I’m sure I spelled the title of this post wrong. But, what do I know from Italy.

What a long, freaking day of many transitions. Work, meeting in city, detour through the new homestead, more work and then an improbable, far from the land of my roots dinner with those self-same roots.

Basically, in the nutshell, in our home town there were two houses of cousins. Of those two houses, I was the youngest, and she was the oldest. In Palo Alto, we just were. Cousins and all with different (entirely) paths in life leading to the same diner. I think our moms, the sisters, would have bee happy to see us breaking California bread.

Technorati Tags: feminists, family

As hard as it was to swing after a week looooooonnnnnnnngggggggg series of meetings and doings at work, I managed to punch off the clock at about 12 noon on Friday or so. Plans, I had plans to AT LONG FUCKING LAST USE THE KEYS THAT WERE VERITABLY BURNING A HOLE IN MY POCKET.

On Wednesday, all possible pieces of paper had been signed, the loan paperwork created some kind of Monopoly game shuffle where the rest of the theoretical worth of our newly purchased spread was passed along a chain, and our real estate agent handed off some keys. Our keys. Keys to the new house.

I headed out on Friday with the aim of some settling in and cleaning. M. showed up after his work day and prowled the house like we had broken and entered. B and E in our own shangri la.

Truth is we were both like the Clampetts, getting used to newfangled finery. Sure, we’re both accustomed to indoor plumbing, but with all new appliances, new surfaces, floors, it sure is like nothing and no where we’ve ever lived.

I was like an ancient ancestor playing with the newly invented fire for the first time when I was cleaning the kitchen sink. I thought I broke the faucet entirely or knocked something seriously loose, until I glommed onto the fact that there’s now such an invention as a pull-out spray faucet.

I honestly did not know such a fucker existed. I gotta take a shot of my own and put up on Flicker.com. Who would a thunk, though, we’d end up with plumbing technology we never knew was out there?

We rented this bad boy to get us around town and pick up an antique tea cart (of all things), which M. decided he would love on our new hardwood floors, and my new Singer sew machine built into a desk.

The best part of a weekend with a behemoth of a plain, white, unmarked paneled van was imagining all the children and whatnot we could have abducted.

Can’t you see the reenactment on Unsolved Mysteries?

By tonight, we used the van to load up a chair, love seat and coffee table for what’s amounting to M.’s rise of British-style colonialism room. (He figures a hookah and a woodcut of an old man smoking an opium pipe he saw at the consignment shop will complete the look. His tea cart looks pretty good next to my Brimfield Fair kilim from roughly a million years or a lifetime ago when I bought it for my Cambridge condo.

After signing our names repeatedly, M. and I headed down the street from our current digs to a French restaurant. He thought it was shameless scamming on my part, but smiling as the manager led us to an unreserved table in the lounge and telling him about our home buying scored us a couple of glasses of champagne. I’ll never be too proud to beg quality drinking. I was raised to enjoy a bargain and a glass of wine.

Technorati Tags: home_buying, real_estate

A long while back now, I signed a mortgage document for $63,000. I was one of those apparently now blameworthy lower middle-class folks who benefited from special programs for first time home buyers. I put about 7 percent down. A whole fucking $5K.

Hell, I bought my place from Freddie Mac, dealing with lawyers not people, because the title had a while before been repo’ed

I faced the same huge fucking ream of pieces of paper and wrist-twisting signing. Page after page of signing your name and promising and promising an promising you’ll pay for the four walls in which you’ve chosen to live. If all goes well, including my getting the cashiers check with many zeroes in the morning and getting it to the title company with the help of our agent, we’ll get the keys next week.

Fucking yikes. It’s still a cute little house, though.

I liked the old one, too. Even if I only owned the downstairs, and it was well over a hundred years old.

I’m sure it will work out just fine and dandy. M. and I will have a swell life.

