Once again: Of the Good, Of the Bad.

Good: I have MOVED. Which is to say, all my shit is IN MY HOUSE, and I have cleaned (where "cleaned" = "lightly vacuumed") my old apartment and turned over the keys.

Bad: I have not, of course, actually unpacked, in any organized, systematic way. OH HELL NO. Instead, I have done that thing where you say "Coffee filters! Where the HELL are the coffee filters?" and you randomly toss-search all the various boxes of kitchen stuff, flinging contents hither and yon, until you uncover the coffee filters. And next up is "Socks! Clean socks!" or "Dental floss! Where is it??" or whatever, and the house fills up with randomly-flung stuff from boxes, and OH DEAR FREAKING GOD THE CHAOS THE CHAOS. (Plus also I am roughly half-done with painting the kitchen, which means the kitchen is filled not only with randomly-flung stuff, but also with paint cans, paint brushes, paint rollers, paint roller trays, dropcloths, putty knives, etc. etc. etc. etc.).

Good: I am so very deeply, happily in love with my new washer and dryer. They are computerized and electronic and made by Samsung, and when you power them up they sing you a little song, a sort of electronic tweeeedle-twee, tweeedle-tooo, just like a Roomba or a Tivo. Plus stuff comes out wrinkle-free, and they have Vibration Reduction Technology, and -- yeah. Looove.

Bad: Someday I shall actually figure out how my house's programmable thermostat works. Preferably, someday SOON, for I weary of waking up, shivering, in a house that is in the high 50s.

Good: This is the first time I've lived in a detached single-family dwelling in TWENTY YEARS, and I am intoxicated with the wild freedom of being able to -- put music on and play it WITHOUT HEADPHONES!! Walk around without worrying about OMG am I treading too noisily??!? Sing in the shower at the top of my voice and NOT WORRY ABOUT ANNOYING THE NEIGHBORS. (I believe my current inclination to BREAK OUT THE CAPSLOCK ON ALL OCCASIONS is not unrelated to my current bliss at being able to LIVE OUT LOUD for the first time in so, so long.)

Bad: Much of the noise I am actually currently making is me coughing my lungs out. I am very ready to be DONE with coughing. Alas, the coughing, it is not ready to be done with me. Also, I have been falling into bed at 6:30 p.m., feeling like I've been hit by a train, which is not helping out with the unpacking, to say nothing of the goddamned half-finished kitchen painting.

There is more, but I'm going off now to (a) see if I can actually FIND the dental floss this time, (b) fall into bed, (c) cough and cough and cough, (d) sleep.

--Homebuying is famously all about location; but timing is also a key element. As in, one ought not to close on a house immediately before the two busiest weeks of the year at one's job. The mismatch between my list of things urgently needing to be done, and the amount of time I have in the next two weeks to do them, is hilarious. Also, my body decided this was a great time to contract a disgusting chest cold, which has knocked me down hard for the past several days, so that I can only work for about ten minutes at a stretch before pausing to lie down and breathe deeply (and cough and cough and cough). But! At least I have not (yet) contracted the Dread Death-Dealing Swine Flu of the Apocalypse! (That'll probably come the week I have to move...)

--I am currently (a) living in the apartment, and (b) spending every possible spare minute at the house, sanding and priming and painting and digging and strategizing. The actual move will be somewhere around the weekend of the 10th-11th, and it is borne in upon me that I really might want to start lining up, y'know, movers. And also perhaps throwing crap into boxes. Except for the part where I have no TIME to throw crap into boxes on account of all the sanding and priming and painting and etc. that must be done. And also I have to keep stopping to lie down and cough.

--It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a house must be in want of a pickup truck. Or I'd take a hatchback, even. But what I have is a small urbane Honda Civic sedan, and there are a great many things a homeowner is going to want to be hauling around -- a half-dozen yards of compost, say, or big heavy non-folding patio furniture found by happenstance at amazing clearance prices when making one of the day's half-dozen stops at the hardware store for painting supplies -- that are just not sedan-transportable. (Although I did miraculously manage to wedge a quite large two-wheeled garden cart in the backseat yesterday, and drove it back in triumph from Lowe's.)

