There's of course some bad news too...

...but I couldn't be all Debbie Downer from the get-go. First, the house is old. A hundy, abouts. So in the remodel they jacked up the floors while reinforcing the foundation, all in order to keep the pritty pritty hardwoods. Apparently it's not an exact science, so walking in a straight line from the front door to the back gives me Mardi Gras flashbacks. I have yet to get my sea legs, and I'm blaming my first-morning-hangover on motion sickness. No way was it the three beers. Three beers. Number two in the sad state of the union. I have lost my tolerance for alcohol. There will be no lazy afternoon sipping IPAs on the back deck, unless I nurse one pitiful little Coors Lite until it's just warm piss water. Which is marginally worse than the cold fizzy piss water it starts out as. They call it the Silver Bullet, but everyone knows Coors is shootin blanks.

Number three... downsizing and the invevitable overflow of incredibly confusing belongings. If my key bowl could talk, it would be speechless. If my desk could communicate, it would cry. And if Pooey's room weren't inanimate it would apoplectic.






But we got this going, which is nice. The books are still on holiday. They will return happy, as we all do when we take a long vacation in a storage unit.


Alas, my house is a lesbian living in a straight appliance world, like sending Ellen and Porscia to Utah. She digs this stove, also a lesbian, but I'm afraid the Appliance Church will send them to Reconfiguration Camp, or whatever the old boys are calling it. (Secretly, the stove will just buy a strap-on and they'll go on as spinster roommates to appease the Appliance Elders.)

Mission Accomplished

Yeah, Mission Accomplished - I should be shouting it from the deck of an aircraft carrier. Which is to say, we are officially out of the other house and officially splattered all over the new house. The dishes are in the cupboards, and the beds are made. The rest of it looks like the factory where the Ark goes at the end of Indian Jones. Except imagine all those boxes in one room the size of Chevy Suburban. Madeleine knows better than to ask me to find her rain boots, scissors, alarm clock, little brother, etc.

A few signs we've left the suburbs:
-Our new neighbor with the hubcap art is a professional piano tuner. His wife is an urban gardener. Her friend across the street is a bird rehabilitator and the guy two houses down makes hand-carved birdhouses. They carry their groceries in cloth bags and pretend not to notice when the temporary paper shades fall down in the bathroom mid-BM.

-Yesterday when both toilet were plugged (damn Heffeweizen) we all walked to the corner store to get a plunger (our two are probably packed with the champagne glasses and antique linens, given the spastic packing in the final days). The store didn't have one, but the owner offered to lend us hers. We declined and received two other offers on our walk home. Yes, I did openly advertise our over-active bowels. Apparently this is how you make friends in the city.

-We've taken to locking our cars at night. The first night we did this, and neglected to see that the passenger doors were wide open on the opposite side of both cars. The urban gardener shut them for us. I was a little disappointed, hoping someone would come along and steal the 800 lb hand-me-down sewing maching. What the hell is a sewing maching anyway?

-Sirens. Last night there were many. A guy a mile from here blew himself and his garage up while tinkering with homemade fireworks. Jim and I, not less than one hour earlier, were wondering if we could implode OUR garage like they do with old buildings. Now we know - yes, but we may have to be airlifted out of the wreckage.

-Birds live in the city. Lots of them, but they all stop singing when the unruly pack of crows come along and crash the party. Crows are the Hell's Angels of the avian world.

Moving wasn't terrible, and the new house fits us. I'll be back later when I feel more articulate. I seem to have lost some of my faculties in the sea of cardboard and crumpled newspaper.

A deluxe apartment in the sky.

We're all movers and shakers these days, aren't we? Thursday's the day. We're closing in the afternoon and need to be completely out by the evening. How much have I packed, you ask? Does throwing away ten pounds of ugly preschool art from the back of our Subaru count? This afternoon, after we go sign Madeleine up for soccer at The Y, we're making the rounds to the print shops to get boxes. Then they'll sit in the living room, collecting stray Playmobil parts and uneaten chunks of cheese until Wednesday night, at which point my period will start, as will the moving angst and irrational crying. I'm saving up the champagne for the grand fete!

Madeleine whimpered herself to sleep last night, as she finally realized we're not going to be in this house at the end of the week. No amount of cajoling would shake her sadness (Dairy Queen will be two blocks away! The new house has mice in the garage! You can hide Pooey in the closet!). But I get it. It IS sad, and we've decided to have a Moving In party to welcome our new house into our family. (Heretofore unparalleled levels of sappiness. I know.) I'm sure House will be an exemplary family member, what with the sheltering, warming and allowing us to wash and poo in it properties.

