Holly Northrop Blog

Ah yes, week four of our home renovations starts out with the siding people still here. The creamy yellow siding is all up; gone is the flapping foil and chunks of demonic wasp nests. That's right, I'm not just fucked-in-the-head over wasps, there really was an infantry of horror behind the old aluminum siding. The boys, (as we now call them), pulled out big slabs of nests all along the back of the house. Some still had wasps in them, but because it was cold, they died upon exposure. If only it were that easy. I can think of a few people that if all I had to do was to rip them out the house onto the front lawn where they would die from exposure, well then Martha, fill up the Prius 'cause we are going on a road-trip.

So what did we learn here? Sometimes, I am not as zany as I may appear to be. I am kind of like that warning on the side view mirrors; objects may be closer than they appear. Just because I'm freaking out about something does not mean that it isn't real.

Anyway, now all that is left to do on the house is the window treatments and all the other little details, which if I remember correctly, is where the Devil lives; in the details.

On cloudy days, the house looks (no doubt about it), yellow. On sunny days, it blends in more with all that damn sunlight and seems to be more cream.

Every part of the outside of the house has been hammered to death. What that means is that all over the inside of the house is dust and little one hundred year old dirt particles. Mostly the dirt crumbs are all around the edges, window frames, outside wall baseboards and any furniture that is against any outside wall. So pretty much everything. I've been trying to keep up with it but it's just useless. So once they leave, (hopefully by Tuesday) I have a immense whole-house cleaning to look forward to.

On the other side of torment, somehow, I ended up on a peculiar mailing list at work. Roughly twice a month I receive a package with a God book in it. I'm on a Christian mailing list. Of all the things that could come to the Voice it is hardly one for the record books. The fact that this package is addressed to me is odd. Someone out there decided that I needed to get my God on.

So far, Thomas Nelson, Inc. from Nashville, TN has sent me:
The Trouble with Paris: Following Jesus in a World of Plastic Promises
Jesus Brand Spirituality: He Wants His Religion back
Finding Our Way Again: The Return of Ancient Practices
And, from the Ancient Practices Series: In Constant Prayer

I've made a little shrine for all these books over my desk. Seeing how I really don't have much personal stuff there anymore. I have been putting up 'my flair' with either weird things I find around the office from past employees cubicles, or things that come to me, like the god books. Up until a few days ago, I still had hanging there my 20 x 13 photo of dead Pope John Paul II that Gianni Giansanti took and that I personally think is one of the top ten amazing shots of 2005, but I brought that home because I didn't want anyone else to snag it.

In addition to all the Jesus crap, I have a Sexual Harassment pamphlet thumb tacked to my cube wall, a webby award that the old web team won back in the 'tail end of the days' when we did shit that was cool, and a copy of a TPS Report.

Walking by my desk one would think that I am some kind of crazy religious dyke with the conflicting protestant and catholic concerns.

While poking around the Thomas Nelson's, Inc. from Nashville, TN website, I noticed a few interesting things. I particularly liked the menu on their homepage for the first three sections; Fiction, Non-fiction and Bibles. It is interesting to me that they find a difference between them. Upon closer look, the line between them all is pretty fuzzy but when you start using the term Non-fiction in reference to anything having to do with Christ aren't you already blurring the lines of reputable classification?

The reference section is more like self-help on how to read The Bible, which furthers my belief that all self-help books are bullshit. In all of the reference section this book: Captivating Heart to Heart Study Guide: An Invitation Into the Beauty and Depth of the Feminine Soul, bothers me the most.

Here is the first paragraph of the books description:

"Every little girl has dreams of being swept up into a great adventure and of being the beautiful princess. Sadly, when women grow up, they are often swept up into a life filled merely with duty and demands. Many Christian women are tired and struggling under the weight of the pressure to be a "good servant," a nurturing caregiver, or a capable home manager."

Eww, eww and yuck.

It's like Haiku:

little princess girl
capable home manager:
tired woman's dream

What the hell is a capable home manager? Is that what they are calling housewives these days? Well, by that classification, my mom was an incapable home manager with a "slight" prescription drug problem, but hey, maybe she just needed a little more GOD in her life or to be dragged out on the front lawn.

In the video section, I found out that James Brolin stared in a A Dramatic Presentation of the Birth of Christianity.

James, (Marcus Welby; Amityville Horror; Barbara Streisand's husband), Brolin plays Peter. The guy who put the Reagan in The Reagans. I hated Reagan so much (still do) that I just wanted to punch the TV anytime he was on the screen. Judy Davis was awesome as Nancy and the reason that I watched it in the first place. I remember thinking at the time that her version of 'Just Say No Nancy' reminded me of my nightmare of growing up in a house of republicans.

This is that movie that the Republican Party got all pissy about and threatened to boycott. But I'm confused here, it's network TV. Who the hell cares if a political party decides to boycott anything that is broadcast on network television? What is the larger message here; does the Republican Party own Nielsen TV Ratings?

Anyway, CBS caved to this threat and moved it on over the Showtime. Showtime, the channel that has always excelled in stupid programming and will run the sloppy seconds of HBO in a heartbeat. This explains to me not only why The L Word ever made it on the air, but why it is in its (gag me) fifth season.

Right, okay, let us see I've covered God and the Devil, home renovations, politics, mom issues, lesbian sex and drug use. Is there anything else I'm not supposed to write about? Why yes there is, but for now I'm good. So I guess I'll go flip back and forth between a little mind numbing girl-on-girl no sex/stupid sex, and the Nielsen TV Rated Oscars, while abusing a just a little bit'o prescription drugs.

Jasmine said it best when she mentioned to me, "Mom. Construction doesn't follow you, you follow construction.", and I think she might be right. There is something wrong with us in that we only like to do major home repairs when the weather is below 20 degrees. More adventures in home ownership; we are having new siding put on the house.

The first day when the workman were here ripping off all the old aluminum siding, it sounded like I was in a tin can. I told myself that everything was fine and reminded myself that is was in no way as loud as when we had the new roof installed. For whatever reason, I actually found comfort in the noise. Go figure I'm a little weird.

After a few hours of yanking old aluminum off the house, they then started either hammering in nails or prying them out. As I noticed that cats were sitting on top of one another in the closet, it occurred to my why it was that I felt like I was in a movie. The hammering and snapping noises from three of the four sides of the house reminded me of Night of the Living Dead. The whole zombies tying to get into the farmhouse sensation.

After a few hours of demolition, I decided to go outside and 'check in'. I stood on the sidewalk and looked at our house all covered in this odd insulation/aluminum foil material. We looked like a big baked potato. In places where the foil had ripped off, I could see the original clapboard; clapboard that had not seen the light of day in over one-hundred years. The wood was in such great shape that if we had a shit load of money we might look into having it restored. But as it is, we don't have a shit load of money so we are covering the clapboard back up with a lovely cream colored vinyl siding with white window trim.