And, I’ll have lemon trees to make lemonade and sell it in a little stand out front if we need some extra income. However, if I were prone to anxiety attacks, I would have been flat out shivering on the floor trying to reach for a fistful of whatever the cool kids are taking pharmacologically these days. All of my twitching, though, is rooted in theory.

When I sold the place that cost me five figures of dough in ’95, I made a good chunk of 6-digit cake in the currency of 2006. I took almost all of that money, slapped it into accounts and put it out of sight as some-day-house money. (Oh, and I went on some fun trips, like to Europe just for the hell of it, bought a friend some chips and curry in the old country, and spent the last couple of years shopping or doing whatever struck my fancy. I mean, shit, who wouldn’t with cash in pocket?)

Before the prior house sale, I had some money in the bank but not tons. I could move across the country and find the right job, but no doubt a job was a must have to live and eat.

Generally speaking I don’t have much loot just lying around. With almost a 20-year career in not-for-profit labor, a gigantic fallback portfolio of greenbacks simply ain’t in the cards. There really isn’t much difference in the way I live between your basic pink and blue bills…

…or your standard issue green with pink and other tinges.

Even though they were a windfall. Even though I didn’t use them. Even though I saved the bills for EXPRESSLY THIS PURPOSE. It’s kind of nerve racking to say goodbye. I think I need a board game to remind me that paper has no intrinsic value (apart from maybe to the originating tree).

Not to mention, this time, M.’s sharing the bills, and the news is reporting only darkness that makes a mortgage almost on par with Red-Sea parting.

Technorati Tags: California, economy, fruit_trees, home_buying, luck, mortgage, real_estate, relationship

I’ve been snookered into buying ladies’ yogurt. M. mocked me thoroughly for the prolonged yogurt-choosing process. Amusingly, I couldn’t really wedge myself in to get a good look until two other women about my age got the fuck out of the way.

I went for Jamie Lee Curtis yogurt.

I want to shit like the star of Halloween. Actually, better yet, the upcoming actress in The Fog, since we’re moving to the evocative mists of the Pacific Coast.

(Yes, it does look like we will be Pacific Ocean bound. The signing of a thousand pieces of paper and the oath of blood (signed in blood, natch) that is now a requirement in the post-bailout, credit crisis dark world is looking like it might happen on Friday. Like 4-5 days from now. Holy fucking sweet mortgage jesus.)

Back to the point of my posting. I have succumbed to marketing to yet another feminine product meant to fix up the perceived health problems of us women. Rather than a laboratory of hormones, microfibers, strings and good, old-fashioned cotton, I’ll be slurping on natural fruit flavors and a naturally occurring, “good” bacteria that a mega-international conglomerate corporation decided to rename and then say they are the only yogurt with that ingredient. Can they do that?

Maybe it’s my white woman, middle-class demographic. Or, maybe it’s the true, real and horrible fact, that my inside workings ain’t never felt quite like the olden days, since I journeyed hither and non in Uganda. You know, deep down my guts are those of a parochial girl who never left Braintree.

Technorati Tags: age, CurrentTV, current.com, Target: Women, California, mortgage, Pacifica, Jamie_Lee_Curtis, real_estate, social_networking, Uganda, women, travel

Let me get this straight, when Obama uses a little Deval Patrick he’s a plagiarizing weasel, but when Palin spends the night spinning Reagan’s corpse in the grave she’s orating? Did I get that right?

In case there is any question about her using someone else’s word, go ahead and read the transcript and search a few of the phrases that seemed a bit too smooth. Even the scripted “there you go again,” came from someone else’s improv. The flagrant bit was in her closing statements. I’ll let the New Republic weblog spell that one out. “Sunset years,” my ass.

Actually, it’s really interesting to read the transcripts. The YouBetchas and darns and doggones seem highly cheesy but authentic (like the mom’s of my childhood who would say “god love ya,” and “Jesus, Mary and Joseph”). Authentic seemingly are the strange outpouring of words in different directions. But, all in all, I think it’s safe to say she had a whole lot of fucking help to even get this far.

