In Which We Stop and Smell the Baby

10 June 2003

Welcome to hyperdrive. Go mode. Etc. I am not usually as intense as I can be, and I'm afraid that the next few days will come much closer to the possible intensity than most. Don't know that that will be visible in the journal, though.

They sent us a notice last week that the water would be shut off today from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Crud. Well, all right; we've filled the kettle and the juice pitcher and the Brita, and I washed down the deck yesterday and will handle the floors and other things that require water tomorrow. Timprov will likely be sleeping into the afternoon at least, and Mark will be at work, so it's just me. It could be worse. It could, however, be much, much better. If they had done this two weeks from today, for example, that would have been much, much better.

Also, our AC is still not fixed. When we went down to sign the new lease yesterday, Anna-in-the-office told me that they swore to her they'd be here between noon and 5:00. Okay. So, since I showered early, before they shut off the water, I'm all ready to head to the grocery store early, so that I can be doing in-house tasks from noon to 5:00, on the off chance that they actually show up when they said. What I will not be doing here, from noon to 5:00, is holding my breath.

It doesn't really matter that the AC doesn't work today, as it's only supposed to get to 67 here. But having a functional AC when seven family members show up might be a good idea. Just in case.

While I was washing the deck yesterday, Timprov woke up. For those of you still catching up, Timprov has a fairly screwed-up sleep schedule, where I use the word "schedule" to mean "utter lack of any physical possibility of schedule." In mid-morning, a couple hours after we had given him good nights, his aunt Judy wrote to me and said that his cousin and his cousin's family were in town, and did we want to come see them? So when Timprov woke up and I came in from scrubbing the deck, we talked about it and determined that today was right out: he hadn't seen Lee in years and didn't want to greet him stinking from lack of shower because the plumbing would be shut off. And Wednesday would have been difficult for Mark to arrange, so all of a sudden we were getting cleaned up and heading to Mill Valley right then.

We got to hang out with Stan and Judy, which is always good. And Timprov got to see Lee and Lee's son Sean and meet Lee's fiancée Fondly, and also Lee and Fondly's son Eric. And Mark and I got to meet all four of them. Sean is about 13 (I guess), and he was a good kid hanging out with grown-ups all night. Eric is 8 or 9 months old. He smelled like clean baby, and it had been entirely too long since I got to smell clean baby. I took him around Stan and Judy's house showing him cool things and telling him the names of them. He desperately wishes he could walk and talk. Very sweet baby.

So even in hyperdrive, I can be flexible if there's good cause. I didn't get to read much of The Years of Rice and Salt, but I'm not all that excited by it at this point, so...whatever. It'll keep until I have a moment to take a break today without having something I "should" do popping up on my radar. Whenever that is.

I sent out "The Little Feet Go Pitter-Pat" yesterday, and also another edited short-short called "Seven a.m. Pacific Time." I've been squinting at the latter for months and finally decided that, yes, it was a story, and worth reading, so out it went. I have Not The Moosing to do today, as well as work on "Rest Stop," most likely. People to call, packages to wrap, letters to write.

In the meantime, it sounds like rush hour is over on Mission. Off I go for groceries. Have a good Tuesday.

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