So, today’s Veterans’ Day. Okay…but instead of not getting mail today, we didn’t get it yesterday or today. Same for libraries (closed both days) and schools (exc. Sophia’s, thank goodness.) Since when do we celebrate national holidays on Tuesdays? I mean, except for July 4 (sacrosanct) and Thanksgiving (picked as a particular Thursday of the month, not a special day), isn’t every other holiday usually celebrated on the Monday, so as not to screw up the workweek? Have I simply napped through previous mid-week Veterans’ Days? Or is this year’s celebration some kind of sneaky way of shutting down the government for 4 days in a row?
Archives for November 2003
My office
Yesterday I hired a babysitter to corral the kids while Darin and I entered the Temple of Doom:
And after three hours (which was all we could stand before Darin went to take a nap and I flew out to do errands), we were this much closer to my having a sanctuary:
I can’t quite use the office yet (obviously), but I can sit on the couch or sit in my office chair or I start unpacking many more boxes on to the shelves I can now access. I can get started on clearing off the desk. I can actually have a place to set up my computer and my Palm cradle and my iPod and my Wave radio and…
Of course, today the kids have been thanking us for making a new playroom for them. Sigh.
Freaky Friday
I’ve told Darin that every so often I hear something in the house that makes me think, “Oh, it’s haunted.” Not really haunted, no—I just hear a noise I can’t figure out, or that sounds like footsteps, or something. Unusual noises in a still-new-to-me house. A house settling.
Today was cold and overcast and sometimes rainy—hello winter, you’re relatively right on time—and the kids fell asleep in the car coming back from the library. So I put Sophia in her bed and I put Simon in bed with me. He’s sick at the moment, and if there’s anything more likely to bring out the mama-bear instincts than a coughing, congested 17-month-old, I don’t want to know what it is: I would probably burst into tears and curl up into a ball. On top of that I was experiencing the kind of midafternoon all-systems shutdown I can’t have too many of these days, because usually if one kid’s asleep, the other’s awake. I had both asleep. Time to take advantage of it. Simon and I settled into my bed and everybody napped.
Sophia woke us up some time later by crawling into bed with us. I’d slept hard and was having trouble getting my wits about me. I heard some of those sounds I hear periodically, sounds of footsteps somewhere in the house far away.
“There’s a man in the house,” Sophia said matter-of-factly. “And he’s angry.”
She was playing around, of course…but the fact that she heard the footsteps too freaked me out. (Her adding the adjective “angry” didn’t help either.) For a few seconds I was completely afraid that there was someone in the house with us, a woman and two kids.
I think I lost about a year off my life over the next minute as I kept listening.
There were no other sounds. If someone was in the house I didn’t hear him leave, which means he’s still here—all of the doors in the house are alarmed to emit a noise if opened (which is nice when you have two tots). I don’t really think anyone was here.
I’m still a little winded by how scared I got, though.
And he’s angry. Quite the storyteller, that one. Always knows the right moment to twist the knife.