Goes Nowhere, Does Nothing

(And, why, yes, I am pretty much just copying frozencapybara's post verbatim. It's a good post, and I'm lazy. :)

As of today, we are officially homeowners.

Background: After a monumentally depressing few days involving another house that looked good on the first glance but fell off our list after a second visit, we pretty much stopped talking about the house hunt -- to anyone. This didn't change when frozencapybara attended a promising open house, or when we made an offer on the house the next day, or as we've been madly running around trying to finalize the deal since then. We didn't post about it in the first few weeks because a) we are masters of irrational paranoia and superstition, and b) if the deal did fall through, as we discovered with the first house we made an offer on, it's even more of a bitch to have to explain it to everyone later. And then we didn't post because, well, it'd been a week and why bother, and we'll post later, etc.

So, as of about 11:30 AM today, we have signed a whole lot of papers, are in a whole lot of debt (we're told it's "good debt" :), and are members of the landed gentry, so if this were 1794, I would be able to vote. Too bad the primary's already over.

(frozencapybara demands credit for that joke, which is only fair.)

Details we are willing to share over LJ:

• The house is in Millis, MA, which you've probably never heard of.
  
• Millis is a tiny little town southwest of Boston, about midway between 128 and 495. It is mostly rural, and despite being well within 495, has a much more rural feel than where we are now. As we are both originally from the middle of nowhere, we are very happy about this.
  
• The house is a split-level built in the late 60s. It is mostly beige-colored with some brick on the front.
  
• Pictures of the house, both interior and exterior, can be found here.
  
• We're not posting the address on LJ. We plan to send out a "we've moved" email to people we think will care that we've moved by the end of May. If you want to know the address before that, drop me an email - we don't mind giving it out at this point, we're just not bothering with the mass email until it's more relevant. Similarly, if you want to know the address and haven't gotten an email by the end of May, let me know, and don't be offended, we're sure we'll forget a number of critical people.
  
• Yes, we will need help with painting. Also, if you have an opinion on what color the living room should be, let me know. It is currently a horrible greyish pink. We're thinking a light bluish purple.
  

And now, off to celebrate with a bottle of the good booze. :)

It's naptime again, so it's blogtime again...

( Wednesday night: On the neon, neon side of town. )
( Thursday: Nowhere to go but up. )
( Thursday night: Stick a fork in it. )
( Friday: Je ne comprends pas cela. Il doit être de l'art. )

(Mme. LaPlante would be ashamed of how long it took me to sort out that title. My French knowledge has atrophied to a tryly pitiful extent over the last 18 years.)

( Sunday: Make a run for the border. )
( Monday: Where do we go from here? )

Well, if I'm ever going to use my LJ for anything, I should probably use it for this.

staralshain and I are engaged.

As of a bit over a week ago, actually -- we've been trying to track people down individually since then. To the people we managed to notify earlier, consider the gag order lifted. :)

(And just to head off the first question, no, we don't know when yet.)

Ah, why not. It's staralshain's fault.

The state meme! Bolded states are ones I've visited (i.e. gotten out of the car to visit things which are not gas stations or rest stops), bolded and italicized are ones I've lived in for more than a month, underlined are ones I've passed through (in a car, or stopped in the airport). Ones that have no font augmentation are ones I haven't been to.

1) Alabama, 2) Alaska, 3) Arizona, 4) Arkansas, 5) California, 6) Colorado, 7) Connecticut, 8) Delaware, 9) Florida, 10) Georgia, 11) Hawaii, 12) Idaho, 13) Illinois, 14) Indiana, 15) Iowa, 16) Kansas, 17) Kentucky, 18) Louisiana, 19) Maine, 20) Maryland, 21) Massachusetts, 22) Michigan, 23) Minnesota, 24) Mississippi, 25) Missouri, 26) Montana, 27) Nebraska, 28) Nevada, 29) New Hampshire, 30) New Jersey, 31) New Mexico , 32) New York, 33) North Carolina, 34) North Dakota, 35) Ohio, 36) Oklahoma, 37) Oregon, 38) Pennsylvania, 39) Rhode Island, 40) South Carolina, 41) South Dakota, 42) Tennessee, 43) Texas, 44) Utah, 45) Vermont, 46) Virginia, 47) Washington, 48) West Virginia, 49) Wisconsin, 50) Wyoming.

Which is worse? To not get enough sleep, or to get plenty of sleep, but spend the last three hours of the night having a series of dreams in which you have overslept and/or forgotten to set your alarm, thus missing most of your day at work?

As you might have guessed, last night was the latter. Let me tell you, waking up repeatedly in a minor panic from 5am to 8am was a blast.

It was a good weekend, all told. NYE madness at jikharra and keshwyn's domicile was a blast. (Ok, everyone, count down the seconds as we watch the staticky and blurry I-think-that's-the-ball drop. ;) Was a particularly nice surprise to see mephron, who I had no idea was going to be in the state, let alone in Somerville, that night. I guess I missed another memo. And I once again got stomped by other ninjas (ninjae?), so it appears 2004 will be much like the year that preceded it. :)

Thursday felt like Saturday. Friday felt like Saturday. Saturday, much to my surprise, still felt like Saturday... and most of it was spent either sleeping in or at the Milford Humane Society, as staralshain made the 45-minute trek southwest for our first of (hopefully) many volunteer stints at the shelter. We were there for about four hours, most of it spent cleaning up for and feeding the not-yet-socialized semi-feral cats in the back rooms. As much as the more socialized "front room" cats are fun to be around, I think I prefer spending time with the semi-ferals. It's very rewarding, to me, to see one of those cats (especially the ones in the "B Room", the ones least trusting of people) come up to me and pet them a little bit, or even just let me get close enough for them to hesitantly sniff my hand. It's very slow progress, and I suspect I could do this for a year and most of them still won't trust people very much, but if I can help them take even a tiny step closer to getting out of those back rooms and into a good home, that's worth the effort to me.

The trick will be finding the time... I think Saturdays are the only days we'll be able to volunteer (due to time, distance, and work schedules), and even those will be sporadic. But, well, it's better than nothing.

Oh, and you should have seen Taichou after we returned home. He sniffed at staralshain very suspiciously, for a good long while. ("HEY! You've been playing with OTHER CATS! I bet you even FED them! Why do you hate me?" :)

Me. As of about 20 minutes ago.

Planes took off, landed. I am not dead.

Texas is too goddamn flat.

Cirque du Soleil continues to rock.

That is all... at least until I get eight hours of sleep (for the first time this week).

Received just now in my work email:

Happy thanksgiving. Thanks to you and for you for all you do.
Stephanie

Stephanie Massengill
HEALTHvision.com
[contact info snipped]
Connecting healthcare to people

NOTICE: This email contains confidential or proprietary information that may be legally privileged. It is intended only for the named recipient(s). If an addressing or transmission error has misdirected the email, please notify the author by replying to this message. If you are not the named recipient, you are not authorized to use, disclose, distribute, copy, print or rely on this email, and should immediately delete it from your computer system.

<meri> i got home, made dinner, fell asleep until 10. woke up, stayed up til midnight. fell asleep until 2. woke up, stayed up til 4. fell asleep until 6. etc, etc.
<truss> You need to set your REPEAT_INTERVAL to something longer. :)
<meri> truss: no kidding. it was kind of amusing, but really annoying.
* Truss would very much like access to his .config file.