Ta-da!

*does a backflip, cracks head on non-existent coffee table, bleeds all over carpets and floor vents*

Hey, I’m back after a widdle-biddy hiatus. (I think I had a hiatus hernia once. Ba-da-bum! The swordfish is delicious, folks. Don’t forget to tip your waitstaff. I’m here all week.)

Our guest posts have been a fat sack of squirming awesome, and I thank those who participated. All y’all got lots of looky-loos if my stats read correctly (though the “Libraries Can Suck My Ovaries” post and the “Game Balance Is Like Bigfeets And Swamp Monsters” post — ahem, re-titled for my own amusing purposes — generated a bit of extra juice in the comments). Thanks, again, all. If I can return the favor for you at some point, please do not hesitate to ask.

Meanwhile, I’ve been picking my ass up and carrying it far, far away to a brand new Wendighaus. And by “far, far away,” I mean, mmm, seven minutes. I’m only seven minutes away from the old house, but ohh what a difference those seven minutes make.

You want a scattershot update? I got a scattershot update. Back to the old-school in-no-particular-order brain-dump mode, if you’ll have it:

• Hey, guess what? Internet butt. No, no, wait, that’s not it — I have Internet. That’s what I’m trying to say. It’s all up in this bitch. It’s in the air, like an invisible miasma — a colorless, odorless gas. Verizon came in, kicked it into gear, and now I’ve got Internet that is markedly faster than what I received under Comcast. We’re talking three or four times as fast. But, it comes with a little tiny downside…

• Sweet Jesus are they an eager company. They’re like an excitable puppy. I call. I get everything setup for a day after the move. They tell me they’ll be there 6-8 hours, gotta do all kinds of stuff. Cool. Great. I say, “We are not settling on the home until that date.” What do they do? Head right on over and unload equipment and start digging a trench across the entire yard. Homeowner (i.e. not us) came home (i.e. the place she owns) and sees this and boots them off the property. After that, I get three messages — one automated call, one email, one local human — calling to confirm Thursday as the day of installation. Then when we’re literally in the middle of settlement (Wednesday), they call me and say, “We’re ready to do the work now.” Great! Except, I don’t own that house! Perhaps they’re confused about the time-space continuum and they falsely believe that Wednesday and Thursday share the same temporal footprint.

• They came then and did the work yesterday, and the subcontractor hired to finish the construction-part told me flat out, “Verizon tells us to go to sold houses and watch to make sure nobody’s home and then just do the work before they can kick us off.” Oh. Okay. That sounds above board. Totally legal. Totally not “class-action lawsuit” bait. Of course, the seller’s agent basically said that Verizon has the right of way if they really want it, since it’s an infrastructure update. So who the fuck knows? All I know is, it’s done, and I guess it’s better that they’re eager to do the work as opposed to eager to avoid the work. And it’s fast. Hot Momma, it’s zippy!

• My back hurts.

• Professional movers — movers of quality, not dubious meth addicts who bring donkeys to cart your shit around — are indispensible. I had no idea. No idea. Over the many many moves I have humped this garbage around myself with the assistance of many good friends, friends whose own bodies were tortured by the weight of my aggregate objects. Never again. The movers were fast, professional, broke nothing, and were not pricy. Pricey? Pricy? E? No e? Ehh. Costly.

• My back still hurts. Feet, too. Would’ve been worse if I was swinging boxes around, but even when you have movers you still have to pick up ungodly amounts of heaviness. Packing. Unpacking. Moving to rooms. All that. My hip hurts. My lower back throbs. My entire right thigh is numb — numb! No feeling. I’ve always had a numb patch there (doctors always seem surprisingly unconcerned by this — “Oh, it’s just your sciatica,” rather than, “You have a cluster of spinal tumors. Or xenomorph eggs”). But now I’ve clearly made it angry.

• So, if you hadn’t heard, the sellers left us stuff. Just… left it behind. By “stuff,” I mean, a flatscreen HDTV. And a home theater system (with DVD changer and surround sound). And the shelves to hold that stuff. And a microwave. And bedding (?) — like, really hoity-toity froofy-poopy bedding. Turns out, they just didn’t want to take it with them. Some combination of charity and laziness won the day, since the TV is bracketed to the wall and the theater system is actually wired through the walls. I am, of course, gracious at the inclusion, but also aware that this provides a tiny measure of trouble — the television and theater system are in a not-so-great position, a place that mysteriously doesn’t allow for the furniture necessary to watch the television. And the television is professionally-mounted, and the wall will probably need to be patched. Still, these are classic First World slash White People problems. I’ll gladly take them over, “Cockroaches tried to eat my baby last night, and the dog got arsenic poisoning from licking the faucet.”

• Our last home had a shit-ton of arsenic in the water. Well-beyond federally-accepted levels, and every couple of months we’d get a letter saying, “But it doesn’t exceed local levels, so don’t sweat it!”

• We have no arsenic in this water.

• This coffee is delicious.

• It’s quiet out there. It’s like the Forest of Endor beyond our home. You can faintly see neighbors off through the trees. And sometimes you hear a rooster. Or a dog. Or that one time, a braying donkey, a donkey clearly freaked-the-fuck-out, a donky plainly suffering under the rough and clumsy hands of a drunken proctologist.

• This is going to be a macro photo haven. It rained yesterday, and the waterdrops? The waterdrops? They’re everywhere. We’ve also got spiders galore. And, in the rain, many little frogs hopping about.

• The dogs are very confused. They seem finally to be getting it, but up until yesterday they’d occasionally visit us with an expectant look of, “We’re going home now, right?” No, little dummies, this is your home. You have more room, so go wander. Get into little adventures. (I actually just took the little dog outside between sentences, and she was happy to go exploring the woods.)

• This is still a lawless and uncertain land, a time unbound by routine. This is good and fun, but also a little disconcerting — I have to develop new patterns and habits here.

• Took some finessing (and reorienting) to figure out the Central AC. We moved in on a very, very hot and humid day (95 degrees, One Million Percent Humidity), and all day the doors were open and the AC was off. So when we kicked it on, I think the damn thing froze up a little — I know they can build up frost. The AC was working, but it really wasn’t cooling anything. Last night was mysteriously cool (55 degrees), and so we just turned it off and opened windows. This morning it seems to be working at greater efficiency.

• Our water is now filtered by UV light. This is pretty heavy science — the Magical Purple Unicorn Light castrates the mean ol’ poo particles and kicks them down a flight of steps. Yay, magical light! Yay, clean water! Huzzah, science!

• Everything is in boxes. “Hey, I need the slotted spoon.” Go find the box. “Hey, where’s that pillow?” Look for the box, or the bag. “Where’s my Magnum P.I. butt plug collection?” It’s in a box. Somewhere. It’s almost overwhelming. Where to begin? It’s not like a mountain where your only goal is to ascend to the top or descend to the base. It’s a wide open field. Each square foot, a little door. Which door first? In what order, and why? I dunno. Just start tearing through it. It’s all you can do.

Anyway. I’m back! I’m just going to ignore the fecal stains on the curtains. I’m going to forget about the clump of hair (and part of a scalp) I found in the garbage disposal. I’ll just quietly take the keys back from you apes and say no more about the trio of dead hookers arranged around a poker table in the attic.

While I was gone, anything I missed?