Escrow closed on Tuesday. The real estate agent called to wish me a happy birthday, and to let me know that the sale had been officially registered with the county. It’s mine now. My very own dirt. Over the past ten years or so I’ve made it a habit of buying myself a gift for my birthday…but this piece of land will probably be the most expensive present of my life.

It’s an odd feeling – this owning of land. Granted there’s no house yet and it’s just a big patch of dead weeds, but that’s only temporary. I had the real estate agent read me the rules and regulations for the community over the phone before I signed. Nothing too horrible. There’s a city tree ordinance that sets a minimum of two trees in the front yard. We can’t park a RV or a boat or other recreational vehicle on the curb more than 72 hours. The house cannot be smaller than a certain square footage. While she was reading them to me, I was typing them madly into the little Instant Messenger box with which I talk to my fiancé during work hours. He and I are still both trying to come to grips with this. We are going to build a house. We. It’s no longer going to be my land, my house. It’s ours – and it’s an odd concept to deal with.

The house issue is the biggest ‘us’ thing though, and I think perhaps it’s been a bit harder for him. I’ve known I was going to either buy or build a house for a very long time. I’ve planned on this, prepared for it, done the legwork. He wasn’t going down that path, but now that we’re an us, he’s suddenly dumped right in the middle of it.

He asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday and I told him I knew it sounded silly, but I wanted to go out and drink a toast to my new plot of weeds. Our weeds. So after dinner we drove out there and in the light of a street lamp, we opened a bottle of sparkling cider and tromped out to the middle of the lot and drank a toast to our future. We stood there and looked around and tried to imagine the house there…and couldn’t. It’s still too new, too mind-boggling. There’s going to be a house there, and we’re going to live in it. Together.

Sometimes we’ll start talking about the house and we’ll comment to each other about what we’re going to have to deal with. Paint colors. Bathroom tile. Molding on the ceiling. What sort of railing for the staircase. It’s been a daunting enough thought back when it was just me making the decisions. I’m sure at some point we’ll end up disagreeing over whether to paint the walls eggshell or old-fashioned white. I’m not naive enough to think that we’ll never fight, but I hope that at least we don’t waste our energy quibbling over silly stuff like the style of knobs for cupboard doors. Far better to save it for the more important issues, like whether coconut is edible.

We. Us. It’s a concept I’m still having trouble getting used to. Oh, I like it – don’t get me wrong. And there is noone in the world I would be willing to do this with except him. But I’ve been so long in the ‘I, me’ mode, that switching does not come naturally, and I see the same in him. And for two people who were hell-bent on being single, it’s an odd transition – one that still makes us look at each other and laugh.

“It’s a size six day.”

She was sitting with a friend, eating lunch, and she leaned over, a triumphant smile on her face. She sounded so proud when she said it.

I’m sure she had no idea she was overheard, but she had one of those voices that carries, and I wasn’t the only one in the restaurant who turned.

I knew the type as soon as I heard the words. She is obsessed with her weight. A bit of water gain that pushes her into the next higher size and she’s depressed. Wriggling into something smaller makes her day. Her emotional state, as well as her self-image, are heavily dependant on the number on the size tag of the clothes she wears..

One of the lesser rings of hell, I’ve decided, is to be surrounded by women who are weight-obsessed. I’ve known too many of them who focus endlessly on the numbers on a scale, who base their self-worth by what size dress they can fit into that day. They range from those who are unhealthily overweight and complain constantly about it yet refuse to do anything about it, to those that are a perfectly beautiful and healthy weight yet still think that they should be model thin, even though their body types clearly were not made for that. The one thing they have in common, though, is an obsession over weight. Meals become weapons, brandished over water cooler conversations. See how lowfat *I* ate today?

In my previous life (pre-computer nerd, that is) I was a graduate student in Nutrition. Granted, my focus was on fetal nutrition – a topic rather far removed from weight loss – and I was not a dietician, but that never stopped people. Invariably, as soon as the word ‘Nutrition’ left my mouth, the subject of weight loss would come up from one of these diet-obsessed females. What do you think about this one? What should I be eating? Is it true that ***insert latest over-hyped and obviously wrong food rumor here***?

