We finally broke down and bought Norton anti-everything software. Richard came home yesterday with that and something else whose name escapes me but will, he assures me, help protect our little local network he’s been busily creating. Every once in a while he tells me excitedly about how he managed to tweak the framus a tad more to the left of the widget on our network and I nod and say “That’s nice dear” because I really have no clue – all I care is that I can turn on my computer and connect to the outside world, and that if I want to print something the only stumbling block in my way should be if there’s no paper in the printer – but it seems to make him so happy that he’s done whatever it is he did, and a wife should always be supportive (okay, you can quit gagging now).

Buying Norton stuff is a good thing, because for all the years I’ve had this computer of mine, it has never had any anti-virus software. It was always one of those things I kept meaning to get around to, but in the starving grad student years and then the early starving computer nerd years there were always things a tad more important to spend my money on, like the phone bill or the electricity or cat litter. Yeah, I was nervous, but then I’ve been extra careful on this computer and so far I guess I was just incredibly lucky. I realize it only takes one time (sort of like how you can get pregnant with only one time, but then I never ended up doing that either, so I’d say my track record is quite shiny at this point, oh yes). Luckily all the viruses always go to my work email, read only on my work computer where anti-virus software sits on my email and makes it take extra-long to download – especially when I’m trying to download it over one of my favorite 2600 baud connections over a hotel phone line late at night and I have a lot of things more important to do than to download the latest exciting sales pitch from the Big Fish (like maybe sleep or play Civilization or something). And this special make-it-slow anti-virus software on the work computer does things like send me the infected email twice – once with the virus, and once without it, and a huge bold ‘VIRUS DISABLED’ added to the subject line so I know right away that here is an evil thing and I must delete it immediately.

So anyway, Norton software. Installed, run, and boy does that stuff take forever to run! I had to resort to going downstairs and cooking dinner while it updated my registry in a more efficient manner (it just wouldn’t do to have an inefficient registry, you see), and even then it still took a lot of thumb-twiddling before my computer finally wanted to reboot and talk nice to me again. And now when my email runs, there’s this nifty little icon that shows up in the tray at the bottom of the screen indicating that it is doing a virus scan, and when I open any document off my hard drive it does a little virus scan, and when I go to empty my recycle bin it has suddenly become much more complicated that merely clicking ’empty bin’ because now I have to care about a lot of other commands. Urk.

But at least my computer is now all safely protected and disk-doctored and speed-scanned and anti-virused. The only thing it’s in danger from now is the inevitable. What’s that, you ask? Well….I’m the one with seven shedding cats. Draw your own conclusions from that. ;-)

I have sunburns on the back of my knees! My arms are a little toasted, but the worst of it is on the back of my legs. Makes sitting on things rather interesting – I end up perching on the very edge of the chair and hunching forward (posture, schmosture!), and occasionally muttering ‘ow!’ under my breath.

I managed to do this because the front of me was facing towards the bricks and therefore safe from the sun’s dastardly rays….and it probably didn’t hurt that the front of me was also getting a fairly liberal coating of brick mortar too (which, I’m sure, has an SPF of at least 35). See, a few weeks ago while at church, Richard and I were accosted by a Clipboard-Carrying Woman and before we knew it we had volunteered to come help lay bricks for the front of the church, where the bulk of the restoration is taking place these days. The church in question has been undergoing restoration for at least several years now (it’s a Genuine Antique Building!), with most of the work being done by volunteers. They’ve done an amazing job of it so far (although the cyclone fencing and construction debris where the front entrance used to be was not exactly reassuring when we first showed Richard’s parents were the wedding would be held), and now they are left with the roof, and the bricks.

I don’t think I’ll be rushing off to become a brick-laying apprentice any time soon, but it wasn’t all that bad. It’s sort of the grown-up version of making mud pies, really. You slap a little mud down, you squish it with a cool triangle shaped trowel, and then you smash a brick in the middle of it and whack it repeatedly with a rubber mallet until it’s in just the right place (determined by judicial application of a large and mortar-speckled balance), and then you grab some more mud and you squash it down in between the bricks with your fingers (they had little tools for this but using fingers is soooo much more fun!) and occasionally you brush the hair out of your eyes (and the mortar into your hair) and then you do it all again. And then some more. And then you go grab more bricks and you keep doing it until they run out of mortar and golly gee shucks you have to stop for the day.