The next day of the project it rained in the morning, (poured is more like it) and then the high winds came, (wind-chill -1), blowing our foil all over the yard. We weren't going to use it anyway but now in addition to a house that looked like it had been singled out by an angry tornado, we now had big sheets of space foil all over the yard. It's a good look. By Thursday, our house was such an eyesore that folks would slow down and stare when they drove by. At night, the house sparkled in the moonlight. The word is they will be done by Friday.

Sickshit
What would a new semester be without a trip to emergency room for Miss Jasmine? Jasmine caught a cold, which turned into a high fever. Therefore, in using the emergency room as her personal doctor she drove herself over there and after about an hour of so they determined she had bronchitis.

Here is quick review of Jasmine's ER visits since she has left home. Oncologist and OB/GYN issues are not listed here.

• She cut the tip of her thumb off fucking around with scissors while opening a box.
• She found a lump in her groin.
• A routine eye exam went to hell when the eye doctor noticed that her optic nerve seemed swollen. He mentioned the words 'brain tumor' and off the ER MRI she went.
• She felt sicker then normal and it was determined that it was because she was dehydrated.
• She fell on her wrist and it proceeded to swell up.

I'm not sure what the official snow total for Hudson was but in our driveway there was easily two-feet of it. Martha wouldn't let me shovel because of my neck and what happened the last time. The only problem was that she had left her snow boots at work and my feet are about two and a half sizes smaller then hers are. So with her feet wrapped in extra large freezer bags she punched through to the garage to get the shovel and then made a single shoveled line to the walkway. It was then that a nice neighbor named Jack took pity on us and with his massive snow blower saved the day. Without that happening, it would have taken Martha all weekend to dig us out. Her back would be broken.

Yep, this is crazy stuff. I've haven't seen so much snow since I lived in Meadville. I think it snowed more in Meadville because of the proximity to Lake Erie but also why I might think that it snowed more was because I was never more then four-feet tall when we lived there. If it snowed a foot well, twelve inches was a big deal back then.

I do remember the neighborhood kids sledding down the back nine of the Hailwood Golf Club that we lived next to. Right at the edge of the green was the woods, and if you got up enough speed, you could fly across the creek at the bottom. Some kids didn't make it across and they would get wet and have to go home. Only once did that happen to me. I got a shitload of creek water down my snow pants. It was cold and gross. Because I was a pussy little redheaded five-year-old, I cried all the way home. I was also the same child that would make so many snow angles in my back yard that from the dining room window the yard looked like Escher's Angels and Devils drawing.

I guess you could say my head is currently in a strange place. My dreams have been running on these three themes:

1. Being laid off and becoming embarrassed about it. (The embarrassment part has me puzzled.)
2. The roof leaking in the kitchen. (It's not but I guess I think it's going to, or this is a bigger thing having to do with water)
3. My dead parents. Now Glamour Magazine says:
A dream of your mother signifies happiness in love or personal affairs, and a dream of your father forecasts progress in business, professional or career matters.

But the folks over at Dream Moods have a totally different spin on the dead parent thing.
To see and talk with your dead father in your dream, signifies that you are about to enter into an unlucky transaction or rotten deal. Thoroughly think through your decisions before entering into them. To see your dead mother in your dream, signifies your wretched and mean-hearted nature towards others around you.

Nice.

So in keeping with my wretched and mean-hearted nature I made one of my fantastic chocolate cakes for Jack, the neighbor who shoveled us out. We tried to give it to him on Saturday. Martha and I put our winter coats on, slid into our shoes and walked next door with a big ole cake on a plate. Martha rang the bell, knocked on the door and... nothing. We went back home, ate dinner then put our winter coats on again, slid into our shoes and went back over. The lights were on so Martha rang that bell, knocked on the door. After a few minutes and very, very slowly, an elderly man pries open the front door but can't seem to unlock the storm windowed screen door. Martha and I stand there watching him fuck around with the small lock until finally, Martha gets his attention and tells him its okay, nevermind. But he can't really hear us through the door.

Is Jack here?
What?
Does a Jack live here?
Yes. He's my nephew.
He was nice enough to plow our driveway and Holly baked him a cake.
Who? What? Oh? Well, he's sleeping. You're going to have to come back tomorrow.

If he could just open the door, I could have given him the cake but that kind of deduction and the whole logistics of it all was impossible.

The next day right before we left to try to deliver it a third time Martha says, "Here me now, if they aren't home, we're coming back here and I'm having a big piece of cake. Okay? Okay."

They were home and they now have the cake.

Maybe He's Caught in the Legend
I have to admit that the whole Van Halen, R.E.M and Patti Smith thing is what had me hooked. Sad to say I spent my Saturday night watching the VH1 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 2007 ceremony. Grandmaster Flash, R.E.M, The Ronettes, Patti Smith and Van Halen.

As far as Van Halen goes, I was always on the David side of that crazy train. Didn't matter one bit what a jackass David Lee Roth was, Sammy Hagar was and is a tool. I saw Van Halen in the summer of 1979, when Runnin' with the Devil was everywhere but this was one of my favorite songs and this lead in to You Really Got Me, (I was already a total Kinks nut to begin with) could be heard coming from my bedroom from half a mile away. No wonder my mother was just out of her mind with me. The only reason she never killed me in my sleep was because I was an insomniac and she was older. She was out by 10:30 on nights where I would go the distance and watch the sunrise.

Just a few short but jam pack years later, I was living in Denver, pregnant with Jasmine and totally nuts about REM. Pretty Persuasion; Talk about the Passion; Sitting Still and Perfect Circle.

Oh but Chronic Town was the total shit, 1,000,000; Stumble; Wolves, Lower; Gardening at Night and Carnival of Sorts, (Boxcars) which I actually think I put on a tape for someone just a few years ago, or I wanted to because I remember it being a really good fit. R.E.M was huge in my world but so was Camper Van Beethoven, X and Husker du. The Cramps and Sonic Youth rounded out tapes with Patti Smith on one side and Nova Mob on the other. And in thinking about this further, I was totally into Hot for Teacher at the same time that I could not stop listening to Little America.

So as REM took to the stage and Stipe started yakking, which always makes my eyes roll. I laughed to myself because years ago, he never made a lick of sense seeing how he was a mumbler, now he speaks clearly but he seems like such a big drag. As I tuned him out, I started thinking about what a huge disappointment they became after about four albums in.

