A peppercorn in the first swallow

2004-07-31 - 9:17 p.m.

The night before last, while I was in bed, I picked something up from my bed and from underneath it came a swarm of black bugs flying straight for me. I leaped out of bed, upsetting a pile of junk from my chair, ducked down below the edge of my bed and grabbed my flashlight, which I keep nearby for just such occasions. I shined my light over my sheets and realized that there were no bugs and in fact there was no object for me to have lifted for them to have come from under. Yes, it was just a dream. I crawled back into bed, but kept the flashlight close at hand in case I should need it again that night. I really feel sorry for the man who marries me, if ever I get married. He's sure going to have to put up with a lot of crap.

Last night, for no reason whatsoever, I stayed up until four in the morning just messing around. I was sorta thinking that this morning I would get up and go jogging, since I haven't done that in a while, but when my alarm went off the first thing that went through my mind was, "There's no way in hell..." and I rolled over and went back to sleep. Perhaps tomorrow morning? I don't plan on staying up nearly so late tonight, but then I didn't plan on staying up late last night either.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, I didn't hear from the WA board today. I wonder how many more times I'm going to have to type that.

As I mentioned before, yesterday we got a new garage door. Our garage is stuffed full of junk, but in order for the door to be installed, we had to move a whole lot of the junk out. What better opportunity to clean? My mom is a neat freak, my dad is a pack rat. I'm both, but my pack rat tendencies are definitely dominant. Today, though, the neat freak surfaced. I decided that instead of just moving all the junk back into the garage, we were going to go through it and throw some of it away. If I had had my way, we would've thrown a lot more of it away, but my dad wasn't going to stand for that. My mom has a chest of sewing stuff that belonged to my grandmother that she's been wanting to put into the room that was originally my dad's office. This room is attached to the master bedroom and, scarily enough, it makes the garage look tidy. I had fun cleaning, straightening, and organizing stuff in that room until the chest fit. And to make my dad happy, I only threw away one thing--a new car buying guide from 1979. After that I decided that some of the stuff that we pulled out of the garage that we never use but my dad won't part with could actually be put in the shed we have in the backyard. The shed is one of those aluminum jobs and it's filled with, yes, you guessed it, junk. And black widows. For an arachnophobe like me, that shed is a nightmare, but I put on long pants, a long-sleeved shirt and gloves and went for it. I pulled everything out of the shed and layed it out in the backyard for my dad to look at. I killed seventeen black widows in the process. I got my dad to agree to throw away a lot of the junk from the shed and then I got it all cleaned up and the rest of the stuff put back in neatly, but while I was doing that, my dad put the stuff from the garage that I was planning on moving to the shed back in the garage. Oh well, you can't win 'em all. But now the shed's clean, the garage's clean, and my dad's ex-office is reorganized. I have an aching back, but I also have a nice feeling of accomplishment like perhaps getting myself out of bed this morning was worth the effort. That's been quite a rare feeling for me lately.