--It is, let me say, just a damn good thing that I have both a Home Depot and a Lowe's within two miles of my new house. Good for them, that is. The amount of money I have spent at each in the past week could constitute its own whole stimulus package.

--Preparing surfaces for painting is, I believe, one of those things rather like childbirth; one tends to focus on the cheering outcome (new baby! new wall colors!) and forget the absolutely hellish, painful, laborious process of getting there. Until the next time. (I wish I could now find a snippet I wrote for "End of the Road" in which Fraser and RayK were doing some painting in their little house in Inuvik, and get into a huge squabble about surface prep, and -- yeah, fairly predictable. But it was fun to write.)

--One thing I was actually looking forward to was buying a washer and dryer, because I have never in my entire 56 years on the planet had occasion to buy MY OWN WASHER AND DRYER OF MY VERY OWN, CHOSEN TO MY SPECIFICATIONS AND WHIMS AND NO ONE ELSE'S AND WITH ALL THE BELLS AND WHISTLES IN THE WORLD. However, this was before I realized that (a) there are perhaps 503,982 models of washers and dryers currently on the market, each with minute infinitesimal differences in feature set and with identifiers like "WPDH8800JMV" and "GLTF2940FS" and "EWFLW65HIW," making comparison shopping a headachey affair; and also (b) it is not only possible but very easy to spend $3000 on a washer/dryer combo if one gets carried away with the bells/whistles. Which is rather more than I had planned to spend.

--The former owners of my house were, let us say, Not Gardeners. They had clearly, bless their hearts, sunk a fair amount of money into hiring someone to come in and do some off-the-shelf generic landscaping, to make the place presentable and saleable; but the landscaping that was done consisted of: (a) demarcating "landscaped" areas by dint of walling them off with Big Jaggedy Black Rocks; (b) within those demarcated areas, putting down a thick layer of landscape fabric topped with shredded bark; and (c) planting therein a few randomly chosen shrubs, all of which (conveniently) still have their Home Depot nursery tags attached. And oh my dear god how I HATE landscape fabric, which reduces the soil beneath it to a sort of sterile tuff, and makes it impossible to wander out with a trowel and jam some bulbs in underneath the boxwood on a September afternoon.

Damn, there's a whole entry (or series of entries) I'll have to write, accompanied by photos, on the oddities of my house's current landscaping (the shrub corral! the ornamental grotto! the Wall o' Boulders!) and the changes I plan to enact, which I REALLY WANTED to start this fall before the rain begins, but since I am miles behind on some rather more essential stuff like PACKING and PAINTING THE GODDAMNED KITCHEN, will probably not actually happen until spring. Drat.

Right, more later. Bed now. First day of the quarter tomorrow, and stressed-out undergraduates a-thronging.

I *almost* had to post the head-explodingly rageful follow-up entry of "Ha HAH, do not count your wire transactions until they are deposited!"

Which is to say, at 3:00 this afternoon, 8 hours after my wire transfer was initiated, I was going back and forth on the phone between Competent Ameritrade Guy and Competent Bank Lady, both of them saying "Uhh . . . well, it really should have come in by now. If it's not there by now? I--don't know, but that's not good." C.A.Guy almost lost his Competence badge by saying at one point, "Yeah, if it hasn't deposited by now, I'd be a little concerned," and I give myself bonus points for not screaming back "WHY THANK YOU FOR TELLING ME, OTHERWISE I WOULD HAVE HAD NO IDEA I SHOULD BE A LITTLE CONCERNED JUST BECAUSE ALL MY MONEY HAS VAPORIZED INTO THE AETHER."

(A thing I learned today! If you have a wire transfer going between one account and another? Say, an Ameritrade account and your local neighborhood credit union? It doesn't just go from point A to point B -- it has to make a scenic side excursion through the freakin' FEDERAL RESERVE. Which is probably why the whole thing took eight hours.)