The last time I saw them was at the Coliseum at Richfield in Cleveland. My best friend and I had waited out all night in the freezing cold so we could be one of the first in line to buy tickets. (What can I say, no one had a credit card and life was a little more fucked up then it is now.) By the time the show came around, it was warmer outside and I'd already heard the new album, (Green) and I only liked one song on it. Turn You Inside Out. That was it. That night the Coliseum was packed and the police were everywhere. I couldn't understand it. I wasn't allowed to move from my seat and no one was smoking ANYTHING. The show was horrible but the band looked totally into it. R.E.M. started to play Perfect Circle and I thought I was going to vomit. After thirty minutes, we left and drove back to Pittsburgh.

As I lay in bed the other night, watching them sing Begin the Begin, I started to feel a little better. Sounded good and I always did like that particular song and dammed if I'm not still totally swayed by that fuckers voice. But then they did Gardening at Night and not just phoning it either. The whole thing actually made me sit up, put the bowl down and listen. I haven't seen it done that nicely in decades. The whole performance made my eyes well up. Sad but true, good music does that to me sometimes. Sometimes, it makes me cry. Of course, I was already weepy from when Patti Smith was on talking about her dead husband, Fred. (Boy, is she really starting to look like Joey Romone or what?) She is sixty for god sake and she is still something to see. Strong woman. Even Jasmine is so moved by her. I can't wait for the new covers album. I saw her do Jimi Hendrix's Are you Experienced? at BAM last year and I about lost my shit right there in the 25th row. But as you can see, it doesn't take much for me to act like I'm fourteen.

Wednesday morning when I first arrived at work and loaded up my browser to check on some email and general nonsense; you know, what has blown up now and what note worthy person has died now, when the very first thing I saw was this article. I busted out laughing and read the whole thing right then. I hit a total and complete perfect 10 on this. Probably not the best thing in the world to hit a 10 on but at least I achieved perfection. Also, Number 9 is an N/A seeing how no one at work is succeeding at anything. Whoops, I will take that back. A few folks are not only succeeding but out-and-out excelling at driving the paper straight into the ground but I would hardly say I am jealous. Well, maybe a little, such obliteration is awe-inspiring if nothing else.

I heard a reggae version of a Bread song four days ago and I can't get the damn thing out of my head. No matter what I listen to. It's driving me nuts. Aside from time, how does one remove a Bread song from the brain? Maybe this can shake it out. I can't seem to stop listening to it. It's has to be all that fuzzed out, heavy and I mean heavy bottom end. So much fun to walk around New York City in this bitter fucking cold weather with something like a mash up between Justin Timberlake and Muse slamming around in old brain.

One night last week as we drove up to the dark part of our street where we live, we noticed that there was a massive crate sitting in our yard. It was like, "Oh my god what the hell is that? What the fuck did you order?" Then upon a few reflective seconds, we realized that it was the new roof shingles and all the supplies for a brand new roof. Cool. But oh shit, that means we have a huge chunk of change that we now have to come up with. No we are not that stupid it's just that things move a little different up here and half the fucking battle was getting on a roofers schedule. We started this whole process in September, (the month that all bullshit starts) and we are just now getting a new roof. Well, not just yet. Should be this week. Right now, the new roof is sitting in our front yard.

I'm not even bothered by the cold snap that has engulfed our area. Seven degrees seems like a perfect time to rip the forty-year-old shingles off a hundred and six year old house and slap down new ones. This house is so old and improperly insulated that I bet if I were to stand across the street at night wearing night goggles with heat seeking sensors that our house would glow a good eight feet out from the walls. It would probably be so bright that it would scar my retinas. I'm surprised all the woodland creatures aren't nesting up against the foundation. If I were a possum, that's where I'd be.

The warmest part of the house is the second floor but once they rip the top off, I suppose that won't be the case. Regardless, the whole process is supposed to take three days, and of those three days, I will be at work every single one of them. Only the cats will be here. And you know, to them it will literally sound like the sky is falling. We're going to come home to some stressed out felines. Oh Zoë, hang in there.

Coming up with the money is going to be funny. Not fun, but funny, odd you know, amusing. We were going to borrow half of the cost from Jazz but she's almost out of grandma money. That's right, I'm thirty-five thousand dollars in the hole for her student loan debt and not only is she not going to graduate on time but she has to go a whole extra year. Grandma's money will be gone by September, (of course) and I'll probably have to apply for another student loan for her fifth fall semester because we will have reached the 10k cap on my dad's trust for the year. At this stage in my little mini rant, I would so like to point out here that her father, my ex-husband, has not paid one dime for college. His dead parents have but not him.

Ahhhhhh. Okay, I'm done. We'll get a new roof and we'll just charge it. Whatever.

Super Boring but Important
Last weekend Martha had an insurance guy come over to the house to talk Term Life Insurance for me. We have a few things in place but almost all of those are in the unlikely event of something happening to Martha before something happens to me. The good money bet is on me but you never know. So this is why we thought we might do a little term on me. You know, estimate out how long we think I might live. What do you think, maybe to seventy ish? It's a good guess. Seventy-five is pushing it and well, eighty is out of the question. Yes, yes it's all very morbid and strange, but the REALITY is that I have maybe twenty good years, (the emphasis on good), left before it becomes an interesting game of Last Dances.

If I die before Martha, what the fuck is she supposed to do? And Jasmine, she'll NEVER be able to get any personal kind of insurance so really, I'm up. All I need to do is pass a drug test. Yep, that's right. So next Saturday morning at 8 am a nurse is coming to the house to take blood and urine. Fantastic and wish me luck, a half a million dollars should make things a little easier for Martha to deal with, right? Of course neither one of them would have to put up with my bullshit once I'm dead so it seems like win-win. It's the least I can do. Shut the fuck up and have someone give them a bucket of cash.

Oh September, why deviate when we have such a good thing going on?

We need a new roof. Now when Martha and I bought the house we knew the roof was old. Like 30 years old. Then we just found out via some chalk writing down in the basement that a new roof was put on our house in 1964. Okay, well I had been hoping to ride out the winter, sock away a few bucks and then in the spring get a new roof.

The house has other plans.

We have a leak and from the looks of it is has been going on undetected for quiet some time. So now we get a new roof. Whatever right? I work for the house so the house can work for me. I'm just glad it did not start dripping in my studio.

We seem to be playing a great deal of the "What the fuck is that?" game lately. I am actually thinking about having a side site dedicated to weird bug of the day because at least once a day either Martha or I see something on or in the garage, or near the sunroom door that is completely unidentifiable to either one of us. It isn't as though we have a degree in Entomology but some of these things I don't even know what their closest domestic cousin might be.

So to date the biggest freak out horror fest that we have seen happened around 4:30 Saturday afternoon. We had spent the day running around Kingston spending money we don't have on things like rugs and a new mattress pad. The sole reason we went to Kingston was to stop in a Lowes and set up a time to have a contractor come out to look at the roof. After a hundred dollars at Target and another hundred at Bed Bath & Beyond, we finally dealt with the general indifference to women of the Lowes staff and set something up.

