Boys Is Boys

I'm raining down delighted destruction upon some of the more errant of my eyebrow hairs when I hear, wafting up from the livingroom,

"I think I have some duct tape in the truck."

I freeze, tweezers poised, and yell, "You are not duct-taping the walls!"  Silence from below, then a muttered,

"...think she'd let us duct tape the window?"

I roll my eyes at my reflection, but it's counterbalanced by the wave of affection swelling up in my bosom.  You see, the person threatening duct tape on my dwelling is my brother, who has come down for a visit.  He and Nathan have teamed up for the very serious masculine pursuit of Watching Football, but in order to watch the next game (Oregon vs LSU) they needed an antenna (which Nathan went out and bought) but more importantly they need the antenna to work, so apparently now they are now... doing things to get it to work.

I think I hear Nathan say something about painter's tape (I relax ever-so-slightly at that) and the next clear snippet of conversation that floats up is him saying,

"You hold,  I'll tape."

Which makes me giggle.  Few things in life make me so happy as having my loved ones near, and the combination of my husband and my brother, those two most beloved males, is enough to put me into Constant Purr Mode.  I finish up my eyebrows and decide to join them...

...and they've left me a spot on the couch.

(That's the Georgia game on the smaller screen.)

Adulthood Achieved

I open the mailbox and give a little squeak of delight as I see the new issue of Real Simple awaiting my careful attentions.  But once I start pawing through the rest of the mail during my saunter up the driveway, the real joy comes.  For there, amidst the statements and the junk mail, is a hand-addressed card.

Ooo, I think.  Real mail!

And I recognize the hand, as well: it is the elegant penmanship of my old-world grandmother.

Hmph, I think.  I wonder what this is all about.

And then I realize what I'm looking at.  Because the card is not addressed to "Mrs. R" or even "Mr. and Mrs. R".  It is addressed to "O-R"

My face splits into a giant grin.  What miracle is this?  Has my grandmother finally accepted that I kept my surname?  After less than three full years?   Hot diggity!

So I go inside and open the little card up, and do you know what it is?  It's a thank you card.  A thank you card!  Now, maybe this is not a big deal to you, but to me?  Oh, this is huge.  You see, I've been sending thank you cards to my grandmother for as long as I've been able to hold a writing implement, because they are important to her and I don't want to make my mother look like she can't raise a properly courteous daughter (in time I came to enjoy writing thank you cards for their own sake, but that is another story).  But never once in all that time have I received a thank-you card for any of the gifts or cards I've sent to her over the years.

Until today.

It's a lovely little card, full of sincere gratitude for the photos I'd sent and compliments for the house, and  it just makes me feel so very, very happy.  Because now I know that I've finally made it; no longer am I a little girl in my grandmother's eyes, too frivolous to know what I want.

No, now I know I'm adult, with all the honors, rights, and privileges pertaining thereto (including my own name).

Nerd: A Tale of Faking and Making

I have a confession to make.

I hate wearing my helmet.  I hate it so much.  And not just because I hate how it physically feels, pressing my sweat-soaked hair against my equally sweat-soaked scalp, denying me the glorious sensation of wind that is the natural born right of everyone who straddles a bike.  No, my hatred and resentment goes beyond that.  I hate wearing my helmet because in spite of all my ballsy proclamations that, "Safety is sexy!", the truth of the matter is that my helmet makes me look like a nerd.  A nerdy-goody-two-shoes-rule-follower.  And I cannot stand knowing that I look like a nerd, gentle readers...

...because I am a nerd.

I'm not talking about being a geek.  I'm not talking about my love of science fiction and fantasy, of my proclivity for reading comic books and playing RPGs, or of my sporadic status as "girl gamer".  None of these things make me uncool (helllllooo geek-chic).  But my deep-rooted instinct to be a "good girl"?  To play it safe?  Total nerdsville.  And I am... still kind of insecure about that.

I know, I know- I am probably the least insecure person you know.  I not only am fully aware of my own awesomeness, I am fully willing to go on- at length!- about it to anyone who cares to listen.  Fer Pete's sake, I write a blog.  Obviously I do not have self-esteem issues, here.  And for the most part that's very true... but what's also true is that my self-confidence is a decades-old, carefully cultivated facade that has slowly but surely become reality.  I acted confident and uncaring-of-others'-opinions until it became the truth.  More or less.  But deep deep down I am afraid that any minute now people are going to look at me, see past my tattoos and bright lips and uninhibited dancing and realize:

This girl freaks out about jaywalking.  Cool people do not take pause at the prospect of jaywalking.

Cool people do not wear helmets, because cool people do bother to think about the consequences of not wearing helmets.  Or, if they are really cool, they do wear helmets, and don't even think about whether or not they look cool because hey- cool people are cool no matter what they do.

Which brings us back to me being a nerd.  I am a nerd because I am afraid that people will see a nerd when they look at me.  Not because of anything that I do, or wear, but because of who and what I am.

But I will pretend that I don't care what people think when they see me wearing my dorktastic helmet and one of these days... it will be true.

Meeting (one of) the Neighbors

Our First Night went pretty well, all things considered.  We weren't able to get the box spring up the stairs (we'll be picking up some plywood at a later date) so our mattress went right on the frame, which helped make our very large room seem even larger.  We sat in bed for a while just marveling.