Anyway! At 3:15, I made one last despondent call to Competent Bank Lady, who said "Hang on -- let me check again -- hey, it just came through! Three minutes ago! It's deposited!"

I whooped, and then I *burned rubber* to the bank, and got the cashiers check, and *burned rubber* to the title company office (OMG, I didn't even mention the truly awesome escrow/title company lady, who soothed my anxieties, and let me go ahead and do all the paper signing even though I didn't have the check, and laughed and laughed at my bitter snarkiness about Ameritrade.)

So -- papers are signed, check is in, I get the keys on Wednesday, and our long national closing nightmare is over. Deep thanks to everyone who has listened to my ceaseless tedious core-dumpings of anxiety and angst, and posted encouraging supportive comments -- I should reply to you all, but right now I have a rendezvous with a nice bottle of champagne.

Of the Rocking Things, today's Rockingest was coming home and finding in my mailbox the BEEEYOOOTIFUL necklace that I purchased from the Etsy store of one mrsronweasley. Oh my god, people, it's just gorgeous, and I will take and post a photo or two at some point soon.

But not this evening, because this evening is dedicated to Intensive Wine Intake, on account of ( Things That Suck, all of them home-buying related (INCREDIBLY lengthy and intemperate ranting follows, with! Bonus poll!) )

So -- we'll see how this one sorts out. And in the meantime, I am admiring the HELL out of my beautiful new necklace (and hitting the wine hard, because the alternative is FLYING TO LINCOLN, NEBRASKA AND THROTTLING EVERYONE AT TD AMERITRADE).

I've always loved fall the best of all seasons, and with time that love has grown to encompass the whole long, glorious slide from the peak of midsummer to the quiet depth of winter solstice. But just now, in late August, I love late summer best of all -- that moment when you start to notice the change in the angle of light, and the mornings all of a sudden are cool and dewy, and one's garden (if one had a garden, as I shall next year at this time HA-HAH!) is full of huge toppling tomato plants buckling under the weight of fruit and redolent of ripe fecundity and rich earthy succulence with just a faint foreshadowing of vegetative death and decay.

I love this time of year even MORE, let me add, now that I live in a place where (a) it is not going to inevitably segue into three feet of snow and -25F temperatures, and (b) it brings with it a lavish bounty of beautiful, glorious, tree-ripened, just-picked succulent juicy tender ambrosial fresh peaches.

In honor of the latter, I ended up, rather unexpectedly, making and canning five pints of peach chutney yesterday (my Seattle friends M and J called and said "We bought a case of peaches! Come do something with them!"). The basic process, taken from The Vegetarian Epicure Vol. 2, is:

--four pounds of peaches (blanched/skinned, then cut into chunks)
--2 cups cider vinegar
--1 pound brown sugar
--two big onions, minced
--a big knob of ginger, minced (around 1/3 cup total)
--a cup and a half of raisins (or craisins, or dried cherries, or some mix thereof)
--one lemon, zest + juice
--one orange, zest + juice
--2 Tbsp mustard seed
--1 Tbsp chili powder
--1 tsp cayenne (adjusted according to one's heat preferences)

Put everything in a big non-reactive (enameled or stainless) pot. Simmer for an hour or so, until the mixture begins to thicken. Spoon into sterilized jars, cap/seal, process in boiling water bath for ten minutes.

I hadn't made this in something like fifteen years, and had forgotten how how extremely delicious it is. Especially when eaten in the company of good friends, alongside some grilled fresh halibut and a huge salad of wonderful things just-picked in the garden, and a bottle of Pinot Grigio, on a golden August late afternoon. (And, bonus excellence, after having gotten to spend some quality time with the fantabulous kormantic and her consort the estimable Mr. Pants.)

In other news, everything is apparently full-speed forward with the house purchase, and I spend my days and nights in a haze of paint samples and garden schemes and being amazed at least seven times a day at this astonishing turn in my fortunes. At some point, I will put up some more photos, and also a few Pointers On Home-Buying For The Disorganized, Stressed-Out, and Chronically Befuddled. Right now, though, I'm going to sip a little more wine, and nibble a cracker (oh and our new local Trader Joe's opened last Friday! No more driving an hour for a TJs fix!) and enjoy another golden luminous late-August evening, as it slips away.

