We’ve joked about our search for Reason (yes, in a world gone mad), but it was surprising, at least to me, that we found him so fast.

Finding the dragon doesn’t mean that our search for reason has ended – just the physical part. This past weekend Richard and I came to a decision that is a rather big one for me. He’ll be moving in this weekend when he flies back from spending the week in Portland for work. I suppose in a way it should be no different, simply because for all intents and purposes he has been ‘living’ with me for months. But it will not longer be the pretense of keeping two addresses. When the phone rings on Saturday mornings with my parents on the other end for the weekly phone call, he’ll be able to pick it up. The answering machine message that says ‘we’re not home’ really will mean ‘we’ now. There will be new furniture in this house and I’m going to have to rearrange some things so that his stuff has somewhere to go. The fact that the garage door remote died a few weeks back now becomes a moot point because we both can’t park in this skinny garage so it will become a place to store boxes of stuff he’ll bring over. I have no idea where we’ll put all his books (he’s got a lot of them, just like me). There’ll now be two of us responsible for filling cat food bowls and making sure that the trash gets to the curb every Thursday morning (something I’m really good at forgetting to do). I’m going to have to get my extra mail key back from the friend who usually watches my house when I’m out of town. And most importantly, he’ll be living here. With me.

So this is where my own search for reason has taken a sharp turn. I know that a lot of people have lived with their significant others and so maybe this isn’t quite so big a deal for most of you. But it is for me. I’ve never lived with a man before – not even as just another housemate. One of the reasons I never anticipated even getting married is that I simply couldn’t visualize the concept. I’ve spent too many years independant; at least with roommates we each had our own room to go to when things got tense. Living with a significant other means no privacy, and I really never thought I would find someone who would make me want to give that up.

Fair warning now – if you abhor mushy I suggest you stop reading right now…because you see, I cannot imagine Richard *not* being here. When he is up in Portland I miss him. I miss curling into his arms as we sit on the couch to read. I miss looking over at him while we are both on our computers, being silly with Instant Messages when we’re only a few feet apart. I miss just knowing that even though we are both in different parts of the house, I at least know he is *there*. There are a lot of perfectly good, rational reasons for him moving in – financial, convenience, etc. But none of these matter more than the simple reason that I have discovered that having him here does not mean that I am giving something up, but actually gaining something far better.

Friday morning I was late for work, but there was a really good reason. I had to drive out to sign the paperwork finalizing the construction loan. The final appraisal of the house plans was finished and now we had an amount we actually get to borrow….so after the bank is done with all the processing that they need to do in the next week or two, we’ll be the proud owner of one very hefty debt. Wince.

And I left work early Friday, for a similar reason. Last night we met with the builder to go through the plans one last time so he could get the budget finalized, and work up the contract. Thursday night, despite both of us being exhausted from work, Richard and I headed out to a restaurant, plans under one arm and notebook in hand, and went through them room by room, trying to jot down any changes, additions, suggestions and questions that we had. The list turned out to be fairly small. I think. I’m not sure exactly what to compare it to, having never done this before, so perhaps our little handful of changes were on the excessive side, but I have to assume that less than ten is fairly small….and anyway, after our chat with the builder, the list did grow a tad.

He’s been wonderful – offering suggestions gently without being pushy, pointing out alternatives if something we ask for isn’t really feasible. I am already drooling over the master bedroom suite. I can’t wait to take a bath in the sunken tub, and the shower is going to be huge, and we’re putting linen shelves into the closet, and moving a wall to make the closet bigger, and adding a window, and….and….and.

The builder suggested a front door he’d seen, so Saturday morning, before heading off to meet with friends for a day of rafting (during which I managed, despite the application of copious amounts of SPF-30, to turn parts of me the color of a tomato), we went down to the lumberyard he’d recommended to look at doors.

It’s an odd feeling, staring at front doors, trying to figure out which one should go into a house we have only seen on paper. We didn’t find ‘the door’, but it did underscore the amount of work this is going to take on our part. We’re going to have to start accumulating catalogs of doors and windows and cabinets. We’re going to have to take weekend trips to Home Depot to browse faucets and fixtures. We’re going to have to start browsing through Consumer Reports to figure out what brand of garbage disposal works best, and what stove we should buy. I’m already looking at this and realizing that if we’d simply done the normal thing and bought an pre-built house, things would be so much easier. Not, mind you, that I think the end result won’t be far better for building it from scratch, but I’m looking at the fact that our weekends are already booked through the end of next month, and knowing it will only get worse from there, and wondering just exactly when we’re going to find the *time* to do this stuff we need to do.

He’s planning to break ground in November. At this point I’m antsy to get started, even though I have to keep reminding myself that initially we had agreed that since we didn’t have a time constraint, he could start later. But now that the paperwork is all but done, I am impatient to see some sign of something happening. I wouldn’t care if he just went and moved random piles of dirt around on the Lot-Of-Weeds. I just want something to happen.

But in the meantime, Richard and I will focus on tracking down tile patterns and cabinet knobs, stair banisters and toilets (yes, apparently there are different sorts of toilets to choose from. I’m not sure just why this makes me giggle, but it does). And of course, a front door.