We get home, drag all our shit inside the house and after about an hour we both settled down enough that Martha starts dozing off on the couch. I'm kind of tired but not really, so I get up thinking that I might go upstairs and write. I stop in the kitchen to grab some water to look out at the backyard with the pretty sunbeams drifting through the trees when I notice an exceptionally large number of gnats flying around. Like a lot. So I stood there, over the sink trying to focus my eyes a little better when I notice that in addition to the gnats I see this other larger bugs flying from what appears to be up out of the ground. There were quite a few of them taking off into the sky. So I move closer to the window to try to figure out where they are coming from when my eyes refocus on the bush that is directly in front of the open kitchen window. The bush, which is about the size of my entire body, is alive with insects. Millions, and I do mean millions, of bugs are crawling all over the bush. They look like flying ants but they also look like termites. What ever they were, they were technically a swarm hatching out of the bush and flying into the sky.

I have never seen anything like it in my life. Well, maybe on one of the Discovery channels specials on the bugs of the Amazon or something but not within a few feet of my head.

I jerked back from the sink and stood in the middle of the kitchen for a few minutes, not quite sure just what the hell to do. This swarm of bugs isn't inside the house, as far as I can tell, and they do seem to by flying away from the home. The bush they are hatching out of has been dying and well, I guess I now know why. If they are termites, I do live in a wood house on the edge of the woods...

I go into the living room and there is Martha all puffy cheeked and asleep on the couch. I touch her leg to wake her up while saying; "Baby, there is something crazy happening in the backyard." She gives me the 'you're the crazy thing in the backyard' look and says; "What are you talking about?"

"Get up you gotta come see this." I say as I point her towards the kitchen.

She shuffles half asleep up to the kitchen window, pauses for a few seconds while the magnitude of what she is seeing sinks in and then...

"Oh my god. What the fuck is that? EW! What the hell, Holly? Oh my god!"

"I don't know what it is. I don't know what they are." I said while scratching my arms and legs. My physic is totally taking a hit on this shit.

"That's it, I'm calling Orkin." Martha announces as she marches off to the living room looking for her cell phone.

She called Orkin in Albany because the local office was closed, Homeland Dan (our lawn guy) and then the cell phone number of the local Orkin guy who came around here about a week ago to talk about the spider problem.

Homeland Dan said he'd be by in the morning to cut the grass and remove the bushes. He also told us that we need to relax and that we will get through this.

I figure we just need to "get through" the first year and then maybe we'll lighten up a little. That is what it was like when we first moved to New York. The first year was tricky but then things chilled out, or rather we became numb to the insanity of NYC. Now we just need to get numb to natures insanity.

Over a week ago, Martha noticed a "thing" on Zoë's neck. A little pea-sized area of scabbing that upon closer inspection, (always a pleasure with this cat) looked strange. Not just a normal claw mark or scratch. We made the unpleasant decision to take her to the vet. The last time we took this cat to the vet, she had a seizure. That was two years ago. I figured that the only time Zoë was ever going to go back to a vet was when it was "time", if you get my drift.

But apparently I was wrong. Martha found a local veterinarian and made an appointment. Now the word local has a slightly different definition up here. In Columbia County, fifteen-minutes away IS local. I understand this and it makes sense. Fifteen-minutes along a backcountry road is nothing. The word local to me means that I should be able to walk to it. Not so. There is no vet in Hudson and so what? What's the big deal with fifteen-minutes in the car? Well, nothing unless you have a frantic cat pacing around counterclockwise behind your head and meowing with every breath it takes.

Zoë is totally crazy and never, was it more apparent then when she was in our Jeep. She meowed the whole way there, the entire time at the vet's office and then, the whole way back. Her meow is somewhat high pitched, and sounds similar to a whinny baby (i.e. Jasmine when she had colic). All I wanted to do was throw Zoë from the car and never look back.

But alas that is not what happened. After the longest fifteen-minutes of my life, we found the vet's office and parked the Jeep. We waited in the exam room for another small eternity while I kept spraying my hands with Feliway and then rubbing Zoë down. This would calm her down for roughly one to two-minutes at a time. During those precious minutes of silence, the air would lighten up and Martha and I were able to have quick slices of conversation. I even made a joke about how seeing how we were already there, maybe we just might want to go-ahead and put her down. I know, I know, not that funny but Jasmine would have laughed with me. Martha however, just glared at me. Humor, it's a funny thing.

So the long and the short of it is, Zoë probably had allergies. The vet gave her two shots of cortisone and charged us just under a hundred dollars. (Nice) With a wait and see diagnosis on our plates we got back in the car and headed home. For fifteen-minutes, I held my left hand twisted behind my back, shoved into the cage rubbing on Zoë's face whenever she would pace near me. It was kind of like being arrested. Chewing gum like a lunatic and bitching that I wanted a fucking cigarette, I counted down the minutes on the digital clock until we finally pulled into our driveway. Once we were all inside, Zoë ran into the bedroom closet and I took a Xanix. I didn't see that cat until dusk and that was all right by me.


FLIPPING AROUND TO NOWHERE
So much has changed in the past month. I have brand new computer that I barely know. I installed what I needed to make it so I could work from home. Did a super fast migration, so fast in fact that I forgot to migrate all my old email. I am finding that all that stored old email has yet to come in handy some three-weeks later. I've got email that has a dates from the 1990's saved. What the hell could I possibly want any of that shit for? I'm like an email pack rat.

I have a new office space that is still in shambles but functions. The thing about a new office space, especially one that now includes enough room for me to have a darkroom, is that it also becomes a time to evaluate the kind of work that I am actually doing in my office. Is this the type of work I want to be working on, etc. Am I writing enough? No. Am I shooting enough, no on that too. Well, just what the hell am I doing up here in my very own apartment? I spend a good chunk of the week on Voice stuff and not much else, because well, that seems to suck the little ol' life right on out of me.

But as I dream big and live strange, time keeps ticking away. Funny how that happens. Well, I'll have some time this week to sort stuff out while Martha is down in North Carolina. She'll be gone for a week and we all know what happens when I am left alone for that long. The crazies will creep over this house like well-fertilized ivy. I'll have days upon days without rational interruption to dwell on shit that is best left murky. It's either figure it out and find a new direction for myself or spend hours upon hours stoned and stuck watching Netflix Faith & Spirituality Dvd's. Or buying everyone I know a pair of these. It's so nice to see The Klan, er I mean the Christians are using the Internets, isn't it?