So! Yes, true, I haven't actually what you might call POSTED here since ... um ... *checking calendar* ... uhh .... April?

But hey! Not dead! Not even sick! Just -- busy, happy, busy, intermittently frenzied, intermittently slothful, same old same.

Anyhoo, I wanted to do the Check-In Of Complete Randomness, to say:

a) a week from now I will be at VividCon (YAY!) and I will see at least some of you there and watch vids and dance at ClubVivid and talk talk talk and jeeezus it feels like at least a DECADE since the last VividCon;

2) You guys (*making sweeping comprehensive arm-motion at the entirety of the flist*) are the coolest and just because I've been utterly incommunicado doesn't mean I don't love ya all; and

iii) In breaking news: I am --

*discordant blatting of trumpets, crumhorns, and sackbuts* --

-- buying a house. Yeah.

(OH. EM. EFF. GEE.)

Not, I hasten to add, that the house purchase has actually been *consummated* yet. But I'm meeting with my realtor tomorrow to put in an offer on a property that is gorgeous, in great shape, has wonderful garden space, is significantly underpriced, and -- is a short sale! Because I am clearly insane and need that kind of hassle!

(Cliff Notes: a short sale means the seller is upside down, or perhaps in default, or about to go into foreclosure; the property is being sold for less than what the seller owes on the mortgage, and the bank that holds the mortgage, in an understandably testy humor, will be sticking its oar into the proceedings throughout, vetoing perfectly good full-price offers in the hopes of somehow extracting more cash from the situation. Short sales tend to take quite a bit longer to close and are significantly more likely to fall through.)

So, it'll likely be a couple of months until I know if my offer will actually be accepted, closing will actually happen, etc. etc., and in the meantime I will continue the intermittent viewage of houses which has been the main feature of my life the past few weeks. Good god, the tales I could unfold about some of the places I've seen -- housebuying at the low end of the price scale is truly an adventure in wackiness.

And -- well, what else? Fannishly, I am well-nigh totally disconnected, having so far not seen either the new Star Trek movie, nor a single episode of Leverage nor Merlin nor -- what the hell IS everyone watching nowadays? I don't even know.

Which will make vid-watching at VVC even more befuddling than usual (at Premieres, I am something like 3 for 74 in "having any idea of what show/movie this is, who those people are, or what the Sam Christ is going on").

So! Some of you I will see soon, the rest of you I wish I could see, and -- maybe, just perhaps, I will post again sooner than I DON'T KNOW FOUR MONTHS MAYBE??!?!?

Earlier today I posted something that, in passing, referenced the washing of cats in bathtubs. Only a few hours later, as if by some cosmic convergence, I found a link to --

--the most amazing compendium of wet cat pictures EVER. I am simultaneously laughing and weeping at these, many of which MUST be made into icons.

(So wet! So miserable! So FEELING THE HATE!)

------------

And speaking of feeling the hate, I am sort of trying to cling to the possibility that the whole Amazon situation results from a massive, ghastly, inadvertent fuckup of epic proportions, rather than a deliberate policy decision of some sort. Because I have a hard time believing that Amazon could do something so COSMICALLY EVIL AND STUPID on purpose.

*sigh*

It has been *pelting* down rain here the entire day long, hard and steady, with a driving gusty wind. I feel terrible for the poor kids who'd organized an Easter Egg Hunt up on campus, and I hope they all gave up on it quickly and went inside for some hot cocoa.

A good day for hot cocoa, or for a big bowl of popcorn, old movies, and a good book, with which I've been indulging myself most of the afternoon, apart from some futzing around with the new laptop.

The day has also brought some low-key domestic excitements, to wit:

1. OK, did you know that if you drop a brand new, entirely full, 32-oz carton of cottage cheese at just the right angle, the bottom of the carton will split and burst open, spewing cottage cheese all over the kitchen floor? I did not know that either.