At first I was naive. I thought they actually wanted real answers, so I’d give them honest replies. But I learned my lesson as, time after time, I watched the eyes glaze over. These women do not want to hear the truth. What they want is someone to tell them that the latest fad diet is the key to instant weight loss. They aren’t interested in how to do it right, nor are they interested in being told that being healthy is far more important than being thin. They build their self-confidence with smug satisfaction of ounces lost and equate that to personal importance. They center their lives around physical appearance. For some of them, that’s all they have.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’d dearly love to be able to lose some weight and fit into some of the cuter outfits, and well, now that there’s a wedding in the works for next year, maybe that will spur me back on track. But my weight does not define who I am. It’s merely one aspect among many others, and a minor one at that. I suppose I was lucky in that I was raised by parents who didn’t subscribe to the theory that a woman must have a man to feel validated, or that a woman’s dress size dictated her success, or failure, in life.

“It’s a size six day”.

I wanted to go to her and tell her that there is so much more to her than that. Her intelligence, her quick wit, her smile. But I knew that she wouldn’t listen. Women like her never do.

I once told you that the thought of marriage scares me – that it is so final, so permanent. I have pondered marriage before, but there was always this little nagging doubt in the back of my head that would eventually grow strong enough so that I had to push away. Eventually I just assumed that it wasn’t for me. I was meant to be single. You took me by surprise when you asked, but for the first time, I didn’t have a single doubt. I am looking forward to growing old with you. I get to spend the rest of my life with you.

I am still trying to figure out how I got so lucky. We’ve known each other for two years, and we’ve become such good friends in the last six months. I once told Ivymoon that I knew I could go for you in a big way, but I also knew that nothing could ever happen. She rolled her eyes at me and told me I’d never know until I tried. I wasn’t brave enough to try. I wasn’t prepared to lose such a good friend if it didn’t work out.

Have I told you lately how glad I am that you were braver than I?

I have never believed in the necessity of reading minds just because two people are in love. I understood that there would be disagreements and misunderstandings and distinctly different opinions on things. I was not prepared for someone who blurts out the exact same thing I am saying all the time, someone who has the same likes and dislikes and opinions as me. We can’t even argue over politics. There’s got to be something wrong with that, right? And I think today the brain cell is mine. You can have it tomorrow, but only because you’ll probably read my mind and cheat at Rock-Paper-Scissors again.

I never believed in true love. No, I should rephrase that. I didn’t believe in it for me. I know people who are truly in love. My own parents, my two sisters. They all seem to have found it. I wasn’t looking. I figured it if happened, it happened, but I wasn’t expecting it. I had my life planned out. I knew what I wanted. The prospect of being single was perfectly fine with me. I bought land to build a house. I mapped out everything. I knew what was and wasn’t going to happen. I was happy. I had my friends and a job I love and this house that is my dream house and my cats and a busy life.

But you had to go and mess up all my plans. You took me in your arms and made me miss you whenever we are apart. You smiled at me and took my breath away. I look at you and realize that the two of us would probably have an amazingly wonderful time watching paint dry because we always manage to have such a wonderful time together. You touched me and I was torn because here I was starting to build a house and I knew that all I wanted was for you to be in that house with me.

I was perfectly happy. I didn’t need anything else. I didn’t want anything else.

Then you kissed me. And I knew at that moment that life was never going to be the same again.

I met with a builder on Monday night. He wanted to know things like my favorite window manufacturer, and whether I preferred composite over tile roofs, and what type of wood I like best.

Let’s see…..roof – waterproof? Windows – glass? Wood – uh…..huh?