Anyway, aside from the new computer, and the new office space there is that whole oddly appealing small town I live in that I know next to nothing about. I'm so far out from New York City that I can't even get New York City news, something that I am still not used to. Not that local news has ever been all that great no matter where you live but I had been quite used to the general NYC rap-up of loathing at the end of each day.

But the local news up here is so thin that one night last week, as I was reading Wired it occurred to me that the 11:00 news had been talking about the weather for over four-minutes and there wasn't ANYTHING going on. No dangerous thunderstorms or crazy crap somewhere else in the world to report. Honestly, I'm not even sure just what the hell they were broadcasting into my bedroom because I was all involved in the article about the snarky folks at Pitchfork. What I do know is that when I started reading the article the weather had just come on and when I finished it, the weather was still on. I had to double check to make sure I hadn't changed the channel to The Weather Channel.

I guess from the News Producers prospective there isn't a whole hell of a lot to yack about up here, but hey I have an idea; the world is a big place and there is tons, just tons of stuff happening all over. I understand that the whole Iran, Iraq war thing is kind of a drag for those in the back of the classroom but for those of us down front, the local news is way too soft and forgiving on our looser president and the global economy.

So maybe they could talk about something else from somewhere else. Instead of four-minutes of clear skies and sunny days, maybe two whole minutes of global news might be kind of fun.

But what the hell do I know, I'm just learning to live here.

Miss Jasmine's twenty-second birthday is this Thursday. Hard to believe in oh so many ways isn't it? Not sure what her plans are. I know she has friends driving over from Philly to spend the weekend with her so my guess is there will be just general debauchery instead of the extravagance she requested. She is however, excepting donations of no less than $1000.00 per gift giver. Drop her a line and say "Hey".

A DIFFERENT KIND OF HIVE
The new house is coming along and is presently waiting for us to move into it two-weeks from now. I am a little panicky. We have discover wasps living in the gutter right over the side door into the sunroom. This is a major in/out part of the house from the driveway. I'm a little freaked out by it all but Martha has promised me that she will have someone come take care of it before we move in. By the looks of all the massive cans of wasp and hornet bug spray that the Home Depot up there has on display, my guess is that we aren't the only ones being terrorized the second we walk out of our house. I'm already not a big fan of the great outdoors in the summertime and this is just a little much. Flooding, I think is what they call it. Further cracking my mind and making me unable to shut up about it, causing Martha to daydream about putting me down, is what it is doing.

WHEN PARENTS ATTACK
Martha has to go to North Carolina this weekend to deal with her Mom and Dad. Things are... well, not going along in a such a great way. Her mother is running the crazy train and dad is having a little bit of trouble now that he is home. The timing is interesting in that I will have to pack everything. No shit, we move on the 22nd so it has to be this weekend that all packing takes place. It will be a weekend of air-conditioning and overuse of the dishwasher. Oh well, give me enough boxes, tape and bubble wrap and I'll have it all ready to go. After all, I am a professional packer.

I LOVE THE TRAIN
I had a five-hour commute on Friday night that in all honesty struck me as more funny than exhausting. The real buzz-kill was New Jersey transit where I ended up sitting next to a yuppie fuck who farted every few minutes. This went on for over an hour on a train that went no faster then five-miles-an-hour due to train congestion. I could have run along side the tracks at a faster clip then the 5:21 train to Suffern. But the whole train thing started out badly.

I had managed to get to Hoboken via The Path in record time and even considered myself lucky at the quick Path snag. That 9th street station is a heat pit of hell and I didn't have to wait too long for a Hoboken train. In Hoboken, I walked into the train station at 5:10 to buy my ticket to Route 17 and I actually thought to myself how cool it was to be able to catch the earlier train. Just as I started to walk towards the ticket window, things started to twist around. I went to the window just as the announcer started screaming train times over the intercom system. I told the lady that I needed a ticket to Route 17 and I thought she said to me, "You're going to suffer." I just looked at her while she took my seven dollars and handed me a ticket that had no information on it except the words Hoboken and Cancel.

"How do I know what train or what track to go to?" I asked.

She pointed to the TV screen mounted on the wall to my left and said, "You are going to be on the train to suffer." I could barely hear her because of the intercom and the bulletproof glass that she was sitting behind had only one tiny little hole drilled in it for two-way communication.

Confused, I walked over to the TV and noticed a listing for the train to Suffern on track 12. If, in all of my six-years of essentially living in the fine state of New Jersey, had I actually paid any attention to anything around me, (other than Manhattan) I would have already known that there was a town named Suffern.

Feeling super stupid I boarded the train at track 12 and proceeded to sit there for over twenty minutes before the conductor announced the train was out of order and we all needed to mad dash it to track 16. So that is what we did, a whole train full of pissed off Friday night commuters ran to track 16, pushing and shoving each other all over the place and within minutes we were on our way. Things were rather speedy until Secaucus, and then it went to shit. Fart man got on and the train slowed way down. It took me two-hours to get to Martha in northern New Jersey and we still had another hour and a half to go. But honestly, once I got in the car with her, I was fine. I mean she and I are always racing to get home to each other. Once we were in the same place nothing else really mattered, until it got dark and we got off the wrong exit up in the Catskills and bugs the size of small mammals hit the windshield with alarming sounds, but whatever, we'll figure it out.

Three days of painting and cleaning have left me bruised and beaten. That almost sounds like poetry.

Martha continued with her terrorization of the doors in our new house. This time she zeroed in on the front door. While she did not try and flip it or touch its hinges in any way, she did try to paint it. Our hidden yuppies have sprung to life and she and I have conversations around things like exterior paint, black shutters and window awnings. At this point that is all we want to take outside for the neighbors to observe is a painted front door. We are trying to keep the crazy in the house until we have lived there a little while and maybe make a few friends. At least, it seemed like a good idea to paint the front door. We bought a gallon of high gloss firehouse red, exterior paint and she went to town. The door was originally a teal green so primer was necessary. Things were fine until she came back at the door for the third coat but the second coat wasn't dry. So now we have a lumpy, textured door that needs to be sanded down and re-painted. Also, we had run out of paint tape so she just decided to "wing it" around the glass parts at the top. Yep, we look like one of those houses. The shutter and awning show later on this summer should be fantastic.

We carried the original bathroom door out to the garage while humming the death march song.

This trip upstate we only went to Home Depot twice but we still managed to spend a shitload of money. We finally ordered the living room carpet but now it is unlikely that it can be installed before we move in. Fuck, we waited too long. Should be interesting. I guess we'll just shove everything into the bedroom, kitchen and Martha's office. On the carpet-ordering trip to Home Depot, I saw someone I work with. How very odd. Apparently, as I am finding out, other Voice and former Voice folks live upstate. My old Editor in Chief lives literally ten minutes away from me. Plus, we are just a stones throw from the Catskills so celebrity sightings are all around. Christ, I think I saw JD Salinger over in the lumber section.