2. My yoga practice, such as it is (and "intermittent flailing" would be a better descriptor than "practice") has been even more maladroit than usual due to my new yoga mat's incredible slipperyness, which leaves me skidding and sliding out of postures. A quick googling turned up much advice about washing the mat, in such cases--in the bathtub, with minimal soap, thorough scrubbing, that'll take the slippery coating right off, etc. etc.

Let me just say, having now tried this, that washing a yoga mat is right up there with, say, washing a *cat*, at the top of the list of Really Entertaining But Ill-Advised Things To Do In A Bathtub. For anyone trying this at home, my counsel would be to just strip down, climb in, and wet yourself thoroughly first, because you're going to get drenched anyway.

Drying it is interesting too -- the usual advice is to lay it out on a towel, roll them up together, and squeeze the moisture out, but you actually need more like three towels to accomplish this, and quite a bit of floor space, and then somewhere to hang the mat to dry. I draped mine over the shower-curtain bar, with some trepidation (as viewers of Wilby Wonderful know, you don't want to put too much weight on a shower curtain bar). But so far it is holding, although no perceptible drying has occurred (probably due to the aforementioned pelting-down rain and consequent humidity levels).

Oh, and a wholly random question: How does one configure Semagic to post into two separate journals at once? I've got the latest version, but I can't see any place to set up a second journal account ...

Thanks to the generosity of batdina in sending me an invite code (thanks again!), I am now fully up and running on Dreamwidth (katallison, as on LJ). Like most people, my plan is to continue cross-posting for some unspecified period (and lordy, the next several months will be messy and confusing as everyone sorts themselves out and makes their decisions about staying connected to LJ vs. cutting loose). (To say nothing of the smaller but still considerable mess that is already ensuing as those on Dreamwidth with OpenID accounts get full-member accounts, and change one for the other, and need to have everyone else re-do the subscribing and giving of access....)

I feel bad whining about my job, given that so many people I know would give a great deal to have a job to whine about, and yet, still --

Holy mother of GOD am I wiped out. This was Registration Week at my college, and to an extent exceeding even the high standard set by Registration Weeks past, this one has beaten me down, kicked me to the curb, and tap-danced upon my twitching fallen corpus. With hob-nailed boots.

The problem is that my college, like pretty much every other institution of higher ed that I know of, is caught in the following brutal equations:

• Students who normally would be graduating deciding that hey, staying in college another year is better than being unemployed with student loans coming due;
  
• plus: People who have been laid off deciding that now is the perfect time to go back and finish that degree and hey, getting even skimpy financial aid beats the hell out of panhandling;
  
• equals: Record enrollment levels.

Simultaneously:

• Open faculty positions (due to retirement, departures, whatever)
  
• plus: Hiring freeze
  
• equals: Insufficient faculty staffing and hence fewer-than-usual course openings.

Adding these two together, we get:

• Courses that filled within, like, five minutes of opening on the reg system, and hence:
  
• An extraordinary number of pissed-off, freaked-out, disgruntled, angry students who cannot get into any courses whatsoever, most of whom have been in my office at some point this week delaminating/melting down/sobbing/yelling.

How wiped-out was I today? When I got home and flumped down in front of the computer, I felt a crackling stiff something in my right front pants pocket. Thinking it might be a Critical Student Note I'd inadvertently brought home with me, I pulled it out and discovered it was -- a five-dollar bill. The five-dollar bill I'd stuck in my pocket to buy a cup of coffee over at the student center this morning.

I just ... I mean, there WAS coffee at some point in the morning. (I'm quite sure of that, since otherwise there would have been DEATH.) I can almost, sort of, vaguely remember walking back to my office carrying a cup of coffee in my gloved hands. But ... I still have the money in my pocket? Did I just fill my cup and saunter out, in blithe oblivion, without paying?

I DON'T EVEN KNOW.

(...Much wine now. And then much sleep.)