Great news, everyone!

We just received word from our real estate agent that not only do we have a contract on the HOUSE, the seller has agreed to our entire list of demands requests about repairs. We thought there would be negotiations! But there weren't! He's fixing it all, including replacing the gutters and refooting the foundation. If I haven't yet said, woot! allow me to say WOOT! And I can spend the entire winter thinking about the garden we're going to have in the spring. (Another WOOT!)

I'm not even going to worry about packing up our one (1) metric fuckton of books. Not until tomorrow anyway.

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!!111!!!!eleventy!!!

Whew! Finished NaNoWriMo last preparatory to leaving town to go visit relatives for Thanksgiving in a few hours. (Finished is such a relative term. In this case it means 50k of wordbarf, with more to come.)

But for now, the 3-yo is excited that we get to go on an airplane, and we get to see scads of family we don't see that often. Yay! See you guys in December. If you're American, have a great Thanksgiving. If not, have a great Thursday.

...We are homeowners!!!

(Or I guess homeowners in waiting? We close in December.)

I am jazzed. And psyched. And gleeful. And so forth.

I have signed my name approximately one billion times.

(Fenced-in backyard! Kitchen bigger than a postage stamp! Not having to deal with the slumlords! Bliss.)

1. I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year. The result so far is a lot of words, but also a first draft that has exploded on me. Which is fine, but it's going to be interesting trying to make it all fit together.

2. I read "A Memory of Wind", a short story by Rachel Swirsky over on Tor.com, and it has been haunting me sufficiently since then that I thought I'd share it here in case anyone hadn't seen it. It's a retelling of the sacrifice of Iphigenia by Agamemnon. It's lovely.

3. Holy crap, we put an offer on a house today. Eeek! Another couple has an offer on the same house. We should find out tomorrow whether we get it or not. I'm very excited and very nervous. I will be thrilled to move out of the apartment, but I'll miss our upstairs neighbors (my in-laws.)

Whew. Keep your fingers crossed for us.

We took our son trick-or-treating, for one thing. This is the first time he's really been old enough to get it, and he got it big time. Between the costume (Thomas the tank engine) and the candy, he was thrilled.

I have always loved Halloween. Part of that is candy, part of that is an inclination to the theatrical and macabre. Last year changed that; my mother-in-law died last year, after a protracted struggle with lung cancer.

So this year, on the anniversary of her death, our family decided to make a picnic lunch and take it to the cemetery. There were eight of us, including my three year old son. We spread out a tarp, because the ground was wet, and put a tablecloth on top of that. We poured champagne, and ate cold chicken, and pasta salad, and corn, and deviled eggs, all next to the grave marker, which says SEARS in big letters.

My son climbed up on the grave marker and started tracing the letters with his fingers. Spotting a learning opportunity, I spelled it our for him as he traced each letter. When he was done, I said, "Do you know whose name that is? That's your last name."

I looked up, and my husband and my brother-in-law were watching me with funny, sort of horrified expressions. I hadn't thought about it; I was just trying to reinforce the alphabet.

But I took my son to a graveyard on Halloween and showed him a tombstone with his name on it.

My mother-in-law would have laughed her head off. It was a really nice picnic.

So, Ben and I are going out tonight to celebrate our anniversary. (Seven years! Actually, it was yesterday, but Ben had to work. But I digress.) I put on nice clothes, and, since I had a few minutes, straightened my hair. I almost never do this, because it takes too long & I have better things to do. Anyway, I walked out of the bedroom and asked my three-year-old son, "How does Mommy look?"

"What are you dressed up as?" he asked.

Heh heh. Good question.

We recently had lunch with a friend who seems to attract odd happenstance. Some of his stories suggested comics to me. Here's one about laundry.



( big comic under the cut )

My sister has produced an adorable offspring! Tonight, I drink to nephews.

page twelve

...and that's the end! Goodbye, Cat and Ghost. May you have many exciting adventures.

(So playschool just started up again, after a summer hiatus. During that time, the tiny human moved up to the 3 and 4 yo class, or as we've been calling it, Big Boy School. I almost always dropped him off in the morning last year.)

A conversation in my house, 7 a.m., this, the second day of playschool:


Tiny Human: I want Daddy to drive me to school today.

Me: Daddy can't drive you today. I'm going to drive you.

TH: But I don't want you to drive. I cry when you drive me.

Me: You don't have to cry when I drive. You can choose to be happy that I'm driving you.

TH: But I don't want to go to little boy school.

Me: Oh! You're too big for little boy school. You're going to big boy school even if I drive you.

TH: Yay!!