What a bloody weekend.
Moved everything out of the apartment…finally. Thanks to some very good friends, I was mostly out, but there was a truckload that still had to go. So Kevin and I got that out, got that unloaded, massively overestimated our own energy, and were left crawling around the house and whimpering instead of using the truck to take a load to the dump as we had planned. (Kevin has some dead furniture that mine is replacing, as well as some general junk since, y’know, we were going to the dump anyway.)
So today we got everything out to the dump…and massively overestimated our own energy…and were back at the crawl around the house and whimper stage.
So tomorrow, he’s working from home, and we’re getting the rest of the furniture out to the store that takes furniture donations…and then driving the truck back to town…and then, since I have learned how this goes, we will hopefully NOT overestimate our own energy, although we will naturally be left crawling around the house and whimpering.
Against the backdrop of all of this, we achieved a few other notable things:
A) Played the Presidential Debate Drinking Game. We observed four rules–Drink when anyone says "golden parachute," drink when someone says something about Wall Street vs. Main Street, drink when somebody challenges the other person’s facts, and drink when McCain mentions that he was a POW.
Needless to say, we were completely obliterated within the hour. (Also–WHAT is the CNN audience reaction ticker? How do they get those numbers? Is it three guys wired to electrodes or what? Regardless, it was like crack! I couldn’t look away!)
B) Destroyed Kevin’s lawn. He drove the truck over it, and the ground was wet, and then the truck slid all over hell, and then he tried to back it up to the house, and had to keep correcting the angle, with the end result that the lawn now looks like a wallow for a water buffalo. (A single, very small buffalo, with poor traction, but still.) He professes not to much care–we’re at the end of a wooded driveway, so the neighbors can’t complain, and it needed re-seeding anyway, but I feel a pang of guilt nonetheless. I will make it up to him in spring by gardening the front yard into submission.
C) Had a severe allergy attack (or possibly the last hurrah of this minor plague) and spent Saturday night in that special sinusoidal* hell of the post-nasal drip sufferer.
D) As I huddled in the passenger seat of the truck, Kevin got out to move his car so that we could play parking roulette.
Me: "You want me to do anything?"
Kevin: "Guard the truck."
I looked around the outskirts of Pittsboro, crime capital of the world. We were in a cul-de-sac at the end of a road in a rural area filled with horse farms, random cows, and occasional goats. One of his neighbors even practices falconry.** Any square foot not containing livestock generally has a church wedged into it, and any area not taken by either goats or churches has a plaster deer wearing a little seasonal outfit in it.***
"What exactly am I guarding the truck for? In case Leroy’s chicken goes on another bender?"
Kevin gave me a grim look and raised a finger. "Don’t even joke about that."
Even when I am half-dead, PMS-ing violently, have just gotten back from the dump, and my sinuses feel like the place sandpaper goes to die, the man can still make me laugh. This is a good thing.
Meanwhile, Penguin wants twenty more illustrations for Dragonbreath. (I was done! I was DONE! I feel as if I have been snatched from the abyss of victory and hurled into the chasm of defeat.) Still, the reason is at least a good one–the marketing department is very excited, and so they’re doing a big push for it, which is nothing to sneeze at, and they wanted some more stuff to work with or something like that. (And my editor admits that they are indeed torturing me, and they’re aware that what they are asking is unreasonable and cruel. Having them admit that makes up for a lot.) So back up to my eyeballs in work, although I’m continuing to make some good headway on commissions at least, and now that moving and commuting is DONE, I should manage to crawl back into normal productivity at some point…soon…I hope…
Oh, well. You can’t spell burnout without…um….Ron. CURSE YOU, RON, WHOEVER YOU ARE!
*I realize that sinusoidal has to do with geometry rather than sinuses, but damnit, it’s a gorgeous word, and I want to use it. My sinuses deserve a good word, after what they’ve been through in the last few days.
** I think the same one with a pick-up truck rusting to death in the corner of the yard. It’s a funny old world.
***The two up by the main road are quite obviously reindeer–one of them is definitely Rudolph–but theywear flowers or easter bonnets during the non-Christmas months. Somebody believes in getting the maximum mileage out of their yard art.