So because of all the playing in mud and slapping bricks around, I’m pretty worn out. Well, it doesn’t help that neither of us got much sleep because we were up really late last night (before having to get up really early this morning – wince). I’m not sure what Richard was up to (although he was mumbling things about ftp and servers and things) but I was happily redesigning my home page, and even though I turned off my computer at slightly after midnight (honest, I really did, and actually did get into bed and everything), I couldn’t stand it so I got back out of bed and spent another hour or two finishing it up.

Before I went to bed the first time I was mumbling about making the final changes and Richard grinned at me and told me he’d see me in a few minutes. I thought he meant he was coming to bed too. When I shuffled back into the computer room a few minutes later to turn the computer back on and keep working, he grinned at me again, having had no intention of coming to bed anytime soon – probably because he was working on some sort of network thingmajig.

Ah, computer nerds in love.

On Wednesday, the highlight of my exciting afternoon was when I vacuumed out the drawers on my half of the office (a slightly less scream-and-stomp-around highlight than yesterday’s). While Richard may be perfectly happy letting all his miscellaneous stuff cohabitate with sawdust, I am not so accepting, and the reason I have been allowing myself to believe that the reason why I’ve been a lazy slob and not yet moved all the rest of my stuff into the office drawers for weeks now is simply that they were full of sawdust and needed to be cleaned. Of course, once I vacuumed them then I no longer had an excuse, so after no small amount of grumbling (which was inconveniently ignored by the cats) I slumped off to the guest room to collect all the remaining things and laid them out on one of the office desks.

Here is when I discovered that I could open my very own card shop. I have an entire drawer full of note cards and stationary! Some of this stuff is in boxes that haven’t even had the plastic covering removed. An entire drawer full of stationary and I Never Write Letters!

Some of it is because my mom gives us a box of Thank You cards every year for Christmas, and one or two of the packages were bought by myself in a weak moment (mainly because they had something feline that was just too cute to pass up, or some other flimsy excuse). But the rest has simply just accumulated over the years, and now I am stuck with trying to figure out just what the heck to do with it all.

I can’t just throw it out. One does not throw out perfectly good stationary (It’s sort of akin to tossing books into the trash which, as anyone knows, is one of the lesser mortal sins). And I can’t really give it as gifts to other people because most of the boxes are a bit squashed from having been forced into an already too full drawer of other similarly sized boxes. And there is no way, even if really did try to sit down and do it, that I could write that many letters. People hear from me once a year, at Christmas. If I type the letter, everyone gets the news. If I have to hand-write it into the cards, only the first half of the people get all the juicy tidbits, while the others have to content themselves with ‘Merry Christmas – hope your year has been as exciting as mine!’ because my hand gets wayyyy too tired to write out a page and a half of chatty blather in that many cards.

I’m thinking I’ll just leave it in the drawer for now. Perhaps years from now I’ll be suddenly struck with a letter writing jones, and well, I’ll be all set.

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Jenipurr’s Helpful Cooking Tips: When you’re making Chicken Paprika and you hit the point in the recipe when it says to add the cornstarch and you add it and suddenly you are stirring something that is bubbling and frothing and resembles something out of a scene from “The Creeping Slime Monster From the Swamps of Dispair” far more than it resembles dinner, it may occur to you that that orange box you reached for was not the cornstarch, but baking soda – this is about the point when you should turn to your ever-patient husband, who has already listened to your little ranting whine about all the ants you had to kill that day and even given you a completely unsolicited backrub in the bargain, and say ‘I think we’re going out to dinner’.

I believe I have mentioned, in this journal, my feelings on ants once or twice. But have I mentioned lately how much I loathe and despise ants? No, I don’t just ‘not like’ ants. I hate them. With a passion that grows daily the more I have to kill.

They keep coming. Nothing I do deters them. We cannot keep the cat food bowls more than halfway full because the instant one of them gets filled to the brim, it is completely overrun. I have become paranoid about leaving *anything* that might attract them out where they might find it. Last night they swarmed the kitchen counters. I couldn’t spray all of them because they were milling around one of the electric sockets and I just didn’t want to have to explain to the insurance adjustor that the house burned down because I was killing ants.

It’s gotten to the point where the Raid can travels from room to room. It does not get put away. It simply sits on the latest counter until we have need of it again. I always know where it is, since I’m usually the one who used it last.

I have an official ‘ant rag’. It’s an old stained washcloth that’s pretty much falling apart, but it’s perfect for wiping up ants and Raid. I can’t leave the bug spray on the floor because it’s slippery, and because I can’t risk one of the cats traipsing through the stuff and then licking it off their feet later. It’s usually referred to in a manner like “Dear, can you bring me the **insert favorite expletive** ant rag? We have **insert second favorite expletive** ants again!”

