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.