He needed to know stuff like that so he could give me a fair idea of budget and cost breakdown. He was very nice and patient with me. I’m sure it was painfully obvious I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, and he could have very easily taken advantage of that. But he didn’t. He wrote out a list of general categories I need to consider and said he usually breaks it all down into budgets. By this I mean that I will have a ‘budget’ for specific things. Windows. Flooring. Kitchen appliances. Lighting. And my personal favorite – I get to have a front door budget. I kid you not. It was on the list. A budget for just one door. Wow.

I’m in over my head here. Oh, not that this is a bad thing. But there’s so much I don’t know. I am building this house because I am head-over-heels in love with it, and finding the dirt to build it on was an amazing bit of luck. But still, it’s more than a bit overwhelming. I can see that I’ll be spending an inordinate amount of time in stores and pouring over catalogs, staring blankly at oven ranges, weighing the pros and cons of Korian versus tile for the kitchen counters, pondering the benefits of two vs. three-car garages. And that doesn’t even take into account colors and patterns…and oh wow. Landscaping. Oof.

There’s been an amusing twist to all this house-building euphoria lately, though. I’ve been getting the condescending nod and smile when I’ve talked about buying/building a house by myself in the past few years. But since I actually bought the land and it’s been more final, the comments are starting to come a bit more often and a bit more pointed. In fact, just today I was asked “Are you sure you want to do this? After all, what if you get married?”. The implication being, of course, that I should wait to buy or build until I have a man on my arm to yea or nay.

Sigh. I wonder if single guys get this question when they break down and buy a house? I wonder if their friends and acquaintances look over the floor plan and under the guise of being well-meaning, pester the poor guy with questions like gee, where are you going to stash all the babies you’re required to produce, and what if your future wife doesn’t like the floor plan, and shouldn’t you wait to get married and consult her before you pick out what color to paint the walls, and how can you possibly do this because what if ,what if, what if?

I usually don’t let this sort of thing bother me, and sometimes it has made me laugh in the past. But I have to admit that lately it has started to get more than a bit annoying. Sigh.

Ah well. I’m going to my very first Home and Garden show this weekend. I figure a few of these and I’ll my head will be swimming with ideas…..and at the very least, maybe I’ll be able to recognize window manufacturers two out of three times, and not return a blank stare when asked if I prefer oak over maple for cabinet doors. And the next time someone asks me shouldn’t I be waiting to do this because ‘what if’, I’ll just smile sweetly, thank them for their concern, and then blithely bore them to tears with a discussion of my current 15 favorite shades of white paint for the walls. Ah, revenge

My phone moved at work. And so I had to follow it. This was infinitely better than the previous time, where I moved, and my phone didn’t. Granted it was only to the other side of a large room, but still, the inconvenience of dashing across the floor every time a phone in that vicinity rang, or appealing to the kindness of the poor soul who got my old desk to come get me each time…well, it got old.

When we started this project, there were fewer of us, and we all fit into this huge storage room they cleared out and filled with tables and computers. Now, however, we’ve outgrown that space – outgrew it weeks and weeks ago. There’s a new building they’re working on that we are supposedly going to move into, but the details keep changing, as does the move-in date. So the latest story was this double row of cubicles that opened up in the current building. Plenty of room for half of our team to move over.

Big business doesn’t like to do things quickly, of course, so it was a hassle for the poor admin to get the phones transferred and the lan lines activated so we could move. Then there was the issue of actually getting us physically moved. Technically, we are not supposed to move ourselves. There is some little group of people somewhere whose sole purpose is to move people from one cube to the other and charge an outrageous sum for the pleasure of doing so. And they would get their collective noses bent out of joint if we were to do it instead.

This is all fine and dandy, but for one minor sticking point this week. Through a series of mix-ups, they moved our phones first. And this time it wasn’t just across a room, but to another section of the building that was just too far away to even *hear* the phone, let alone go leaping for it. So……we’ve been moving. Yes, all by ourselves. A phone leaves, and shortly thereafter one more desk empties in the storage room and one more cubicle in the new section miraculously sprouts a computer, developer, and all the accessories that go with the pair.