Even though we are sort of living at the new house, I haven't really been cooking and the whole dinner thing has been difficult. Anything other than salads, yogurt, almonds and pretzels needs to be purchased off-sight. We went out for a sushi dinner that is within a two-minute walk from the house. It was super yummy and they will know me before too long. We also stopped at a local country bistro just down the road from Home Depot. We had to pick up a few things and needed real food, so okay, right? Well things close early round those parts and we pulled in 15 minutes before closing. Once seated the waitress informed us that there was no baked potatoes, mashed potatoes or liver. Then the cooked barked in "there aren't no home fries neither, or french-fries". They seemed all freaked out about the whole lack of potatoes but I just smiled at the waitress and apologized for being there.

All in all here is what we did in three days.

The idea behind going up to the new house every weekend until we finally move up there is so that we can take care of all the things that are so much easier to deal with when none of mountains of crap we own is in the way. Things such as painting and steam-cleaning carpets go much easier when the only hurtle you have to climb is exhaustion combined with lower back pain.

Martha found a very nice man to take care of our lawn until we either get it together ourselves or use him the entire time we live up there. He cut our yard last week and stopped by on Saturday morning to collect payment and work out a schedule. He was not what I expected at all, a retired caterer who now owns a small lawn care business with his wife and a full on supporter of America - with a big A. He wore a navy blue cap with the seal of the United States embroidered on it; a Homeland Security laminated picture ID card around his neck and his ring tone is the Stars and Stripes Forever.

His wife was a very thorough collector of 'incase of emergency' information considering it is just lawn care. According to her, she will laminate each card and he will carry them around with him while he is working on the yard. If he sees anything, anything at all, he is to call Martha and probably the National Guard just for good measure. I personally feel like we passed through a Homeland Security checkpoint. Our names have been entered into some database that's for damn sure.

But with a house there is a shitload of little things that we can't help but tinker with in the course of a day just because we are excited and slightly crazy. Things like cute new doorknobs and electrical faceplates break up the monotony of painting. One of the projects that we had wanted to do but thought it might be best to wait until we were in there was to flip the main bathroom door. The door opened out into the hallway instead of into the room. It bothered me and the visual reminded me of a handicap thing — not an idea I want to think about every day.

After steam-cleaning the second floor, Martha got a wild hair up her ass and decided to flip the main bathroom door. She forged ahead without all the proper tools for the job, we have but a small toolbox and the pounding and chiseling began. I stayed in her office and painted under a revolving ceiling fan, periodically checking-in to see how it was going. After a few hours, she had the door off; new holes dug out for the hinges and needed my help in hanging it. Trouble began when it was determined that the hinges were a mere 1/32 of an inch off and no amount of pounding was going to move either one of them. They would have to be unscrewed but before that happened, I wanted to see if the doorknob hole lined up, and so resting on one hinge we tried to close the door. This is when we discovered the real reason that the door was not an inny but an outty. The counter top for the sink, a very long and very attached Formica top extended the full width of the space, prohibiting the door from closing. We could, as I have seen in many a ghetto apartment I've had, saw out a square of the door to accommodate the counter top and live like white trash. Suddenly it all became crystal as to how things like that happen.

Opting out of hillbilly décor and going more for the open air idea, we now we do not have a door on the main bathroom and probably will not have that taken care of until after we are in. I have some fabric that I'm going to hang until we buy a smaller door, a 2 x 4 cut to size, additional crown molding and detailed instructions on how to install a new door with frame.

THE ART OF WASPS
A black wasp, the size of my pinky, flew into the second floor through a screen-less open window (a major security breach) and became disoriented and unable to get out of the house. I saw it when I went up there to dump the water from the carpet cleaner. Just as I was pouring a bucket of gloomy grey water into the bathtub, I noticed a black blur coming from the corner of my right eye. Deliriously tired from painting and the whole door thing, I didn't think too much of it until I turned to face that direction head on. That is when I freaked out, slammed the upstairs door, ran down the steps and straight to the doorless bathroom where Martha was taking a shower.

"Baby, there's a big black wasp upstairs." I said super fast to the mirrored shower door, noticing how old and idiotic I look up close.

"What?" Martha said.

"Baby, there's a big black wasp upstairs." I repeated while trying not to hyperventilate.

Long pause, "Okay, I'll go look."

After Martha gets out of the shower, I ramble on and on about the size of it and quizzed her like a five-year-old with an endless supply of 'and then what's' about how she is going to handle it. She didn't want to kill it, which I did not want to hear at all. A first, she grabbed a wooden spoon and was going to 'shoo' it out a window. Much to her annoyance, we went over how that was not going to work. The next and only idea was for her to smack it with a big brown bag.

While I remained freaking out on the first floor, the black spawn of the devil proceeded to dive bomb Martha upstairs. I am deathly afraid of wasps and the idea of one in the house just freaks me out beyond any rational. Hey, we all have our shit. Martha hates crawling bugs, so that's my job, spiders, things with a hundred legs, you name it. If the cats don't get it first, the job falls in my lap. But wasps are her job. She must kill it or I will not be able to let it go. Bees I can at least get my head around but wasps are evil. A major perk of living in the city is that the only bugs that live here are various kinds of roaches and big NY horse flies. I see it as a perk anyway. I do realize that the whole thing is disgusting.

After about twenty minutes of stalking the wasp, Martha lost him somewhere upstairs. We were on our way out to an opening of a local friend and all this goofiness had made us late. As we walked the eight or so blocks to the gallery, my legs so tired that I actually started tripping over my own feet, we noticed that almost everything in the little town of Hudson closes by eight o'clock. All but a few restaurants and the weird smelly bodega. Stumbling along Warren Street we finally arrive at the gallery; an old warehouse with four floors of a hi-brow action well underway. By this point, I was hallucinating and pretty much unable to participate on any form of adult level. When asked about the new house I responded, "We have a wasp on the second floor." That was all I could get out. That and a longwinded ramble about gallery spaces, shooting in Manhattan and dinner. Making friends. You know there are only 7000 people in this little town; I would like to try and not alienate everyone before I actually move here.

Martha's dad fractured his hip somehow (his swears he didn't fall) and Tuesday he had hip replacement surgery. I am glad that the surgeon decided to replace the hip instead of using the pin thing. The recovery time is faster, in fact, he should already be at the rehabilitation center, and the pain is less severe. So yes, in-between the already normal high anxiety of home buying, add in the stress of parental health issues and there you have Martha's general state of mind. She is holding up surprisingly well considering that her mom has now decided to act like a wild caged animal and lash out at her daughters. It has been an emotional rollercoaster that is far from over.

