I'm hiding out here at my mother's place for a while during the agents' caravan; we'll be going to get her car fixed in the valley in a half hour or so.

My Mandy is here. There is some talk of my mom getting rid of the dog, since Mandy's so spirited—and my mother isn't getting any younger. If she does, I hope Mom takes her to Pit Bull Hall and "trades her in" for an older, more sedate dog she can keep up with.

But it would make me sad.

I haven't been around much to help, though, lately, and I cannot complain about it.

I can't take her, because my husband doesn't want a dog at all—much less a rambunctious, large-ish one.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 10:19 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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It's been a day; I've been online intermittantly, but in between I've been washing windows and mopping the balconies.

I still have miles of clutter to work through; I also have to finish cleaning the downstairs bathroom.

I haven't slept much the past two nights; I spent part of the evening with my mother yesterday evening—and am now thoroughly apprised of all the mistakes I could be making, and what I might be doing wrong, and at least a few things I am doing wrong. When my husband got home yesterday from his run, the mom and Mandy were already here. I followed him into the bedroom and announced that I was definitely having a martini with dinner.

"She's only been here for 45 minutes," he told me.

"She's in rare form," I replied.

The "for sale" sign went up at 9:00 a.m. this morning. At 10:00 a.m. some pushy agent tried to talk his way into the house a day early, because he had a client with him. (As if he hadn't brought her with him on purpose; what'd she do?—materialize suddenly in his car?) I said "no."

The real estate agents' caravan is tomorrow; we have to be finished, and out of here by 9:20 or so. Which means that after I knock off today, I have just over two hours' of daylight in which to finish the windows. And anything else that needs to be done.

Oh, and—my body informs me that I have PMS. So if there were any chance of getting through this week without either crying or screaming at someone, it went out with the estrogen supply.

I'll be here, cleaning my .357 with a grim smile and guzzling red wine. Come on by.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 05:12 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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The smile, the allusion both to my European and my Native American roots. My big, fat, wide, white face.

Now I truly know what it means to be a narcissist . . . I could just stare at it for hours:

Thanks, Darrell. I assume you got the face from that lunch with Desert Cat and Daisy Cat last winter?

Posted by: Attila Girl at 07:12 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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. . . that those things had uses beyond disposing of dead bodies. I feel so . . . innocent and naive.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 02:59 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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The new MacBook has two gigs of memory. Never mind that I remember when a single meg was a big deal—and for disk space, not memory. What I want to know is why the new machine is slower than my husband's PowerBook, with its own two gigs of RAM. It even underperforms my own old PB, with its 512 megs or whatever (that is, when the thing wasn't crashing every five minutes; but it could bring up Gmail consistently, and it didn't get upset when I had more than two windows open).

My great-great-grandfather, bringing people along the Oregon Trail to the West Coast, used to counsel them that laptops were never s reliable as desktop machines, and that they were hard on one's posture. He said that the handiness of being able to call up the Internet while at the reins of the covered wagon was far offset by having to do extra T'ai Chi to bring one's spine back into alignment.

Right again, old man.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 05:25 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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