I've gotta cut this short. Madeleine overheard me talking about soccer sign-ups and donned her fake jersey (#8 taped on the back of a t-shirt with electrical tape and silky shorts that are most likely swim trunks) and tiny soccer shoes and is practicing against the dog.

Here's the new place...

The first thing Jim said was, "Well, at least the tree is leaning away from the place..." That's high praise.


The view through the front window, better known as "The view the neighbors will see in the morning when I run down the stairs half-dressed to a wailing confused child or to take out the trash. Depending on the day."


Cool. There's hubcap art next door. I fucking hate neighborhood associations.


The view through the back window, or better known as "Mignon, buy yourself some goddamn clothes. You're not always on your way to soccer practice any more."

Hurling, hurtling, hurting, and in between there were sandy beaches and laughter.

Well, that was different. I woke up the morning we were to leave for Portland with that familiar unwelcome tickle in my throat. Three hours later my nose was full of cement, not to be breached for another five days. It serves me right for my repeated criticism of the piss-poor restaurant selection in Missoula. I flew to Portland, to partake in the culinary ecstasy, only to be denied my sense of taste. And to reinforce how wrong I was to say Missoula's beloved Noodle Express sucks ass, my kids got sick too. Fevers, bloody noses, buckets of snot. All of it.

In between the fitful nights and glassy-eyed afternoons in front of Nickelodeon in the hotel, it was good. My mommy was there.

But then came the flight home. First a nasty altercation with the manager of the ticket desk for another airline. Apparently they should add the warning "May cause inarticulate speech and irrational anger" to the side of Dayquil. Then I got dumber and confuseder before going through security and had to pour out two bottles of milk and two sippy cups of juice, still reeling from the other-airline-desk-clerk -altercation.

Finally we were on the plane - or was it? It reminded me a lot of the cheap plastic toy planes I bought for the kid at the beach. The kind that are shot into space with a rubber band, only to come crashing to the ground because there's nothing remotely aerodynamic about them. That's what our plane was like. First the turbulence hurtled Quinn across the seats while I was simultaneously changing his diaper and trying to clean the spilled milk out of the crevices of my computer bag. Hurtled him across the seat into Madeleine's face, which immediately gushed scarlet blood all over her coloring book. Whee! Then Quinn settled down and fell asleep, just in time to miss the excitement of Madeleine vomiting all over everything. A grande hot chocolate. Am I a fucking idiot or what? At least I caught the majority of it in her sweatshirt. The rest will be left for the kind people at Big Sky Air. Dude. A flight should not be that bumpy, and there's no reason the entire plane needs to be heated by a 6000 Volt space heater strategically placed under Row 9. I stripped her naked and put my sweatshirt on her and we de-boarded sheepishly, leaving a trail of curdled chocolate milk and bloodied diaper wipes. I can think of no better way to put the exclamation point on such a frenetic, yet enjoyable, vacation.

Mom, let's do it again next year! I'll bring the Airborne, you get the gin. I think they'd mix nicely.

Let's get this straight.

First and most importantly, can we please ignore Ann Coulter so that she may go away just like playground bullies do when their victims just walk away? If she calls, hang up. That's what you'd do with a telemarketer, right? She's no better. She's a kid with a microphone, showing off for her friends. Hang up.

Second, we sold our house and bought another. It's great. It's also a shoebox and every piece of furniture we put in it must have a drawer. I'm trying to figure out how to fit the bathtub with drawers. If diapers had pockets, Pooey would carry his own raisins. We may have to put this in the kitchen so it can double as the guest room. And if a pile of money falls from a hijacked airplane, we'll get this for Madeleine so she has a place to play on the floor of her cubicle room.

Third, my friend and her husband have a brewery here in town. This is good. Ask your local retailer (I say that only because I feel like I've heard it on TV. In reality you'll probably just have to come here and sleep in our fold-out bed/desk and drink it on our back deck while Jim bbq's some elk steak and the kids take turns screaming about stuff). It's in cans so you can drink it on a river-raft, because on the river bottles are bastard step-children.

Fourth, we're going to Portland for a week. We're leaving Tuesday. To mark the occasion I just went to Target and bought a pack of multi-colored pens for a dollar. I also bought some tiny hand-sanitizer bottles, a pack of cheese and a 98 lb bag of dog food. And a stroller. Target, I may stray on occasion, but you will always be my One and Only.

Fifth, one more in the series of The Ugliest Shoes Ever Made.

I posted Madeleine's American Idol audition tape a couple minutes ago, but when she realized the world was watching, well, that was not okay. Sorry Tiny. All pictures and videos must be cleared by management henceforth.

This one got the stamp of approval.

Sing it with me: If I were a bendy-straw, I'd bend in the mo-or-nin....