I have kept reminding myself that it’s just ants, and it could be far worse. I keep reminding myself that this is a new house and we are bound to get bugs. I keep muttering that the benefits of having a raised foundation far outweigh the ants. I keep insisting that I can handle this – it’s not so bad; we don’t get them every day; there really aren’t that many.

Ha! As if last night’s electric socket invasion wasn’t bad enough I walked into the master bedroom and found the mother of all swarms! There were ants covering an area several feet wide, and the worst of it is, I have no idea what they were after!!

I sprayed. I wiped. The ant rag came back nearly black with hundreds of horrid little bodies. I managed to somehow talk my stomach into settling down and kept on grimly cleaning up the carnage.

This has gone to far. Tomorrow I’m calling exterminators. Surely one of them has *got* to be able to do something to keep the nasty little creatures at bay. If they can’t, I may just break down and scream.

I hate ants. I really, really, hate ants.

Sob.

We have a huge black wrought iron plant tree in the living room that has 12 hooks. Granted, it may seem odd to some, but when filled with hanging plants, it looks really cool in the bay window, and we’ve plans to fill out that area with a few more pots hanging from the ceiling and then a few larger types placed on the floor – to give it that ‘jungle’ feel (and to give the cats something else to tip over / shred / otherwise destroy). What we’re going to do with all the plants when it’s Christmas Tree Season we’re not exactly sure – we just know we have to move them, since as any self-respecting home owner knows, ‘Bay Window’ is synonymous with ‘Christmas Tree Window’. Perhaps for the month of December, all the plants will migrate to the bay window in the master bedroom, providing the gentle sound of rustling leaves at night (as they’re ripped from their stems by those of the feline persuasion).

So anyway, the point of mentioning all these green things was to lead into the fact that this week I repotted all the ones that have been hanging there. The exciting thing about this is that…oh, okay, so there is nothing exciting at all. My life has come to this – writing about repotting plants. Um. Where was I? Oh yes. Repotted plants. The whole downstairs smelled faintly of potting soil all day – and I mean this in a good way (not a ‘euww, what’s that stinky dirt smell!’ way).

One of the plants that was supposed to be of the hanging variety is not, in fact, the dangling draping sort of greenery. Instead, in complete defiance to the little picture on the plastic sliver that was stabbed into its pot when we bought it, it insists on growing straight up instead of out and over like a well-behaved hanging plant should. This one I took pity on and put it into a new, non-hanging pot, and placed this on top of the piano (which, along with providing a nifty new place for the cats to sprawl, also provides a nice smooth surface for placing a non-drip pot, since it’s very near the window).

I’m pondering whether putting it there was wise, however, because I keep finding little bits of potting soil around that pot. While it may be perfectly safe since it won’t drip water all over my lovely new piano, the dirt is a bit annoying. The piano-lounging cats swear in complete innocence that they know nothing of how the dirt got out of the pot, but I suspect they know more than they’re letting on.

I had a dream the other night, that I got a computer virus. We went off to buy an anti-virus software program, but the salesman was being cagey. He was one of those over-eager sales clerks – young, tall, thin, and pimply – who kept extolling the virtues of the product, but he wouldn’t answer my question – which one will fix my computer? I woke up almost angry, to find myself eyeball to foot with a cat. I pet it, it purred, and I went back to sleep, computer safe for now.

********

One of the gifts we got for our wedding was a coffee maker – something entirely appropriate (and desired) for two caffeine-addicted computer nerds. This marvelous gift came from my little sister – a woman who is, herself, also extremely devoted to the Immortal Bean.

This is not just any old boring ordinary coffee maker. This is a Coffee Maker Deluxe. This thing grinds the coffee, brews it, times it all so it wakes you with the tantalizing smell of Vanilla Nut or Cinnamon Hazelnut (yes I drink flavored coffee. I also pollute it with cream and sugar. Got a problem with that?). And all this comes in a nifty little machine that is also fun to watch! Oh yes indeed. When we ran it the first time, Richard and I huddled over the counter, noses close to the top, peering through the clear plastic to watch not only the beans grind into powder, but the water itself blort through the little channels into the filter basket.

********

Oh yeah, wedding pictures. Richard and I weeded through the 200+ shots (the photographer did both color and black and white) to choose just a few to post. Click on the picture below to see them. Enjoy!

Ever since Richard came back from his trip to Europe, I’ve been dying to go myself, so our honeymoon will be a trip to Ireland. However, what with building the house and planning the wedding, neither of us had any energy left to plan a honeymoon, so that’s tentatively planned for next spring. I say ‘tentatively’ because this depends on the job situation (for both of us). But regardless, we wanted to at least go *somewhere* after the wedding, just to get a chance to relax and be just ‘us’ for even a short while.