HOMO HOMEOWNERSHIP
Last minute reworking of numbers about drove me crazy. Despite both Martha and I being on the verge of total panic it all seemed to work out. There is nothing worse then the sight and sound of two lawyers franticly punching numbers into calculators searching for a seven hundred dollar discrepancy. Yeah, now that was a good time and the error did not work out in our favor. But we also had to pay the rest of this years city tax so we walked out of the closing having to shell out an additional eighteen hundred dollars. Not ideal, but for New York property, it could have been a blood bath.

So here we go, we now own a home. I signed away my life and got a 106-year-old farmhouse in return. It all surprisingly seems to fit.

Miss Simon and her gang made the trip down from Vermont on Friday to spend two fun filled nights on an air mattress in the soon to be horn room of our new house. Sheri came with the new girlfriend (Jess) and two huge boxers (Josie and Oliver). We had a lot of dawg in our house that is for damn sure. After the initial frantic excitement of meeting new people and a new house, the dogs (and people) settled down and the four of us painted three rooms in one day. I bet Jess had a great time, all we did was work like crazy and bitch about Martha's mother and fret over the health of her father. For big fun on a Saturday night, we drove up the road for some soft serve ice-cream. God, we are a drag. I am sure when we finally get up to Vermont, Martha and I will have to plow a field or something of equal value. We owe them big time.

The town is super cute and at every turn, I love it more. This kind of thing makes me nuts because the more I like something the more I look for the other shoe to drop. It's a fucked up way to go through life but good and bad are like hot and cold faucets on a sink. Either one is too much without the other to tone it down a bit. When things really suck, I am always looking for something good to cling on to and when things are going great, I get jumpy. So this whole buy a house, dad's in the hospital thing is strangely on track.

The living room, our bedroom and the sunroom all have fresh color on the walls and that has perked things up enormously. We still need to deal with the living room carpet (disgusting) and steam clean the other carpets; paint the hallway, the whole upstairs and Martha's horn room. The kitchen and about a million other things will have to wait until we are in there. The grass needs cut and not only do we not have a mower we haven't dealt with having someone come mow it either. Martha is going down to North Carolina to deal with her whack job family so it will be two-weeks before we are back at the new house. Already, we have suburban concerns.

THE PUBLIC KILLING OF AN ALREADY DEAD HORSE
What a week to be without internet or more specifically, what a week to skip work. I didn't see a TV, email or a web page for four days, and I gotta say I'm okay with that. So it was over the phone on Friday that Sheri told Martha about Erik Wemple. Holy shit. You know, I should have known that that meeting was too good to be true. Erik's introduction and the hour and a half conversation that followed was, what I consider, an actual high point when reviewing the last five months of this merger bullshit in my head. For ninety minutes, I actually started to believe that things 'might' get better. I should have known. He seemed like a good guy, he seemed like he wasn't a big asshole, any more or less then is required in this business. The New York Times wrote, "His resignation thrusts The Voice back into turmoil." You think? Can't wait to go back to work. Should be a gas. I told Sheri that I was just going to sit at my desk listening to Frank Zappa, pump out the queer issue, and try not to pay a bit of attention to anything around me.

It is official; we close on the house this Thursday at 3:00. Thursday, the check writing will be endless, even the lawyers have lawyers and everyone wants money. Martha will probably shut down before nightfall. I think the plan is to spend the weekend up there, alternating between tinkering and freaking out about the fact that we just bought a hundred and six year old farm house in upstate New York. Big, big Xanax day. The whole thing should be highly entertaining and costly. We need a huge bucket of money to fall out of the sky and land on us.

The new air mattress came and I have started to make a stack of stuff for the transport. We have roughly a month and a half to get out of our luxury hi-rise but before we can even move in to the new house a few things need to happen. The electrical must be converted to 200 amps, otherwise the minute we turn on a window air conditioner and a light bulb at the same time, we will blow a fuse and neither one of us ever wants to go down into the basement -ever. A third electrician is coming to give an estimate this week and from there, we should be able to pick one to do the work. Although, I think the one guy doesn't want to work with us because Martha said she really didn't understand why his estimate cost so much and she wanted it in writing because she felt like we were getting "fucked". He hasn't called back since and my guess is I'll never meet him.

We also want to paint and if you want to waist the day just thinking about paint, Behr Paint has just the thing. We will also be ripping up old mauve carpet in the living room and probably my office. The overall list of shit we want to do is pretty endless but it certainly is fun to dream. And boy do we have dreams.

Notes on Hudson from: chpartnership.com.
The City of Hudson (pop. 7,524), chartered in 1785, was the first planned city in the new United States. Until 1815, and again from 1830 to 1845, it was a center of the American whaling industry. As the railroad replaced river- and canal-based transportation, Hudson became a general manufacturing and retail center. Over the last decade, Hudson has reinvented itself as a retail and tourist center while welcoming new industry. Along Warren Street, the principal business street, are more than 40 high-quality antiques dealers, along with upscale restaurants and art galleries. Architectural gems from the Federal, Greek Revival and Victorian periods have been given new life. As the County seat, Hudson is home to the Columbia County Courthouse and several public-service agencies. The New York State Firemen's Home and the FASNY Museum of Firefighting are just north of downtown. The city's manufacturing sector ranges from furniture makers to high-tech plastic fasteners.

Like I've said before, we are moving from a city of eight million people to a town of seventy-five hundred, this should be interesting. The whole town of Hudson is roughly the amount of people I move through in a day. Between the subway, WTC walking from West 4th across NYU to the East Village, running errands at lunch up to Union Square and back down to Cooper Square then reverse that all to get back home, yep I travel around a lot of people in a day. No wonder once I get inside I'm not that willing to leave.

NOTICEABLY ILL
I see most of us made it through 666 day. Just more support for both of the theories that I hold onto. The first one is that this is actually hell and heaven is tremendously boring, but very, very clean. The second idea is an oldie but goodie, God is dead and so is everything else. Be still that old existentialist black heart of mine. Interesting that I alternate between believing that either I'm on the wrong side of the universal question or that it is all bullshit.

I had a headache for a solid week. Now that shit will make you crazy. Every day I would wake up with a throbbing pain behind my right eye that slid around the temple area to the back of my head. Throughout the day, I'd chew on Tylenol, and Sudafed Sinus until I became all shaky and weird. I had cottonmouth akin to an Ohio speed freak and chewed gum like a lunatic. I never realized just how neurotic I am until I started chewing gum. Anyway, I know it is allergy related but sweet Jesus. I almost passed out on the subway. It was the strangest thing. I was sitting on the train, and the guy next to me had iPod headphones blasting his useless brain to death, they are all morons I swear, but anyway, he kept moving to the beat which was driving me crazy , because I'm trying to read and he keeps jumping around in his seat. Somewhere under the Hudson, I start to get dizzy. I'm just sitting there getting dizzy. This is not a good sign.