I mean, come on is there actually a verb predicate kind of thingy here?

PALIN: A two-state solution is the solution. And Secretary Rice, having recently met with leaders on one side or the other there, also, still in these waning days of the Bush administration, trying to forge that peace, and that needs to be done, and that will be top of an agenda item, also, under a McCain-Palin administration.

Technorati Tags: 2008_Campaign, Biden, campaign, Campaign 2008, debate, Democrats, economy, elections, GOP, Palin

What could I add when the only thought I have is what the fuck? What the serious, god on fucking high (if you believe in that and apparently she does, more than book learning), what sweet mystery of jesus is going on?

This answer is not a fucking answer. Or, really, it’s the kind of answer you give when you have no books in your house. No books (well, maybe the Bible and her kids school books). No newspapers. No periodicals. No information of a factual nature.

COURIC: And when it comes to establishing your world view, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this — to stay informed and to understand the world?

PALIN: I’ve read most of them again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media —

COURIC: But what ones specifically? I’m curious.

PALIN: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years.

COURIC: Can you name any of them?

PALIN: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news.

I have to call the editor of Foreign Policy tomorrow (for reals). Maybe I should ask him to send a free subscription to old Sarah.

Technorati Tags: 2008_Campaign, Politics, Sarah_Palin, Palin, television

The inspection went swimmingly.

Everything wrong with the little house was just the kind of thing normal people live with everyday of their living lives. Oh no, there’s a one-inch strip on the windowsill where it must have gotten wet some time in the last 54 years. And, apparently, subterranean termites, who live every fucking where in this weather-friendly, little state, are eating a board in the back yard.

The upshot is we are moving so fast toward actually moving that I may have heart attack. But, by god, it’s a sweet little house.

I really think I like this feature the best of all.

There’s something about the brick, in it’s pinkish, brownish glory, that screams suburban California somewhere between 1954 and 1972. Wonderful.

Sadly, I think it’s both a positive and negative that M. and I are sharing a creative vision of decorating it up all mid-century modern leisure living. I see a lot of molded plastic and plywood in our future.

The sadness is our shared vocabulary. The look we’re going for would be evoked by say “The Valley,” aka San Fernando Valley, aka 70s pornos. Irrepressible as I am, I, of course, mentioned pornos to the dude at the Design within Reach who responded with speechlessness and a kind of stunned, quizzical look on his face. Henceforth, I have only referred to Boogie Nights. Somehow, a movie about the porn industry in the 70s seems more civil descriptively than the real deal.

As a co-worker pointed out, it’s motherfucking art. Just check out this link for proof, and do a Google search for Larry Sultan and enjoy the mix of suburban and adult. How can I not save up for a hot tub some day?

M. has a smidge more class than me. He thinks we should aim for Johnny Depp’s drug-money acquired beach pad in Blow.

Technorati Tags: beach, California, movies, mortgage, real_estate, surfer

Who knew there was a fucking infomercial about shit. Literally.

Dual Action Cleanse. A high tech, “natural” laxative with all sorts of fake information about how much poop can hurt you. Did you know you probably have toxins in your poop that are best depicted dramatically by a crop duster?

Better yet, if you are fat, it may in fact be poo.

Like all good infomercials, there are endorsements. Some Asian chick actually can feel herself transform to lighter and cleaner after a good grunt. An African American woman talks about how you overhear people all the time saying something to the affect of “You know, I ate a big meal yesterday, and I still haven’t…” Where-o-where, lady, do you overhear such chatter?

It was a very rainbow of diversity commercial. I think that’s because, well, Everyone Poops.
Apparently, the goal is to shit like a child, because they do it up right and large.

From now on, I shall strive to be more vigilant about monitoring whether my own releases are “short” or “thin.” Thin I actually get, but I’ll have to really ponder the short.

Technorati Tags: infomercials, television, Uganda