I’ve got a cubicle now. All my own. And here’s where I’m starting to get scared. Because I *like* it. All this space! A whole shelf just for me! Okay, there’s no file drawers or cabinets to stash stuff, but toss on a pencil cup and a plant on the counter and I’m just thrilled to pieces. Shudder. Oh, the horror! It’s a good scientific experiment I suppose….put people into a cramped and difficult environment and then once they’ve just about reached the point where they’re almost begging, move them to cubicles. Anything is better than a table in a room next to the cafeteria, with the hollow sound of aerobics classes echoing through the thin walls from the adjoining workout room. But still, I can’t help but feel amusedly ashamed. I *hate* cubicles with a passion. And here I am, thrilled to pieces to have my very own.

I suppose if it had only been the acquisition of the cubicle this week I might be more accepting of my slide into worker-drone fate. But it gets worse. Much worse.

They deactivated our pagers. After my company was swallowed by a bigger fish, we’ve been going through all sorts of lovely transition foo. We consultants had pagers. They dangled cell phones in front of us and the weaker ones snapped up the bait. But I held out, proudly, clutching my pager to my chest. Sigh. I knew this would happen. They turned them off and neglected to tell any of us until after the fact. And then when I called to beg for a replacement, I realized what it is that I had to do.

Wincing, I bowed to the pressure and ordered myself a cell phone. No more pager. Yuppieness has taken hold. Dilbert, I salute thee. I have been assimilated.

Someone take me out back and shoot me now. Please?

I flew to Washington to baby sit my niece, because my little sister had surgery yesterday.

She had a tumor on her ovary. They thought it was a cyst at first because it grew so fast, probably spurred by her recent pregnancy. But it was a tumor, and for a while there they thought there were tumors on her uterus and other ovary too. They mentioned the possibility of a partial hysterectomy. She is only 29.

She didn’t want to tell us at first, and I think we all understood why. There are some legacies that are passed from generation to generation that are happy – like grandma’s favorite china. But this is one legacy that hangs over all the women in my family like a gray cloud. My grandmother died of ovarian cancer. My mother had a hysterectomy as a result of similar problems, and both of her sisters had a lot of complications. My sisters and I hold our breath each time we go for that yearly exam. Other women may dread mammograms. The women in my family fear pap smears because of what they might tell us – that what lurks in our family history will come back to haunt us.

She could have asked a friend to help out that day, but she didn’t. She told no one but her family, and she asked my mom and I if we could come up to help with her daughter while she was in the hospital. Fiona is about three and a half months now. Plenty old enough to wrap mature adults around her chubby little fingers. She coos and giggles and has this wide, open-mouthed grin that shows off all her dimples to best advantage. It’s been too many years since I’ve changed a diaper. They used to have sticky tape. The ones Fiona sports have a velcro sort of fastener which is, of course, much more convenient but it took a while to figure it out, especially when huddled over a squirmy, giggly baby at the time. My mom and I worked out a system. She did the bottle-feeding, and when Fiona got fussy, I plopped her on my hip in this really weird sack-of-potatoes position that she adored, and walked her around until the giggles returned. We eyed the phone and didn’t talk about what could or couldn’t be happening in the surgery. We discussed where to order pizza, job stress, whether Fiona looks more like her mom or her dad, the new man in my life. But we didn’t talk about our worries about the surgery. We whispered them to each other on the plane to Washington the night before. But it was as if speaking aloud in her house might make them come true.

She’s just fine. Everything turned out well and we’re all breathing huge sighs of relief. She’s in pain from the surgery but that will pass. Now that everything is fine, she and her husband could joke about their worries – about it being more serious; about her not being able to see Fiona grow up. They were more animated, even as their exhaustion finally showed. They can focus on happier things now, like the house they just put a bid on, and on their beautiful daughter. My mom and I left them alone to rest and recover and flew home, back to life as normal. We didn’t really talk about it on the way home. We didn’t need to.

ow to spend a rainy Sunday:

