So This is Wanderlust?

I have things to do. Lots of them. Along with the tasks that arise on a daily basis, my to-do list includes things that aren't urgent but really should have been done days, weeks, or in one case, over a year ago. But am I doing them? Nay. Lately I haven't felt much like doing anything. That includes reading, watching TV, crocheting, and taking hot bubble baths. In fact, the only thing that's been exciting me lately is the idea of stepping away from my normal life for a while. Train rides, campsites, and unfamiliar geographies tantalize my imagination. Tomorrow, assuming I finally get paid, I'm buying a National Parks travel guide. We can't actually leave town for a few months, but I can't wait to start planning our short-term escape.

Survey Says

Apparently my previous color choices were very, maybe painfully, bright. But, like Loralee, I enjoy the orange. So here, for your appraisal, is a slightly muted version of the same.

Who Wants a Pina Colada?

So Minima Black was starting to depress me. And now, while I'm definitely not bummed out by my blog anymore, I need to know whether reading these colors will make your eyes bleed. Discuss.

Refresher Course

While boiling some noodles to eat with leftover stroganoff, washing the dishes and writing a web page, I'm listening to Ani Difranco. Because we're seeing her tonight and I've barely listened to her CDs for the past five years, most of which I spent in a sort of Ani Difranco hangover resulting from the years after high school when I considered her indispensable to my political and feminine coming-of-age and listened to little else. It's too bad, really, that I went off my Ani when I did, because I was just beginning to think I liked her newer stuff better than the older stuff. Mellower, more complex, less political. So I'm looking forward to tonight, both for the nostalgic fun of the earlier songs, and for an introduction to the recent ones.

Mold and Mail

In the words of our (Polish, I think) maintenance guy, "Toilet leaking. I fixed it. I come back next week, fix ceiling. After dries."

The process of fixing the toilet earned our upstairs neighbor a thank you card taped to his/her/their door, and made the ceiling leak so steadily--until it stopped--that a large chunk of plaster is now dangling from it. That chunk of plaster, and the ceiling it used to be attached to, is partially covered with dark green moss-like mold, and my asthma and I aren't thrilled about letting it be there for four or five more days.

But--but! Thanks to the package that finally arrived this morning, I can Zen my cares away with my replacement yoga DVDs. And the new KT Tunstall CD makes me happy too.

More Reality on Steroids

Between snooze alarms at about 8:00 this morning, a loud tapping sound suddenly caught my attention. There are a lot of noises here, noises from the hallway, noises from the cats. But this was definitely coming from inside our apartment, and I couldn't imagine what the cats could be doing to make this particular sound. So I got up, walked out of the bedroom, and followed the sound around the corner into the bathroom. Turned on the light, and said, "Oh, no. Oh, gross."

There has always, since we moved in here, been a sort of circular network of cracks in the ceiling just above our toilet, just below where I think the upstairs neighbors' toilet sits. This concerned me vaguely, but there are lots of cracks in our ceiling in other rooms, too, so I shrugged it off. And then, at 8:00 this morning, there was water dripping from the cracks in the bathroom, splashing tap-tap-tap-tap onto the lid of the toilet.

I whipped a cleaning bucket out of the closet and set it on the toilet to catch the drips, which stopped within a minute or two anyway, and called the property manager, who said, "Oh, that's not good," and promised to send someone from maintenance out today. And now I'm imagining a giant hole in my ceiling and huge clouds of mold spores and all of this going on for days and having to lock my cats--one frightened and one combative--in the bedroom for hours and hours on end.

Stay tuned.

A Little Grossed Out By Life

This weekend was Eric's youngest brother's wedding. And it was great. Our hotel was a four-hour drive from all our responsibilities, we saw friends we hadn't seen in months, and there was free food and booze and a dance. Just tonight I learned of the existence of photographs of me doing the Macarena, which, in case you're curious, is still not cool.

But then we got home last night, and reality came barreling back into our lives. Complete with dried cat puke, a centipede on one of my flip-flops, an exceptionally boring day at work, a misread recipe that resulted in really really salty homemade salsa, and PMS. It's almost as if I had such a good weekend, it threw the universe out of balance, and now that balance is being restored.

Relics

After living here for a month and a half, I finally remembered to vacuum under the radiator in my living room. I found twenty extremely dusty cents, pine needles from someone's old Christmas tree, and a bus pass dated November 5, 2005.

Apartments are kind of gross.

Fair to Middling Day

There's just nothing quite like finding out that you won't be getting paid for another three weeks, and that your haircut just cost you half again more than you were expecting, on the very same day.

And it doesn't help when, while muttering to yourself in the car about the price of your haircut, you forget to stop at the library on your way home to pick up the Spenser novel you've been aching for because it's fall and time for some literary comfort food. And it makes it ever-increasingly worse when you aren't willing to get back in your car and drive the five minutes to the library because both sides of your whole street are posted with temporary no parking signs and you might lose your halfway-decent parking space on a cross street.

On the bright side, because I insist that there be a bright side to all of this, my haircut is pretty much fabulous, possibly the best I've ever had. And class was wonderful today, because before I tortured my class with their first test, I pulled out some of my best and most fun educational activities. Also, All Creatures Great and Small is pretty good cool-weather reading, even if it doesn't involve the character who inspired me, when I was 13, to learn to raise one eyebrow independently of the other.

Dilemma

So when you're sitting in your apartment and overhear, through an open window adjacent to the front door of the building, a neighbor you've never met using her cell phone to tell several friends that she stepped outside for a cigarette without her keys and is now locked out, do you go let her in?

I was thinking no, absolutely not, that would just be too freaking creepy, even if I don't eavesdrop on purpose. Besides, it's a beautiful day and someone will eventually leave or come home and let her in. And then, about five minutes later, she told someone she'd been making arm signals at the windows of the apartments (which I hadn't seen, since I'm working on the computer), so I did it anyway. In my pajamas even. And she didn't seem creeped out, just grateful, and now my Girl Scout's daily good deed is out of the way and I can relax and be mean to everyone.

Like a Commune Where No One Communes

Living in an apartment building reminds me of living in a college dorm. A bizarre, impossible college dorm where you've never met or even seen most of your floormates. But nevertheless you're privy to their smells--pot roast, laundry detergent, burnt coffee, outrageously fruity shampoo--and their smells oddly become part of what makes the place home. And while I'm not always crazy about apartment life--strangers smoking right outside my open window, awkward meetings with neighbors who won't look me in the eye, circular saws in the hallway at 8:30 in the morning--and I hope to someday live where I don't have neighbors, not close ones anyway, I've got to admit that if all the mysterious other people who live in this building left and took their smells with them, I would feel pretty lonely here.