So when we left the reception, we went to Napa. Okay, if you want to get technical about it, actually, we went home first to change, stopping on the way to cut off the cans and pans and shoes our friends tied to the bumpers. There was a laughing battle with Azzie over who got to play with my veil (I won). The ‘Just Married’ sign blew off on the freeway halfway there, and it was so late and we were so incredibly tired and the stairs in the bed and breakfast were far too steep.

The day after was marvelously lazy and unplanned and slow and just what we needed. We slept in as long as we possibly could, snuggled under mounds of blankets because even though it was the middle of July, that room was incredibly cold. We poked through doors and drawers and cupboards, exclaiming over everything. Look, they left us robes! Any idea how to work the jacuzzi tub? Mmm, chocolate. Lots of it.

We were tired. Completely and insanely tired from everything that had gone on before. We walked, slowly, hand in hand around downtown Napa. We sat – in fact we did a lot of sitting. We watched a flock of baby ducks skitter around the mud bog down below us as we ate lunch. We lounged in a grassy park and listened to a duet play celtic music.

We did all the cutesy things, kissing on corners and swinging our clasped hands like two school kids in the beginning of a crush, and finding ways to refer to each other as husband and wife. We poked around in little shops and sipped coffee on the swing in the gazebo. We took a long nap and discovered each other in new ways all throughout that slow, spontaneous, lazy day.

The next morning we’d planned to eat breakfast there and then go home, slowly. It turned out a bit more rushed than we’d planned, because Richard’s asthma took a turn for the worse, and that cold and sore throat I’d been fighting off was kicking in with a vengeance.

But still, even though the word sounded foreign and odd to my tongue (and still sometimes does), it was wonderful to say “my husband” when we checked out that morning to someone else for the first time.

We’re driving, heading from breakfast to the recycling center to drop off the latest pile of packing boxes. Richard picks up one of the clear crystal-cut ring boxes that have been floating around in my car since the wedding.

“This looks like something I could use in a D&D game.” He adopts the voice of a wizened old mage. “Here, sonny. The Box of Ringing….except it’s empty. Because it’s invisible.”

And then a few seconds later. “That makes it immaterial.”

“Immaterial?”

“Yes.”

“And if you put it on?”

“Then you’re immaterial too.” He ponders for a moment. “Well. Except it’s hard to put on because you can’t really touch it.”

“So then you just think boring thoughts and it’ll slip right on, hmm?”

Luckily he wasn’t actually drinking when I said that. I’d have had coffee spewed all over the dashboard.

Things have a way of just ending up in my car. Every once in a while in a spurt of cleanliness guilt I empty out the back seat and try to figure out where everything goes, but the reason stuff often lives in my car is because I’m just not sure where to put it anyway. Okay, that and I’m lazy when it comes to bringing stuff in. The notebook I use for the two organizations for which I play secretary (never tell anyone you can type or you can spell. And never tell one group that you’re the secretary for another. It’s an endless loop, I tell ya!) pretty much lives in the car full-time – only coming inside when I’ve got to type up the minutes. Usually the day of the meeting. Sometimes only an hour or two beforehand. Luckily I can type really really fast. Heh.

********

I loaded up my car with stuff to take to the thrift store earlier this week, and found a dead frog. It wasn’t squashed – it was perfectly formed. Just dead. I don’t recall ever hearing a frog in the garage. I’m not sure how it even got there. But there it was, and there it still is. Our own little mummified dead frog. I hope it died of natural causes (whatever that might be in frog-ese). I’d hate to think of this poor little frog being trapped in the garage…although it certainly couldn’t have died from starvation. We’ve got quite the little population of daddy-long-leg spiders going up in one corner. I hadn’t noticed the smaller ones til this morning. Heh. I think someone just had babies.

Because I really want out of consulting, and because if I go off of vacation they will stick me on a project as soon as they can, and because all the projects they could stick me on would require me to get on a plane to somewhere, I’m on vacation. Still. And I’ve got enough vacation saved up that I could quite conceivably stay lazy until the end of August. It’s not as pretty a picture as it sounds, since I’m trying to find a new job – one that won’t require me to get on a plane more than every few months instead of every week – and with my perfect sense of timing, I couldn’t have picked a worse time to go job hunting in the computer techno-geek field.