• When one of your best friends asks if you would be willing to help another friend move and you don’t know this other friend at all, don’t even stop to ponder the fact that you are volunteering to help a perfect stranger lug boxes around. Just say ‘sure!’
• Realize that when you drive up to the new place and see that it has a steep and narrow staircase and you have a very large truck full of stuff that has to go up that staircase, it is then too late to reconsider one’s offer to act as movers.
• Discover that having lots of books is really cool except when you face the reality of having to carry 26 boxes of them up the aforementioned steep and narrow stairs.
• Learn that if we ever start to wonder where Ivymoon’s newest SO ran off to, all we need to do is check the closets because apparently he is very good at locking himself into them.
• Discover that there are at least three different versions of the song ‘The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out’.
• Find out that apparently when one is trying to lug a box of dolls on a dolly, this can unbalance the load, and the whole thing will tip over. Be unable to do anything to help because you and the other two women are collapsed on the floor of the moving truck laughing while the dolly-pusher makes snide and grinning comments that at least he is actually *moving* something.
• Sing camp songs at the top of your lungs, badly off-key, while driving through the rain on the freeway. When you run out of camp songs, go through your limited repertoire of Muppet tunes.
• Learn that some men know the words to far more Monty Python songs than you might expect.
• Discover first-hand that heavy furniture makes extremely awkward fashion accessories.
• Realize that it is extremely hard to carry big boxes up steep stairs when you are laughing.
• Determine that when you wonder where the men are and you go find them sitting near the foot of the stairs with a heavy wooden couch frame in their laps, laughing, that you should just shake your head and leave them alone.
• Discover that if you were to form a band from the musical talents (or distinct lack thereof) of our little moving crowd, and throw in the widow of a former Beatle, you would have the Yoko Ono Double Oboe, Bongo, Bone and Whistle Band.
• Say the name of that band over and over until you end up doubled-over laughing and unable to walk.
• Determine that your first release will be the ‘Prig’ song, just because it’s Ivymoon’s favorite.
• Go out for dinner afterwards because after moving heavy boxes in the rain, you know that you all are just so incredibly hot and sexy looking that everyone will be unable to keep their eyes off of you.
• Come to the conclusion that even though you weren’t looking forward to helping perfect strangers (who are now friends) move into their new home, that it turned out better than expected, and an incredibly fun day.

Work has been hectic…but then again, what else is new. Too much to do, and not enough time to do it. A coworker looked at me Thursday before he left and said ‘you need to delegate or you’re going to burn out’. I didn’t answer, just rolled my eyes, but I wanted to reply. Delegate to whom? All the others on my team are just as busy. I already handed over – quite reluctantly because I was so looking forward to coding it – the internal tracking tool we’re using, to the testing team. They’re doing all the work on that. I draft the other analysts into doing pieces of the project plan because I know I can’t get it all done by myself. I pushed for an additional resource because I realized that we needed it. But there’s only so much I can give away, and it’s not like any of the rest of them have time to do it either. This has been one of those weeks where I question myself constantly. What ever made me think I do manager-type stuff?

It’s the little things that make it better though. The business team lead that fully understands why I wanted to step back and take a second look at what they were designing, even though the others snarl at me. The head of the development team who remembers to tell us that we’re doing a great job, even though he’s even more overwhelmed than we are. The little comments from other members of the team that make me realize that despite the overall chaos of this project, I’m doing all right.

I’ve also been in land-limbo all week. The seller was supposed to get back to me regarding my offer by Monday. No word. Tuesday night the realtor paged me to let me know he’d *finally* gotten back to her with a counter offer. My immediate response – yes. Oh yes. I just want that land! More limbo. I went in the next morning before work to sign the paperwork. He was supposed to sign that night. No signing. Arrgh!

But the realtor just paged me. Congratulations. I’m a land owner!! Wow! Finally!

I’m so excited! I’ve never owned property before. This is new and different. Granted right now, all I have is my very own plot of weeds (albeit fine, high quality weeds, to be sure), but sometime soon it will have a house on it and trees and a deck and…well…it will be perfect. I suddenly feel like an adult. But this is one time when feeling old is just fine.

