this morning and about a week ago

i’m trying to decide where to start now and i pull up itunes on the computer for some inspiration. no time to really focus on what i want to hear, so when i click on itunes dj i don’t expect to hear tracks from the “free to be you and me” soundtrack. love the music, a gift my aunt exposed me to as a child, but it’s hard to get fired up when “it’s alright to cry” is playing. and brandi carlile is disturbing me because she is not only not stopping by to sing to me on her next tour but she is also making a few too many stops on main stream TV lately, i.e. Grey’s Anatomy and Army Wives. i know this because i watch these shows. this seems a little two-faced, i know, but i like my separation of church and state. or music and television. same diff.

my last update post was almost two months ago, when harper turned eight months. this week she’ll be ten months old. she is my world and sometimes i want to run away and live in the tiny crook between her neck and shoulder while her arms wrap around me. it’s like she knows i need her.

i’m putting off the inevitable here. so there are a few things going on with us and i will probably split them up into several posts. here they are in no particular order. actually, i think it makes sense to just start with this morning:

this morning:
i felt something crawling on my head and felt my hair. found a tick. yep, a tick. i have read in the past that if you find a tick on your arm or ass or something you should paint it with clear nail polish so that it will suffocate and you can pull it off. this was a non-issue because i was holding it between my fingers. i searched around frantically and saw a pile of leftover plastic easter eggs. oh yes i did seal that tick up in an easter egg. it’s sitting right here on my desk as i type this. what the hell am i supposed to do with it?

please respond in the comments. seriously.

so the whole tick thing really is freaking me out because about a week ago i could barely walk down the stairs in the morning. i took to self-diagnosing via the computer (isn’t that what we’re supposed to do these days?) and determined that i either have arthritis or lyme disease. so now the tick this morning really put me over the edge, you know in terms of dying from lyme disease and stuff. plus, tom insisted on searching my head for additional ticks. and amelie joined in. i can only imagine what folks on the street below must have been thinking when they looked up from their walk and into our home only to find a two year old and forty two year old hunched over my head and picking at it like two gorillas.

honey, it was a tick, not head lice.

stay still, i need to look.

man loves a crisis. thankfully his search was fruitless and i was not suffering from a full-on tick infestation. not today at least. we’ll see what the doctor says tomorrow.


about a week ago:
our landlord e-mails and says that he needs to come by the following morning and fix some things. oh, and he needs to talk to us about something.

i told tom to bring home some empty wine boxes for packing from the restaurant that night.

sure enough, he explains that he is separating from his wife and he has lost his job so we can either buy the house or move. i laughed as he walked out the door, half because i was going off the deep end and half because he had not notified us in writing. we had just gotten used to this place. we had just made friends with the neighbors. they had given us hand-me-downs. amelie referred to katie and gigi as her friends. i knew the nannies. we received someone’s package when they were out of town. worst of all we had planted red runner beans that promised to stretch beautiful vines along the back fence, producing scarlet flowers and edible beans along the way. we had literally taken root. i held out hope that because he had not given us notice in writing we were good to go.

that is until we received a certified letter the next morning giving us 90 days.

and so begins the search for a new home to fit our huge family, a tick-related diagnosis, and for the remainder of my sanity.


more to come.