But anyway, I’m off from work, home. So here’s a list of things I’ve been doing:

• Laundry: I can finally keep up with the laundry, and there’s just something about the smell of line-dried clothes and sheets that makes you want to clean them more often. Oh, and by the way, the socks are still there. I think it’s a point of honor now. Heh.
• Unpacking Yes, there’s still a bit to be done, but in the first few weeks of my freedom, I managed to plow through a lot of boxes, to the point where what remains fits neatly in either the corner of the guest room, or the corner of the dining room – both rooms that are rarely seen by other people, and so can afford to be left corner-cluttered for the time being.
• Organizing: And boy did I need to do this. Lots of paperwork to be filed, and things to move around now that we’ve got the new office, and drawers and shelves and cupboards to fill. I’ve still got empty drawers and cupboards in my kitchen. The mind boggles.
• Discovering the joys (ha!) of cleaning house: With the cats, we really have to vacuum a lot more often, so I’ve been trying to keep up with it, since I’m home and Richard isn’t. We also got a Swiffer mop, just to see what all the fuss was about. I’m not all that impressed. Oh, granted, it cleans nicely, but the mop handle is just a bit too short, so that when cleaning the floors (and boy do we have a lot of floors!), I have to bend at an unnatural angle for longer than my back thinks is necessary. The day someone comes up with self-cleaning floors is the day Jennifer is a happy, happy girl.
• Coming up with lots of nifty ideas for how to ‘do’ the house: I dragged Richard off to the fabric store and we picked out some patterns for curtains. I’m going to make curtains. Really I am. I just need to open the pattern and figure out how much fabric I need and take in something the right color to match it with and then drag out the sewing machine and I’ve finally got a sewing room, by golly, so I’d better get to it.
• Being lazy: Gloriously so, I might add. It’s been a wonderful treat to be able to just plop down and read a book or do a logic puzzle or even drag out my sewing any time I want.
• Wondering just how long it’s been since I actually took a vacation: The fact that I had more than 200 hours saved up in vacation is kind of a scary thought, when it comes right down to it. I’ve got to be better at taking time off.
• Oh yeah. Job hunting: No, I really am doing this – firing off resumes right and left and searching madly for anything that looks as if I might be remotely qualified. No luck so far (sigh), but I’m trying to be hopeful.

And there you have it. The exciting, thrill-a-minute life of a computer nerd on vacation. Just about knocks your socks off, doesn’t it?

You can put your socks back on now, though. And if you weren’t wearing any to begin with and you’d like some, we’ve got a few extra, still on the line. I’ve got to hang new laundry out there today, but just to be ornery, I might just leave the dry socks there, just to see how long they really will stay.

Whee! There I go again!

When planning where to go after the wedding, I let Richard know that he was not to tell anyone where we were going. I wasn’t too worried that someone might try to follow us or track us down, but several people invited were people to whom I and others had done things to (short-sheeting the bed, for example) and I wasn’t willing to take any chances. So when asked, Richard told people we were going to Fresno. Yes, lovely scenic Fresno, whose only claim to fame seems to be the existence of a raisin museum.

We didn’t go to Fresno. We went to Napa instead because who, after all, really wants to go to Fresno for their honeymoon.

Silly me. To think what we missed by not going to Fresno after all! Imagine my chagrin when I opened the newspaper this afternoon to see the headlines “Raisin Growers Launch Revolt!”, followed closely by the starting words “A group of rebellious raisin growers…”

Revolt? Rebellion? Strife amongst those who provide America with cute little boxes of shriveled up grapes? Seems there’s more brewing in Fresno than we’d thought!

My mind was instantly filled with images. I pictured those life-size raisins that used to show up in California Raisin commercials, boogieing along to ‘Heard it Through the Grapevine’, attired this time not with sunglasses and microphones, but with camoflauge pants and shoulder straps of machine gun ammunition that wouldn’t be bullets, but instead, strings of prunes. ‘Heard it Through the Grapevine’ would be playing in the background still, but deeper, and somehow more ominous. In the distance, the sound of gunfire would be heard, and occasionally the squelching bellow as some poor post-grape gave up its life, all in the name of freedom. To think, we chose Napa over this – this hot bed of brewing, seething rebellion! The mind simply reels.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), realism won out. No giant person-sized dried fruits were creeping around on cartoon-shoed tip-toe, rat-a-tat-tatting their dried fruit cannons. The revolt in question has to do with price wars and, while highly critical to the raisin farmers (although technically they’d be grape farmers because raisins don’t really *grow*, they *shrink* when exposed to heat, but where was I?), nowhere near as colorful and exciting as I was happily imagining.

“Raisin Revolt…” the back page continued. “Tease!” I muttered back at it. Ah well.