19 March 2001
I'm at home today, which is why I'm posting a little late. I feel sortof absurd for being home. I'm not actually sick. But I did spend all day yesterday wrestling with allergies - mostly just the sniffles, but they're the sort of half-stopped-up sniffles that make breathing a chore, so I only got about three hours of sleep last night. When Matt's alarm went off this morning and I could barely drag my eyes open, I decided to call in sick and get some more sleep.
I'm still sniffling. I think after I've showered and gotten dressed, I'll head up to the CVS to see what kinds of drugs I can buy. I suppose I should start back on my Claratin, too.
We spent most of Saturday helping Jeremy and Elizabeth move to their new house. Except for the wallpaper in dubious taste (made to spec to match the previous owner's furniture, and no one else's), I think I'm jealous - their house is not only enormous, but has a large, beautiful yard. And there's a children's playhouse in the back yard that I'm sure would make a perfect potting shed.
We'd asked Jeremy's ex-neighbor, Max, to move his car so we could get the U-Haul as close to Jeremy's ex-apartment as possible. Well, actually, Jeremy had asked Max's wife, who then rousted Max out of bed to move the car. (She's not a selfish bitch, she's blind.) As Jeremy was backing the U-Haul into the spot, Max himself came along and started in on a diatribe, the gist of which was that if he'd known it was Jeremy, he wouldn't have agreed to move the car. Asshole.
After the U-Haul was unloaded at the new house, the boys took off to return the U-Haul and to bring a second load of stuff from the apartment in their cars. Elizabeth and Kris and I unpacked for a while. Despite having carried stuff up and down the stairs all morning without incident, when Elizabeth asked me to go downstairs for a knicknack we'd uncovered earlier, I tripped going down the stairs emptyhanded, and twisted my ankle. It holds my weight, so it's neither broken nor sprained - but it's pretty badly strained.
But other than that, the move went off pretty well. The six of us went to Ruby Tuesday's for dinner, where the frustration of an hour-long wait for a table was somewhat ameliorated by the presence of what appeared to be a convention of pirates. When we were waiting outside, we saw a tall man with dark curly hair to the small of his back, a tricorn hat, and an old-fashioned red ship's captain's coat. We immediately dubbed him "Captain Hook."
We found out later that there was a show going on in Williamsburg: Military Through the Ages. So that probably accounted for it.
Sunday morning I was up bright and early (well, 8:30) and working in the garden. I turned over all the dirt and pulled out weeds. I pulled enough weeds to fill our dumpster almost a quarter full. (Oh, my aching back...) Then I sprinkled the ground liberally with perlite, to help aerate the clay soil, and turned that in.
I'd planned to also add fertilizer to the ground yesterday, but I had a thought: I almost certainly missed some weeds. Why give them anything to work with until I absolutely have to? So I'll wait until just before I'm ready to actually plant the vegetables before I turn in the fertilizer.
While I was recovering from this effort, Matt and I both goofing off on our respective computers, our doorbell rang. It turned out to be Carl, who said he'd been sent by Colleen to find out if we were going to the Military Through the Ages show. We told him no, and he sat and chatted with us for a while.
Eventually, he got around to telling us why he'd really been sent - he wanted to borrow my digital camera.
I don't mind admitting I was somewhat dubious. Things lent to Colleen have a better-than-even chance of never coming home again. But I didn't have a good excuse, so I made Carl promise to bring it back that evening, took out the disk I was currently using, and gave it to him.
Somewhat to my surprise, the Trinity (Colleen, Carl, and Richard) showed up around dinnertime to return the camera. While the smell of both campfire and cigarette smoke that clung to their clothes tormented my allergies, they sat and chatted with us for a while.
I had just been thinking that we hadn't heard from them for three or so months, and it was time for them to show up unexpectedly. I guess we won't hear from them again until summer, now.
Word of the Day:
diaphanous - characterized by such fineness of texture as to permit seeing through; ethereal; insubstantial, vague
Currently Reading:
- The White Plague by Frank Herbert
Current Projects:
- sniffling