We took showers, and learned which windows really need curtains ("Hi neighbors!").  We discussed the placement of furniture and potential future additions.  We decided that a ceiling fan is high on our list of "must-have" improvements.  It was all very domestic and good.

After I brushed my teeth I started hearing a strangely rhythmic clinking.  At first I thought we had a leak in the sink, but after about five minutes of me "Shhh!"ing Nathan (because it kept stopping and starting at random) and creeping around from place to place, I finally decided it must be coming from outside... and I could hear music, too, and maybe someone singing...

Suddenly Nathan announced, "He's practicing drumming!  That weird noise- that's the ride cymbal!"

Mystery solved, we talked about whether nor not we should go ask him to keep it down.  "After all," I reasoned, "It's almost eleven o'clock."  I volunteered to be the one to go down (I'm better at getting my way in such a manner that the other party thinks I'm doing them a favor), but as I got dressed we realized the noise had stopped.

"Maybe he only practices until eleven?"

Well with that problem solved I got undressed again, crawled into bed, and promptly fell asleep...

...only to be jerked awake a little after midnight by even louder (and, to be honest, more offensive-to-my-ears: I'm not such a fan of death metal) music, accompanied by correspondingly enthusiastic practice-drum noises.

Once again I pulled pants and shirt on, stumbled downstairs, fumbled my shoes on, and went over to meet our musically-inclined neighbor.  I went out through our front gate and walked over to their fenced-in-patio and said (in my best nonthreatening, adorable female voice),  "Excuse me,"

No break in the drumming.  So I turn up my own volume.

"''Scuse me!"  and a startled head pops up over the fence like a paranoid meerkat.  He's younger than us, and shirtless, and quite possibly... in an altered state of mind.

"Hi," I say, giving my best sleepy-yet-charming smile.  "Could you turn it down a little?"

"Oh!  Oh yeah, sure.  Sorry," and he disappears to do so as I'm offering up my, "We just moved in..." segue.  I trail off, because he is staying disappeared and obviously we are done here.

Possibly my charm is not as charming as it used to be.

But that's alright, because if nothing else, at least one neighbor is quite reasonable.

Carnivores and Their Habit(at)s

Nathan took the day off from work today, and our friend Todd helped him move all the furniture into the new place.  When I got home Nathan looked more or less like this:

(That's where the couch used to be.)

It was exhausting just looking at him, so I took a nice half-hour long break to recover.

Once I was feeling refreshed, we hauled over a few more bins, and did a bit of furniture arranging (and I managed to take a chunk out of the wall, so I guess I can't stop worrying about when I'll do that) and then Nathan grilled us our very first meal at Timaru: a couple of petite sirloins.

Aaaaand then we realized that while we had thought to bring over the plates, we somehow didn't think to grab the silverware.  But if you're going to be eating meat you may as well be a barbarian about it, right?  Right.  So we tore in with our bare fingers and teeth, sitting in the backyard and enjoying the breeze from the west.

It was delicious.

And now?  Now we get to spend our first night in our new home.  Huzzay!

New Neighbors

"Do you think they're nice?"

"I don't think it matters if they're nice, because we're not going to talk to them.  We're not even going to let them see us.  In fact, we ought to leave now."

"Pssh, don't be such a nymph.  They're too busy carrying stuff to notice us.  Nobody said anything about not watching them."

"It's implied."

"Oh it is not.  Anyway you can leave if you want to.  Then there won't be any witnesses."

"Witnesses for what?"

"Doesn't matter- you won't be here."

"Fine.  I'll stay.  But only to keep you out of trouble!"

"...I like the look of that one."

"Which one?"

"The female.  Look at her eyes- she has proper eyes, all slanty like ours."

"So does the male."

"Yeah, but he looks grumpy.  She looks... like she still believes in fairies."

"Don't be ridiculous.  You know the grown ones never believe in fairies."

"That one does.  I can tell."

"You'd better hope she doesn't.  The last thing we need is for her to recognize signs of our presence.  Then we'd have to move again, and I like it here."

Pemberly, Tara, Ashgrove... and Timaru

That is a Smooch of Ownership.

The last two evenings have been spent in a whirlwind of dusting and scrubbing and vacuuming, but now at last our new home is at the super-ultra-clean Starting Point I wanted it to be.  Nathan, game fellow that he is, went along with the madness in spite of his firmly stated opinion that the house was already clean.  (And it was, but not by my inner-German-grandmother standards...)

Which means that now we can start moving stuff in- which we did, actually.  Mostly just a few (of the many) boxes of books, but it's deeply satisfying to see some of our stuff in our house.  Which, as you may have gathered, I have christened "Timaru".  I came across the word in a poem and thought, "Oh what a lovely sound- that would be a perfect name for our new house!"  And then I thought, "Hmm, I'd better make sure it doesn't mean something like 'dung beetle'," so I looked it up and lo-and-behold, it's a city in New Zealand that takes its name from the Māori phrase Te Maru, meaning 'place of shelter'.  Which means that "Timaru" is, in fact, the perfect name for our new house.