It’s been a crazy week as a result. Overworked, stressed over the land question – will he sign or won’t he? Yet through it all there has been this incredible euphoria. There are some things that make caffeine addiction worthwhile; when the unexpected but hoped for becomes real and tangible; when conversations linger, and laughter become seductive. I am overwhelmed. Ah, bliss.

Sunday was a wonderful day. I slept in, as much as the cats would let me. Which wasn’t much, but still, I wasn’t ruled by the alarm, so that has to count for something. The sun was shining and it just warm enough for shorts. I spent the entire day with good friends and we had a blast. IHOP for breakfast, a stroll through the Scottish Games followed by a mid-afternoon beer/coke break, and sushi to finish it off. And through it all we laughed and talked.

It was the kind of day that spills over into others. Even though today I realized that we’re short three people for the technical evaluation that we need to do at work because the ones we have don’t have the knowledge to do the job, that they are letting users design a system for which they have no experience, and that part of being in this position I’m in is having to be the wall that stops things from changing irrepairably, and being prepared to face the consequences. It should have been a bad day. Add to that my extreme lack of sleep and subsequent over-caffeination to make up for it, and I should have been a zombie today. But it wasn’t….and I wasn’t.

And the reason that today wasn’t as bad as it could have been was because Sunday was also a day of unexpected surprises. Like finding the perfect carved stone dragon for my front hall at the Scottish Games in Woodland. Discovering that laughing your head off while driving can make steering a challenge. Learning that sometimes what is pondered can become reality, that laughter with a good friend is more important than sleep, and that some things can linger long after the laughter has faded away.

‘ve been in an offsite meeting all week going through this monstrously huge functional design document. We’ve been breaking it down into workable components, mapping out dependencies, determining capacity, scope, numbers of people needed to develop this project. Add this into my regular duties of meetings, etc., and it’s made for some incredibly long days. Friday we were finally done and I was tasked to map out a project plan for at least the first two weeks. It’s not something I could just put off til Monday. So I had to go back to the office to do this.But try to go through a huge project plan – a tedious task – when you’re antsy to be gone!

I’ve had a real estate agent looking for places for me. Not that I’ve had a whole heck of a lot of time to go looking, but I figured it was at least worth getting the ball rolling. I also asked her to look for plots of land, just on the off-chance that she could find one, so I could maybe build that house I’m in love with.

At lunch, I got a call from a real estate agent in the town I’m currently searching. She was pretty excited because when I told her what I wanted, she said there was one lot that fit my specs exactly. I tried to calm myself down by telling myself that there had to be *something* wrong with it. It couldn’t be as nice as it sounded. The agent had the size wrong. It was in a crappy neighborhood. It was going to be way out of my price range.

I left as soon as I possibly could. Luckily the manager was very sympathetic. Phew. I dragged a friend with me. We went to go see this plot of land. Oh wow. I mean, really. Wow! It’s next to a park. It’s in the middle of a whole bunch of custom homes. The house I want to build would be one of the smallest. The field next to it, I found out, is slated for more homes and a golf course. It’s exactly the right size. It’s perfect. I’m dreaming. No, I’m not. It’s there.

I made an offer. I had tons of errands to do today so I went to the office in my jeans and tee-shirt to sign contracts and make an offer on a piece of land. Afterwards I felt like for this momentous occasion I should have dressed up a little. The owner is contemplating it and will get back to the agent on Monday. He bought it two months ago and apparently his house wouldn’t fit on it (big house, I guess!). This means that a lot of the paperwork like the title and the geographical survey (I had no idea they had to do one of these!) will still be current, so it would go quicker. If he accepts my offer. The big If.

I’m not sure when I’ve ever been so excited and nervous at the same time. I’m checking my pager every hour, it seems. I know she said he’d get back to her on Monday, but maybe he’d decide earlier…..oh, I know I’m being silly, but how can I help it? Of course this is only the first step – if I get this land I’d still have to find a builder and go through that hassle. But at least I’d have my dirt. Finally.