I make it off the train and up the escalators, but by the time I travel to the top I am a cold sweaty mess. I know how I look because I've seen it before. My face I completely drained of color and I am drenched with sweat. I get outside and stagger over to the statue of the soldier with the bayonet stabbing him in the back and I sit down and immediately put my head between my legs. People walk by and pay me no attention what's so ever. This is fine with me but an interesting social observation I must say. So I sit there with my head between my knees desperately trying to trick blood back into my brain so I can walk three blocks home. Finally, after about twenty minutes I start to get cold because my shirt is wet and sticking to me. Nice. I pull it together and shuffle on down the road towards the apartment.

CATASTROPHE AS A HOBBY
This weekend was a strange one. It was probably our last quiet one for quite some time. Oh sure the normal cleaning and trash removal happened. We even managed to make it to a movie. Just coming off of watching The Grapes of Wrath Saturday night, Sunday morning, we sat through Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Pretty awesome stuff there Al. Highly disturbing and I was pretty much a weepy mess from the beginning. Actually, I was a weepy mess from the minute they showed the Oliver Stone preview of World Trade Center —a movie that I just don't think I can handle. If I can't watch a preview then logic would dictate that I would be a basket case if made to watch the whole epic. And come to think of it, why is there an epic at all? Why did Oliver Stone feel compelled to make this story about two Port Authority police officers who are trapped under the rubble? Who is it for? The rest of the world? Honestly, I can't see how anyone of us who where here that day could possibly sit through it. It would be beyond flooding. I can barely tolerate when the least little indication of 9/11 shows up in normal TV shows or movies. I openly flinch and wait for the moment to pass. I understand the idea of providing at least some context to a storyline but I feel very strongly that what I am watching is entertainment, not news and information so cut the grandstanding and get on with the stupid storyline. But to provide an Oliver Stoning of the WTC, where what is viewed in movie form as a true story of courage and survival seems like a complete waist of his privilege. He could have obsessed about so many other projects, like I don't' know, maybe global warming, or something boring like that.

After it rained all day last Monday and well after I had been sitting at my desk, cold and wet for hours on end, I came home to two notes. One was attached to the elevator informing the residents of my building that there was no hot water and will not be any hot water until after 11:00am Tuesday morning. The hot-water pipe had burst on the roof and now the penthouse was flooded. That can't be good and it probably isn't just the penthouse. All that water had most likely run down the walls to the lower apartments. We live eight floors below that nonsense so I was a little worried. This has happened to us before and more than once. In fact, I almost expect it to happen again.

Anyway, the second note was attached to our mailbox. I had to take that little note and walk over to the doorman and sign for a larger packet of paper. Inside the packet was our new lease, and should we choose to stay in this deluxe apartment in the sky, the management company was informing me of their intention to raise our rent by $400.00 a month. The new rent on our apartment would be $2420.00 plus an additional $160.00 for parking. That's, $2580.00 a month for a two-bedroom in Jersey City. Jesus Christ.

Monday could have been so different. I could almost see the alternate version of the evening playing out in front of me in the dark corners of the apartment.

If we were staying in this luxury apartment, Monday would have been a freak-out fest. It would have marked the start of the apartment scramble and the crazed race to find something that costs at least what we are paying now (before rent hike) with the same amount of space, safety and comfort. The horns would have been blown. There would have been yelling and many, many phone calls to various people who could not help us or give two shits about helping us. My guess, we probably would have called a lawyer.

But, because we are in the middle of buying a house, all that bad vibe stuff just kind of lingered in the air and then faded away. Oh sure, we have to let them know if we are leaving and there are all these crazy rules about how to move out. Extra 'move out' deposits and a general attitude of "fuck off, you tenant you", but we'll work around all that. Frankly, they can kiss my butt. I love this apartment and will miss the view and all that extra crap but not for $2580 a month.

MOMENTS OF ZEN ARE ALL AROUND
Usually, at least once a week but sometimes way more, New York City develops a certain synchronicity that is bothersome. It usually comes together over a two or three block radius before you realize that everyone has taken extra cranky pills that day. It happens slowly. You might look up and just so happen to catch sight of a well-dressed elderly woman aggressively giving the finger to a cabdriver who almost ran her over. As you keep walking, you come upon a group of folks standing near the corner dominating the entire sidewalk while waiting on the 101 bus, behaving as if they are trying out for The Jerry Springer Show. They scream slang and general obscenities at one another while you try to push through the crowd without being smacked in the head. And it's right around then, when you'll notice that you have been walking the block with a fire truck that is stuck in traffic with the siren blaring and horn in the on position. Your eardrums are about to shatter. You make it to the corner where black Lincoln town cars and yellow cabs have created a logjam at the light and the whole city smells like butt crack.

It is the exact opposite of that weird magical moment when for a few seconds the entire area of the city that you are in goes completely quiet. Not a sound is around and it is the middle of the day. It is so quiet that you'll start to hear birds chirping. A soft breeze blows down the street and the sent from the flowers at bodega on the corner floats around you, inviting a smile. If you close your eyes, you will swear you are in the middle of nowhere. Like a swing that has gone just a little too high and is momentarily suspended in the air before gravity pushes it all back to earth, the sounds and smells of the city rise back up to the normal rhythm, only to slowly swing the other way. The screaming butt crack way. New York does this dance all day long, all over the city.

EMPTY
In what is beyond a joke (and well beyond believability) yet another person in my department quit last week. Honestly, I have never seen anything like this and I've seen an enormous amount of shit in this business. We are now down to the final three and goddamn it, I am going for the prize.

Several months ago all the cream was let go from this company and now the whole wing of offices that held the executive staff is empty. It is kind of creepy to walk down that darkened hall with all those empty offices tree-branching off into nothing, but at the very end of this dark tunnel is the executive ladies bathroom and I've got to tell you, it's a whole other private world back there. As long as they keep that door unlocked, I will never use the public restroom on the fourth floor again. I feel like George Costanza.

MOVING JASMINE
This week we will be making the fine, fine trip through Pennsylvania to visit with Miss Jasmine. She is moving into her very own apartment and we are driving there to help her settle in. I can't wait to see her. I haven't seen her since that whole eyeball thing in March but it feels like it's been so much longer. No sure why. Hmm, regardless, I can't wait to squeeze her.

More road tripping but I think this is the last of it for quite some time. The next big drive will be when we move upstate. Okay it's not a big drive but for a car full of two cats and two neurotic woman, two-hours is considered a trip. And technically, it's is three-hours from our current overpriced apartment in Jersey City to the house in Hudson. I figure once we get in the house we ain't going no where. We will have this thing called a yard to deal with, among many, many other things.